EAP Films and Theatres Private Limited - Star Interviews

MADS MIKKELSEN INTERVIEW: "BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH IS LIKE DOCTOR STRANGE, IN A WAY"

2016-11-09T08:25:56+05:30

Bond baddie, Hannibal cannibal, Cumberbatch nemesis and soon-to-be Star Wars rogue. But what’s to fear from Mads Mikkelsen?

His ‘sinister gravitas’ won Mads Mikkelsen the role of Kaecilius, the key nemesis of Benedict Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange in Marvel’s latest movie, said the film’s executive producer Stephen Broussard.

The 50-year-old Dane certainly has form as an antagonist, having played a villainous banker in Casino Royale, the eponymous cannibalistic psycho killer in Hannibal, and a dastardly accountant called out by Rihanna in the Bitch Better Have My Money video, to name but three…

The Big Issue: What is the key to creating a compelling opponent?

In Doctor Strange we are dealing with an antagonist – or the villain, if you prefer – that has a point. It is brainy. There’s a lot of philosophy in this, isn’t there? Kaecilius wants to create a beautiful world, much better than it is now, where people are not suffering, there is no pain and we get a little bonus called eternal life. I think this makes him quite compelling. I don’t see what the issue is, why are you all against him?

Well, without going into spoilers, some of his methods are questionable…

Exactly, his way of getting there is immoral. A lot of sacrifices on the way. But there are always sacrifices in a good fight, that is how he sees it. Even Doctor Strange thinks Kaecilius may have a point. If you make the villain a mirror reflection of the hero, then you really have something.

This is Marvel, it is Benedict playing Doctor Strange, and there was flying kung fuDid you take much convincing to join the Marvel universe?

Not a lot. Nothing, actually. This is Marvel, it is Benedict playing Doctor Strange, and there was flying kung fu. What is not to like? I loved it. I’m a very physical person, I’ve done gymnastics all my youth, so it is a big part of me to throw myself into all the stunts.

Did you pick up any injuries?

Tonnes. If you do the same move, land on the same elbow, eventually it is going to hurt, right? It is impossible not to bruise yourself. That is fine. I loved the weeks of bootcamp to nail the fight scenes. We learnt our moves, worked with the stunt guys, but eventually me and Benedict had to do it for real. We had to find each other’s dance, because every individual has a different rhythm. We had some great fights and took good care of each other. But we also got a couple of real punches in each.

How was sparring with Mr Cumberbatch?

Benedict picks things up so easily. It is ridiculous. He is like Doctor Strange in a way. If there is something he can’t get his head around he keeps going until he has sorted it. And when you put on the costume and make-up, it is a carte blanche. It allows you to go into that universe.

I would love to do a straight drama with these guysWe’d love to see a straight drama with this cast – could you dig that too?

I make straight drama in Europe, with fantastic actors from Scandinavia. So it is not that I miss out. And I would love to do a straight drama with these guys. But I am very satisfied with doing flying kung fu with them as well!

With all the CGI, how do you visualise your surroundings when you are flying through different dimensions?

We had an animated version of all the physical scenes, to get the geography right. ‘Oh, so he is upside down and I am running along the wall, when I go around that corner, he is on my left?’ But nothing came close to the final result, which was just mesmerising. I was blown away. One of the best signs as an actor watching a film is that you forget you are in it. This film took me on a ride. Right now, they are so good, they can move the bar whenever they learn something new. Only the pen could make these worlds; now they have the ability to put it all on screen. Nothing is stopping it.

Talking of unstoppable, don’t you help build the Death Star in Rogue One [trailer below], the upcoming Star Wars film?

That is what people say, let’s see what happens.

Star Wars is the iconic stuff you grow up with. It feels surreal to be part of itStar Wars is another big world to enter…

It is enormous, right? Star Wars is the iconic stuff you grow up with. It feels surreal to be part of it and doesn’t make sense, but I’ll take it! We shot Rogue One first, then Strange. It is all about scheduling, and if you throw enough money at it, the post production work can happen really fast.

Do you want to escape back to reality after all this?

There is a reality within this universe. It can never be the same reality as you get within the small budget Dogme film, but we play on the same instrument. We still bring honesty into what we do.

You’ve been at the forefront of Danish drama for two decades – and it looks like it has never been stronger, on TV and in film?

I am pinching myself. When is it going to stop? It seems they keep producing things that have an interest around the world, so we will milk that cow as long as we can. There was a generation of filmmakers who came through and all wanted to change things. In Denmark, the film is the director’s and for that reason, they are solid, strong pieces of art. We started putting Denmark on the map, the work started travelling, and then the actors started travelling as well. We have been rolling since then.

Your brother [Lars Mikklelsen, aka The Killing’s Troels Hartman] has also taken on Cumberbatch, as Charles Augustus Magnussen in Sherlock. Do you need to join forces to take him down?

We haven’t got together to talk about that yet, but I think that has to be the final outcome. Because we can’t do it with just one of us. We have to team up. And I’m not even sure that two of us can take him down. I will have to call up some other Danes…

Eva Green Talks Bond, Burton, and Her Decision to Work with Roman Polanski

2016-10-18T09:19:33+05:30

The Miss Peregrine's actress has officially reached muse-dom.

by MEHERA BONNER

Not to be dramatic, but Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children is Tim Burton's best movie since Edward Scissorhands (that's right, I went there), and that's in large part thanks to Eva Green. The Parisian actress nails her titular performance as the quick-talking headmistress, so it's no surprise that she's been dubbed Tim Burton's new muse. But is she ready to take the mantle from Winona Ryder and Helena Bonham Carter?

MarieClaire.com sat down with Green at the ultra-atmospheric McKittrick Hotel and talked about all things Miss Peregrine, whether she thinks the world is ready for a female James Bond, and her decision to work with controversial director Roman Polanski.

Marie Claire: You recently mentioned wanting to get away from scripts that describe the female lead as a "beautiful, mysterious woman." Do you feel Burton gives you the opportunity to subvert typecasting?

Eva Green: In a Tim Burton movie, you know it's going to be something unusual, or a bit mad. Something "other." The characters are many-layered. I've never played a character that is just beautiful, but sometimes you can read scripts that sound so shallow, like women are objects. I've never done something like that, though.

"I'VE ALWAYS FELT LIKE I'M FROM ANOTHER PLANET."

MC: This film celebrates difference. Have you had personal experiences of outsiderdom?

EG: I've always felt a bit weird, very shy. Like, I can't believe I'm here giving interviews and doing stuff like this—it's so surreal. I've never been very good talking about myself. I'm very proud of this movie and of course I want to promote it, but it's kind of paradoxical. I've always felt like I'm from another planet.

MC: I saw a really interesting article reading the film as an allegory for Syrian refugees. There are also many allegories to be made about bullying. What do you make of the film being a lens to discuss these important social topics?

EG: I think everybody will imagine their own thing. In the novel it was quite obvious that the Peculiars were the Jews and the Hollows were the Nazis. It's more like a generic message—don't be ashamed of who you are, embrace who you are. And if you're weird, it's good to be weird. It's boring to be like everybody. I love that.

MC: You've been described as Tim Burton's new muse—does that put pressure on you, or do you embrace it?

EG: It's kind of a big responsibility. Of course, I'm very flattered he asked me to be a part of his adventure—but I find this word a bit intimidating. It's scary.

MC: What draws you to the fantastical worlds Burton creates? Is there a sense of escapism you search for when picking movies?

EG: Of course, it's a Tim Burton movie so full stop I would do anything. But at the end of the day, I choose something that makes my heart beat, that I can relate to, that's very complex, or human. Miss Peregrine's is a fantasy-adventure; it has striking moments and you escape for a little while—but also it makes you think and it's very human.

MC: You were a Bond Girl. As someone who's been involved in the franchise, do you think the world is ready for a female Bond? There's been a lot of chatter about the possibility.

EG: I think if it's a woman it would be a different thing. They could do a movie about a spy woman and all this, but I think Bond...I mean, call me old-fashioned, but I think he should remain a man.

MC: Strange question, but you are never without your giant silver skull ring. What does it symbolize to you?

EG: It's weird, it's funny. It's kind of a cheap ring that I bought in Paris. When I did The Dreamers I left it in a bathroom at a hotel. It's a bit stupid when you're superstitious and you lose your lucky stuff, but I panicked. I went all the way back and found it. All my jewelry has stories.

MC: You're slated to star in Roman Polanski's new film. What drew you to the project? I wanted to ask about making the decision to star in a movie made by someone so controversial.

EV: I just thought it was a very good role, and there are not many good roles for women. It's a very intense story, it was inspired by a French best-seller. He's done fantastic movies and I just see him as an artist. Then the man, I don't want to get in there— it's a different thing and I don't really know him. I'm just working with a great artist.

Marie Claire

Interview: Roland Emmerrich, Director of Independence Day : Resurgence

2016-06-30T10:50:47+05:30

It’s been twenty years since Independence Day exploded into theaters, with incredible special effects, one of film’s best pre-battle speeches, and the punch heard ’round the world, courtesy of Will Smith. But it seems that the fat lady never did actually sing: the aliens are back for more in Independence Day: Resurgence, which tells the story of both old and new characters, two decades after the alien invasion that decimated some of the world’s biggest cities.

But can humankind survive another catastrophic attack from our old, tentacle-y friends? More importantly, do more famous landmarks get blown up? We chatted with the director and co-writer of both Independence Day films, Roland Emmerich, to find out.

This is the fist time you are directing a sequel. Have you found there to be any difference in the process?

You know, I’ve always stayed away from sequels, because I’m always kind of more interested in doing original movies, standalone original movies, because that is just my passion. So when I decided to do a sequel to Independence Day, I just didn’t just want to do a sequel, but do a continuation. So it’s a very different deal in that way. It’s twenty years later, we meet some of the characters again and how they’ve developed in those twenty years, how the world developed. There’s a new generation and everybody is quite in a different place than in the first film. It is a sequel, but it’s also not.

Was there a specific character that you were excited to revisit from the original Independence Day?

Yeah, when you’re a director, you always think back at movies, you know… and Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman, Brent Spiner, Judd Hirsch, they’re such amazing actors, and I just kind of wanted to work with them again. It was interesting, it was a little bit like a class reunion because when we shot the first film, we had a lot of fun and we immediately took off where we left. (laughs) It was like a class reunion with new kids.

With all of the technological advances have been made in the twenty years since Independence Day came out, was the process any easier, particularly regarding special effects?

