/Film

‘Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World’ Trailer and Poster: Steve Carell and Keira Knightley’s Apocalyptic, Romantic Comedy

Germain Lussier — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 01:49:01 +0000

You’ve just found out there are three weeks until the inevitable end of the world. What do you do? If your the characters played by Steve Carell and Keira Knightley in Focus’s upcoming romantic comedy, you fall in love looking for your loved ones. The film is called Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World and it’s written and directed by Lorene Scafaria, who wrote Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist.

In addition to the two leads, the star studded cast includes Connie Britton (Friday Night Lights), Adam Brody (The OC), Rob Corddry (Children’s Hospital), Rob Huebel (Human Giant), Gillian Jacobs (Community), Derek Luke (Antoine Fisher), Melanie Lynskey (Away We Go), T.J. Miller (Cloverfield), Patton Oswalt (Big Fan) and William Petersen (CSI). It’ll be released on June 22 and the trailer and poster has just come online.

Thanks to Yahoo Movies for the trailer.

I’ve gotta say, this trailer looks pretty damn solid. Great cast, interesting balance of drama, comedy and romance. If it’s all handled well, this could be something really special. Melancholia meets The 40 Year Old Virgin. Plus it’s rated R, which means it doesn’t pull any punches.

Here’s the official plot description and poster for the film.

Set in a too-near future, a man searches for a meaningful connection as humanity’s last days are at hand. Can he find his greatest love at the worst possible time? As the respective journeys of Dodge and Penny converge, the two spark to each other and their outlooks – if not the world’s – brighten.

Do you think Seeking a Friend for the End of the World has promise? Or will it get lost in the high powered Summer shuffle?

DreamWorks To Remake Alfred Hitchcock’s Only Best Picture Winner: ‘Rebecca’

Germain Lussier — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 01:00:30 +0000

Alfred Hitchcock‘s filmography reads like an all-time best of list: Psycho, Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Notorious, The Birds, it goes on and on. But out of all of Hitchcock’s movies, only one received the Academy Award for Best Picture: 1940′s Rebecca. Hitchcock’s first American project, Rebecca featured Laurence Olivier as a widower whose new wife (Joan Fontaine) is overwhelmed by the spirit of his late wife, the title character. It was based on a 1938 book of the same name by Daphne du Maurier.

Now, DreamWorks and Working Title are planning to go back to the source material and remake the story with Steven Knight, who wrote Eastern Promises for David Cronenberg, hired to write the screenplay. Read more after the jump.

Variety broke the news of this deal, which almost make sense in a weird kind of way.

Hitchcock’s movies have, for the most part, been handled with kid gloves when it comes to remakes. Yes some of his lesser works got remade or reimagined, TV adapted a few here and there and even Gus Van Sant did Psycho but, for the most part, the true greats have been left untouched. Rebecca is certainly one of Hitchcock’s great films but, even with the Oscar win, is still kind of underrated. If you were a studio executive looking not to piss off film fans but also find a great, relatively unknown piece of art to rip off, Rebecca would be at the top of the list.

All that said, just go rent the original because it’s really fantastic.

Can you live with a film like Rebecca being remade? What about Knight – who also just adapted the Dan Brown novel The Lost Symbol – as the screenwriter?

‘Just Like Being There’ Trailer – Gig Poster Documentary Premieres at SXSW 2012

Germain Lussier — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:30:00 +0000

Maybe you’ve noticed over the past few years, but we here at /Film are fans of limited edition, pop culture art. This is evidenced by the copious amounts of posts we write on the subject, be it Mondo, Gallery 1988, Spoke Art or just some talented artist who does work portraying TV, movies or comics. And maybe you remember last year when we exclusively revealed that an in-production documentary on that subject was titled Just Like Being There. We even revealed some early, early footage.

That film, directed by Scout Shannon, has finally been completed and was accepted into South by Southwest 2012. However, as tends to be the case with any documentary, in the several months since we first wrote about it, the film’s focus has shifted a little. The music gig poster, while still a major part of it, also led the filmmakers to explore the current movie poster craze driven by the work by the aforementioned galleries and companies. So the crew ended up at several Mondo Mystery Movies, Gallery 1988 openings and even a certain /Film writer’s apartment to see his disgusting collection.

To that aim, they’ve cut a brand new trailer for the film and you can check it out after the jump.

Here’s the trailer for Just Like Being There.

And here’s the official synopsis:

In the gig poster community, artists such as Daniel Danger and Jay Ryan prove that creating this artwork is a way of life, more than just a career. These artists are at the forefront of an expansion of the gig poster genre. MONDO’s reinvigoration of “the film poster as an art form,” and Gallery 1988′s theme based exhibits are only two ways in which this artwork is reaching a greater public. In a community with strong roots, dating back to the 1960s, this expansion is controversial- refreshing to some, sacrilegious to others.

Though I was interviewed for Just Like Being There, I have yet to see the film and have no idea how it turned out. Considering it’s about a topic I’m passionate about, I have high hopes, but the real test will be if it’s a movie that can draw in the average audience member who doesn’t know Olly Moss or Daniel Danger from a homeless man sleeping on the side of the street.

We’ll have more on the film as SXSW draws nearer but, for now, what do you think of the trailer?

Jason Reitman’s LACMA ‘Reservoir Dogs’ Reading Will Feature All-Black Cast

Germain Lussier — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:00:43 +0000

Our apologies. Even if you live in Los Angeles, posting about Jason Reitman‘s awesome live readings at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is torture. The casts are so fantastic, the projects so good and yet it’s virtually impossible to go because they sell out so quickly. In fact, they sell-out weeks before the script or cast is even announced.

I was lucky enough to see The Princess Bride a few months back with Paul Rudd, Mindy Kaling, Patton Oswalt and returning cast members Cary Elwes and Fred Savage. Reitman has also done The Apartment with Natalie Portman and Steve Carell, The Breakfast Club with Aaron Paul and Jennifer Garner and more. It’s super-impressive.

The penultimate reading, long sold out, happens February 16 and it’s Quentin Tarantino‘s Reservoir Dogs. That by itself is insane. But instead of simply casting alternative famous people to play roles actors like Harvey Keitel, Steve Buscemi and Tim Roth made famous, Reitman and co-curator Elvis Mitchell decided to change the entire race of the project. They’ve selected an all-black cast. Read the list after the jump.

For Mr. Blonde, originally played by Michael Madsen, Reitman has cast Terrence Howard.
For Mr. Pink, originally played by Steve Buscemi, he’s cast Anthony Mackie.
For Mr. Orange, originally played by Tim Roth, he’s cast Cuba Gooding Jr.
For Nice Guy Eddie, originally played by Chris Penn, he’s cast Anthony Anderson.

