10 Amazing Things We Learned On The Set Of Cowboys & Aliens
By Meredith Woerner at io9
Earlier this year, we spent one hot summer day at New Mexico’s infamous Plaza Blanca landscape watching Jon Favreau, Harrison Ford, and Daniel Craig make their alien abduction Western mash-up. Here’s what we learned. Plus two new behind-the-scenes images!
They know you think the title is silly, and that’s a good thing.
When asked about the obvious nature of the title and some of the public’s comical reaction to it, Orci was fine with it — in fact, he almost welcomed the general snickering at the mention of Cowboys & Aliens even though the movie isn’t a comedy. “We tend to treat these things like a campaign,” Orci explained. “And you don’t want to be the front runner up front. So having a title that people snicker at is actually not a terrible thing, because when they find out what it really is, it actually compels them to discuss it and to say, ‘It’s not what you think.’ As opposed to – you don’t want to be Hillary Clinton a year out, you know. You want to be Obama a year out… We’ve been through this before. We’ve been through it with Transformers, where they thought it was – whatever you think of the movie – is it a cartoon, is it the Power Rangers? And then you see a trailer for it and you realize it’s got a different scale and a different theme to it. It’s the same thing with this. I think Iron Man went through a similar thing. ‘Oh, it’s a B grade, superhero.’ Then when you see it, so – we like coming from behind, and having the title change in your perception.”
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Michael Bay denies reports that his “aggressive” style messed up Transformers 3’s 3-D filming
By Meredith Woerner at io9
Will Transformers 3‘s 3-D footage be as beautiful as Avatar‘s, or as ugly as Last Airbender‘s? Even though Michael Bay shot the film in 3-D, some sources claim the result wasn’t usable, forcing him to use the dreaded 3-D-post-conversion process.
Unnamed sources told IESB that filming in 3-D, using state of the art cameras, didn’t actually work out too well for Bay.
The 3-D looks like shit and we don’t know if we will be able to use all of it the way it is… Avatar set the standard very high for 3-D films and even though some of the best people in the 3-D business were brought aboard for TF3 but with Michael’s quick, aggressive style of shooting without any real past experience has caused hiccups.
The source added that Bay didn’t plan to reshoot this footage, but instead some scenes would be handed over to a post-production house, to be treated with the same process that resulted in muddy, eye-blistering footage for Clash of the Titans and The Last Airbender.
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Disney asked Johnny Depp whether Jack Sparrow was gay
By Scott Edelman at Blastr
We’ve all heard the stories of how Disney execs were worried by Johnny Depp’s performance in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie—that they felt his mumbling, Keith Richards-inspired delivery wouldn’t be accepted by audiences. It turns out that was the least of Disney’s worries about Captain Jack Sparrow.
According to Depp in the latest issue of Vanity Fair, Disney also worried about the character’s sexuality:
“I think it was Michael Eisner, the head of Disney at the time, who was quoted as saying, ‘He’s ruining the movie.’ It was that extreme—memos, and paper trails, and madness, and phone calls, and agents, and lawyers, and people screaming, and me getting phone calls direct from, you know, upper-echelon Disney-ites, going, ‘What’s wrong with him? Is he, you know, like some kind of weird simpleton? Is he drunk? By the way, is he gay?”
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World of ‘Avatar’ coming to Seattle’s science-fiction museum
By Moira Macdonald at Seattle Times
“Avatar” director James Cameron says he and Paul Allen — co-founder of Seattle’s Experience Music Project|Science Fiction Museum — “love to geek out together” about science fiction.
That friendship has led to something tangible for Seattle’s sci-fi fans: “Avatar: The Exhibition,” a collection of memorabilia from the 2009 blockbuster film, will be launched at the museum beginning June 4.
The exhibit will include some 40 to 50 artifacts from the film, such as costumes, props, concept models and sketches, said museum associate curator Brooks Peck.
Also included will be several interactive displays in which visitors can experiment with concepts explored by Cameron while making the film: performance capture, virtual cameras, sound design and the Na’vi language created for the film.
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I have absolutely no desire to see Transformers 3, especially now that I know it’s in 3D (and crappy 3D, apparently). And it really shouldn’t matter whether Jack Sparrow is gay or not; Dumbledore was gay and he was awesome. It’s just sad to me that it was such an issue (before the money rolled in).
Do you want to see the Avatar exhibit? Are you looking forward to Cowboys & Aliens or Transformers?
