Jim Cameron vs. Robert Zemeckis? An insider's view of the rivalry

"AVATAR" COUNTDOWN: 23 DAYS

Our countdown coverage of "Avatar" continues with the conclusion of our two-part interview with the film's production designer, Rick Carter, whose credits include "Forrest Gump," "Jurassic Park" "War of the Worlds" and "The Polar Express." The Oscar-nominated Carter has been one of the key members of director James Cameron's "Avatar" team (that's the pair working together in the photo below, with Carter on the left), and he has worked as production designer on six films directed by Robert Zemeckis. That résumé gives him an interesting vantage point on the two filmmakers as competitors on the motion-capture and 3-D frontiers.

This is Part 2 of the Carter interview; you can read Part 1 right here.

Geoff Boucher: James Cameron says you were the one that brought up "The Wizard of Oz," a film that became a sort of touchstone for "Avatar" and even lent some of its dialogue to the new movie. What can you tell us about the connection there? 

Rick Carter: I actually thought this movie is like "Wizard of Oz" meets "Apocalypse Now" and I laid out a whole board showing that. Like "Oz," you go into this whole other dimension, but unlike that movie, we go back and forth in this one. There's a change too in the way the audience feels about the place they are going. The whole design of the movie, to be in sync with Jim, is to try to create an immersive experience where in the beginning you can be referenced by the humans and our world and what we are doing on this other planet. Then slowly there's a transformation to embracing the "otherness" of Pandora and the Na'vi race and the whole ecological system from top to bottom. And then [the audience's sympathies] in fact change sides along with the main character too. What you emotionally relate to in the film changes. I think that's part of the hybrid of the movie, not just technologically with live action and motion capture and CG animation. The hybrid is between where you, the audience, are and where the alien race is. That in fact is the [main character's] avatar state of being, which is a mixed DNA version of the two. The film is, in a funny way, trying to get you there in that state too, to understand that place. As a designer, to help Jim get to that, I had to kind of give myself over to something unknowable and is, in a sense, in conflict until I could resolve these two different worlds.

GB: It sound like you could teach a film theory class on this movie before you even reached the set.

RC: I know all of this sound highfalutin, but it is how my brain works now after spending time with directors like Jim, [Steven] Spielberg and [Robert] Zemeckis. Entering "Avatar," that's how I approached it and tried to get inside Jim's head and his vision and the glimpses he could offer -- which were quite elaborate at times. On this film, as production designer, it was like "The Polar Express"; I needed help in the full realization of that vision because I needed, physically, to be in two places at once. I had to be with the motion-capture part of the film, but I also had to oversee the live-action part of the film which was down in New Zealand.

GB: How on earth do you do that?

RC: Well, I got help. There's a co-production designer on the film I brought in and want to acknowledge. His name is Rob Stromberg and he comes at this from the visual effects side of things -- the matte-painting world -- and he came up with imagery that he and his team could create, along with my input. And he really had to run the point a key thing: how to make this planet come across as an alien ecological that is connected, just like our world, but more than that is almost connected like a nervous system. The wildlife, the fauna, the people-esque creatures -- it goes all down to the basic core of the planet and its spirituality. That spirituality and connection is what is at stake in the movie.

GB: The theme then is two civilizations that approach nature with fundamentally different views. Do you dominate nature or place yourself under its dominion. That's a classic clash, really, and resonates with the stories and imagery of films such as "Dances With Wolves," "At Play in the Fields of the Lord," "A Man Called Horse," "Farewell to the King," etc.

