Rather lengthy highlights:
Part 1:
http://movies.ign.com/articles/758/758976p1.htmlPart 2:
http://movies.ign.com/articles/758/758569p1.htmlIGN: This Turtles film is not a reboot, correct? Do the existing movies exist in this storyline? Does the animated series?
Murnoe: I'd say this is more [part of] the movies if you had to place it. We acknowledge the adventures that they've been on. I think, if you just look at the three movies, just knowing they've been on those adventures pretty much encompasses anything that the animated series could do when you go from mutants to the whole TCR stuff to the traveling in time. It's a reworked story, yeah, because we didn't have any interest in doing a reboot of it and retelling the origin story. Everybody knows it. That's pretty much the same reason why Shredder isn't in it -- in this first one, at least. The idea of having them reborn as a family, how do you tell an origin story without telling an origin story? The idea is that they've been through all these adventures and Splinter as a worried father is concerned that having a common foe is the only thing that binds them together as a family. That's not the right thing that binds you together as a family. So the family is sort of falling apart at the beginning of the movie, and it's about them coming together as a team and as a family. So at the end you sort of end with this world that you want to go back to and revisit, and it doesn't feel like we're treading in the same water all over again.
IGN: Is this a PG-13 movie or PG?
Munroe: It's close. It's going to be PG, but it's tight… but our biggest enemy is intensity. I mean, it's not because we want to be graphic with any of the violence or blood or language, but just sort of that feeling that we want people to feel real peril. That's sort of the benefit of the Spider-Mans and Batmans -- it makes you feel like those characters are going to die. So how can you push that without pushing too far, so you push until you get hit, and then you pull it back. We never intended it to be a, sort of, very G-friendly sort of movie; we knew we'd go too far for that.
Warner Bros.
Gray: We would love to do it rated PG-13, but you can't really. I mean, when we first started setting this up, we went to the studio they said there's no way you can do PG-13 because everybody lives in the quadrants -- the seven to 11 and then the older one -- so we tried to get a compromise where we could shove it up a little bit and get close to it without getting a PG-13. We had to pull back on several items that are really taboo, which are the throwing stars, the shurikens, to a certain degree nunchucks. They, certainly in the U.K. and Scandanavia, are forbidden -- and those are the toys of the Turtles! But it's one of those things where we would love to graduate, maybe, if this thing is successful, take to another level of PG-13 because personally, for me, when we had an early discussion, we said, "I don't care about the little kids; I want to satisfy the alums which were with us back in the day in the '90s." I said, "If we can make them happy, then I don't care." The little ones are going to get it off the television and they run around and they're looking at the toys, but those alumni that really made this happen in the beginning, those are the ones you've really got to [satisfy].
When I bought it in June of 1988, I wasn't completely sold on the concept myself. I was coming from a company that made all of the kung fu movies in Hong Kong with Jackie Chan and Jet Li and earlier, Bruce Lee movies. I said, "If we could take the Ninja Turtles and throw them in some suits, put our stunt guys in them and put Phoebe Cates in it, we'd get our money back in Japan." I have that letter at home, which I wrote to Raymond Chow saying we could make this for three million bucks in our studio in Hong Kong. That became the origin of why we originally decided to greenlight the project. I always thought it would make money, but I never thought it would be as big as it was. This time coming around, it wasn't easy to set up because the wisdom was there's X-Men, there's Spider-Man, there's other superheroes now, and the Turtles don't really have any fantastic things that they do. They don't fly or do any of those things. It was out of the belief from Warner Bros. and The Weinstein Company [that this film got made]. I remember Harvey [Weinstein] was in Hong Kong and we showed him a trailer and he said, "I missed it the first time. I've got to have this now!" He said, "I want this movie." So there's never... it's not an easy project because it was post-Howard the Duck in the beginning, when everybody said, "If George Lucas can't make money on a comic book, how can you?" And I said, "Well, George Lucas never had toys and he was never in syndication." It's oftentimes what happens in this business -- people that are in the business don't see it for whatever it is. They don't listen to their research departments, who could tell you that this thing was really sitting on the shelf.
When Kevin and I were schlepping around town trying to make presentations, what really sold the people was that he cut a really phenomenal trailer, which was very crude in the beginning. But once they could see how these Turtles would look, then it started to become a reality. And the price that we were making this film at, everybody said, "How bad can it really be?" I don't know. I've lived large off of this for a long time and I think that it's not so much me, it was the fact that I always felt there was an audience that was with us, is still going to be with us and then we have the new group. So, if we execute in a halfway decent fashion, we should make some money.
OK this doesn't bode well!
IGN: With what you storyboarded, what ended up being the toughest thing for you to bring to life?
Munroe: The Leo-Raph fight was really hard because you're sort of tempted right away to make it about these two guys beating on each other with weapons, and it has to be such a character-driven performance. It's the apex of the movie; everything culminates in that moment where the two of them just sort of go head-to-head. It's got to have so much subtext in the fighting, and it can't just be about them trying to kill each other. It's got to be [about] why are they fighting each other. It was a lot of action and a lot of acting, and plus just technically it was a pain in the ass with all of the rain. We wanted everything to sort of interact differently - when the rain hit his helmet versus his sword.