No, not really, because these kind of movies have changed quite a lot. When you look at these movies in the nineties, there were, like, five thousand special effects. There were a lot of special effects. And there were those kind of movies like Star Wars, which had like maybe sixteen hundred or so, but even they tried to do a lot of that, which were completely built, etcetera . So when you have to do these things, you have to work a lot of blue screen, you have to have a lot, lot more effects. It’s just kind of the competition. So it was quite different. But I’m doing these kind of movies regularly, so it was not, for me, that different. Over the last twenty years, a lot has changed.

Speaking to that, you've directed quite a few doomsday-type movies: 2012 and the day after Tomorrow are some examples. Comparing the social climate now as opposed to 1996,do you feel the general attitude of those types of movies has to be different than it was?

Yeah, I always think every one of these movies has to have a theme or some sort of a story… I mean, when you look at all the Marvel movies and all these superhero movies they also have to find, always, some sort of a new angle, otherwise, you know, people feel they’re seeing the same movies again and again. This year, it’s like the conflict between superheroes, so it’s like in the same way as these kind of doomsday movies. I think 2012 is kind of the re-telling of Noah’s Ark, in a way. The Day After Tomorrow was an ecological movie with a kind of warning about what we’re doing to our earth. Independence Day was an alien invasion movie, so they’re all quite different from each other, and they have to be different. Otherwise, the people are like, “Well, why should I watch this?” And Independence Day: Resurgence is built on… the outcome of such a war. And we won it with pure luck. It wasn’t the fact that we beat them because we’re stronger, but because we got lucky. But this time, the aliens left all their weaponry and anti-gravity engines on Earth. We humans are very clever, how we can kind of build around these alien engines, our own ships. And so what we did for the last twenty years, we’ve STAYED unified. The whole world is unified. There’s this one purpose: to defend planet Earth against aliens because we know they’re coming back. We don’t know when they’re coming back, but they’re coming back. It’s a quite different world, you know? It’s amazing to think what we could if we would all be united. I always said this on the set: “Look, guys, we could be on the moon!” You know what I mean? We could have a base on the moon and you could kind of take vacations there. The amount of money we spend on weapons to kill other humans, it’s just staggering.

Going back to the special effects, there were some really iconic destruction scenes in Independence Day. Can we look forward to more of that in the new movie?

I think we came up with some very iconic stuff, too, in the new one. When you see the trailer, it shows, you know, twenty percent of that. Keeping out stuff… there’s always a little bit of a tendency nowadays to pack everything in the trailer, what you have. I’m actually very happy that Fox isn’t doing that with this film. We talked about it, and I said, “We cannot do this, we cannot do that, otherwise why would people go and see this movie?” So we have quite a bit more stuff going on which we don’t show in the trailer.

Other than directing and film, what are you nerdy about?

(laughs) You know, I’m nerdy about books. I love, love to read. Whenever I have some time, I read a book.

Directors Pierre Coffin and Kyle Balda talk Minions

2015-09-10T14:02:33+05:30

Kat Kourbeti: First of all, congrats on the film. You can’t deny its success – everyone is absolutely loving the Minions. What can you tell us about their made-up language? What kind of process went into that?

Pierre Coffin: Well, it started on the first Despicable Me, actually. When we came up with their look, after some research—we went through some big-looking orcs and stuff like that, and we ended up with these little characters—we knew that in one scene they were supposed to say “Gru! Gru! Gru!” when he was coming on stage. That was the extent of their language. When we started animating this shot, Chris Meledandri, our producer, saw the potential for them to live on their own and serve as funny cut-aways to help the movie in terms of rhythm. And so we started adding stuff, and the more we added the more we were wondering, like “how can we do it, just with silent characters?” And that’s when I started experimenting with gibberish, actually. Talking about nonsensical words, or words that were sort of English but not really. That was Despicable Me. When Despicable Me 2 came along, the Minions were more central to the story, and they had to be a little bit more understandable. That’s when I started adding stuff that was hugely inspired by what I ate, usually, at lunch; stuff like “banana”, and “tikka masala”, “popadom” and whatnot. That became part of the language because, as we all discovered in the first one, it wasn’t necessarily the words that were important but rather the way they were said, and the melodic quality—the music, basically—of their language. So, in the third one, the beauty of it came out of the fact that Brian Lynch, our scriptwriter, came up with the idea that they’ve existed for a long time and they’ve been serving all these masters all over the world, forever. That made total sense for their language to include all the languages of the world, like Italian, Spanish, Korean, Japanese, Chinese… and I did the same work, meaning that every time I had an argument between two Minions, or one Minion was telling a joke, I had to find this quality of words which together helped me convey the emotional state of those characters. Basically it’s all about the performance, as opposed to the words.

Did you expect the Minions to be such a success, and what do you think is the secret?

PC: Oh man, if only I knew! If only I’d known that! We get a lot of questions like “did we know it was gonna be successful”… I think, from the moment you start thinking about making a success, that’s where you fail. That’s my theory. And I have the tendency—probably because I’m French—to say that I don’t like everything I do. I usually enjoy it but after about two years or so I look back and go “oh… it’s okay.” I just can’t tell, and I don’t think it’s a good attitude to say “we’re gonna do that because I know how to make a success” and Chris Meledandri, our producer, is the same way. He has a very acute eye on the story and on the characters and on how the movie should look, and I remember asking him, “how do you do that?” And he said… [shrugs] “I don’t know, if only I knew!” And that goes for the good things as well as the mistakes he’s made, which he totally owns up to.

Kyle Balda: Yeah. A lot of it is about finding the movie, and finding the characters. We try so many things, and then things don’t work, and we try it again. I think a lot of times when you start storyboarding or working with the characters, there’s a kind of intuition or trust you kind of have with the characters ‘cause they kinda tell you where they wanna go to, so it makes it really hard to think like “here’s a formula, and here’s what’s gonna really hit with people”. It was completely unexpected that it would become as popular as it was.

What was the attraction to you both about 1960s London? Being in an audience in London really struck a chord with everyone here. How did you decide on that location?

KB: Part of it is that the ‘60s had such a graphic style, the psychedelic and the colours and the designs of the cars and the way people dressed, and of course the music—we’re huge fans of that era of music—and we really wanted to pick a special era to tell the story and to give that as the backdrop. London became really important because it’s a huge part of the narrative, having to steal the Queen of England’s crown, but the ‘60s was just something we wanted to have some fun with, mostly.

PC: What was super cool about it as filmmakers is it gave us all these options, like “how do we [colour-] grade the movie? How do we shoot it? What kind of ‘lenses’ do we use, how do we re-create that?” I don’t know if it really shows, but we wanted really to differentiate ourselves from the others, basically. Every time we see a movie from the other studios it’s always sort of the same design, the same look. That gave us licence to basically make a timepiece, which is really fun, and music obviously became a part of it. I remember when we first pitched the idea of putting The Doors in there, it was like “what? The Doors? That’s creepy…” because I had helicopters in my head, shooting people… And then I was like “okay, let’s see how it works” – and now I’m hoping that people won’t necessarily think Vietnam or Apocalypse Now when they hear that bit, but, you know… Minions.

The film was made with a relatively low budget compared to other animated movies. How did you make the decision of what to include in the film?

PC: Everything we chose to put in the movie, nobody told us “you can’t do it”. The music included. Every time we went for another song, it was like “there’s no problem”. To the point of it being a little freaky. Like “oh man, we should’ve asked for more!” Kyle can talk about the other studios, but what I think is that we have a limited budget but that’s not to restrict us creatively, because it goes all over the place in development. It’s just a good thing we had a sort of bottleneck in Chris Meledandri, the producer. He’s the big chief. He’s the one that backs us like three times a week, when we show him the new stuff and he reacts, and we react to his reactions. He’s really hands-on. He’s a great storyteller so he knows what to try, and I’m personally very good at small stuff, constrained stuff. I’m really not good at longer stuff, Kyle is better at that than me. We had these huge discussions about where the story should go and stuff, and the fact we were on such a restrictive budget puts the ‘pressure’ both on Chris Meledandri and us to try to make the best movie in those three years. We have three years, usually. I’m not sure that one can look at the movie and say it looks cheap, I highly doubt that. A lot of it falls on Janet Healey, one of our producers, who does the daily cost track and sees when Chris Meledandri should be reacting quickly because that scene is going into production and so on.

KB: It’s a little bit like flying on an airplane while you’re building it, because we start the movie really early in the process, while we’re still discovering the story. Things just get moving, and I think part of what works is that the momentum is what’s driving it. We see really quickly, we try things over and over very rapidly, editing the storyboards and testing out scenes and seeing which scenes are working and reacting to them, because of showing them so often to Chris.

PC: We basically have a three-year shoot, and up until maybe the last month there’s still writing going on, there’s still shots being animated. As opposed to a live-action shoot, where you shoot stuff over two months maybe at the most, and then you have all these rushes and you edit them… we don’t have that, we can’t shoot two shots, because we have to ask people to animate those shots. If you have three, four, five characters in there, that’s time-consuming. So the idea is to see the movie as quickly as possible in terms of storyboards, and try to get the sense of “is the global story okay? Do we care about the characters? Is the story that’s happening to these characters that we like interesting?” We see all that after a year, and we make adjustments as we go. It’s very scary. I remember on Despicable Me, when they told me that and I said “really?” I read the script and I thought it was crap, and it was like three sequences into production, and I was really nervous, like “you’re gonna change the story?” I didn’t believe them, because I was being very pragmatic. I thought “you have a script, you get it good, and once it’s good, you put it into production and then do things in order”. Here, everything is super overlapped, which is very scary because most of the time you don’t know where you’re heading. You can’t be witty, and pre-plan the ending and know you’re aiming for it so you plant seeds here and there. Ultimately though, the three films I’ve done at least, have become witty in the end, but that was totally out of my control. I had doubts throughout, and when I saw the final results I was like “wow… how did we do that?”

Is there a lot of pressure on you? Do you feel like you need to compete with bigger studios like Pixar and Disney?

PC: I’m not thinking about that, actually. Universal is thinking about that, but I have other problems to make my life interesting.

KB: I think we’re always looking at ways to make a distinctive film, something that’s different, rather than try to look at what the other studios are doing and copy that. Especially as we were making sequels—or in this case, a prequel—we’re very careful not to go back to the well and use material that we’ve used before, to always keep it fresh and push ourselves to find a different way to tell the story.