RC: That's absolutely right. And the interesting thing is if you think about those "going native" stories and even "Apocalypse Now" to some degree, they reached a point where it was harder to tell the full story of that without running afoul of history and political sensitivity issues. Take "Dances With Wolves." Although God knows it was a wonderful movie and did as well as any movie could hope to do, it still had to run in that middle ground between the truthful Indian existence, as perceived today, and what is acceptable to the Indian community and then still be a Hollywood-oriented star vehicle for Kevin Costner. There was a lot of lines to toe and issues of political correctness, almost, to tell that tale. Now if you go back and make a movie that tells the story and is free of that. ... Think of the imagery of the  Johnny Weissmuller movies of Tarzan and the portrayal of Africans, which any of us watch today and we go, "Oh, that's a little cringe-making," but at the same time there was a wonderful freedom to Tarzan's existence and a freedom in the storytelling. By Jim picking a state of existence that does not exist and then all of the jumps of science -- like combining human DNA with an alien DNA and projecting a character's consciousness into the new being -- all of that creates a "there" where you can stage a story that you can tell with a real freedom. The three of four leaps that you've taken, if you make them credible, you can mirror back on those themes that you were talking about and say what you want about them. Nature, what do we value, technology, all of that. Jim basically felt like the filmmaking technology had reached a point where he could create this place in a credible way to tell that story. The movie lets you take a journey to see what you value. And the movie is also, ultimately, a love story. The iconic storytelling patterns and structure allow us to access a big unknown story but through a drama that we can touch and recognize. The love story, the perceived betrayal in the middle of it and a choice that needs to be made. And then at the end of it, you can go back and answer the question that we talked about at the very beginning of this: What do I see?

GB: It's interesting to see "Avatar" arrive in short order with the latest Robert Zemeckis film, "A Christmas Carol," and to consider the journey of these two filmmakers, Cameron and Zemeckis, and their different paths along this contemporary frontier's edge in 3-D and motion capture. I'm curious if, from your vantage point, you view them as being far apart in their approach or just several degrees removed from one another?

RC:  First of all, I like your questions and the way you're approaching this. Because there is a difference. I also have to say some interviews that I do, the questions that I get -- it all turns into "Dragnet" very quickly. Who did what? They want to put it into something they preconceive that they can write to a form. Ninety percent of what goes out falls into that, that marketing thing. And with good reason, it's appropriate and I'm not knocking it. But those interviews -- "We did this, then we did this, then we did this" -- feel like a young person's sport and I did that with "Jurassic Park" and "A.I." and "Back to the Future" and it was fine, but now my interest is in conveying the things I see that are real. The real deal. To me, my whole time doing this, it's been almost blessed since I've only been with Zemeckis and Spielberg and now Zack Snyder. So what I'm interested now is the simple question, "Is there a real vision there?" And that's not the same as having a bunch of imagery in your head. That can be like confusing being nearsighted with being a visionary. It's not even about having the vision being something that you can articulate and that it's all yours alone. To me what it is is a director on the level of a Spielberg or a Cameron or a Snyder brings something to life by having enough glimpses of it and knows that it will work, and can convey that to people. It's innate in them. Zack is a young version of those other guys. He doesn't have to get his fingerprints over every single morsel or pixel of his movie in order to say, "That's mine." These are guys who can come up with something that's inclusive enough that a creative team can get on board the proverbial train if it's Zemeckis or proverbial planet if it's Cameron. Or if it's Zack [with his "Sucker Punch," now filming in Vancouver, Canada], it's into the center of a generational zeitgeist that he makes his own and, importantly, has a lot at stake dramatically in its story. 

GB: It's interesting to consider the scale of the movies these directors make and how, no matter the size of the machinery, the stories can veer from wildly complex to relatively simple -- or perhaps elemental is a better word.

RC:  They come at from one place: what grabs them and holds their attention. It can be as simple a guy on an island and a volleyball or a story of a famous ship sinking where everyone knows how the story ends. It can be a weird creature from another planet who just wants to get home. For Zack, it can be going into the most interior-exterior place imaginable, on [the green-screen set of] "300," and not getting claustrophobic. Something almost like alchemy happens.

GB: You worked on "The Polar Express" and I wonder how you would draw a line between that film, its technology and its filmmaking philosophy, and "Avatar."

RC: For background, for Bob, "Cast Away" was like looking at his own life and at the end of it he felt like he was at a crossroads. He had run a course in his career of how he was making films and how he wanted to make films. I think he was at a place where he was ambivalent just like the Tom Hanks character after he returns from the island in the film. Then Bob went to another place with "Polar Express" where he tried to go a new path. He tried to find something new and fresh to him and he saw this [motion-capture] technology that Peter Jackson had used in "The Lord of the Rings" and thought it could be utilized but that didn't drive the thing. At the beginning the source was a simple 10-page story as a memory of something that you had to believe in. That was what he wanted, to see if he himself could find something to believe in again and get on that train.