IGN: How challenging was it to add rain to the movie?
Munroe: There's a reason a lot of people don't do it, and we sort of learned that a lot on this. To add wetdown and reflective surfaces and stuff doesn't stop us, but we get there and Hong Kong politely asks us, "Could you maybe not kill us this month? It would be really nice if we had some of our artists still alive at the end of the month." So we'd figure a way around it and we'd shoot it and we'd do what we can, but you never try to compromise before you see if it can actually work. That was one of those ones that even in the first draft it always took place in the rain and it always looked like that.
GN: What are we going to hear in the film music-wise? Is Vanilla Ice coming back?
Gray: Vanilla back? No [laughs]. We got Atlantic Records, a lot of their artists. We're still sorting through that now for certain scenes. Klaus Badelt will score the movie; he did Constantine, so there will be themes, but I don't know if there is really a classic Turtle theme so to speak. The Fred Wolf, I think legally it was a little [tough]; there's a lot of people involved.
IGN: Besides just getting this made, what has been your biggest challenge?
Munroe: That is the challenge [laughs]. I'm trying to think if there's anything else other than that. Um, coming into work this morning [laughs]. No, I think setting up the studio in Hong Kong, that was a really big challenge -- other than getting it made, but that's the first thing that comes to mind. The fact that we have like 400 people in Hong Kong, and half of them this is like their first job. It was half art school, half movie production, so it was a lot of communication and a lot of back and forth. It's amazing because I'm constantly surprised by stuff, like there's like 80 animators over there and only a handful speak English, and the idea that there is so much subtext to a lot of the animation and a lot of the acting and it's just being interpreted by our Hong Kong-born animation director, who just goes in and acts it out in Cantonese for these guys. And the same thing with the action; they just push all of their desks aside and it looks like Fight Club when you're walking through. In the West, animators grow up with a healthy dose of Chuck Jones and Disney and those kinds of animation, but they grew up with a pedigree of Hong Kong cinema and that kind of background, so much of this comes naturally -- on top of the fact that I think over half of them have trained in martial arts, too. So it was really neat to just say, set up the camera here and just kind of go, "Go nuts." We talked about getting a choreographer at the beginning, and while it looks cool for the DVD to show us doing this, it's really more of a side step.
IGN: What are you hoping that people will get out of this update? People presumably already are familiar with the characters, but what's different about this film that's going to make them happy and give them something new to watch?
Munroe: I think, as a movie, it's deeper. I think it runs just a little more believable. I'm not going to say realistic because I don't believe we are striving for reality, but I prefer 'believable reality.' I think the first movie does it really well in the sense that it's a very encompassing movie -- you just get in there and you are submerged in that world and it feels like they just actually lived in the sewers to me. Well, at least that's the memory of it. But in this one, I think it's especially important to concentrate on family. They are a family, but you never really got a strong family dynamic, like real tension between brothers and why brothers fight and the way brothers make up and stuff. So it's kind of nice to approach them as a family instead of just character archetypes, you know, the funny one, the smart one, the leader, all this other stuff and just go a shade deeper. I think for the older fans, you get that excitement that you remember, even though when you watch the old series it doesn't hold up the same way that you thought it did, but this is just trying to tap in to what you still remember in your head in terms of level of excitement, and then going a little bit further. We're trying to go a bit beyond the in-jokes for adults, the little wink-nudge to the mom and dad, there's just really no reason for it. There's a level of fun to this movie that will hopefully bring in the older audience to this film.
IGN: Can you talk about the casting of Sarah Michelle Gellar, Kevin Smith and Chris Evans? And who are the voices of the Turtles?
Gray: First of all, we didn't want to touch the Turtles. Remember, we had Corey Feldman way back in the day and that was, kind of, the only person that was somewhat known. [But] we always felt that the Turtles don't require getting Adam Brody or someone like that to play Leonardo or whatever you wanted to do. If we could hold back the Turtles, then we could say, "OK, if you require going with April or Casey -- or Max Winters in this case -- then we would be amenable to go out and look at actors." Although, we didn't really want to do that; we wanted to get just really great voices because our theory is, this is the kind of movie where we're not drawing those characters to look like someone. Sarah Michelle doesn't look like April. But we were somewhat encouraged by the studios to say, "We need to get a little more firepower out there, so let's go get some so-called names to play the supporting actors in it." We said, "Alright, as long as we don't touch the Turtles." And, of course, we had Mako to play Splinter, who, unfortunately passed away. But we got pretty much 90-percent of his voice in there. I think that, certainly Kevin can elaborate on this, it just didn't seem to feel that we were trying to make a movie that was based on star power because we felt that the Turtles transcend all of that. The Turtles are the Turtles and they are types and they are voices. So, I think that was the whole concentration, staying close to what people would perceive them as sounding back in the '90s.