And for Mr. White, originally played by Harvey Keitel, he’s cast…we don’t know yet. The Entertainment Weekly article leaves that role open for debate at this point, along with others like Mr. Brown (originally played by Tarantino), Joe, the cop Marvin Nash and the radio DJ originally voiced by Steven Wright. Odds are, Mr. White will be the biggest name of the bunch as Reitman likes to save one big name for last. My guess? Morgan Freeman.

If you live in Los Angeles, there will be a stand-by line for this but odds are it’ll start early and only a few of those people will get in. Head here for more info. Ahead head over to EW, who broke the news, to read Reitman’s quotes on the event.

Casting Bits: Naomi Watts as Princess Di in ‘Caught in Flight;’ Haley Joel Osment in ‘I’ll Follow You Down’

Russ Fischer — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 23:30:19 +0000

There is a staggering amount of casting news today thanks in part to the in-progress European Film Market at the Berlin Film Festival, where producers take projects to gather foreign distribution deals and financing. So let’s get right to it.

First up, the Princess Diana film Caught in Flight, which will be directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel (The Invasion, Downfall) has found a new Princess. Last year Jessica Chastain was in talks for the role — there was a moment where she was in talks for every big female role, it seems — but now Diana will be played by Naomi Watts. Losing Chastain is unfortunate, but if Watts is the replacement I can’t see too many complaints being aired.

Written by Stephen Jeffreys, the film will shoot later this year with an emphasis on the last two years of Diana’s life; that is, after her 1995 divorce, and through her relationship with heart surgeon Dr. Hasnat Khan. “It charts how finding true personal happiness for the first time allowed her to achieve her defining successes evolving into a major international campaigner and humanitarian.” [Deadline]

After the break, Haley Joel Osment goes back to science fiction, and we catch up with two new roles for Katherine Heigl that were announced not long ago.

Haley Joel Osment, who broke out as a child talent in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense in 1999 and all but disappeared from screens after the 2003 film Secondhand Lions, is starting to make his way back to movies. He has shot a part in Sassy Pants and should be in Wake the Dead, which is shooting soon.

Now he’s booked the lead role in I’ll Follow You Down. The movie is a sci-fi mystery tale about “a scientist who mysteriously disappears after a business trip, only to have his son Erol, played by Osment, make an eerie discovery about his whereabouts, several years later.”

Richie Mehta (Amal) wrote and will direct; the film will shoot in Toronto in May. [Deadline]

Finally, there’s Katherine Heigl. She’s moving into new territory with a couple new films. One is Face Blind, a thriller about “a psychologist struck with a rare affliction that makes it impossible to distinguish people by their faces.” She ends up being stalked by a guy who also hunted one of her clinical patients, but because she can’t tell who he is, the cops think she’s nuts. You might be thinking you’ve seen this movie before, but you haven’t seen it with Heigl. Dominic Harari and Teresa De Pelegri scripted; Heigl is also producing. [Deadline]

In addition, Heigl is looking at a part in Brian Henson‘s film The Happytime Murders, a film the younger Henson has been trying to make for some time from a Todd Berger (Kung Fu Panda 2) script. The film is sort of an adult version of Roger Rabbit; it takes place in a world where humans and puppets live side by side, where the puppet cast of an ’80s kids show is being bumped off one at a time. An ex-cop turned private detective ends up trying to catch the killer. Both of these seem like image-changing efforts. And hell, if it works, congrats be to Katherine Heigl. [THR]

Jon Favreau To Direct New J.J. Abrams Pilot ‘Revolution’

Germain Lussier — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 23:00:29 +0000

As Jon Favreau continues to prep what we think will be his next feature directorial gig, Magic Kingdom, he’s taking some time to work with J.J. Abrams. Favreau will direct the pilot of Revolution, a new drama produced by the Lost/Alias/Felicity/Star Trek/Super 8 mastermind. The NBC show, also produced by Supernatural creator Eric Kripke, is about humans struggling to survive in a worth where all energy has mysteriously disappeared. Read more after the break.

Deadline broke the new of Favreau’s new gig, which will mark the first TV drama he’s ever directed. He did the pilot for a show called In Case of Emergency and an episode of Undeclared but those are comedies. (Or were: RIP Undeclared.) The Iron Man director is also scheduled to direct the pilot of Tweaked, a TV comedy he’s producing at ABC.

Back to Revolution. It’ll be Abrams’ second try at NBC after his show Undercovers bombed pretty spectacularly. This show, much like his other successful mystery dramas, seems like it could have more legs. The Deadline description says in the world of the show “all forms of energy have mysteriously ceased to exist,” which sounds cool – sort of green/post-apocalyptic – but definitely raises some important logistical questions.

In this world can we not create kinetic energy? Is there no more potential energy? Does this world exist without gravity or friction? Or is it just like someone turned off a giant light switch? We’ll have to wait and see.

There’s no word on when Favreau would be helming the pilot but one would have to guess it would be in the coming months as pilots for 2012-2013 are already being cast.

Are you excited for Favreau to helm this pilot? Do you think it’ll make it to air?

/Film Interview: Bret McKenzie, The Oscar-Nominated Songwriter of ‘The Muppets’ [Video]

Germain Lussier — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 22:30:34 +0000

If you walked out of The Muppets feeling like you were on top of the world, Bret McKenzie was a big reason. The actor/singer/songwriter, best known for his HBO series Flight of the Conchords, was hired by director James Bobin to write many of the brand new songs for characters like Kermit, Miss Piggy, Fozzie, Gonzo and others to sing in the Muppets triumphant return to the screen. And to that aim, McKenzie was a success. He was rewarded for his work with an Oscar-nomination for Best Original Song for “Man or Muppet,” which features Jason Segel’s character Gary and his brother, Walter the Muppet, signing about their true identities. It’s funny, clever, catchy and has a 50/50 shot at gold since only two songs are nominated.

We sat down to talk to McKenzie about the honor, his process integrating songs in the film, the song not being performed at the Oscars, as well as his upcoming role in a tiny film called The Hobbit and more. Watch the video interview after the jump.

The below interview took place on the Disney lot in Burbank, CA on February 7.

George Lucas Contends That Han Never Shot First, You Were Just Confused

Germain Lussier — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 22:00:56 +0000

After seven years away from theaters, Star Wars comes back to the big screen this weekend. Of course, it’s not a new movie or even an original re-release. Instead it’s what’s generally considered one of the worst of the bunch, converted into an experience many people hate. I refer, of course, to Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace in 3D and if one good thing comes of this re-release, it means George Lucas has to come out and answer questions. (Of course, he did this for Red Tails too but focused more on his upcoming career and Hollywood controversy.)

In an interview Lucas did with The Hollywood Reporter he offers what I think is the most plausible and straightforward answer he’s ever given as to why he changed the Greedo/Han Solo scene in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Read the quotes and agree or disagree after the break.