You can ask the question, "What is the legacy of 'Polar Express'?" and talk about its dead eyes and all of that, but it still went out and made its money and, for a lot of young people, it became a perennial, a part of their holiday tradition. For all of its crude, ugly duckling aspects, it still had enough of a heart that people could make it mean something to them. Now, Bob has gone that road further [with "Beowulf" and "Christmas Carol"] to see how close he can get to portraiture, frankly, a human face that is created in our likeness that we believe. Obviously that runs into the aspects that everyone has talked about, the uncanny valley, and some people will look at it and always point to what is not there, as opposed to what is there. You know, if you're in space and in every part of the journey you get halfway to the destination, you never actually reach it; you just get very, very close. I happen to think it's gone through this process where now the inner and outer are starting to get very close. I haven't seen "Christmas Carol," so I can't comment on it and what emotion comes out through those characters. I do know that at its essence it's Bob trying to create portrait characters at this stage and then broaden out again and that, hopefully, lead the technology to a place where it can solve the issues in order for people to relate. We're talking about a very fundamental thing: Is it alive or not? Is it animate or not? We know that when we're babies and when we were cavemen going into the jungle. Is that a threat or not? Do I like this or not?

GB: Do Cameron and Zemeckis view themselves as rivals? I don't ask that to be crass -- we live in a public arena now that searches for, invents and amplifies conflict, but that's not my goal in asking. They just seem to be in the same arena but with different philosophies, so I wonder if that stirs up a sort of competition between cinematic belief systems.

RC: I would put it on the Lennon-McCartney level. Look how healthy that competition was even when it was unhealthy. Look at the results of it. Different approaches and personalities and each makes the other better. There's this dialogue right now and I would throw Spielberg into it too. There's a dialogue among a generation of filmmakers. I would say Spielberg is out ahead of it at the forefront, I'd say, being older and with what he carved out with George Lucas and the creation of the summer blockbuster. But to answer your question, of course, between Zemeckis and Cameron, yes, there's a tremendous awareness of what the other is doing. It's like Beatles and the Stones. And I'm so pleased that they are doing this; to be in their 50s and forging new avenues, to be taking risks and putting this much work in to it -- and to be taking a certain amount of flack. Both Cameron and Zemeckis have remained true to their visions and gone places that people would rather they not go, in some places. Don't think that people haven't said, "Hey, Jim, can maybe you make a movie that doesn't cost so much and puts the entire studio on the line again?" And, "Hey, Bob, can you maybe give us something a little more safe commercially and maybe not push so hard and so far out there?"

GB: Do you think Cameron is eager to see "Christmas Carol" and Zemeckis is eager to see "Avatar"?

RC: I can't get too much into their heads. Are they eager? I don't know. Will they be sure to sit down and watch the other one's movie? I can assure you, yes, they will do that. And my guess is that coming out of this season we will find that there is a recognized new way forward in this arena. It doesn't mean that others in Hollywood will pick between the two and replicate one; what I mean is there is a sense that this area is coming of age now. Some of the challenges that have been defining these movies are getting sorted out, so all of us can get on with the comfort of having this just be a part of the way we make movies and we will have this foundation in place that lets storytelling be the primary focus. That is the next level.

-- Geoff Boucher 

RECENT AND RELATED

Txantstewä Fpìlfya -- that's how you say Hero Complex in Na'vi

"Avatar" as innovator: "We were in new territory ... there was no road" 

Jim Cameron, cinema prophet? "Moving a mountain is nothing" 

Avatar: The Game will follow its own path through the alien jungle

Sam Worthington looks for the humanity of "Avatar": "I don't want to be a cartoon"

Giovanni Ribisi loves Jim Cameron

James Cameron on "Avatar": Like "Matrix," it opens doorways

"Avatar" star Zoe Saldana says the movie will match the hype: "This is big"

Welcome to the jungle: Mixed reaction to "Avatar" trailer

VIDEO: "Avatar" interviews with Sigourney Weaver and Jon Landau

Peter Jackson: Movie fans are fed up with the lack of original ideas

Top photo: Rick Carter and James Cameron at work on "Avatar." Credit: Fox.  Second photo: Cameron and "Avatar" star Sam Worthington. Credit: Fox. Bottom photo: Robert Zemeckis.