PC: That’s very interesting, because when we pitched the story about the Minions, we had this feeling that the studios just wanted to make this movie because the characters had been really successful. I’ll get it totally wrong now and he [points to KB]’s gonna kill me but… it feels to me with all the marketing stuff that the Minions are the cash cow of Universal, and I have that very cynical, European, French mind and say “well, they wanna make money… I just wanna make the best movie ever.” If I’m given the opportunity I’m going to try and go not where people are expecting me to go, and that’s in every scene and every shot of the movie. We try to find a way to make it original, to make it pleasing, and that’s how we approached the whole movie, by trying to make it distinctive and not like “this movie is gonna make money”, but like, a movie on its own, even if it means making less in numbers but becoming kind of cult in a way. Everybody’s sort of expecting this movie for kids, but the truth is we were having more fun doing our movie our way than having constantly in mind “oh, we can’t do that, it’s for 4-8 year olds”. We’re always thinking about the poor parents who will be accompanying their children to the movies, because we live that thing every week. “What do they wanna see? Oh God, here we go again.” And usually I’ll be super bored or just mildly enjoy it. So you want to care about the parents, like the kids will get the jokes at their own level, but the parents will enjoy it for other things.

Who came up with the initiative for the movie? Was it Universal or was it you?

PC: It was Brian Lynch, the scriptwriter, coming up to Chris Meledandri and pitching him the story. Like “I’ve got this idea, what if there was this thing called Villain-Con, the equivalent of Comic Con but in the evil world? So you’d have these two parallel worlds, but the normal world doesn’t know about the evil world…” So he came up with that concept, and when they pitched it out to us there was this whole thing going on, like “oh, we should make a prequel”, “we should show the Minions in time”, “oh, maybe we show them being around forever and they just want to serve the greatest master around, just to arrive at a very natural point where maybe they meet Gru at the end… I don’t know”. I remember Chris Meledandri saying “oh man, that whole thing in the past, we’re gonna make twenty minutes of it”. And I said “twenty minutes, really? Because that’s gonna feel weird when we get into the real story.” Ultimately we nailed it down to ten minutes, though we animated a great deal of it—not twenty minutes, but it used to be way longer, “The Minions in Time”. We have all those shots, actually.

Extra footage, maybe?

PC: Maybe not, maybe like an extended version…

That sounds painful, to delete all that stuff.

PC: Oh, we’re used to it.

KB: It’s really part of the process. Sometimes it’s doing all that work that helps you find the stuff which makes it to the screen. You get attached to stuff, for sure, but you have to let go of it.

What was it like to voice the Minions?

PC: When I voiced the first two movies, it was okay. It was very small parts in the first one, then the second one was a little bit more but still okay. When I said yes to the third one, I didn’t know I was gonna voice hundreds of Minions. And how do you write for Minions? Ι remember Brian Lynch going “how do you write the dialogues?” Most of the time I’d find the comedy of their interactions, like “this one’s pissed off for some reason and then he’s gonna do this”, and all of that goes through the voice and it’s just me in front of a mic. It’s been a bit hectic. For three years I woke up at 6am, took care of my children, brought them to school, and from 8:30 to 10 I would voice whatever version of the script we had at that time. For three years. I was becoming a little crazy. Trying to keep up, trying to find words that don’t mean something by themselves but once put together they had the right melody to make an idea or a situation clear… It’s been really tricky.

So what does the screenplay look like? Do you see the gibberish written out as the Minions would say it?

KB: Well, Brian ended up finding a way of just expressing in English first… like, say, “fuck off”. Then I would find an insult equivalent to that, or put words in and find that little description that he has, like, “the Minions are hitchhiking, and nobody’s coming, and eventually a car stops and it’s the Nelsons”. Literally three sentences.

KB: We work with the storyboard artists to try and find out what actually happens in that sequence, and then it goes to Pierre who voices it after the fact. There’s a script that circulates afterwards, because the script is constantly evolving with the storyboarding etc, so eventually it gets replaced with words like “blummock” and so on, where you can actually read what the Minions are saying, but when we start there’s nothing there.

Did you record with Sandra Bullock, or did she do all her voice work separately? And how was she involved?

PC: She was great. She had this experience with The Prince of Egypt, which was pretty bad for her apparently, because she was brought in just to say words without an explanation of what was her character thinking or whatever. So we wanted to include her as much as possible within the process, and that was really helpful because, as we were saying earlier, we have this first version but in three years you can screw up like… how many times did we screw up? [They laugh.] We don’t even count anymore. But one of the screw ups was, we said “let’s have her be evil! The Minions are after someone evil to serve.” And so she played it that way, but she had great doubts about it, about her being evil throughout, because that’s not really interesting to play. And so she talked with Brian and with us and we all established together that in her introduction she needed to be super sweet, and her snapping point is actually when she’s telling this very sweet story to put them to bed but it turns into a nightmare all of a sudden, like “whoa, where did that come from?” And that’s why we went for the stop-motion, very kid-like stuff, to create that contrast between how sweet she is throughout and how dangerous she is in reality. That’s the turning point, and that was all her [Bullock]. Like with the crown at the end… she embraced that beautifully also, the fact that she gets frozen, but she has that little moment of sweetness.

KB: It humanises her character.

PC: It makes her this evil character but with a heart.

Interview: 'Jurassic World' Director Colin Trevorrow Talks Dino Love

2015-06-18T06:34:43+05:30

"There was a lot of unrequited dino love out there." A few years ago, a little film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival called Safety Not Guaranteed. It earned praise from critics and introduced a filmmaker, Colin Trevorrow, who later landed the gig of a lifetime - directing a brand new Jurassic Park movie, to restart the series again after it died with JP3 in 2001. Colin Trevorrow is the director of Jurassic World, a continuation of Michael Crichton's vision of a dinosaur theme park that Steven Spielberg made us all believe in back in 1993. It's already breaking box office records. A week before it hit theaters, I was lucky enough to spend 15 minutes chatting with Colin (on the phone) talking about creative control, Spielberg, the attention he's getting nowadays, and how he pulled off a movie like this as only his second feature as a filmmaker.

Trevorrow's Jurassic World continues the story started in Jurassic Park by finishing the park that John Hammond first built. But this time it's bigger, better, with more dinosuars, more rides. Trevorrow had to balance time with a huge ensemble cast, various park staff and visitors; plus he had to wrangle dinosaurs, through VFX and practical special FX, as well as massive sets and complex action set pieces. To handle all of this, and still make an entertaining movie that is better than the other two Jurassic Park sequels (Sound Off right here), is certainly an achievement for a filmmaker jumping from a low budget indie to a $100 million+ Hollywood blockbuster for his second film. Anyway, let's get into our chat about making movies and more.

My first question is - are you okay with all this attention now? You seemed to be pegged as the "Spielberg protégé" with this one. Are you fine with that?

Colin Trevorrow: I don't know. I reject it to a certain extent because I feel like anytime you start throwing that around, it doesn't end up for anyone who claims to be anywhere close to what Steven Spielberg is and what he means to all of us. So I sort of immediately say, "No, no, no." I hopefully am myself and somebody who has a certain kind of film that I'm interesting in making. And I think that we share a certain set of priorities, he and I, as far as how much we love the audience and the way that I think we can have movies that have multiple different tones that are all functioning at once.

I grew up on these movies. So did you, and so did a lot of us. We have a certain love for this stuff that is unique in our generation. And I recognize that. Yet, my biggest fear going into this was it was going to be fan fiction; that it was going to be some kind of carbon copy of this thing that I love. If anybody wants to insult me or make me feel terrible, they'll say ,"It's just a giant rip-off of Jurassic Park."

I hope no one is saying that.

Colin: Someone is gonna.

Don't take this the wrong way - but what made you feel confident, or was there someone or something that made you feel confident, that you could undertake something this big and not be worried it would turn out that way?

Colin: No. I don't know man. I felt that the very fact that he asked me in the first place gave me the confidence to attack it. The first conversation we had was… I never said no, but I was very hesitant at first, because… a couple of reasons. One is that I do feel like a filmmaker needs to earn the street cred that they're given and not all right away, like over time. You make a series of films and they grow in their scope and scale, if that's even what you're interested in, but ideally they grow in their complexity and their success.

And to make that kind of a leap, I skipped four or five movies in between my first film and my second film. That was the first thing I said, was: "Look. I'm kinda being robbed of something to a certain extent here." And not to make it sound like a negative, but robbed of the ability and the time to make myself better and to get good, and just really, really good. And I have high standards for what good means. And I knew that in order to do it I would have to almost travel through time and direct the movie as myself 20 years and 4 movies from now, which is kinda what I had to do. I had to push confidence all the way to the border of arrogance without slipping over the edge into arrogance..

Were there any ideas you really wanted to include but learned you had to let go of, or realized "we just can't pull this off"? I've been reading about your rules, but I'm curious how you determined what was important, what wasn't and how it evolved through production.

Colin: Once we wrote that first draft and decided to push the movie to really make it as successful as it could be as a piece of storytelling. It was a long and very involved, challenging process - Derrick, Steven, and I on the phone having those kinds of transcribed phone calls that we've all read. You know, the ones they had on Raiders of the Lost Ark, I would get these transcriptions that looked exactly the same of our story and conversations. And it was those kinds of discussions: Why does this exist? Who is this person? What are the attributes that we can put into this animal that means something? What is this movie about? Those kinds of things led to the movie that we have now.

The only thing, just to give you a very specific answer, the one thing I can think of that I really loved that we didn't put in the movie was there was once scene where the Indominus Rex gets surprised by an animatronic T-Rex, like an animatronic that's in the park that they had. He bites its head off. So it's like a real dinosaur biting the head off a robot dinosaur. It looked so awesome. And Stephen was really against it. He was saying, "No. You are saying CGI dinosaurs are destroying Stan Winston's dinosaur." I was like, "Oh, no. that's not what I meant, but you're right. I don't want to say that at all." So we didn't do it. But, man, I'm telling you. That image was the coolest.

That would've been cool. It still seems like there are a few of those, "we just had to put this shot in here" kind of moments anyway…

Colin: Well, not because anyone had a gun to our head at all. I made the movie that I wanted to make. There certainly was no studio pulling strings. I didn't get a studio note on this movie. I answered to Stephen and that's where the notes came from. And it was a very collaborative, creative experience that I wouldn't trade for the world. I'm so proud of the result. I loved making this movie. And I love this movie. I have no shame in saying that.

I'm impressed by the way you balance what would be a really entertaining, fun action movie, but also a smart movie that makes you think about ourselves at the same time…

Colin: Well it wouldn't be a Jurassic Park movie if I didn't do that.