Here’s Lucas talking about about Greedo and Han over at The Hollywood Reporter:

The controversy over who shot first, Greedo or Han Solo, in Episode IV, what I did was try to clean up the confusion, but obviously it upset people because they wanted Solo [who seemed to be the one who shot first in the original] to be a cold-blooded killer, but he actually isn’t. It had been done in all close-ups and it was confusing about who did what to whom. I put a little wider shot in there that made it clear that Greedo is the one who shot first, but everyone wanted to think that Han shot first, because they wanted to think that he actually just gunned him down.

Does that mean it’s okay? Of course not. In the original film part of what made Han Solo so cool was that bad-ass swagger, which Lucas removed in 1997. What he’s admitting here is that fans were giving him credit for something he didn’t originally intend. Han Solo was never supposed to be that. As a fan, that kind of annoys me but at least I finally see his reasoning for making that change.

Head to The Hollywood Reporter to read more from Lucas including thoughts on Hugo, Blade Runner and his explanation why Yoda was changed to digital in The Phantom Menace.

So what does this explanation mean to you? Does it make it okay? Do you believe him? Personally, I believe him. If he really meant for Han to shoot first, he would have changed the original scene to make that clearer. Maybe, after all these years later, Han didn’t shoot first after all. We just saw it that way.

It is almost unfathomable that our readers haven’t seen these clips many times over, but just in case, here’s the original version with Han shooting first:

And here’s the revamped one:

Superhero Bits: The Amazing Spider-Man, The Dark Knight Rises, Smallville, Daredevil, Venom, Justice League Doom

Germain Lussier — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 21:00:29 +0000

Want to watch an epic video interview with The Amazing Spider-Man himself, Andrew Garfield? Where can you see the next season of Smallville? What gift did Gary Oldman get when he wrapped on The Dark Knight Rises? Will Mark Millar be buying Beyond Watchmen? And is a woman out there giving birth to Venom? Read about all this and more in today’s Superhero Bits.

MTV News has an epic interview with Andrew Garfield talking about The Amazing Spider-Man. Head to that link to start watching, but here’s one clip about his rumored Avengers cameo.

This is so screwed up. But hilarious. Someone posted their wife’s sonogram on Reddit and pointed out it looks like Venom.

The Sports Hero is at it again, breaking down whether or not Joseph Gordon Levitt‘s John Blake is, or isn’t, Robin in The Dark Knight Rises.

Comic Book Movie has an exclusive clip from Justice League: Doom introducing Wonder Woman.

Cute Captain America Cake made at the English Cake Lady of The Royal Bakery. Thanks to Between the Pages.

Marc Webb spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about why they chose The Lizard and more in The Amazing Spider-Man. Here are his thoughts on the new trailer versus the teaser:

We felt it was really important to give the audience a more specific idea of what the film would look like. When you do a teaser trailer it’s always tricky, because we were still shooting the movie when that was being cut. This time we wanted to show Peter and Gwen a little bit more. To get to know more of the characterization, and a lot of the visual effects stuff that we’ve been working on, just to display the attitude of the film that we’re trying to create.

Continue Reading Superhero Bits >>

Due to the amount of graphics and images included in Superhero Bits, we have to split this post over THREE pages. Click the link above to continue to the second page of Superhero Bits.

Douglas Trumbull Plans To ‘Reinvent’ Cinema Beyond The Work of Peter Jackson and James Cameron

Germain Lussier — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 20:30:56 +0000

Douglas Trumbull, the man who helped redefine visual effects in cinema working on films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and Blade Runner, has very lofty goals. Despite being on the outside of Hollywood looking in, for the most part, since the mid-eighties, the director is still trying to push the limits of cinema in innovative and interesting ways. He’s talked about using a new, high-speed 3D system and recently sat down with The Hollywood Reporter to go into more detail. A lot more detail.

Trumbull said he’s working on a film that will “reinvent the movies.” A “first person cinema reality which is indistinguishable from reality” set 200 years in the future, dealing with “man’s place in the universe.” He says it’s “way beyond anything that Peter Jackson and Jim Cameron have been doing or are thinking of.”

You’ve got to read more details after the jump.

All of the below quotes come from a fascinating in-depth interview over on The Hollywood Reporter. They spoke to the filmmaker after he received the Georges Melies Award at the Visual Effects Society awards earlier this week. It’s best to let Trumbull just speak for himself. I’ve bolded some highlights.

I left LA in 1987 because of the Natalie Wood disaster; I was frightened for my own life, I was standing between MGM management and a $50 million fraudulent insurance claim. It was a very, very messy situation, and it was the worst personal, professional experience anybody should ever have to go through to get that movie done. And when I got it done, I said, if this is what making movies in Hollywood is like, I’m going to go do something else. I had to consciously decide to put my directing career on hold and go do something else. I did things like the Back to the Future ride and theme parks and expos and took IMAX public and things like that, which I think have been a big boon to the movie business. But I haven’t been on the playing field as a film director, and so nobody from Hollywood calls me to direct their movies. I’m not on anybody’s A-list to do that. I’m not on anybody’s list to want to see the future of cinema, because I feel I have to do it myself. I can talk until I’m blue in the face, but I have to show them what it is. And so I’m developing my own film, well, several films, but one of these films is going to go into this new territory I’m talking about – which is first person cinema reality which is indistinguishable from reality. The screen is going to be so big it’s like a window into another world. I’m going way beyond anything that Peter Jackson and Jim Cameron have been doing or are thinking of, and I don’t expect to get traction from investors until I can show what it is. Because no one’s ever seen it before, and no one can imagine what it would be like. But I can, and I know, and so I’m comfortable with personally making the investment. I have my own studio, I work in the Berkshires, I have my own stage, my own cameras, my own lights, my own editing, my own workshop, my machine shop, and I’m trying to reinvent the movies – with no help whatsoever from Hollywood. But very good, supportive help from projector manufacturers and camera manufacturers, who are completely open to anything that’s going to invigorate their business. So I am getting support on the technical side, but I’m not getting any support on the production side – and I hope that will come.

The Hollywood Reporter then followed up asking if he could give more details on the film:

I can only say that it’s a 200-years-in-the-future science fiction space epic that’s going to address very big, lofty issues, like man’s place in the universe, and how our contact with an extraterrestrial civilizations that are so mind-bogglingly in advance of our own that it will go into some of the same territory that 2001 went into, and it’s going to do it in a very plausibly scientific way, not a fanciful way. There are no alien monsters, and the earth is not being attacked by anybody. It’s going to be a much more intelligent, what we call hard-science fiction, and I think there’s absolutely nothing out there like this. I think the studios believe that they have to dumb everything down and the audience is not scientific, not up for anything truly intelligent, but I think just the opposite. I think we’re in the most technologically advanced society of all time, and people can go with that immediately. Most people you poll would believe that there’s life in the universe, for sure, and the Kepler project and another project are showing that the likelihood of inhabitable planets in our galaxy alone is going to be in the billions, and so the whole plausibility of contact with extraterrestrial civilizations is becoming very real scientifically, very plausible. Talk to any scientist and they’ll say, absolutely, yes. But Hollywood is still in the monster phase, it’s in the b-movie monster phase. And I’m not saying how it should be, I’m just saying what I would like to do, and I’d like to make something more intelligent that I can really be proud of.