"AVATAR" COUNTDOWN: 23 DAYS

Our countdown coverage of "Avatar" continues with the conclusion of our two-part interview with the film's production designer, Rick Carter, whose credits include "Forrest Gump," "Jurassic Park" "War of the Worlds" and "The Polar Express." The Oscar-nominated Carter has been one of the key members of director James Cameron's "Avatar" team (that's the pair working together in the photo below, with Carter on the left), and he has worked as production designer on six films directed by Robert Zemeckis. That résumé gives him an interesting vantage point on the two filmmakers as competitors on the motion-capture and 3-D frontiers.

This is Part 2 of the Carter interview; you can read Part 1 right here.

Geoff Boucher: James Cameron says you were the one that brought up "The Wizard of Oz," a film that became a sort of touchstone for "Avatar" and even lent some of its dialogue to the new movie. What can you tell us about the connection there? 

Rick Carter: I actually thought this movie is like "Wizard of Oz" meets "Apocalypse Now" and I laid out a whole board showing that. Like "Oz," you go into this whole other dimension, but unlike that movie, we go back and forth in this one. There's a change too in the way the audience feels about the place they are going. The whole design of the movie, to be in sync with Jim, is to try to create an immersive experience where in the beginning you can be referenced by the humans and our world and what we are doing on this other planet. Then slowly there's a transformation to embracing the "otherness" of Pandora and the Na'vi race and the whole ecological system from top to bottom. And then [the audience's sympathies] in fact change sides along with the main character too. What you emotionally relate to in the film changes. I think that's part of the hybrid of the movie, not just technologically with live action and motion capture and CG animation. The hybrid is between where you, the audience, are and where the alien race is. That in fact is the [main character's] avatar state of being, which is a mixed DNA version of the two. The film is, in a funny way, trying to get you there in that state too, to understand that place. As a designer, to help Jim get to that, I had to kind of give myself over to something unknowable and is, in a sense, in conflict until I could resolve these two different worlds.

GB: It sound like you could teach a film theory class on this movie before you even reached the set.

RC: I know all of this sound highfalutin, but it is how my brain works now after spending time with directors like Jim, [Steven] Spielberg and [Robert] Zemeckis. Entering "Avatar," that's how I approached it and tried to get inside Jim's head and his vision and the glimpses he could offer -- which were quite elaborate at times. On this film, as production designer, it was like "The Polar Express"; I needed help in the full realization of that vision because I needed, physically, to be in two places at once. I had to be with the motion-capture part of the film, but I also had to oversee the live-action part of the film which was down in New Zealand.

GB: How on earth do you do that?

RC: Well, I got help. There's a co-production designer on the film I brought in and want to acknowledge. His name is Rob Stromberg and he comes at this from the visual effects side of things -- the matte-painting world -- and he came up with imagery that he and his team could create, along with my input. And he really had to run the point a key thing: how to make this planet come across as an alien ecological that is connected, just like our world, but more than that is almost connected like a nervous system. The wildlife, the fauna, the people-esque creatures -- it goes all down to the basic core of the planet and its spirituality. That spirituality and connection is what is at stake in the movie.

GB: The theme then is two civilizations that approach nature with fundamentally different views. Do you dominate nature or place yourself under its dominion. That's a classic clash, really, and resonates with the stories and imagery of films such as "Dances With Wolves," "At Play in the Fields of the Lord," "A Man Called Horse," "Farewell to the King," etc.

