I'll be honest, this is one of those films that seem so epic in scope and story that I just can't wait to see. Talking to Geoff Boucher of LA Times'
Hero Complex, director Andrew Stanton (
Finding Nemo,
WALL-E) shared more info on the overall process of making this big screen adaptation, what were some of the films he watched before doing this, and more. Plus, new concept art has been revealed showing us design of the constructs in the film. It is a very long interview, so for much more just follow the link at the bottom of the page.
Stanton worked very long on this project, and now they are in post-production stages, preparing for the 2012 release date:
We’ve cut the movie together and started the whole visual effects animation process last summer and then we did a month of re-shoots in L.A. in April, and now it’s just a race to get it all done in time. I knew this was going to be a long journey. It’s like saying, "We’re going to cross the ocean in a sailboat, never done that before." You just know that every day is going to be interesting and hard or both. And that’s certainly what it was.
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On the story and and source material:
I’m just as much a fan of all that stuff as anyone, so I didn’t want to repeat anything and I didn’t want to go exactly to where other people had gone. And I certainly recognize the influences coming directly or indirectly from people like Edgar Rice Burroughs. But I haven’t felt the satisfaction [from the other works] that the thumbprint or the identity of the Barsoom books … [gave me] as a kid. I still felt like there was a flavor or a shading or a color that could still feel fresh or special. None of this is in reaction to those other movies. I want to come to everything honestly. If at the end of the day the dust settles and it’s very similar to another movie, then I can live with that if it came there honestly. But my big thing is this: There were so many personal fantasies that were fulfilled or cathartically found by fans through those books — in other words, they used the books as a conduit to their own fantasies and the things in their own head. I’ve never had to answer this before so I’m stumbling around a bit, but the thing is that because I know this book was so much the source material, directly or indirectly, for so many things, I got intrigued by the idea of treating it as if it really was the source material in the historical sense of the term. What if this really happened? That kind of opened my eyes. I suddenly had a fresh way to see it. And it goes back, in a way, to the way we take things in when [we were young readers]. When I was a kid I really wanted to imagine it as if it was a real sequence of events that took place on the surface of Mars in another century.
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On what films did he watched before making this, he said:
Yeah, I looked at things like Apocaplyto and Rome and even things like Shogun and Lawrence of Arabia, things that as a viewer I could accept as having a level of historical research. They give me a sense of what it would be like in that land and in that age. So then you ask, "Well, what if we just did our Martian research really, really well and treated it as a period film. There are so many times and places in history in our world that I just don’t know anything about, and when I learn about them they’re always fascinating. I don’t need a predisposed interest in them if they are presented well. So we said, "We’ll treat it this way, we won’t treat it like some fantasy being fulfilled by a fan." We tried to make it feel like we’re going with the story of what really happened. This is how it was, this is how those cultures really existed. That was one of the many levels, for instance, that I enjoyed The Lord of the Rings on. One of the similarities between Tolkien and Burroughs is that they came across to the reader as if they had done so much travel research; they seemed like they had gone to these places and documented the flora and the fauna and the architecture and the culture and the rules. They did it in ways that someone who visited those places would have done it. That made it much easier to treat the film as history in a weird way because I had this encyclopedia of all the aspects of Mars.
And as for skipping this year's Comic-Con, he said:
I think what it was is the perception that it’s getting harder and harder to stand out amid the din. We’re going to do our special event to get some focus and separation. I know some people will read that as a sign that we’re unsure of our property. It’s just the opposite. We want to control how and what is being seen and the way it is presented. So much stuff now is just spit out so fast and the churn of it all. You almost gain nothing by talking about things really early in this day and age. I think in the future we might see things arrive the way Prince announces a concert where a few days before the show he announces it and tickets just go up. You might see that with movies and other things. That seems like the only way to get people interested and then capitalize off that interest.
Starring Taylor Kitsch, Lynn Collins, Mark Strong, Willem Dafoe and Thomas Haden Church,
John Carter is set to hit theatres on March 9, 2012!