He elaborates more in the interview, which is a must read, discussing the state of Hollywood filmmaking and which filmmakers he believes are attempting the kind of experience he’s talking about.

Here’s the sad thing about this. Trumbull is very right about the fact that Hollywood is likely not interested in a smart, sci-fi film like this without major action at its core. Hopefully, though, he’ll be able to find some independent funding and just do it on his own.

What are your thoughts on this? Will we ever see this film from this visual effects legend?

‘Man of Steel’ Henry Cavill Cast in Ed Zwick’s ‘The Great Wall’

Germain Lussier — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 20:00:58 +0000

In 2013, we’ll see Henry Cavill jump buildings in a single bound. After that, he’ll be building them. The Man of Steel star, who is just about done shooting that film, is busy lining up his next project. Variety reports he’ll star in Ed Zwick‘s The Great Wall, an action epic produced by the new Legendary East banner of Legendary Pictures, which will uncover the mystery of how The Great Wall of China came to be. Read more after the jump.

The news of Cavill’s casting broke over at Variety, who says that he’s in negotiations to star in the film. That means it’s all but a formality.

Zwick is co-writing the script for The Great Wall with Marshall Herskovitz and Legendary East hopes it’ll be the first film under the new banner. The new arm of Legendary was launched last year as place for the company to make huge, historical based, worldly adventures.

This is the first news on the film in about six months so it’s good to see that things are moving forward. And casting Cavill seems like a smart, forward-looking idea. Odds are The Great Wall will be released after Man of Steel and, at that time, they’ll potentially have one of the biggest stars in the world. On the other hand, if Man of Steel is a stinker, The Great Wall will have little to no juice.

It’s important to remember, though, that Man of Steel is produced by Legendary as well so Zwick and company have almost certainly seen footage of Cavill in that film. This casting bodes very well for Snyder’s Superman, scheduled for release June 14, 2013.

Are you already a Henry Cavill fan or are you waiting until Man of Steel to decide? How about Ed Zwick?

‘Paradise Lost,’ Indeed: Legendary Pictures Kills Big-Budget War in the Heavens

Russ Fischer — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 19:45:47 +0000

Briefly: There’s not much info at this point, but both Variety and Deadline are reporting that Legendary Pictures has scrapped the Alex Proyas film Paradise Lost.

The big-budget film was originally set to shoot early this year in Australia with Bradley Cooper playing Lucifer and Benjamin Walker, Casey Affleck, Djimon Housou, Diego Boneta, Camilla Belle, Sam Reid, Rufus Sewell and Callan McAuliffe set to play a variety of angels, both exalted and fallen, in a film that would use John Milton’s epic poem about the fall of Lucifer as a springboard to present massive aerial battles.

That live-action shoot would be greatly augmented with CG in a lengthy post-production process, the cost of which is likely to blame for the film’s cancellation. (Update: Variety’s Jeff Snieder went on to say via Twitter, “insiders close to PARADISE LOST say that while Proyas’ vision for the pic was great, the technology wasn’t there. “We weren’t making AVATAR”")

The film was delayed in December when the budget climbed well above $120m. Cue some script reworking, and at Sundance Bradley Cooper was hopeful for a summer shoot. We’ll update with more info when it becomes available, but for now it looks like the Proyas project has fallen with no hope of recovery.

Morgan Freeman Will Lead a Resistance Force in Joseph Kosinski’s ‘Oblivion,’ Starring Tom Cruise

Russ Fischer — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 19:30:11 +0000

Joseph Kosinski is set to follow Tron Legacy with an original sci-fi idea that he hatched as a proof of concept graphic novel a couple years ago. The film is Oblivion (which has also been called Horizons, and said to be untitled as well) and was originally housed at Disney before the studio cut it loose. But the film ended up at Universal with Tom Cruise in the lead role, and now Morgan Freeman has joined the cast in an important role.

Cruise is Jak, a surface drone repairman on a post-apocalyptic and highly irradiated Earth. Most of humanity lives off-world, thanks to the virulent aliens that stalk the wreckage on the surface. When Jak discovers a mysterious woman (Andrea Riseborough) in a crash-landed pod, it sets off an unstoppable chain of events that will force him to question everything he knows.

Olga Kurylenko is in the cast as Jak’s wife, and Deadline reports the addition of Freeman. Variety’s Jeff Sneider chimed in on Twitter to say that Freeman is playing “Malcolm Beech, the leader of the human resistance on Earth.”

And one last interesting point: Toy Story 3 and Little Miss Sunshine writer Michael Ardnt is the latest guy to pen a rewrite on the script. William Monahan wrote the first draft, Karl Gadjusek rewrote that and now Deadline says Arndt is on to polish up things before the film shoots. We don’t know precisely when production begins, and the film actually doesn’t have a release date set at this point, which is unusual for a major studio tentpole.

Michael Showalter Says a ‘Wet Hot American Summer’ Sequel is “Absolutely” Happening

Russ Fischer — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 19:00:07 +0000

The great, wacky 2001 comedy Wet Hot American Summer didn’t do any respectable box office business, but the deep goofiness of the film has generated a fervent cult following in the decade since its original release. It doesn’t hurt that the film featured a treasure trove of comic talent, some in the early stages of their careers: Janeane Garofalo, David Hyde Pierce, Michael Showalter, Michael Ian Black, Zak Orth, A.D. Miles, Paul Rudd, Christopher Meloni, Molly Shannon, Ken Marino, Joe Lo Truglio, Amy Poehler, Elizabeth Banks and Bradley Cooper.

The film suggested the possibility of a sequel, and the sequel is a frequent object of inquiry when director David Wain or one of the primary cast members does an interview, even a decade later. In the last couple years, Wain has said that a sequel or prequel isn’t out of the question, despite the fact that Universal doesn’t seem to believe in the project, and several of the original cast members have a much higher quote now than they did a decade ago.

But there may be reason to rejoice, fans of WHAS: Michael Showalter now says that a sequel is “absolutely happening”!

On Watch What Happens Live, via HuffPo, the actor responded to a question about a WHAS sequel with,

Absolutely yes. One hundred percent yes. The whole gang. Everyone’s back. We’re doing it.