RC: That's absolutely right. And the interesting thing is if you think about those "going native" stories and even "Apocalypse Now" to some degree, they reached a point where it was harder to tell the full story of that without running afoul of history and political sensitivity issues. Take "Dances With Wolves." Although God knows it was a wonderful movie and did as well as any movie could hope to do, it still had to run in that middle ground between the truthful Indian existence, as perceived today, and what is acceptable to the Indian community and then still be a Hollywood-oriented star vehicle for Kevin Costner. There was a lot of lines to toe and issues of political correctness, almost, to tell that tale. Now if you go back and make a movie that tells the story and is free of that. ... Think of the imagery of the  Johnny Weissmuller movies of Tarzan and the portrayal of Africans, which any of us watch today and we go, "Oh, that's a little cringe-making," but at the same time there was a wonderful freedom to Tarzan's existence and a freedom in the storytelling. By Jim picking a state of existence that does not exist and then all of the jumps of science -- like combining human DNA with an alien DNA and projecting a character's consciousness into the new being -- all of that creates a "there" where you can stage a story that you can tell with a real freedom. The three of four leaps that you've taken, if you make them credible, you can mirror back on those themes that you were talking about and say what you want about them. Nature, what do we value, technology, all of that. Jim basically felt like the filmmaking technology had reached a point where he could create this place in a credible way to tell that story. The movie lets you take a journey to see what you value. And the movie is also, ultimately, a love story. The iconic storytelling patterns and structure allow us to access a big unknown story but through a drama that we can touch and recognize. The love story, the perceived betrayal in the middle of it and a choice that needs to be made. And then at the end of it, you can go back and answer the question that we talked about at the very beginning of this: What do I see?

GB: It's interesting to see "Avatar" arrive in short order with the latest Robert Zemeckis film, "A Christmas Carol," and to consider the journey of these two filmmakers, Cameron and Zemeckis, and their different paths along this contemporary frontier's edge in 3-D and motion capture. I'm curious if, from your vantage point, you view them as being far apart in their approach or just several degrees removed from one another?

RC:  First of all, I like your questions and the way you're approaching this. Because there is a difference. I also have to say some interviews that I do, the questions that I get -- it all turns into "Dragnet" very quickly. Who did what? They want to put it into something they preconceive that they can write to a form. Ninety percent of what goes out falls into that, that marketing thing. And with good reason, it's appropriate and I'm not knocking it. But those interviews -- "We did this, then we did this, then we did this" -- feel like a young person's sport and I did that with "Jurassic Park" and "A.I." and "Back to the Future" and it was fine, but now my interest is in conveying the things I see that are real. The real deal. To me, my whole time doing this, it's been almost blessed since I've only been with Zemeckis and Spielberg and now Zack Snyder. So what I'm interested now is the simple question, "Is there a real vision there?" And that's not the same as having a bunch of imagery in your head. That can be like confusing being nearsighted with being a visionary. It's not even about having the vision being something that you can articulate and that it's all yours alone. To me what it is is a director on the level of a Spielberg or a Cameron or a Snyder brings something to life by having enough glimpses of it and knows that it will work, and can convey that to people. It's innate in them. Zack is a young version of those other guys. He doesn't have to get his fingerprints over every single morsel or pixel of his movie in order to say, "That's mine." These are guys who can come up with something that's inclusive enough that a creative team can get on board the proverbial train if it's Zemeckis or proverbial planet if it's Cameron. Or if it's Zack [with his "Sucker Punch," now filming in Vancouver, Canada], it's into the center of a generational zeitgeist that he makes his own and, importantly, has a lot at stake dramatically in its story. 

GB: It's interesting to consider the scale of the movies these directors make and how, no matter the size of the machinery, the stories can veer from wildly complex to relatively simple -- or perhaps elemental is a better word.

RC:  They come at from one place: what grabs them and holds their attention. It can be as simple a guy on an island and a volleyball or a story of a famous ship sinking where everyone knows how the story ends. It can be a weird creature from another planet who just wants to get home. For Zack, it can be going into the most interior-exterior place imaginable, on [the green-screen set of] "300," and not getting claustrophobic. Something almost like alchemy happens.

GB: You worked on "The Polar Express" and I wonder how you would draw a line between that film, its technology and its filmmaking philosophy, and "Avatar."