That's what the first movie is all about. You could very easily lose track and deliver something that is pure fun, or has no fun. There's a great balance to it all of the characters and where the story goes with each of them, I was impressed.

Colin: Thank you. And in addition to that, it being something that does deal with certain themes. Hopefully, if it's just like a fluff piece, I wanted to make these scenes additionally emotional and to have characters that you not only care about, but you get truly engaged in what they are going through. And also, you know, to experiment with characters that are not all entirely likeable at first. That's something that I am very interested in. I did it in Safety Not Guaranteed and I did it here. I think Bryce Dallas Howard's character and Nick Robinson's character are both somewhat unlikeable at the beginning of the movie. They grow into characters that… I think you really love. And you are glad they changed in the direction that they did. That's something that's difficult, especially in a movie of this size and with actors who want to be portrayed as likeable at all times, usually. They were both very brave to allow me to do that.

I was also impressed by the cast, since it's such a massive cast and everyone gets their time, yet the story also keeps progressing. There's no time wasted on any of them in any scenes.

Colin: It's an ensemble piece. I think that's something that the marketing does not entirely communicate. Chris Pratt is awesome in the movie, but it's not just a Chris Pratt show. It's an ensemble of great actors.

How much of this was you saying, "I love these actors. I want them." And how much is it agents and marketing lining up?

Colin: None of that was a factor. I got to pick all these people. I gotta tell you, man. I remain shocked at the level of creative freedom I was given on this movie.

What's interesting hearing you say this now is how much it lines up with what we see in the movie.

Colin: Yeah. It is. I was actually frustrated when I mentioned that I wasn't planning on doing the sequel, which is always something Stephen and I agreed to a long time ago. I felt like the reaction when you hear something like that is one of three things—either I didn't have a good experience, the studio didn't have a good experience and fired me, or the movie is bad. And none of those things are true. It's really out of my love for this particular movie and how great an experience I had and how I just sincerely believe that this particular franchise is very difficult to sequelize. I think much like Mission Impossible, the best prescription in order to keep this thing going is to have a new voice every time to give us just a different take on something that does threaten to get pretty repetitive.

I agree. I'm already looking forward to the next one, thankfully because you have delivered something that's really satisfying to us so it makes the next one that much more appealing, bringing back the dino love that originally built up when Jurassic Park first came out.

Colin: There was a lot of unrequited dino love out there. It needed someplace to go.

Was there one moment or one character you really wanted to make sure you got right, or that it came out completely satisfactory to you in the end?

Colin: Bryce's character was a challenge, because she's the one who really changes over the course. The two boys, making sure that didn't dip into… the saccharine… was a tough balance. Pratt was pretty awesome from start to finish. This guy's rad. I felt like there was… On a story level it was a challenge for me to make some of the moves we were making. I follow your website and I know how people respond to the idea of a guy who trains raptors. I knew how that was going to shake out and I knew what we were going to do in the story. But I didn't want to reveal any of that. So you kinda have to take some hits. You have to take some bullets for the movie and be like, "Yep, yep. They're just friendly raptors the whole time."

That's interesting you mention, because you were just talking about creative control. Your creative control must end when it comes to marketing then, or at least with how much you want to make sure it gets out there… As a movie fan want to make sure that people have an experience in the theaters, but also they have to sell the movie. They have to make sure enough gets out there.

Colin: I would say that's arguably true. It entirely was a collaboration. And I worked very closely with them in cutting the Super Bowl trailer specifically, because I wanted that to be a certain way. But those guys very earnestly believe they know what it takes to get people to come to the theater to see this movie that we're making. Unfortunately, for any argument that I would ever present, they've been proven right time and time again, especially this year; they are just killing it. We live in a day and age where if you don't let an audience know what they are in for, they may not want to go. And we've seen that happen in response as well.

So that is a balance. It's a bit of a dance. In the end, I think the campaign that they put together has been really effective and clearly people want to go. If I ran the world we would show far less. But I don't.

I hear that a lot from filmmakers. They don't want to show anything from the film.

Colin: Well yeah, of course. It's like a magician telling everyone how you do your tricks on their way into the theater. Who wants to do that? I knew I wouldn't want to necessarily withhold everything, but there is a magic that Steven Spielberg's original movie had that was only enhanced by the fact that we did not know what we were going to go see, even though there was a book and we kind of knew. But there's moments in this movie that are in the trailer that are surprises, that are literal jump scare surprises that are in the trailer. My big fear is people are going to be like, "There's the part where that happens." But I've seen it with audiences. It's actually not what happens. People are so engaged that they don't really have time for their brain to process, necessarily, that this is the moment.

And marketing and I did collaborate in some ways to make people think they'd seen the moments and then realize that it's actually something very different that's happening. So there are surprises embedded throughout even the things that everyone has seen. They were also kind enough to keep my last 15 minutes for me, for all of us.

There was a kid at my screening, when it ended, who flipped out and was saying "This is what it's like to go to the movies again - people screaming, everyone watching it together…" And I thought, "yea, I'm glad someone else had that experience, too." I'm glad you've brought back that idea about "Hey, don't forget, this is all about all of us going to the theater together to watch this together."

Colin: Yeah it is. Movies are a shared experience. It's funny. I had to approve the Blu-Ray yesterday, the 3D Blu-Ray. So I watch it on this monitor and it looks spectacular. It just looks insane. The way we're able to watch things at home is that much less of an argument to go to a theater. But when you are in a theater with a movie like this and people are laughing, and screaming, and punching each other, that's a very special, very unique feeling. Personally, how much money this makes doesn't really affect me that much. I hope it makes them all of the money. I just want a lot of people to love it and I want people to go and share that experience together.

I think you've pulled that off. What are your plans for the future? Do you want to make bigger studio movies? Do you want to go back and make smaller movies? Where do you see yourself?

Colin: I want to do both of those things. I just want to be able to tell many different kinds of stories. I love big movies. And I love smaller films and medium sized films. I'm not a filmmaker who feels like, "Oh, I'm going to make one big one for them and then one small one for me." I can make a big one for me and a small one for me. That's really the hope. What is really important to me is I'm able to… I just want to make at least one or two of the movies that I probably should have made between these two movies, just so I can feel like I have a body of work that is diverse. The kinds of filmmakers that I love, they don't all hit homeruns every time. Sometimes they are a little weird. Sometimes they don't plan. But you want to go to the next one because you want to know what's going on in that guy or girl's brain right now. So that's all I can hope for.

You've totally sold me. I want to see the next six films you've made… Ha!…

Colin: Well, thanks, man. We got one. We got $12 per movie.

A very big thank you to Colin Trevorrow for taking the time to speak with me, and also thank you to Universal Pictures for arranging the interview.

Interview: Poltergeist Director Gil Kenan

2015-05-27T10:29:27+05:30

The Monster House and The City Of Ember director Gil Kenan talks to us about remaking horror classic Poltergeist.

Gil Kenan has now returned to the haunted house genre, after his debut feature Monster House, and the world of working with young actors once more, after his follow-up, The City Of Ember. The result is a new remake of Poltergeist, and we spoke about the film at length this week - touching on what was shorn away in the edit, how the 3D gets really sexy, and the influence of the actors on the screenplay, amongst plenty of other things.

First though, it started with Gil picking up the phone and, whether he intended to or not, evoking the so-called Curse of Poltergeist. Here’s our conversation from the very beginning.

GK: Bodies are falling left and right here…

It’s quite alarming to hear that.

Just so you know, not to stress you, but the first reporter who interviewed me this morning showed me unexplained scratches that he got all over his hands from his hotel last night.

Well, I’m an evangelical disbeliever in the supernatural, so you can’t scare me.

Famous last words! That’s exactly what ‘they’ want to hear, Brendon.

Let’s go to the other end of the spectrum and talk about reason. Tell me how you work out some of your filmmaking choices, starting, generally, with the camera. How much do you use process and how much is instinct?

I began my life as a storyteller by making picture books as a kid and for me, the drawn images was always the first way I told the story for myself before I then picked up a Super 8 film camera, later on a video camera and now whatever monstrosities that we’re using today. I do begin with a sketch, and for me, the drawings are important and they help me get into thinking about what height I will want to put the camera at.

This might seem trivial but especially because so much of a film like Poltergeist is about the discovery of the space, and that dark potential of that space, it becomes critical to think about the eye level of the camera. If you place it at the height of the children, who are the first ones to detect that there are
strange things going on, this creates an immediacy for the audience with that dawning awareness. This strips away this ‘adult’ instinct to look down on children and disregard their fears and thoughts as childish.

Stereography is a language that a lot of people don’t understand at all. How did you make your choices with the 3D?

I had a little bit of experience with stereography with Monster House, but with that film, the stereo process was something that happened about half way through and I had already laid out most of the film, it luckily worked out well and I was able to make the most of it. With Poltergeist I was able to design the photography of the film around the idea that I’d be creating a stereo release.

One of the things I wanted to explore was not only how to get the spectacle to play out in 3D, and we already have many examples of that working well, but also how intimate, domestic moments can be enhanced through the use of scale and the relationship between subject and camera in 3D. It’s subtle, and it creates something that most audiences won’t be aware of but will feel, a closeness to the characters. For me it’s an exciting and underexplored region of stereo filmmaking.

Can you cite a choice in this film that you’re pleased with?

There’s an early moment of intimacy with Sam and Rosemarie when they begin fooling around and it seems like it’s going to lead somewhere, and their bodies naturally go horizontal. It’s a very strange frame, one dictated by performance, but I got excited about the horizontal nature of their interaction. It holds for quite a bit and they’re having a very intimate, grounded moment, but the subtle angle of how they lay across frame and towards camera mean that we’re in there as a kind of voyeur. I always get excited to see that film in 3D because it feels like we shouldn’t be in there, we shouldn’t be that close. It ramps up the natural sense that the foreplay is leading somewhere, it’s exciting and risky. Knowing that 3D can do this too got me excited.

Another sequence where I was able to much more conspicuously was with tracking cameras. I’ll cite the example of the first ‘electrical awakening’ of the house than leads to the iconic television moment. I was thinking about the shift in tone that film was taking, and also the visual shift that we were now going to move through the house in a more ominous, subjective role. This felt like a shift that would give rise to the awakening of the spirits, and stereo was able to create not just this feeling of flying through the house but also some discomfort as well.

You talked about how that ‘horizontal shot’ was driven by performance. Do you generally bring the actors in and block with them, change your plans around what they do?

