Vincent Ward directed this $85 million metaphysical romantic fantasy, an adaptation of Richard Matheson's 1978 novel about eternal love and the afterlife. Chris Nielsen (Robin Williams) dies in an auto accident and ascends to Heaven where he's welcomed by his host and guide, Albert (Cuba Gooding Jr.). The loss of Chris prompts his wife Annie (Annabella Sciorra) to commit suicide, but she goes to Hell. With the help of the wise Tracker (Max von Sydow), Chris searches for Annie by traveling the River Styx into Hell. Ward noted that "75% of the film is set in the afterlife," depicted here in landscapes inspired by religious mysticism in the symbolic landscape paintings of German romanticist Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840). The Ron Bass screenplay changed the wife from a caterer to an artist, enabling Chris to comprehend that the vast vistas and colorful psychedelic-flavored landscapes of his Heaven are all extrapolations of Annie's paintings. Such visualizations of Heaven and Hell, rendering three-dimensional worlds from two-dimensional art, are a direct result of technological advances in digital visual effects (executed here by POP Film, Mass Illusions, CIS Hollywood, and Digital Domain), combined with location filming (Montana, San Francisco). Metafilmics producer Stephen Simon spent 20 years getting this Matheson novel to the screen. The original novel carried an afterword in which Matheson stated that the research he had conducted to write the novel had brought about a belief in the existence of an afterlife. As the film's advertising blurb phrased it, "After Life There Is More."