RC: For background, for Bob, "Cast Away" was like looking at his own life and at the end of it he felt like he was at a crossroads. He had run a course in his career of how he was making films and how he wanted to make films. I think he was at a place where he was ambivalent just like the Tom Hanks character after he returns from the island in the film. Then Bob went to another place with "Polar Express" where he tried to go a new path. He tried to find something new and fresh to him and he saw this [motion-capture] technology that Peter Jackson had used in "The Lord of the Rings" and thought it could be utilized but that didn't drive the thing. At the beginning the source was a simple 10-page story as a memory of something that you had to believe in. That was what he wanted, to see if he himself could find something to believe in again and get on that train.

You can ask the question, "What is the legacy of 'Polar Express'?" and talk about its dead eyes and all of that, but it still went out and made its money and, for a lot of young people, it became a perennial, a part of their holiday tradition. For all of its crude, ugly duckling aspects, it still had enough of a heart that people could make it mean something to them. Now, Bob has gone that road further [with "Beowulf" and "Christmas Carol"] to see how close he can get to portraiture, frankly, a human face that is created in our likeness that we believe. Obviously that runs into the aspects that everyone has talked about, the uncanny valley, and some people will look at it and always point to what is not there, as opposed to what is there. You know, if you're in space and in every part of the journey you get halfway to the destination, you never actually reach it; you just get very, very close. I happen to think it's gone through this process where now the inner and outer are starting to get very close. I haven't seen "Christmas Carol," so I can't comment on it and what emotion comes out through those characters. I do know that at its essence it's Bob trying to create portrait characters at this stage and then broaden out again and that, hopefully, lead the technology to a place where it can solve the issues in order for people to relate. We're talking about a very fundamental thing: Is it alive or not? Is it animate or not? We know that when we're babies and when we were cavemen going into the jungle. Is that a threat or not? Do I like this or not?

GB: Do Cameron and Zemeckis view themselves as rivals? I don't ask that to be crass -- we live in a public arena now that searches for, invents and amplifies conflict, but that's not my goal in asking. They just seem to be in the same arena but with different philosophies, so I wonder if that stirs up a sort of competition between cinematic belief systems.

RC: I would put it on the Lennon-McCartney level. Look how healthy that competition was even when it was unhealthy. Look at the results of it. Different approaches and personalities and each makes the other better. There's this dialogue right now and I would throw Spielberg into it too. There's a dialogue among a generation of filmmakers. I would say Spielberg is out ahead of it at the forefront, I'd say, being older and with what he carved out with George Lucas and the creation of the summer blockbuster. But to answer your question, of course, between Zemeckis and Cameron, yes, there's a tremendous awareness of what the other is doing. It's like Beatles and the Stones. And I'm so pleased that they are doing this; to be in their 50s and forging new avenues, to be taking risks and putting this much work in to it -- and to be taking a certain amount of flack. Both Cameron and Zemeckis have remained true to their visions and gone places that people would rather they not go, in some places. Don't think that people haven't said, "Hey, Jim, can maybe you make a movie that doesn't cost so much and puts the entire studio on the line again?" And, "Hey, Bob, can you maybe give us something a little more safe commercially and maybe not push so hard and so far out there?"

GB: Do you think Cameron is eager to see "Christmas Carol" and Zemeckis is eager to see "Avatar"?

RC: I can't get too much into their heads. Are they eager? I don't know. Will they be sure to sit down and watch the other one's movie? I can assure you, yes, they will do that. And my guess is that coming out of this season we will find that there is a recognized new way forward in this arena. It doesn't mean that others in Hollywood will pick between the two and replicate one; what I mean is there is a sense that this area is coming of age now. Some of the challenges that have been defining these movies are getting sorted out, so all of us can get on with the comfort of having this just be a part of the way we make movies and we will have this foundation in place that lets storytelling be the primary focus. That is the next level.

