Although Comic Con ended over a week ago, plenty of information is (thankfully) still pouring in about many of the film coverage present. This time around, we hear from Kenneth Branagh, who recently wrapped principal photography on Marvel Studios' THOR movie; which stars Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Tom Hiddleston and Anthony Hopkins.
Regarding adding another character into the established Marvel Cinematic Universe:
"The fun of it, Kevin [Feige] will tell you, he’s the uber-meister I think of all of that, but the fun thing is when you know, and you go and see Iron Man 2. You get a couple of lines saying, 'Clark has to get down to New Mexico. We have a little bit of a problem down there.' You know we’re the problem! We’ve got a couple of little nods heading Joe [Johnston’s] way with our picture. I got thrilled when I went to see the set the other week so what was nice is, at least I didn’t feel, you may have done it so brilliantly I didn’t notice, but I didn’t feel I had to think about it at all. It was Thor-centric."
How is Branagh planning on "selling" the fantastical characters in THOR to general audiences who aren't familiar with comic movies without costumed superheroes?
"We always talked early on, I’m there for what it’s worth to try and guide the tone. I was passionate that we should have a contemporary earth sequence to the movie. I believe, they do in the comics, that we can live in both places and people can travel maybe to both places potentially and that we can [finesse] the tone. [We've] got to stay very honest and very truthful, and I hope we do. Tone was always, always kind of the key issue. Key people early on, props and production designer Bo Welch, Academy Award winning costume designer Alex Bird was also somebody who was trying to be inspired by the comic book, but also she kept being imaginative about it and trying to present textures and elements. When you know that people travel through space, when they live in the world of gods, it isn’t just a question of just metal or just molded kind of human material. So we’d always just try to look at it, see what we saw in the comic and then try and reinvent, re-imagine, go back to some original source. That got everybody very excited, so you want to try to be pure and classical in it but bring in new twists."
Regarding the film's production design; specifically Asgard and New Mexico:
Production design, we wanted a mammoth quality to Asgard, having monumental buildings. If you walk around the city of Rome and you look up on any street corner, there’s just a sort of massivity that would have kept people visiting that place in ancient Rome awed. So we wanted to have Asgard awe its inhabitants by its size, its magnificence, its beauty, its goldenness, all of that but that it had a heft and wasn’t kind of airy fairy."
Would he be open to acting in one of these films?
"I don't know, actually. I haven’t been asked, so there you go. We’ll find out if we do a second one."