That’s great, but I’m still at the point where I’ll believe it when I see it. And will this be a sequel or prequel? The original film had the characters talk about getting together after years had passed, but last year David Wain suggested we might actually see a prequel:

Yes, we have been talking about a sequel, prequel, something or other… The prequel would be the same summer so they would be 20 years old for the part yeah, but not younger. So it would be 40 year olds playing 16 year olds. And yeah, we’re in the early stages of thinking about that.

Watch Riley Stearns’ ‘Magnificat’, Starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Stephen Tobolowsky

Angie Han — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 18:30:10 +0000

Mary Elizabeth Winstead‘s 2012 is definitely off to a good start. Her starring turn in the indie drama Smashed earned high praise at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and she’s got A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter on her upcoming slate. But Vampire Hunter‘s not due out til summer and Smashed and Charles Swan have yet to even announce release dates, so it may be a while before most of us actually get to see her on the big screen.

Thankfully for those of us who’d rather not wait that long to enjoy her talents, she recently starred in Magnificat, a short film written directed by her husband Riley Stearns. Winstead plays a woman who’s “tormented by malevolent visions that begin to bleed into reality.” /Film favorite Stephen Tobolowsky also stars. Watch it after the jump.

Creepy! I love the shades of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, and Tobolowsky gets a nice chance to show off that versatility that’s landed him such a wide range of roles.

Winstead’s next feature will be Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, which hits June 22. Tobolowsky currently appears in Showtime’s Californication, and recently wrapped Pearblossom Hwy – or, if you live in NYC or Boston, you can check him out when the Tobolowsky Files tour hits your city.

First Look: Martin McDonagh’s ‘In Bruges’ Follow-Up ‘Seven Psychopaths’

Russ Fischer — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 18:00:50 +0000

Seven Psychopaths, directed by In Bruges writer/director and playwright Martin McDonagh, is one of my most-anticipated movies of 2012. (A list which, as predicated, is already completely in need of an update or revamp after Sundance.) The reason is simple: McDonagh has a unique and compelling voice, and the film features a killer cast: Colin Farrell, Woody Harrelson, Christopher Walken, Sam Rockwell, Tom Waits, Gabourey Sidibe, Abbie Cornish, and Olga Kurylenko.

We haven’t yet seen any footage from the movie, but here are the first images. And for those who haven’t tracked down the screenplay we’ve got some new details as well, which might do a little bit to enhance interest in the movie.

EW has the images and interviews with the cast. First, a gallery:

The film sees Harrelson as a gangster who loses it a little bit when his dog is stolen by a broke actor (Rockwell), who is working with a professional dognapper (Walken) who has dogs stolen, then returns them for a reward. But the weird bit is that Farrell plays a screenwriter named Martin who is working on a script called Seven Psychopaths, and when he gets caught up in Rockwell’s orbit, he finds material for his script in the whackos that he meets.

Sidibe is a dog-walker who runs afoul of Harrelson; Kurylenko is Harrelson’s girlfriend, and Abbie Cornish is Farrell’s better half. Tom Waits, meanwhile, is “Zachariah, a rabbit-petting weirdo who offers up strange stories from his past for the Seven Psychopaths screenplay.” In other words, he’s basically Tom Waits.

The self-referential aspect of the script is interesting, and McDonagh tells EW that this is a more overtly comedic story than some of his other work.

Farrell praises his director:

It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that there are very real and very deep feelings at play in all of his work. They’re just masked by this hugely exorbitant language and very extreme, and at times potentially violent situations. Beneath all that stuff, the truth that lies beneath his writing is compassion — more than he would stake a claim for.

There is no release date for the film at this point, but I’m hoping it makes a successful festival appearance that pushes CBS Films to set a solid fall release date.

‘John Carter’ Set Interviews: Andrew Stanton, Taylor Kitsch, Willem DaFoe, Lynn Collins and Thomas Hayden Church

Peter Sciretta — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:30:09 +0000

While on the Utah set of John Carter, a group of journalists (including myself) has the opportunity to interview to the cast and crew. On the following pages, you can read the interviews we conducted on set, transcribed in full:

Interview with Andrew Stanton

Stanton: It’s kind of overcast now. We’ve switched to setting up for dusk.

Q: Isn’t that a good thing?

Stanton: No, because you can always change — You can’t add shadows. If you really want to get dimensional lighting, you want nice, hard shadows. Overcast isn’t our friend. You can always make the sky a little different or tone it down, but you can’t do that much. We wait for bright sunlight. Hard, hot Martian sun.

Q: I think you’re the first person we’ve talked to that’s not completely beaten up.

Stanton: Really?

Q: And you seem so energetic. How do you keep that up with everything that’s going on?

Stanton: Everyone says that and I think you caught me actually a little less energetic. But I don’t know. I just sort of accepted my fate before I went onto this that it was going to be hard as hell. It’s sort of like saying, “Okay, we’re going to go sail around the world.” There’s nothing really easy about that and there’s something mental about just accepting that up front. I’ve been through blizzards in the UK and volcanoes delaying staff and cold nights and hot mornings. It’s been fine.

Q: How does it compare going from the studio to the outside world where you can’t control the elements?

Stanton: Well, again, I knew that was going to be the case and certainly that’s the biggest change. But it’s not as different as I thought it would be. People think — and I know they don’t really think this, but their unconscious knee-jerk reaction is — “Oh, you work with computers. Therefore you don’t work with people.” The truth is that I work with 200 artists every day that are incredibly talented at their jobs and they’ve been good at it for two decades. I have great DPs, great costumer designers, great set designers, great actors and I’ve had to speak the language and move lights around, move sets around. All that stuff that you have to do out here. It translates pretty much directly out here. It’s just how they do their job is different.

But what I have to do in telling them what to do and how the shot should look when it’s actually on frame in the camera, is not that different. They’re actually quite impressed that I can hold so many elements in my head because it has yet to challenge me to the level of Pixar. There’s something about CG animation where nothing comes together for weeks or months. You have to hold all these disparate jigsaw puzzle pieces for such a long time. You’re the only one who is hoping and crossing your fingers that this is what the picture will look like when it all comes together. I’m only asked to do that for a couple of hours here or a day. Then I get to see what we’ve all come up with. They’re very impressed with that mental strength or capacity. All the other animation directors are like, “What’s it like? What’s it like?” and I go, “Guys, you’d be fine.” Pixar is like a massive boot camp for that.

They’re also very shocked that we can picture images in our head before seeing anything. Before we see rehearsal or anything like that. That’s all we’ve ever had the option of doing. We have to come up with it before we make it. I didn’t realize that it was such a weird muscle to have. It’s been very advantageous on something like this. But I’ve also been incredibly spoiled. I realize that one of the reasons that it’s easy is because I’ve been given some of the best people in the industry on the crew. I couldn’t have a better, more talented and more cooperative cast. They’ve made what is a very, very hard shoot seem doable and sometimes downright fun. I’ve lucked out on that and I can’t take credit for it other than saying yes to accepting all these people.