Absolutely. If I’m working with purely younger actors my process is more one of coralling them through the story as I had it mind, but I learned so much about making movies with this group of young actors that I think I’ll treat things differently on the next one. But with Sam and Ro there was, right from the beginning, even at the scripting stage, a want to get as much of their experience and souls and trap that in the film. This included David Lindsay Abaire the screenwriter being there with us as we workshopped scenes, even with individual actors, not necessarily bringing actors together.

Then all the way through to filming where if I knew I was doing an intimate scene like the one I described, or a scene of drama, generally I’d have an idea of where it goes but I’d hold off on making a specific shot list until we’d blocked it. Sometimes because it’s a little more exciting this way, and you don’t want to get to the point where it feels like you’re just checking off shots from a list, you want the high-wire act of “How are we going to tell the story today?”

Let’s clarify the journey of the screenplay, then, through this. Was there a draft when you came on board? How did that change during the workshops and development? Did you leave a lot of pages behind before shooting? And did many minutes get cut out in the edit?

I’ll try to go through it in order. There was a very strong draft that Sam Raimi sent to me at the beginning of this process - I’m a huge slack-jawed fan of his so I think I probably mumbled through our first few introductions. I took the script very seriously, though I was terrified of stepping into the perfect world of Poltergeist, and the script changed my mind. It took the characters seriously, and the drama of the daughter’s abduction seriously, and it posited an examination of the modern family, 30 years after the original.

I had grown up in a world very similar to the one depicted in the original film and couldn’t escape it fast enough when I finally became a University student. I would rather die in the city today than have to go back and live the rest of my days in the suburbs I grew up in; they feel like part of a life that I was excited to leave behind. I loved the central conceit that this family would begrudgingly accept their defeat in this subdivision.

And there were a lot of things I wanted to explore. I had a solid six months of script development with David who is incredibly talented and a very generous writer. He did so much in that process to help shape the film into the one I was able to shoot. And then with the actors, sort of by necessity, I holed up in a hotel with Sam Rockwell and David and worked through the script so it felt like there was not this locked, formal document but rather something living that could breathe and adjust to get the most out of our actors. A lot of the dynamic between Sam and Ro came through those workshopping experiences.

The script had several scenes that I shot but that did not end up in the film. I like a lean film, I’m not yet at the point where I want things to play out luxuriously, I like efficiency in storytelling. So I was very brutal with my own cut before I presented it to the studio, trimming off things that were either moving character forward or not story or which were interesting for one reason or another but didn’t support the final cut. A lot of those scenes turned out great so I’m hoping to put together a longer cut for the Blu-ray or whatever phantom format is out when the film is getting released.

Yes, who knows what we’ll have in a few weeks time.

I’ve started the process with Fox Home Video of figuring out a probably 100 minute cut of the film. It will have a lot of really nice development of character and relationships that it will be nice to have in the film.

Another six or seven minutes is it?

Probably seven or eight.

So, before we go, I would like to know what was happening to your Giant movie.

My great heartache. I love that movie so much and I came so close to shooting it twice. Both times we got into pre-production. The tragedy with films that you would love to make but which are not a commercial mandate by the studio overlords is that the universe is predisposed against them not happening.

There’s a lightning in a bottle moment that could mean they happen, and I came close twice, and I hope to make it again. It’s always been a factor of casting, where I’d need two actors of a certain value and I’ve always had one amazing one at a time but have never been able to line up the schedules of two in the right way. I’m still very committed to it, and the script - which I wrote but I can humbly say is beautiful - is burning to get out. Hopefully one day.

I hope so too. Thank you, Gil Kenan.

CINDERELLA Interview: Kenneth Branagh

2015-03-18T13:03:00+05:30

He’s tackled Shakespeare numerous times and even ventured into the world of Thor, but director Kenneth Branagh had never thought about tackling a classic fairy tale until the script for Cinderella came his way. With it, he tells the story of the beautiful Ella (Lily James), a young woman who, through it all, believes that kindness and courage will help her overcome anything.

At the film’s press day, director Kenneth Branagh spoke to Collider for this exclusive interview about how tricky it was to find the right balance of classic fairy tale with a modern feel, the need to find the perfect actress for Cinderella, that it’s equally intimidating to tackle popular and beloved texts, whether it’s Shakespeare or comic books or fairy tales, that there will be a handful of deleted scenes on the Blu-ray, and why he wanted to tackle Romeo & Juliet for the stage in the West End, with Lily James and Richard Madden (aka Prince Charming) in the title roles.

Collider: Was it tricky to find the right balance of classic fairy tale with a modern feel?

KENNETH BRANAGH: It was, and we’re very pleased that the movie seems to be playing well with people and striking those kinds of chords, and that’s possible when these big cultural artifacts and myths are there. It’s no accident that Cinderella has been in the culture for thousands of years, and in cross cultures. I’ve traveled a bit recently, and in Russia, they completely believe they own this tale. And in Italy, they feel it absolutely is part of who they are. There is a timeless web to it. Somehow, it’s been getting under our skin. It’s our identification with the underdog and our hope that she represents our own success in life. It’s a fairy tale with very familiar dynamics. It’s family dynamics with sisters and a stepmother. It’s very close to us. It’s not men on horses riding across rainbow bridges. There’s some magic in it, but a lot of it is things that are fairly close to us. That’s what drove us to try to find the balance that we found.

At a time when everyone is making fairy tales darker, this story has something as simple as a heroine who thinks you just need to be kind. Why did you decide to take that route with this telling of the Cinderella story?

BRANAGH: Yeah, and I remember saying, at the beginning, “I’m not starting this conversation, ‘I see it as very dark. I think, this time, it should be very dark.’” I feel as though that absolutely prefaces almost every approach to a classic subject, these days. Sometimes I don’t see the evidence of it, in the finished product. I just thought here that there was a real opportunity to do the opposite. I think that was largely down to (screenwriter) Chris Weitz understanding that was the case, and me feeling very motivated to do it. I felt very enlivened by that. I felt very positive about it. I meditate a lot, and have done so for the last 14 years or so, and because I’m interested in it, I’ve noticed that the world does now, too. For all the cynicism that the world contains, people are a little more open to those things that maybe are to do with returning you to some kind of simpler, happier state. I feel like this is a tiny contribution, in that regard, even though it includes the forces of darkness, in the shape of the Stepmother and stepsisters.

That succeeding must have heavily relied on finding the perfect actress.

BRANAGH: Totally. I remember, on Thor, there was a moment where we were getting close to casting a certain actor and I said to Kevin [Feige], “If you want this to go on, like I know you want it to go on, this won’t work. It has to be perfect casting, and we’ll know it. We’ll test all the things we can test, but we’ll know it when we see it. There will be some magical element to it. I don’t think you should make the film unless you can really feel that.” Particularly, what we were asking for on this was, in a way, invisible acting. You’re asking for things that just come for free and that are lightly done. The last thing we needed was earnest or self-righteous. We needed somebody who seemed fun, who seemed like good company, and who you’d want to sit down and have a cup of tea and hang out with. It was absolutely crucial to find that person, and Lilly [James] was that person.

As a filmmaker, is it more intimidating to tackle Shakespeare, beloved comic book characters, or iconic fairy tales?

BRANAGH: I’d say it’s equally intimidating. The ferocity of passion that is engendered by people when they don’t like what you’ve done is really tremendous. It’s intense. But my feeling is always that the original work is there, at the end of it, or whatever people might deem as the traditional way of doing things. But, I always think that’s a myth. Particularly with Shakespeare, they weren’t there in the 1600s, so it’s usually an idea, in our own heads, of what’s right and proper, or just what you prefer. Sometimes when it’s wrapped up in classics, there’s this great proprietorial quality. If you do something that is honest to your vision of how you’ve re-imagined the classic and it still isn’t liked, that debate keeps everything alive. It rediscovers it a little bit and makes people look in that other direction that they think it ought to be done in. It’s all valid and valuable. The thing to bear in mind, when you’re actually making it, is that you can’t set out to make a classic. If it turns out to be regarded in that way, great. You’re just trying to find this moment to tell this story, at this time.

How long was your first cut of Cinderella, and are there a lot of deleted scenes that we’ll see on the Blu-ray?

BRANAGH: You’ll see probably half a dozen deleted scenes. We were probably at two and a half hours, with the assembly cut, but that was just everything. Most of that was really to do with additional traveling and things. There were some very interesting scenes, but this was not one where you feel like you’re killing your darlings, as they say. It was more of a refinement of the various flavors in the piece. The editing process was really natural. We didn’t do any additional photography on this movie, which is highly unusual for something like this. I’m not saying that there was any perfect world going on, but simply that it had a natural, clear momentum that was understood fairly well on the page and understood pretty well in execution, and that seemed to follow relatively directly, in post-production.

What made you want to team up with Lily James and Richard Madden again, to do Romeo & Juliet on the stage in the West End?

BRANAGH: I guess just ‘cause I’m used to it, I find it more exciting than daunting. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like to do new material with them, or indeed for myself. But, they have this incredible chemistry. As I discovered from working with each of them, they have an intelligence and skill that, with this amount of work done together, we have a chance of getting a little further down the road with these unknowable classics. You never get to the end of them. We have a working knowledge, rapport and history now that potentially that work could be very fruitful. It’s the first Shakespeare play I directed 30 years ago, and I didn’t do a very good job of it, and I’d really like to do a better job of it with two people that I think are just right for it.

Was that something you’d been wanting to tackle again, at some point, or was it these actors that inspired you to do it?

BRANAGH: Both, actually. I’ve often thought about doing it again. But frankly, with these big parts and these big plays, you don’t commit to it, unless you feel you have the people. You don’t do it just because you have an idea. Much like Cinderella and Thor, you do it when you find the person. So, I felt as though I’d found my Romeo and Juliet.

Are you going to try to tackle another movie before that?

BRANAGH: It seems as though I have some time off, which I’ll enjoy. At the moment, I’m reading things, but I made a decision to just get to the end of this movie and enjoy it as well as possible. During the last picture I made, I was prepping the next one, and I didn’t want to do that this time.

Interviews with directors Simon J. Smith and Eric Darnell

2014-12-02T06:04:26+05:30

Q: Congratulations on such a fun and clever film! How did you originally become involved with the “Madagascar” films and now, the “Penguins of Madagascar”?

