Speaking with
CNN,
The Lone Ranger director Gore Verbinski and producer Jerry Bruckheimer talk about the difficulties of filming Disney's big budget western. The former comments on meeting expectations amidst competition, saying,
"I think every director who's making a big movie this summer has gone through the same thing,. That's what audiences expect, and you've gotta be really entertaining. It's competition." Bruckheimer adds,
"Nobody understands how difficult it is actually to do it. The grueling hours, the lack of sleep. [Verbinski's] always looking for another location -- he lost a location, he's got to shoot something else the next day, an actor's sick. ... It's just unbelievable that you're running this thing for a number of months and you're moving an army five states."
As previously reported, all of the trains that we've seen in the trailers are not CGI. In fact, it's all practical. Bruckheimer had this to say about shooting those action sequences with actual trains and more.
"Everything is real. Gore doesn't like to do it with the visual effects, so those guys are really on the train, the train is actually moving, it's not a CG shot -- so everything you see here is real. So it had to be built. You can't imagine how many people it takes just to keep the train running; to get the stunt guys to keep the guys on top of the train; the rigging so they're all safe and the amount of extras [to be] the people in the background; it's just a lot." As for Verbinski, he won't deny just how challenging it was to film
The Lone Ranger.
"Eleven [on a scale of one to ten], definitely. This is the hardest movie. I mean, hats off to ['Stagecoach,' 'Searchers' director] John Ford and ['Once Upon a Time in the West' director] Sergio [Leone] and all those kinds who make these Westerns because they're really hard. I mean we all know what a train looks like and we all know what horses look like and it's not a giant robot or a flying saucer, so what are you going to [do], put someone against a blue screen?
"But we know what that [Western] reality looks like, there's a whole language that's been established about what we know and feel from real horses and real dirt and real trains, and they're hard movies. This movie has Comanche and cavalry and trains, and we went and shot in five states. It's a big movie." Finally, Bruckheimer comments on reinventing The Lone Ranger's (Armie Hammer) origin story, told through the perspective of Johnny Depp's Tonto.
"[Verbinski] makes big movies and that's what audiences love and that's why summer movies become blockbusters, because you give them a lot of punch for their 10 or 12 bucks. [We're] reinventing the tale of the Lone Ranger, but starting with the origin. It's the origin story, told through Tonto's point of view, who's not quite accurate with what he remembers, so it's a lot of fun." Are you looking forward to seeing
The Lone Ranger later this summer?
The Lone Ranger stars Armie Hammer, Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Ruth Wilson, Tom Wilkinson and William Fichtner. The film is set to hit theaters July 3rd.