Q: What’s been a challenge for you, then?

Staton: It’s interesting to see the system and how the live-action system works. It’s based on a lot of things that maybe made sense in the day or decades ago or are holdovers from the studio system. It’s unionized and there’s a lot of rules that don’t make a lot of sense logically. Pixar has none of that. I realize that one of the reasons it’s Nirvana is that we didn’t realize how a movie was made and just used — god forbid — logic. We figured that if we made a movie the way it should be made, that was the way they were being made. Our system is very logical and we keep improving upon it. We criticize ourselves and we have post-mortems every movie to improve the system. Out here, nobody questions the system. It’s just the way it is with all its faults and everything. We don’t have unions. Steve was very smart. He said, “Let’s give them why there was unions. Let’s give them great healthcare. Let’s treat them extra special and there’s no reason to have that.” There aren’t these weird byproduct rules that actually cause problems in one area when they think they’re helping another. We have a very clean system, Pixar. After you’ve worked in that, it becomes very obvious how things should work and very obvious how things don’t work the right way here. I get a little frustrated at the haphazardness of it. The world of moviemaking, since the studio system broke down — and this is my guess — lives and breathes off of triage. It lives off disaster planning. People feel comfortable in the disaster. “Oh! I know how to deal with this. This is chaos. Somebody’s on fire. Let’s run and get an extinguisher.” That is not Pixar. Pixar is planning to avoid every disaster possible. It’s a very opposite experience to the extreme and that took my awhile to get used to, the embracing of the chaos. There’s a certain level of it that I feel is necessary. I feel like a parent having their first kid and I can’t wait to have to the second one because I’m going to do the parenting a bit differently. I’m somewhat half observer and half participant in watching how this whole things happens.

Q: This film has an extensive post-production phase –

Stanton: I don’t call it post. I call it “Principal Digital Photography”. Once you look at it like that, you realize, yeah, I’m not done with this shoot at all when I finish in June. Four of my leads are CG and I’d say three or four supporting cast members are CG. Then half the world — not half literally, but the extension of worlds and the extension of sets. These things that are so massive and fantastical that you can’t build them — have to be done. The movie always was planned to be half CG and half live action. Not in look, but in the attempt to build this vision we had. Hopefully, if we do it right, when it’s all done, nothing will look CG and you’ll just accept it. That’s all I ever wanted. I always came to this just as a fan. I’ve spent 40 years of my life just wanting to see somebody make this movie and just see it as a fan and only four realizing, “Oh my god! I can maybe be the one to do that.” All I ever wanted was to just believe it and see it on the screen. That’s really my goal, to not be showy or spectacle for as much as there is, but just believe that I’m really there. Because I’ve spent a whole lifetime just wanting to go there.

Q: Can you talk about approaching it as a fan and what it meant to be able to bring it to life as a super-fan of the property?

Stanton: Well, I’ve been a fan of movies longer than anything else. One thing I learned a long time ago is that you can’t translate a book literally to the screen. It won’t work because it’s a different medium. And it would be the same in reverse. There’s this naive belief by some people that, if you do exactly what’s in the book, it’s going to be good. I would say that that’s false thinking. I would say that even movies you think are great adaptations of the book, if you were to compare them, you would suddenly realize, “Oh my gosh. They changed a lot.”

Q: What would you say that, at the core, was the most important aspect to maintain?

Stanton: Well, the books were serials. The thing that people don’t realize is that the books were originally written as serial chapters in magazines. They all had a three act structure in each chapter. You can’t make a movie like that. It’ll just be this episodic series of train cars going together and it’ll annoy people. How can you keep the spirit of what it felt like to be in the book and to be in these scenes and to be with these characters and to make it work in a three act structure for an overall film. That’s where I came at it. Believe me, there’s a million scenes that I just imagined in my head reading a million times over in the book since I was a kid. Now that I’m older, I still want to see them and I’m trying my hardest to see that they exist in the film, but the thing that has got to work first and foremost is that the story overall works. And that I invest in the character. To be honest, I never actually invested in Carter 100%. He was always a kind of Prince Valiant, did-it-right-from-the-get-go kind of bland, vanilla guy. I think it was his situation that was more fascinating to me. It was a stranger in a strange land, guy thrown out to circumstances. Also, there’s the oddity of the time period. I really love that somebody from the Civil War gets thrown into what we would consider the antiquated past of Mars. That’s been something that I’ve really tried to embrace on this and give it its special thumbprint. Its been such the touchstone for so many things since 1912. It inspired, either directly or indirectly, things like “Flash Gordon”, “Star Wars”, “Superman” all the way up to “Avatar”. If you literally made the book, people would think I was ripping off everyone else and that’s the catch-22 about it. So I thought, “What’s the spin into it that will make it feel fresh and stand on its own ground?” The approach that I finally decided on was that it should feel like a period film. It should feel like it’s historically accurate to everything that really does happen on Mars, as odd as that sounds. It’s the same way that I might watch a film about a civilization that I didn’t know about in the deep regions of South America or the Middle East of Asia. If it’s done in the right way, maybe I’ll go, “Wow! Maybe that’s how it really is on Mars.” I’ll sense these layers of history that go behind it and that go unexplained. I’ve already gotten to see a bit of what it’s like to juxtapose New York City in 1888 against suddenly cutting to Mars and cutting to Arizona in the same time period. It really has a nice, period spin on it. Cross my fingers, I hope it’ll go in that direction if not nail exactly what I was going for. I think that’s what’s needed to make it stand out on its own. If you really nail out the bones of it, it’s a structure that many films have done.

Q: Burroughs goes into great detail about the setting and the creatures. How loyally did you follow those designs?

Stanton: Well, he’s very description, much like Tolkien. Sometimes to a fault. I remember reading “The Lord of the Rings” and getting to a whole chapter about a hill. But it’s really helpful for us for our direction and how we want things to look. Again, what I would do is try to follow the basics, but what was really the rule book was, “Do I believe it? Do I believe it really exists?” I don’t want anything to look — for lack of a better term — fanboy. I don’t want it to look like it’s something that I’ve been drawing on my notebook my whole life while ignoring the teacher and now I finally get to put the Arnold Schwarzenegger bicep guy up on the screen. To me, I roll my eyes just at the thought of that. I want to go, “What would nature really create if that was the case with Tharks and beasts with multiple legs? What would the architecture have to be for a world that is so arid and desert?” Always using the framework from the book as a jumping off point, but tweaking it the moment we felt it was fantasy for fantasy’s sake. For example, I made the Tharks in the height range that they’ve been described a little bit lower. In the book, they’re been nine and fifteen. I made them between nine and ten. But I made them very thin and very ropey because I looked at all the desert-dwelling tribes that we’re aware of — the aboriginals and the Maasai warriors and the bedouins — nobody’s thick. They’re all down to the sinewy muscles and just the essentials. They’re the definition of the word “essential”. That’s what I felt they should be. It was a great exercise because, if we’re taking the physiology that literal and trying to make it look like arms weren’t just stuck on — How would your pectorals be if you actually had a second set of arms and what would their function be? They ended up coming across as a very noble-looking creature and first impression is a very huge thing, even for the character of Carter when he lands on the planet. That really got us inspired to always take that approach on everything.