Eric: Well, gosh it’s been like over 10 years now that these Madagascar films have been around. So I was involved in the beginning, and then as we were making “Madagascar 3″ DreamWorks just realized that these penguins deserved their own film. So Simon got involved in that, and sort of took that from the starting line and began running with that ball while I was still working on “Madagascar 3,” but then when “Madagascar 3″ I finished off the film and joined him and we finished off the film together.

Q: Did you ever expect the penguins to reach this level of individuality, separated from the original Madagascar characters?

Eric: No, it was never a goal. You know, these penguins were always like these great, sort of comedic spies that we could bring in for a minute or two, here or there. They didn’t have to advance the story, they didn’t have to grow as characters, they’re really just there for comedy relief, sometimes they advance the plot, almost by accident. But people just love them! You know, I think because they’re these silly flightless birds that shouldn’t be capable of doing any of the things that they do and so they’re these underdogs with this sort of misplaced confidence in themselves, and yet ultimately it’s not misplaced. And I think that people just really connected with those guys. So of course the challenge then is if you are going to give them their own film you’ve got to dig a little bit deeper and tell a story that does involve their characters and does have some growth and some change, but at the same time keeping alive all that comedy and insanity that people love so much from the Madagascar films.

Simon: I think that, I feel like when they asked me to direct the movie I was absolutely thrilled. I said, “Are you kidding me? Absolutely, I love those guys.” I think for me I love the fact that they’re so proactive and they’re tiny, like tiny penguins, but they run towards danger. It’s fantastic how they’re just so gung-ho and they have this fantastic moral call where they will right the wrong in the world and they will do absolutely anything to save it. And so that’s why I was so attracted to them and they’re completely in sync, just brilliant.

Q: What makes the “Penguins of Madagascar” different from the other Madagascar films?

Simon: Well I think it’s the introduction of these two new sets of characters, Dave the Octopus and his octopus henchman, and the North Wind. I think they’re two sets of fantastic contrasting characters to the penguins and they make a really fun journey for the penguins to navigate the story. And that was the most exciting part, was putting these penguins through this path where they collide with a villainous octopus called Dave, played by John Malkovich, and then having to compete with the very slick professional spy organization led by Benedict Cumberbatch, which is the North Wind.

Q: How much of an influence did you have in developing the characters of the film?

Simon: Quite a lot. We have to know exactly who the characters are in order to make the movie properly. So we’re pretty much in there with the writers working away every second to make sure that we have the best round we can and the best recipe of characters, to make a really super fun film.

Eric: And the more you can go into the recording both with a clear idea of a character, then you’ve got a much better launching pad when you’re working with someone like Benedict Cumberbatch or John Malkovich, which is not to say that those guys don’t contribute significantly to the development of the characters as well. But by going in there with a really clear picture of where we’re starting then they can use that as a springboard to really find the essence of these characters. So to work with John and Benedict in the recording studio to give them freedom to improvise and to try things and to experiment and to take advantage of the incredible talent that they bring to the project is a huge part of how the characters are developed. And you have to know your characters before you do that.

Q: What was the casting process like? Were the casting decisions easy to make?

Simon: Yeah, very early on we had the character combinations set and then it was a case of who are the best people to play this. And John and Benedict were our number one choices for each character and we were incredibly lucky that they both said yes. With John we just wanted a villain that you were never going to forget. We didn’t want a cliché, generic villain with a mustache twiddling type of guy. We wanted someone you could emphasize with and that you could understand his madness and who would deliver something completely unique. And that’s John, that John Malkovich. So it was fantastic that he said yes and we just had a field day just feeding off of his performance.

Q: What was it like working with Benedict Cumberbatch?

Eric: You know he’s just this constant professional. You know, a lot of people think that doing comedy is just a walk in the park compared to doing something dramatic, per se. And Benedict would be the first one to tell you that comedy sort of the most difficult stuff to do because timing is so critical and a lot of times the only reason that comedy works is because you, as an audience, are really invested in the characters and who they are. So when certain things happen to them or they’re in these kind of hilarious situations you can really identify with the character. Benedict understood that completely and would work really hard to make sure that we had the right rhythm, and the right timing, and what was happening to his character made sense, and the way his character reacted to what was happening made sense. And it really is, as I was saying before, it’s a collaboration.

It’s not “Just a here are the script pages, would you please read them into the microphone? Thank you very much.” It is something that we go back over and over sometimes, where we might record John in May and in June we go in with Benedict and play on the stuff that John did as Dave the villain, and then Benedict will go, “Oh okay. I see what he’s doing now, I can play with that and I can take it to this place and then he’ll add to it.” And then we’ll go back with John in July and he’ll hear what Benedict has done and he’ll go, “Oh great I can use that as a stepping stone and I can maybe twist thing around and get some more character out of this or some more comedy out of that.” So it’s sort of a slow motion line performance or for those who know what it’s like, it’s like work shopping a play where you keeping going over things, over and over again, trying to poke holes in thing and experimenting and introducing new ideas. It’s a luxury as filmmakers for us in a way because we do make our movie many many times before we have our final version.

Q: What was it like working with Ken Jeong and how his previous animation experience influenced the project?

Eric: It’s great that Ken understands what is like to get in front of the mic. The thing about animation is it’s all about exaggeration and that has to do with the world’s that we design, the characters we design, the way those characters move and the way that they act. So Ken had no problem with just going crazy and pushing things over the top and giving us that kind of exaggerated performance you could only really do in animation.

Q: How do you feel about the way the Madagascar movies have grown and developed?

Eric: You know, it’s great. Some people say, “Aren’t you tired of working on the Madagascar project?” And it’s like, I never get tired of it. I can’t believe how lucky I am, and Simon I’m sure feels the same way, to be involved in this thing that has this life, this sort of life of it’s own and has brought so much joy frankly to so many people. And to think that they’re kids who have kind of grown up watching Madagascar movies and to have that kind of connection to and impact on people’s lives is something that I just really fortunate about and lucky because it’s something it doesn’t happen all the time. As a filmmaker to have that happen in your career is just a very amazing thing.

Simon: Yeah, I feel very lucky. It’s just been brilliant, absolutely brilliant fun working on the movie the last four years, working with people like John and Benedict and then the crew of DreamWorks have been unbelievable, they’ve offered such incredibly hard to animate spirit and everybody was working together in just an amazing way. Cause something special that happens when people in the crew believes in the movie and all of a sudden they’re just buzzed for every time you go and see a new part of the movie, and have a new shot, or a new scene, or a bit of new effects, it’s a snow ball effect that happens when people are really enjoying themselves and all ends up on the screen. And I think that’s what you feel when you watch something like this.

Q: Of all the penguins, which character do you relate to the most?

Simon: Probably Private because I’m English and I’m the least likely person to be a hero so that’s probably me.

Eric: Skipper is kind of the real soul of who these guys are and he’s sort of derived from that sort of late ‘50’s, early ‘60’s Americana, the stuff that I grew up as a kid idolizing, whether it’s John Wayne or Dragnet, just these characters just have this firm belief in what’s right and what’s wrong, and they have this commitment to the American way, and we are going to fight evil, you know. And you know frankly who sees the world as black and white, and that’s really who the penguins are, so I think I connect with Skipper that way. He’s probably the one I connect with the most in terms of bringing that sort of idea into the penguins of the team.

Q: What do you love about the medium of animation? Can you talk about how technology’s evolution has helped this time around?

Simon: I think technology wise we’ve had some new development in software at DreamWorks which has really been amazing, this animation software called Primo, that’s really helped the animators have quicker response times to their animation and really hone their performances. And then animation in general, I think what’s fantastic is you can create these amazing worlds in 3-D and stereo and we work really hard to make sure it’s really powerful, smooth, really enjoyable process watching a stereo movie, because sometimes the stereo isn’t so good on a lot of movies because you don’t have as much control. With CGI animation, you have total control over camera and choreography with the stereo and so it makes a really pleasant, fun, experience, it doesn’t give you a headache, your eyes aren’t strained or anything like that. So I think that’s been a huge development in technology over the past 5 – 10 years, it’s just so much easier to make the stereo visceral and help to make the story- highlight moments in the story, but without making it cliché or uncomfortable.

Eric: What I’ve always loved about animation is that it can take you to these alternate realties, these worlds that could never exist in our world. It really allows you to go places and explore ideas and push things beyond, and as a said, to exaggerate things, to have talking animals. And especially with computer animation, to create these worlds and these places that are realistic, but not of our reality, but still you feel like you would know what it would be to reach out and touch those feathers on that penguin because they have that level of complexity, and detail, and volume. To me it’s just magical.

‘Maze Runner’ Interview: Will Poulter & Kaya Scodelario on Life in the Glade

2014-09-26T06:23:54+05:30

There are quite a few monsters in the maze. Where they created using practical effects or CGI?

Kaya Scodelario: It was CGI. We had a guy in a blue lycra suit on set with a stick and that’s all we had.

Did he wave the stick at you threateningly?

KS: He did, it was good. He went for it.

Was it the same with the set? Was it mainly green screen?

Will Poulter: What’s so awesome about Wes [Ball] was as much as his background is kind of based in visual effects and as much as that is a focus for him, I think he was very keen to try and give us enough to react to, so the performance didn’t fall by the wayside or our reactions weren’t kind of secondary to what was going on visually. So with things like the set we had actual pieces of the set there to react to, it wasn’t just like we were watching imaginary doors closing, they actually built the doors, working doors, with the corridor.

KS: We also had that stuff on the laptop, though, what was it called?

WP: The pre-vis.

KS: The pre-vis. So he’d got a system up so we could see what it would look like eventually. Very very rough, but just so that we could understand it a little more from the visual effects point of view.

Will Poulter The Maze Runner Maze Runner Interview: Will Poulter & Kaya Scodelario on Life in the Glade

Part of the world-building in the book includes the slang used by the Gladers. How much of that made it into the movie?

WP: Yeah, there’s some “shucks” and some “shanks” being thrown around. “Klunk…”

KS: I don’t ever use any of the slang.

WP: No you don’t, do you? Because I guess it’s the kind of thing that comes about from being there for a long period of time. But yeah, shuck, shank, klunk… there were a couple of others. “Greenie…”

Is it hard to make that sound natural?

WP: Yeah, it was, but that was another thing again, one of the things that was taken from the book and sort of transplanted into the movie. From page to screen there are some things that don’t transfer that well, and we’ve already talked in other interviews about how the telepathy wasn’t working and James approved that, and he approved every single transition. But I think we found some of the language really worked, and kind of gave this unique vibe, because it makes sense that they would develop their own slang. Some of them have been there for years.