Seems like an OK compromise. There was pressure to add star power, so they did that but kept the turtles untouched. So for example Raphael would sound what the director wants him to sound like, and not some big name actor. That pleases me so much. I FUCKING hate that about all the new animations out by Disney or Pixar.
I've said it before, but big name actors ruin animations for me. They don't even try to sound like anything other than themselves and it is distracting as hell.
This sounds like a fair compromise though, thankfully.
IGN: So who is voicing the Turtles?
Gray: Sarah Michelle Geller plays April, Chris Evans plays Casey Jones, Max Winters is Patrick Stewart, Ziyi Zhang is Karai, who's a new character from the film. We have a cameo from Kevin Smith who, just, really wanted to get into it. He came one day and stayed the whole day and just laid there on the floor and said, "I want to do this!" We're having narration from Lawrence Fishburne as well. So it's not a huge cast, but it is a good cast and it seems to work for this film. You know, you go overseas and it doesn't matter; we are going to dub in over 17 languages, so it's all about domestic [appeal]. Again, do these people go on Oprah and talk about it? I don't think so, to me it's almost gilding that lily -- you really don't need it. There are so many great voices in this business that are perfect, but then again, you are always in the position of, "Well, if these people can go and help market the film then why not." It doesn't pull back, you see, as long as the turtles are unknown.
Yea that's not too bad. As long as they don't get the backstreet boys, Nsync or some other motherfuckers to do the voice acting for the turtles.
IGN: How long did it take you guys to figure out what the look of the movie was going to be in terms of making sure that it was faithful to the comic book and yet achieved a degree of photorealism?
Munroe: You head down a certain path of what you want it to look like. Our production designer comes from live action, a guy called Simon Murton, and he's worked on the past two Matrix films, Judge Dredd, he art directed The Crow, and he's got a pedigree in sort of that genre, cool, gritty realism. And we sort of knew from the start, it was funny to read Web traffic and stuff when we first announced Turtles and everybody sort of assumed they knew what it was going to look like. The whole idea was to have it not look like what people were going to assume right out of the gate. So we lit most of the film in black in white before we even added a stitch of color. We sort of went to [movies] like The Third Man and a lot of really good high-contrast black and white movies instead of just a Frank Miller look -- going back to when black and white film was such a great art form. So, it just sort of grew from there. We shot ourselves in the foot -- though in a good way -- when we started adding stuff like wet downs and specularity and little highlights and all these little details, and you realize why they are not in every little CG film: because it's really hard to do. Especially once we've got one sequence working really good with it, that really stuck out and we had to make the rest of the film like it. It was a little bit of an evolution, but the final look is pretty much what we intended from the start. I just didn't realize that we were going to be able to follow through quite so much. We've got a lot of production keys, just hundreds of them, and it always seems to me that's the 100-percent that you aim for and you think you're gonna hit 75 and you'll just have to make it work. But Hong Kong is just amazing with how they can actually implement and that they can actually implement whatever direction you give them. We wound up really close; were color timing last night until 3:30 in the morning and we were looking at the film and there are so many shots that look just like the paintings that we did. So we ended up pretty close and it's cool.
Sweet! IGN You discussed cutting it back for a PG rating. Will there be an extended or more aggressive cut on DVD?
Gray: I think that would be up to the studios -- you know, their DVD department -- if they wanted to push it a little bit. I'm not sure that would be constructive because it might upset some people to say, "Well, these guys really cut this thing back." And we didn't really cut it back, to be honest; if [we presented] that cut that we really wanted to make, it would be PG-13. So we pulled back some of the things that were pointed out to us, some of the sharpness or some of the monsters were a little bit too over the top, so we pulled back in the effects and the music, so it's not going to really [be] that dramatic. But, again, if the thing does work, I don't know if the studio would allow us to do a 13 again. I certainly would like to do it and grow the franchise in that direction, but I'm not sure. They would look at it economically and say, "Well, you're going to cut out a huge sector of our audience, so don't do it."
IGN: To clarify, there are no nunchucks in the movie at all?
Gray: They are in the movie. Nunchucks are OK in the U.K. if they are in the belt or you don't see somebody get whacked with it, because what happens is -- and also with the throwing stars -- kids were going into metal shop in the U.K. and they were making these things and they were going to football matches and launching them into Manchester United. So they outlawed these things. So, and then, you get into the Scandinavian countries where violence is totally taboo and they don't want to know about it. Bruce Lee was banned for years and years in Scandinavia. There's levels around the world of censorship. But we are kind of victimized by the fact that we have three pictures out here, so the Motion Picture Association said to us, "Well, you're rather special because the parents will say, 'Oh, the Turtles are benign, they're not going to be bad.'" And some of the action that we have in it is pretty strong. So they said, "You guys are walking on a tightrope here; pull back a little bit." But I think when we're pulling back, we'll do it more with effects and music; it won't be as dramatic, so it will still have power. Kevin and I were just scratching our heads and saying, "You go look at Narnia and some of the movies out there and they are far more violent. But we come with that preconceived idea that parents will bring their kids to see this.
WTF?
NOOOO!
No wonder some fans are ticked.