Q: We were talking to the dialect coach and she was mentioning that the Barsoom language was concocted the same way Na’vi was.

Stanton: Well, one of my producers, Colin Wilson, was one of my producers on “Avatar”. He had a connection to the same dialect coach. I was a little nervous about it, because I didn’t want to be ripping off or stealing or anything like that.

Q: Are you worried about people making the comparison?

Stanton: Well, there’s nothing we can do. That thing was on reels for a long, long time, but this book has been around for 100 years, I just want to see it. I’ve had the same pressure with other films I’ve had to make. “Oh no, someone else is making one just like it!” All that stuff. It all lasts for about three months — it used to be six — and it cycles before nobody gives a crap. It’s about “is it a good movie and am I going to pull it off the shelf and watch it again?” I’m in it for the grandkids and I always am. I’m not in it for the short term. I’m in it for who might watch it after all the B.S. about box office and anything else controversial that can be created goes away. And it goes away almost faster than you can say it now. It’s not worth getting caught up in. I’ve got a book that has held the test of time and I’m going to make a great movie out of it and hope it sails.

Q: What was it about the book that has kept you so involved in the characters?

Stanton: Again, not to diss anything, but it was almost in spite of John Carter that I liked the books. That was where we put a lot of our work in. How to make him somebody to root for, not that I wouldn’t. But it’s not that unique to just this story. It’s often that the hero is the least interesting person and that the interesting characters are the people around him. I felt like I’d rather watch damaged goods than somebody who has their act together. I went for someone who pretty much resigned himself to the fact that his purpose in life was over and sort of went with the thinking that it’s not for us to say what our purpose in life is. You may think it’s done or finished or ended or been missed, but life’s not done with you sometimes. It may take awhile to figure out what your other purpose is or what your greater purpose always was. That’s sort of the tact I took with Carter and it’s really what made Carter perfect to play the role. He’s the bad boy/wrong side of the tracks and that really worked a lot better.

Q: Are you able to include any of the quote/unquote savagery that Carter had in the books?

Stanton: I used to laugh because it seemed like, in every chapter, there was the sentence, “And then I fought the greatest battle of my entire life.” I went, “That can only happen once, technically!” We decided, Hey, it’s an action movie. It’s probably going to be two hours, two hours plus. I don’t want to bludgeon the audience. I don’t want to make it a gorefest. I don’t want people to check out. I want every single battle to move the story forward. I want every single conflict to feel like it’s different from another and special. You certainly want it to compound and feel like you haven’t blown your wad early. You don’t want the best thing to happen in the middle of the beginning of the film. We worked really hard to make tentpole scenes of conflict and saved or combined things to make them that much stronger. Because there was a lot of fighting to choose from. But we’re trying very hard to make them feel like they felt in the books. For me, it was equal amount thrill of adventure and equal amount romance. At the end of the day, I felt like it was a romance. I’ve really tried to make that the bigger thread through the whole thing.

Q: What have you done to the Deja Thoris character to make her more three-dimensional?

Stanton: That was my concern because we don’t need another, “Yes, I’m a nuclear physicist.” And yet I’m sure this book inspired people to do exactly that. I thought that I couldn’t hide that she’s technically a princess, but I can make sure she has as much investment and drive and as much of a goal if not more than Carter for why she’s in the story. That’s what I tried hard to do. But I wasn’t going to hide from the femininity. I feel like that would be a knee-jerk, small-minded, male way of approaching it. I went for the tougher one of saying, “I’m going to embrace the sexiness, but I’m going to go at it from an almost asexual approach of, “Why? Why is she doing everything that she’s doing?” Fortunately, someone like Lynn was a huge win because she brings such passion and strength and integrity to the thing. If the moment didn’t service it, we had to bring it up to that when I was working with her. It’s always a fine balance. You can’t please everybody. I do, every now and then, peek on these blogs and see everyone saying, [Geek Voice] “Are they naked?! Are they naked on Mars?!” Use your brain! It’s a Disney film! [Geek Voice] “Are they going to lay eggs?!” They might! Some might. Not everyone is going to be happy. I’m going to make it as solid a story as I can using as many elements as possible. Because they were introduced to me as a series as a kid — which is a little ironic. I’m the guy at Pixar who is saying, “I don’t want to do a sequel. I don’t want to see a second ‘Nemo’. I don’t want to do a second ‘WALL-E’” — But I’m the guy saying, “I would love to see a series.” Because that’s how it was introduced to me. I’ve tried very hard, me and Mark and Michael Chabon, too, to think wider from the get-go before we ever set out on the first film. So in, touch wood, the event that this film is good enough that they ask for another, we have a plan. It’s a good TV show that has meta issues that can evolve. But we also worked really hard to give it closure. Nothing bugs me more than a cliffhanger with the hubris to think that there is going to be a second one. It’s been interesting. It’s been fascinating to have that going in to something.

Q: Where are the second and third films at at this stage?

Stanton: We outlined three altogether. But the nice thing about not doing anything in tandem is that we can learn from the first and go, “oooH! I like that guy. I like that situation. Let’s see if we can tweak that into the second and third.” We’re constantly growing and constantly adapting. We’re trying to stay ahead of it. We’re writing the second right now while we’re working on the first… You know the cool thing we’re doing is Nathan Crowley, who’s our amazing production designer — he did ‘Dark Knight’ and all of Nolan’s films — we came up with this idea of going around and finding geographical rock structure that already look like ruins and would just need a tiny bit of CG work to suddenly add a stairwell or a few window holes. It would flop into your eyes and look like a whole ruin, like Petra. We’re making it look like it’s bleeding off this whole mesa. That whole mesa is going to look like a city. And it you drive over to where we’re shooting right now, that will be the entire city in a big, empty harbor basin. We won’t need to do more than 20 percent CG work on top of the physical photography. Your eye will see 80% reality. Hopefully people will say, “Where the hell did you find that and where did you shoot it?” I thought it was a very clever way of grounding it reality and not in fantasy.

