Director Andrew Stanton On Making JOHN CARTER, The Books, Reshoots And More!
In this in-depth interview, director of the upcoming science fiction epic John Carter, Andrew Stanton, talks about making his live-action debut with this big scale adaptation, reshoots, sequels, his love for the novels and more. Check it out...
Academy Award-winning director Andrew Stanton (WALL-E and Finding Nemo) makes his live-action debut with this big film, and now, in this in-depth interview with Empire (which you can find in the upcoming issue), Stanton talked about number of topics, including what he thinks of the books to which he was introduced at a very young age (and still likes them), reshoots and much more. Check out the whole transcript of what Stanton said below:
If he is making this film for a specific audience:
"That's the worst way to make a movie. I do not listen to The Beatles because they know what I want; I listen to them because I want to know what they like. It's not designed from the outside. I've been asked that question for 20 years at PIXAR, and I've given the same answer: we do not think of who the audience is. That's the worst way to make a movie!"
On how he made this story fresh, since (some of) it was already seen in films that took Burroughs' novels as inspiration (Avatar, Star Wars), and how did he solve this issue:
"I wouldn't have made it if I was worried about that because there's no way around that. My big thing is, 'How do I make this feel how it felt to read it?' I have no control over when people see this, I don't know what else they've seen. I just want this to be pure for what it is. All I cared about for most of my life up until 2006 was that somebody would do it and that somebody would do it right."
Stanton says that when he heard that Jon Favreau decided to leave the project in 2006, he approached Disney to direct it:
"I called Disney and said, 'If WALL-E doesn't flop, would you guys consider me maybe crossing over and doing this movie? Because I know how to do it right.' They said they'd consider it, and in two months bought the rights and said yes. It was a case of, 'Be careful what you wish for'; I thought, 'Wow, I'm really going to do this now.'"
When he got the job, Stanton knew it's going to be big, but since he was passionate about the project, he decided to read the books again, which will sustain him over the next four years:
"At 12, it was the idea of this stranger in a strange land, this human being thrown into a world he didn't see coming, and discovering it through him. But my wife likes to say I'm just gay enough. I really enjoyed the romance - I've always been a sucker for unrequited love. And here he's getting the girl, losing the girl, getting the girl and losing the girl. Plus the adventure! The books are simplistic, they're meant for a young age group, but I put a lot of value in things that stay in your psyche so I felt there was fertile ground there. I mean they're not perfect, and I'm kind of glad: it took a little bit of pressure off that they weren't Pulitzer-Prize winners!"
For 4 years, they have been working on a script, until they started filming in January of 2010. They filmed for 6 months, until July 2010. According to Stanton, he brought in Pixar's Mark Andrews (who is now directing BRAVE) along with Michael Chabon to work on the screenplay:
"It's the obvious thing: [Michael] he's just an insanely great writer. Mark and I were trying our best to fake dialogoue of this weird antiquated style, but Michael, it's in his veins. He'd just make it this beautiful, poetic thing. We put the book away, and for almost a year basically treated it like an original story. Like, what would be the strongest way to do this? What was amazing that, when that process was over, I went back to the book and it wasn't that far out. It was a chiropractic adjustment to make these things work, but you had to have the intestinal fortitude to do that."
Stanton shot JOHN CARTER on film instead of digitally (like most of the movies are filmed these days), and also he wanted to test himself with making a live-action epic, rather than doing an animated film:
"When I read the books as a kid I saw it as real. I saw a real man standing in the real desert with real creatures that were nine-feet tall, and I want it to feel like that when I watch the movie."
This is big budget adaptation, and Stanton knew very early on that he will do reshoots:
"I said, 'I'm always going to stay on schedule and I'm always going to saty on budget. Because I'm 100 per cent positive that I'm going to reshoot, and I need as much money and support and time as they will give me for that. So why should I give anyone an excuse to scrimp on the reshoot I'm positive we're going to do. I'm going to be a good citizen.' I don't get how you can make a movie without reshooting, because there's a certain part of the brain that doesn't work until you watch it like a movie."
He also insisted on calling the post-production process a "principal digital photography" since there are around 2200 CG shots:
"Up until this summer (2011), so about a year-and-a-half, I still feel like I've been on a live-action shoot, but it's all been digital. But there's the same mentality that we can still change lines and edit differently. I've had a lot more tricks of the trade than I'm used to in an all-CG environment - I was able to make myself a much better filmmaker than I probably was on the shoot my first time around and I'm not embarrassed by that! All that matters is what's on the screen. But I definitely want to be better at it next time."
Stanton decied to show JOHN CARTER to Pixar's inner circle, which includes John Lasseter, Lee Unkrich and Pete Docter, so he could take some of their notes when doing the reshoots:
"I got one big whack in the face. The biggest thing that came out of it was, I was so concerned about people understanding all the rules of Mars that I felt I had to present a lot of it at the beginning, and it was sort of information overload. They felt I had to reset, and I just hadn't come up with a clever way to come into the story later with a lot of the Mars issues. That opened my eyes, and I had to reshoot whole scenes, but I'm glad I did because they were reimagined better. And there was a lot of patchwork stuff. Just a big facelift."
As for sequels, Stanton said:
"I'm the guy that's always saying no to sequels at Pixar, but I was introduced to these books as a series and I always hoped it would be a series like Bond. I remember saying that out loud when I was 12. But it's not that I'm confident we'll get a sequel. I'm just paranoid that you can never start writing early enough. I'm emotionally fine if this is the only movie; I don't have the hubris to think it's going to do well ahead of time. But if it does well and they want to make another one, they're going to want it yesterday. And even if it ends up on the shelf, it's writing practice!"
And for the end, Stanton added:
"Everybody wants to make good movies, and we [Pixar] make it so difficult for ourselves because we contribute to the myth that the are products that have to be made for the outside world as opposed to being, at the end of the day, art - an expression from the inside out. No matter how sexy or what the amount of spectacle, you have to invest in the characters and you've got to care. That's all I ever really want when I watch a movie or read a story: what's going to make me care?"
To read more what Stanton had to say about 3D, pick up the latest issue of Empire Magazine which will be available soon.
Big thanks goes to CBM's Josh Wilding, who provided me with this interview.
Starring Taylor Kitsch, Lynn Collins and Willem Dafoe, Mark Strong, Bryan Cranston, James Purefoy, Dominic West, Thomas Haden Church and Ciarán Hinds. John Carter is set to hit theatres on March 9, 2012!