Plotwise, how much does the movie deviate from the book?

KS: Not an awful lot. I think it’s just practical things that have to work within film, that you can’t translate, but I think the fans will be happy with it. Any of the differences they will understand and some of them are for the better, so I don’t think anyone’s going to be particularly upset about it.

What do you think has led to the current interest on sci-fi movies set in dystopian futures?

KS: Because it doesn’t seem that far away nowadays, I don’t think. With the movement of technology and social media, that doesn’t seem too crazy any more. There are so many things happening now that you’ve seen in films from years ago, like cloning and all of those things are actually happening now, so we can kind of visualize it a lot more, and I think our generation particularly know that we’re going to be a big part of that, we we’re kind of fascinated with how human beings will fare in the world.

WP: Yeah, I think with the rise of technology and the advent of online activity there’s an argument that that’s kind of stifling our imagination… but I’ve found the opposite through this experience, seeing the fan art that people produce for The Maze Runner and the videos that they post etc. I think that the way technology’s going, it’s only serving to improve people’s appetite to be creative and gives them more tools in order to execute their creative visions.

The Maze Runner Teresa and Thomas Maze Runner Interview: Will Poulter & Kaya Scodelario on Life in the Glade

What’s the relationship like between Teresa and Thomas? Is there any romance there?

KS: I’ve never seen it as romantic, even reading the books, I don’t think James’ intention was to make it romantic. I think they have a connection that you sometimes get with people, and you can’t quite explain, and sometimes you mistake it for lust or love. But I think they just, they understand each other, they have a love for each other that isn’t a sexual love, it’s not what we would nowadays see as a relationship. I think the instincts are to survive and to help each other and to care for each other. There’s no time for “Let’s go on a picnic date.”

WP: They’re not like, running through the maze and going, “Let’s stop off and kiss each other.”

KS: There’s none of that bulls**t, it’s very much, we need to survive and look after each other, we need to look after the group. And that’s what I really liked about the script, that it wasn’t a love triangle or anything like that. It’s just a human connection.

WP: And it’s one of the differentiating factors when you compare it to other films in that bracket, like The Hunger Games and Divergent and stuff. I think it’s one of the things that kind of makes it unique and sets it apart.

Did you consider Gally to be a villain when you were playing him, or were you quite sympathetic towards the character?

WP: My view on Gally is that he’s not quite a villain, he’s more kind of this conflicted character, and that’s something that me and Wes totally clicked on. I think that my thing as an actor, choosing a part, is that I have to question whether I respect a character, and I don’t feel like I can actually represent them unless I can respect some aspect of them. So it doesn’t matter, the most vile, horrendous character you can think of, I think unless they have some thread of rationale, I don’t think I could personally play them. And I understood Gally, I understood where he was coming from, I empathize with him a bit.

So we tried to draw that out of him a little bit, whereas in the book he’s leaning more towards that villainous sort of character. But I suppose in many ways he’s the antithesis of Thomas, who’s very much the kind of born leader and hero, and I’m kind of… I get it wrong, and I lose the respect of the Glade, which I guess makes me more a villain than a hero.

"Dawn of the Planet of the Apes" Director Matt Reeves

2014-07-30T08:05:26+05:30

It’s not that he’s been lying dormant before now, though. After working in television, from directing an episode of Homicide: Life on the Street to executive-producing the hit The WB drama series Felicity, Reeves shifted his interests to film exclusively in 2008. First, he linked up with super-producer and childhood friend J.J. Abrams to direct the secretive monster movie Cloverfield, staging some truly tense and tightly choreographed urban destruction while ushering in genre cinema’s current obsession with found-footage filmmaking. Two years later, he bravely remade the widely beloved Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In into Let Me In, a tender and deeply disturbing kid-driven bloodsucker drama that sank at the box office but holds up as one of the best horror films in recent years.

Through those two films, Reeves has established a trustworthy reputation among artfully minded genre fans, but without the kind of name-recognition prestige his buddy J.J. Abrams knows all about. His latest work should change that. Following up director Rupert Wyatt’s successful 2011 Apes franchise reboot Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Reeves is the driving force behind Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (in theaters today), a sequel that bests its impressive predecessor in every possibly way. Rather than showing how the worldwide effects of the first movie’s Simian Flu, Dawn centralizes the conflict in San Francisco, focusing on ape leader Caesar’s (once again played via performance-capture by Andy Serkis) attempts to keep his thriving ape community intact as a group of human survivors ingratiate themselves into the animals’ realm. Naturally, the peace-keeping efforts give way to death, warfare, and Caesar’s own self-evaluation.

In January, news broke that Reeves had signed on to direct the as-yet-untitled third new Apes movie, suggesting that all involved think highly of what he’s done with Dawn. It’ll only take one viewing for audiences to echo that confidence. The anti-Transformers, Dawn thoughtfully builds its world and characters without sacrificing any of the necessary summer-movie spectacle. It’s a blockbuster made with an indie drama’s mentality, and that’s largely to Reeves’ credit. Even though Dawn’s his biggest movie yet, Reeves hasn’t lost any of the heart and soul that elevated Let Me In above remake-haters’ cynical expectations.

In this candid discussion, Reeves explains how he was able to make a summer film anomaly, why never losing sight of Dawn’s emotional impact was tantamount, and the analytical care that goes into making action sequences feel like more than eye candy.

As a big fan of both Cloverfield and Let Me In, I was excited to learn that you’d be handling the sequel to Rise of the Planet of the Apes. I went into it with minimal expectations and was knocked sideways by it.
I had the same exact reaction. It felt like sections of that movie were from a riveting silent film, specifically all of that stuff in the habitat. For me, the big miracle of Rise was I’d never had that level of emotional identification with a CG character. The way Andy [Serkis] played that character and the way WETA Digital realized his performance pushed motion-capture performance to the highest level it’d ever reached at that point.

I’d already been a lifelong Planet of the Apes fan, and then I thought, wow, this idea of truly getting into the inner life of an ape, where the most human character in the film was an ape, was amazing. It was a great reason to reenter the world of the Apes films I loved as a kid. You could actually be that intimately connected to the emotional life.

I was really taken aback by how intimate of a story Dawn is, despite being a big summer movie with incredible visual effects and action.
That was the goal. What I think is so cool about Planet of the Apes is that the one fantastical element is that they’re intelligent apes, and of course there’s going to be spectacle because it’s a summer movie—for me, I love seeing apes on horseback. [Laughs.] That’s something from my childhood. But, at the end of the day, the movie’s secret is that it’s also kind of a drama.

What I saw in Rise and what blew me away was the intimacy, especially everything involving Caesar. When I first got involved, the outline they were talking about doing didn’t focus as centrally on Caesar, and I was really surprised. I was like, “Wait a minute, the secret of Rise is that it ends up being Caesar’s movie, and you totally earn that by the end—that’s what blows people away.” They actually started in the post-apocalyptic city with the humans and then the apes came down and joined the humans, and then there’s this question about what’s going on with the apes, and they’re very articulate from the movie’s beginning. It skipped all of this stuff, so I said, “Hold up, you guys did all this stuff so well in Rise, you shouldn’t skip so far ahead; in fact, make sure that this is Caesar’s movie.”

I wanted to do a movie that started like it’s essentially 2001: A Space Odyssey, where it’s not the the dawn of man but the dawn of the apes, where you saw this kind of eerie, almost frightening primal opening with the apes, after the humans have done themselves in, and then you start peeling the layers away and you start connecting to and identifying with Caesar and the kingdom that he has, which is essentially his family. He’s not only the leader, he’s the patriarch, the father.

For me, it’s like The Godfather and Caesar is the Don Corleone of the apes, and then we would reveal that there are humans left. And then, like you said, it would become an intimate-scale story, like a suspense story out of a classic mythical western or something, where two tribes are vying for survival on the same land. The question becomes, will they or when will they turn to violence? And is there a way for them to coexist? I wanted to really explore all of that, and to my amazement, the studio said “yes” to all of that. [Laughs.]

I envisioned it as having two families: a family that’s trying to heal itself after a terrible tragedy, the worst that humanity’s ever seen, and an ape family that was on an ascendancy and now confronted with conflict. I wanted Caesar to go from being a revolutionary in Rise to being a leader in difficult times.

The cool thing for me, again talking about intimacy, is that the movie’s tension is as much within the characters as it is between the characters and between the species. Caesar is just battling his own impulses as well; he has a root in the human world and he has roots in the ape world, and he’s torn. Things are tense for him, and he loses his temper. The question is, can you really master those parts of yourself, or is violence inevitable? The fact that that’s the central question in a summer blockbuster is crazy.

Speaking with Andy Serkis, I mentioned that I loved how Dawn opens and closes on Caesar’s eyes, showing how his goes from being primal to reclaiming his humanity throughout the course of the film.
Andy and I talked about that. I didn’t want the apes to be as articulate as was originally planned. One of the things I loved in Rise was watching him grapple with the situations that were before him and struggling to express himself. When he finally does speak and says, “No!” it’s an amazing moment. I was like, “We should really do that and explore the different ways in which the apes have sort of come into articulation.” That meant there would be ways in which it was easier for the apes to communicate.

One of the things I thought was cool about Rise and Project Nim is the concept that you can actually teach an ape to sign. In fact, one of the things that happened for in between first watching Rise and then watching it again before meeting with Fox was I’d had a son. I’m a first-time father, and it was amazing to me to learn that my son could actually use sign language before the spoken word. I could see this intelligence in his eyes before he could speak, how he could understand what was going on around him and was frustrated by that. So when I watched Rise again, I was surprised, like, “Look at that! That’s what my son’s doing!” It’s so much about human nature.

When I was working with Andy on the apes’ speech, we had to figure out that, at the beginning of Dawn, Caesar has been away from humans for a long time. He’s gotten in touch with his ape-ness, and gotten back in touch with his basics. They’ve created this kind of Eden. Without being too idealistic about it, it’s this idea that they could maybe have a world that will succeed better than the world that we, the humans, had, and that maybe they won’t succumb to the same things that we did. Caesar actually believes that apes are better until he realizes how human the apes are, which I thought was a cool through-the-looking-glass sci-fi revelation.

But you’re right, at the end, by that time his humanity has reawakened. In the beginning, Andy’s speaking in a way where his first words are really hard to understand; by the end, he can speak pretty clearly and coherently, and, obviously, better than all the other apes. That was a surface way of representing that idea.