John Carter Set Visit Interviews:

Continue Reading John Carter Set Visit Interviews >>

/Film Visits The Set of ‘John Carter’

Peter Sciretta — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:00:00 +0000

I visited Mars almost two years ago. It was April 2010 and the film set was in the middle of nowhere. Finding Nemo/WALL-E director Andrew Stanton was making his live-action debut John Carter, a big screen adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs‘s novel A Princess of Mars. There had been many failed attempts to bring the material to the big screen, but somehow Stanton was able to convince the studio heads to let him be the one to make the adaptation at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Disney flew a group of journalists into the Las Vegas airport, where we boarded a shuttle bus to a location five hours away. A location so far away that we were no longer in Nevada. Located at the center of the Grand Circle, Big Water Utah has a population of only 417 people (which probably explains why you didn’t see many John Carter set photos). The set was located out in the middle of a desert.

You wouldn’t have any idea a big Hollywood production was being shot in town, aside from small yellow signs that read “BARSOOM” which help crew members find the small dirt road which leads to the set. And by set, I mean a few structures which have been constructed on the grey dirt in the middle of these large brown hills made of sandstone. Barsoom, of course, is what the Martians in the books call their home planet.

Producer Colin Wilson tells us that visual effects artists will augment the hills with alien windows and structures. Wilson just got done working a long stint as Executive Producer and Unit Production Manager on James Cameron’s Avatar, so he’s happy to be out of a performance capture studio and back in a real environment. When the John Carter teaser trailer was released a year and a half after this visit, fans criticized that it looks like Cameron’s Avatar. Sure, there are computer animated characters created using performance capture, but the production of the film couldn’t be more different.

We watch filming as Willem Dafoe and Thomas Haden Church (both academy award nominated actors, and members of Raimi’s Spider-Man villain gallery) walk around on three-foot tall stilts. Men in green suits shadow their legs in case they tumble. The alien creatures in the film are nine to ten feet tall, four-armed, and have large tusks. Dafoe and Church are wearing the grey pajama-looking mocap suits you’ve seen in DVD/Blu-ray special features for other movies. They’re wearing huge head gear with telescoping arm cameras to capture their complete facial movements. While normally you’d think this would be distracting, the actors praised the head rigs for helping them figure out where their large tusks would be in real-space.

Thomas Haden Church told us,

For the most part, our physicality is captured by the cameras and then all of our facial maneuverings and manipulations are caught by the headset cam, There are two of them. It’s a different process because, on Spider-Man, so little of it, so little of the animation was available to me as a physical actor, whereas this, you’re completely embedded in it. My whole body and my head and everything is going to be in motion capture with an infusion of my body and, as I already said, my physicality and expressions and emotions of it.

The whole set-up helps the lead star Taylor Kitsch interact with these gigantic alien creatures, and gives the performers more control of the animated performance. In the scene we observed, Kitsch is arguing with the alien group — the stilts allow him to get a proper eyeline and see the performance in real time, rather than have to imagine and interact with a performance that doesn’t exist.

We were shown a rig which allowed the actors to ride alien creatures called thoats. Basically it is a moving vehicle with a saddle controlled by a puppeteer to simulate the galloping of the animal. They would later add the computer animated creature into the shot. Normally such a sequence would be shot completely on green screens, with the actors sitting on a bouncing rig. Stanton wanted to make Barsoom feel as photo real as he could, and use computer generated effects for the alien creatures and to augment practical locations and constructed sets.

Things change over the years. The movie was still titled John Carter of Mars while we were on set, and didn’t get retitled until a year later. Stanton told us that he wasn’t interested in releasing the film in 3D and that the studio was behind that decision. Meanwhile, Producer Colin Wilson told us that there were still internal talks about the possibility of post conversion. We all know how that turned out — the film is being released in post-converted 3D.

Behind the scenes photos:

Page 2: Breaking Bad, Walking Dead, Star Wars, Dredd, Banksy, Kristen Stewart, Back to the Future, Indiana Jones,

Peter Sciretta — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 16:00:12 +0000

What is Page 2? Page 2 is a compilation of stories and news tidbits, which for whatever reason, didn’t make the front page of /Film. After the jump we’ve included 50 different items, fun images, videos, casting tidbits, articles of interest and more. It’s like a mystery grab bag of movie web related goodness. If you have any interesting items that we might’ve missed that you think should go in /Film’s Page 2 – email us!

Header Photo: Kyle Hilton has created Breaking Bad paper dolls.

Find out Why Clint Eastwood was a last minute addition to Disney-MGM’s “Great Movie Ride”

Nerdy Star Wars oven mitts.

Miss Piggy will appear at the British Academy Film Awards 2012 on Sunday.

Watch Lee Hardcastle’s claymation short film parody Robo with a Shotgun.

VFX Trailblazer Douglas Trumbull Describes His Radical 3-D Experiment to Save Movies

The Walking Dead poster by Danny Miller

TopTenz lists the Top 10 Movie Characters Who Suffer From Split Personality

Supercut: Tumbleweeds (commissioned by the Columbus Museum of Art)

So much for the studios complaining about all the lost DVD/Blu-ray revenue — Universal announces that Bridesmaids earned $40 million in video on demand.

Continue Reading Page 2 >>

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Watch Martin Scorsese, Thelma Schoonmaker, Ben Kingsley and More Discuss ‘The Magic of Hugo’

Angie Han — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 15:00:05 +0000

Of the nine movies currently up for Best Picture, Martin Scorsese‘s Hugo is my personal favorite. There’s so much I love about the film, from its eye-popping visuals and impeccable use of 3D to its inspiring tale and lovable performances. I’m not the only one that feels that way, of course — Hugo‘s been a popular pick on many critics’ lists and awards ballots. And now, as Academy voters mull over their final decisions, Paramount is eager to remind everyone of Hugo‘s many wonderful qualities.

The studio has released a six-minute featurette titled “The Magic of Hugo,” which goes behind the scenes to look at the hows and whys of making the picture. Scorsese, editor Thelma Schoonmaker, production designer Dante Ferretti, producer Graham King, visual effects supervisor Robert Legato, composer Howard Shore, and stars Ben Kingsley and Sacha Baron Cohen all appear to discuss their work on the project, and to talk about what made the film so special. Watch it after the jump.

[via First Showing]

I don’t know about you, but I found that to be a damn effective refresher on why I fell so hard for Hugo in the first place. I walked out of the theater feeling that the movie had really been a labor of love, and you get a good sense here of just how much care and effort went into the project. Plus, I got a kick out of watching Scorsese directing Kingsley, who as filmmaker Georges Méliès is himself directing A Kingdom of the Fairies.

Based on The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick, Hugo stars Asa Butterfield as the titular boy and Chloë Grace Moretz as his friend, Méliès’ young niece. Scorsese’s first family film is currently up for eleven Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director. The Blu-ray hits stores February 28 — check out the press release for more details, or head to Amazon.com to pre-order.