Dawn opens with almost 15 minutes of life within the ape community, and it’s so well done that once the humans show up, and Kirk Acevedo’s character wrongly acts on impulse, I thought, “Dammit, why did these humans have to disrupt everything?”
[Laughs.] That’s great. I wanted to start the film in a way that’s elemental, primal, and eerie. You see Caesar and you see his eyes with this war paint, but then we start peeling layers away and you start to see the humanity and empathy in these apes. You see he’s a father, you see his son, and you see that, oh, they have these relationships that remind us of ourselves. There’s a real intimacy here. You start to see their world, and that had the humans been completely gone, the apes’ world would have proceeded uninterrupted and who knows what it would have been. But now, of course, things change. The idea is, when the humans show up, not only is it going to be a fight between the apes, it’s also going to unearth the kind of fault lines that would exist within the ape community based on the previous experience that most of the apes had with humans.

Caesar had a very unique experience with James Franco’s character, Will. Will was essentially his surrogate father. To hear Andy talk about it, when he played Caesar in Rise, he felt that he was human, and the revelation for Caesar is that he’s not human. He’s an outsider, and when he’s thrown into the habitat prison, he realizes he’s different from those apes as well, so he’s an “other” his whole life. He’s had a really unique existence, and that’s what makes him uniquely suited to lead at this particularly difficult moment, but it’s also a huge challenge. He has understandings that the other apes don’t have. How do you explain that? How do you lead?

In addition to Caesar, there’s also Koba calling shots in the ape community. In the beginning, it seems like he might become the film’s villain, but as the film progresses, you learn why he’s so hate-filled. Was the key to not give the film any clearly defined villains?
Yeah, definitely. It was critically important that there be no villains, in that sense, in the movie. I wanted you to have empathy for every character’s point-of-view, on the human side and the ape side. Basically, you’d see that they’ve come to their respective worldview in an honorable way; meaning, they’ve come to it through life experiences. Koba’s experience is so brutal; his background is that he was experimented on by humans. He went through an ape holocaust—it’s horrendous. Of course he’s not going to trust humans. But Caesar is his brother, he’s the one who led Koba through bondage. He owes everything to Caesar. They truly love each other, so that makes for a very complex relationship and story. Really, it’s a tragic arc, about how the revelation of humanity’s existence is the thing that threatens the relationship between these two brothers and their kingdom. It’s kind of Shakespearean.

And Koba is evolved in his own unique ways, too. You see it in how he manipulates the two armed soldiers. He’s super-intelligent in his own ways.
Yeah, what’s great about his character is that he’s wickedly smart. From that bitter experience comes a kind of terrifying, wicked intelligence. He has a real sense of how to exploit things. There’s another scene I think is great, and it’s such a weird thing, which is him planting the seeds of discord within Blue Eyes, Caesar’s son; after Caesar has humiliated Koba in a way that he’s not going to be able to come back from, he starts planting the seeds that maybe the humans are going to be threatening Caesar’s life, and it’s all very wicked and Shakespearean.

Toby’s amazing, he’s like a force of nature in this movie, and there are a couple of really key places where you truly feel for him. There are a couple moments like that where Caesar puts him in his place. You see the woundedness, and that’s Toby totally playing that woundedness. He’s a really damaged character who’s risen up in the worst possible situation, given his background.

You mentioned Blue Eyes, and he’s a great way to transition into Dawn’s action-heavy third act. Much of the huge battle sequence near the end of the film is seen through Blue Eyes’ overwhelmed and inexperienced eyes. It brings a vulnerability to this otherwise ferocious battle.
And that was actually the biggest challenge of the sequence. In Rise, the story was so stacked against the humans. You cared about Franco’s character, Will, and you didn’t want anything bad to happen to him, but there are some humans in that film, the guys who run the habitat where the apes are being held are being so cruel towards the apes that it becomes like a prison movie. You’re just waiting for the humans to get theirs, so there’s no question during that big bridge sequence—you want the apes to succeed. It’s a rousing battle confrontation. In our film, though, it’s more ambiguous than that. It’s not really a justified attack at all, but the idea was that you’d feel badly about the battle.

It was important for me that you would experience the battle through two points-of-view. One was almost from an Akira Kurosawa film, like Ran, where it’s this completely unleashed id version of Koba. That part of the battle is like a fever dream; it’s like seeing him just be a force of nature, riding through flames while holding two machine guns on horseback. And then you see the tragedy of it through Blue Eyes; in that way, it’s meant to be like the opening of Saving Private Ryan, having him have idealized Koba’s feelings towards war and battle but then being led into this actual battle and then suddenly be confronted with the reality of apes dying and apes being hurt, and him suddenly being terrified. He’s watching the cost that comes from this. The battle, in contrast to the one in Rise, was meant to be tragic and a bit nightmarish. That was its own challenge. You had to really make sure that you were filtering those points-of-view or the audience wouldn’t know what to feel. They’d be like, “Well, there’s some cool imagery here, but what am I supposed to feel?” So that was a really delicate thing to navigate.

Was your experience making Cloverfield any kind of preparation for Dawn’s big action sequences?
Definitely. Both of the films deal with the suspense of dread. There are scenes in both that are like slow-motion train wrecks, where you know it’s not going to end well for certain characters. Once you know that the humans are there, the question going forward in Dawn is when will the violence that lives within these apes manifest itself? It was meant to have that level of suspense while still maintaining intimacy and the potential for something good to happen. It couldn’t be too relentlessly grim. That meant that when we got to the battle stuff, it would be filled with suspense, dread, and horror, which was very much like Cloverfield. In that way, I had been prepared for certain things.

What I wasn’t prepared for, though, was that I’d never done performance-capture before, and that is a beast of another color. It’s crazy. The complexities of editing and shooting performance-capture are of a kind that I’d never experienced. You take any of those shots, like the tank shot, which is this big choreographed battle—the easiest part of shooting that was that actual shot. You take a 3D camera and mount it on the back of an actual tank, with a turret that’s actually turning and drive on a set with no actors around. The shot was gotten and driven right into the front of the colony, and then another year was spent creating everything that’s in that shot. We did the stunt in the foreground, the stuff going on with the guy in the tank, and then Koba’s performance on top of the tank, and all of the apes that come into view as the tank spins. It was a crazy carnival of material that had to be worked out bit by bit.

And in fact, when WETA works on shots like that, you get different numbered versions of them; the shot that ultimately give you, after all of their effects passes, might be version 100, or maybe even version 200. That shot on the tank, when we got its final version, was version 1,030. [Laughs.] I asked them if that held any kind of record at WETA, and they wouldn’t commit to it but they said it’s close. When I finally said, “I think we got it, guys,” WETA erupted into applause during one of these six-hour daily phone calls I had with them. They apparently popped champagne, too. The whole town that’s basically WETA worked on our movie.

When you’re conceiving shots like those, is it time to show and prove?
Maybe. To be honest with you, though, what those moments have been more about for me is point-of-view. We had some shots like that, which are much more invisible, in Cloverfield, these long, extended takes. The idea was, if you were in the middle of one of those moments, you wouldn’t turn off the Handycam. The thing that I find most powerful about cinema is point-of-view, and it’s the idea of having empathy for characters and living through their shoes, but sometimes there’s something really chilling about the kind of restricted but also indifferent point-of-view. That tank turret in Dawn is just sort of casually spinning and taking it all in, in this one slow movement.

That kind of approach is what I found chilling about Children of Men. It’s funny, certain people might interpret as, “Oh, it’s like a journalist of a news camera,” but a news camera would have been more like Saving Private Ryan, right? It’d be a guy who, when the shots go off, ducks, because he’s recording the thing; in Children of Men, and what I tried to execute with the tank in Dawn, is this point-of-view that’s there, is indifferent to the experience, and is just recording it very clearly. Moments like that can be really chilling, and that’s what that Let Me Inand the tank turret shot are about. It’s taking it all in.

I love those sequences in Saving Private Ryan, but I also love, which came out that same year, those landscape, running-up-the-hill battle sequences in The Thin Red Line, and just the idea of seeing the landscape and then the figures trying to take that hill. The tininess of characters against the landscape reminds of Kurosawa, the smallness of us. All of that stuff bounces in your head, and then, at the end of the day, you just hope it’ll be engaging to an audience and be in some way thrilling.

There is one particular moment in Cloverfield that gives me the same reaction. It’s when Hud’s running towards the subway staircase, quickly points the camera upward, and we see a brief glimpse of the monster.
Yeah, definitely! They’re all a part of the same vibe, the same feeling. The feeling of that shot in Cloverfield, and I’ve obviously never been in an event like that, is very reflective of my worst fears. In a way, for me, those shots are connected to me confronting my worst fears. In Let Me In, it’s the suddenness and randomness of a car accident; in Dawn, it’s taking in the horrendous nature of battle; in Cloverfield, it’s being in the middle of some horrific event that you didn’t expect or want to be in, whether it’s a giant monster or a city under attack.

What do you think it is about this Apes franchise that gives it the power to be something that leaves viewers thinking about it for weeks, whereas other big spectacle franchises aren’t able to be so character-driven and emotionally resonant?
I think it’s because Planet of the Apes has a strong legacy. The conceit is this fantastical idea that the animals have become intelligent and have taken over the planet, but the secret of that is, of course, we’reanimals. So when you’re staring into the faces of these apes, you’re really stating into human faces and our nature.

What’s crazy is that we got to do a war drama, this mythic western kind of drama, and the reason we got to do that was this crazy element of intelligent apes. I’ve always found this to be true of really interesting genre films—if you take the right metaphor, you can actually do a film that is about real things, emotional things that are engaging. You’re almost smuggling it in, but you’re not really smuggling it in because I think the audience really responds to those things. Of course they really want the spectacle, but when that spectacle comes charged with something that feels real, it deepens the experience, and the audience really likes that.

It’s crazy when you think about the Apes franchise, and how dark all of the endings are, and how dark the movies are, and yet there’s something very pleasurable about these movies. It really comes down to the potency of this idea, of seeing intelligent apes. I’ll never forget when I was a kid, seeing that first glimpse of when the nets are thrown, it pans up, and you see that the people throwing the nets aren’t people—they’re gorillas on horseback, and you’re like, “What?” [Laughs.] It’s such a provocative image, and so powerful. It somehow speaks to this idea of the animal in us and having to confront that, but conveying that through this fantastical conceit.

I kept pinching myself the whole time we were making this movie. There were certain moments where I said, “Wow, so you guys are really letting us make this movie?” [Laughs.] Because, as you say, it’s not your typical summer blockbuster kind of movie. I was constantly aware of that.