-- Geoff Boucher 

RECENT AND RELATED

Txantstewä Fpìlfya -- that's how you say Hero Complex in Na'vi

"Avatar" as innovator: "We were in new territory ... there was no road" 

Jim Cameron, cinema prophet? "Moving a mountain is nothing" 

Avatar: The Game will follow its own path through the alien jungle

Sam Worthington looks for the humanity of "Avatar": "I don't want to be a cartoon"

Giovanni Ribisi loves Jim Cameron

James Cameron on "Avatar": Like "Matrix," it opens doorways

"Avatar" star Zoe Saldana says the movie will match the hype: "This is big"

Welcome to the jungle: Mixed reaction to "Avatar" trailer

VIDEO: "Avatar" interviews with Sigourney Weaver and Jon Landau

Peter Jackson: Movie fans are fed up with the lack of original ideas

Top photo: Rick Carter and James Cameron at work on "Avatar." Credit: Fox.  Second photo: Cameron and "Avatar" star Sam Worthington. Credit: Fox. Bottom photo: Robert Zemeckis.

2009 Holiday Geek Gift Guide: The perfect presents for Muggles, Trekkies and fanboys

HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE, PART ONE

Stressed about finding the perfect gift for that special Muggle, Trekkie, Twi-Hard, Jedi or Bat-fan in your life? Relax and read on: You've come to the perfect place at the perfect time, because this is the 2009 Hero Complex Holiday Gift Guide -- just think of us as a sort of retail Yoda guiding you through the complicated swamps of holiday shopping. "Buy or buy not. There is no browse..."

It's the perfect time to get your geek on, too. The fanboy culture is in full blossom at the box office and in pop culture beyond, and this holiday season there's a mountain of gifts and gadgets that speak to the Comic-Con constituency. Here are some of the most heroic:

"FRINGE: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON" ($60 for DVD, $80 for Blu-ray): "Fringe" may be the best sci-fi show on television right now, which is saying a lot considering the crowd of competitors. The series was impressive from its very start for its production values, casting and cerebral ambitions, but early on it was missing a certain something; I didn't stop watching and I'm glad I didn't because by the middle of the first season the show found its groove (in part by finding a defining rhythm that wasn't beholden to a rigid, single-episode procedural pace). Like "The X-Files" (yes, it's hard not to compare the two, considering the starting-point premise of FBI investigations into the paranormal), this show has an intricate and still-unfolding mythology. It's not too late to jump on board, especially with this polished Warner Home Video collection of the entire first season on seven discs with extended scenes, loads of commentary, featurettes on special effects and the science of the show, a "Deciphering the Scene" feature for true "Fringe" students, a gag reel and more. The Blu-ray is worth the extra money, the features are even better and the show's cinematic approach lives up   to the format.You can find it at retailers everywhere or directly from Warner Home Video. Want to read more about the show? Check out the Hero Complex visit to the Vancouver set.

TAUNTAUN SLEEPING BAG:

($100) This may be the best nerd gift of the year. Originally made as a one-of-a-kind prototype for an April Fool's Day spoof, the sleeping bag is an irresistible bit of "Star Wars" that takes us all back to the icy slopes of Hoth, where frosty Luke Skywalker was saved by his quick-thinking pal Han Solo, who was resourceful enough to eviscerate a dead tauntaun (think of a cranky snow camel crossed with a llama) and show the desert-planet kid inside to keep warm. Hmmmmm, cozy! This sleeping bag is made of polyester and it won't save you from hypothermia on the frozen tundra (it's not for outdoor use) but it's a crackerjack gift and even has a lightsaber zipper so you can slice your furry friend open just like Han did. For sale exclusively at ThinkGeek.

"THE HUNTER" GRAPHIC NOVEL: ($25)  Here's one of the best graphic novels of the year and a killer gift -- Darwyn Cooke's sublime adaptation of the hard-boiled antihero created by Richard Stark (the pen name of the late, great Donald Westlake). The handsome book boasts Cooke’s spare and stylized artwork (think somewhere between the vintage cool of “Mad Men” and the storytelling flair of Milton Caniff’s “Steve Canyon” comic strips), and the 144-page tale from IDW Publishing is a meticulously faithful adaptation of the 1962 novel of the same name that introduced the scowling Parker. Available through most book merchants or directly from IDW. You can read more about this great book in the Hero Complex feature on Cooke and his mission to bring Westlake's classic character alive in a new way.

"TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY" LIMITED EDITION: We don't know if "Avatar" will live up to its billing as "a game-changer" for special effects, but director James Cameron already pulled that feat off once with "T2"  and its then-startling quicksilver CG effects. I'm a bigger fan of the first movie in the franchise (better story and none of Ed Furlong's petulance) but this limited-edition packaging ($115) of the sequel is too sweet to ignore with the 14-inch, skinless, glowing-eyeball bust of the T-800 that even makes sound effects. This six-disc (!) definitive packaging comes with every "T2" featurette and extra to date, including the Skynet Blu-ray edition of the film. That's fine, but did I mention that the metal skull makes noises and its eyes glow? Cool. This package was just released by Lionsgate in May so there's a good chance that fans you are shopping for may not have seen it before. A great gift, too, for any old college friends who now work in the Schwarzenegger administration who are spending Christmas in Sacramento for the last time. You can find it for sale at a variety of merchants.  

HERMIONE'S EARRINGS, STARFLEET CUFF LINKS and "THE DARK KNIGHT" MONEY CLIP : If you're looking for a sly, understated gift for "Harry Potter" fans (you know, something that doesn't scream "Muggle!") consider these graceful earrings of sterling silver and pink crystals ($59) fashioned as an homage to the ones worn by actress Emma Watson on screen. You can find them at the Warner Brothers shop along with a staggering array of wizard merch. In the same low-key vein, for fanboys who don't want to loudly broadcast their obsessions, there are some nifty Starfleet cuff links ($65) that are crafted from enamel and plated silver and have a bullet back closure; you can find them (as well as a Klingon counterpart product) at Cufflinks.com. We also like the folding, magnetic Batarang money clip ($39) from the Noble Collection that would fit the sleek sensibilities of Bruce Wayne but might be too small for the wad of spending cash he keeps in his utility belt.

-- Geoff Boucher

CHECK BACK SATURDAY FOR PART TWO OF THE GIFT GUIDE

READ the 2008 HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE

Why cloudy days are no good for the werewolves of 'New Moon'

SCENE STEALER

Patrick Kevin Day spoke with effects legend Phil Tippett about creating the werewolf effects for "The Twilight Saga: New Moon," (and no, we're not talking about Taylor Lautner's supernatural 16 pack). You can read his previous Scene Stealer interviews and Liesl Bradner's Wizards of Hollywood series right here.

Darkness may be a visual effects artist's best friend, but his biggest enemy isn't bright sunlight -- it's the overcast day. So adding all those CG werewolves to scenes shot in cloudy Vancouver, Canada, was a particular challenge for "New Moon" visual effects supervisor Phil Tippett and his team. "On a sunny day, you get really nice contrasts, but with flat lighting and a furry thing -- the fur really soaks up the light and everything appears flat," Tippett said. "So to make it appear three-dimensional, we had to goose reality. We emphasized their shadows and used rim lights" to make the wolves stand out from the background. But that's not the only way Tippett and company played with reality. When that wolf checks out Bella, it's not a wolf's eyes, it's Jacob's. "We brought Taylor [Lautner] in and had him haul his eyelids back as far as possible and shot close-ups." They then added those eyes to the giant animated timber wolf used in the scene.

-- Patrick Kevin Day

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"New Moon" Photo: Summit Entertainment / Phil Tippett Studios

'Avatar' as innovation: 'We were in new territory...there was no road there'

"AVATAR" COUNTDOWN: 24 DAYS

"Avatar" may be the most ambitious film of 2009, and here at the Hero Complex we're bringing you coverage that fits this major movie moment with 30 stories in 30 days. Today it's the first installment of a two-part conversation with Rick Carter, one of Hollywood's most celebrated production designers, whose credits include "Forrest Gump," "Jurassic Park," "War of the Worlds," and "The Polar Express." I spoke to the Oscar-nominated designer in Vancouver, Canada, where he's at work on "Sucker Punch," director Zack Snyder's surreal action fantasy.

 

GB: You've worked with a relatively narrow group of directors but it's quite the list -- Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Robert Zemeckis and now Zack Snyder. I would imagine, too, that "Avatar" is already feeling like a career highlight for you just based on its aspirations...

RC: Absolutely. Jim has made an amazing movie. He's quite a talent and when he puts his mind to something it's quite formidable.

GB: Coming into this project, what were some of the specific challenges it presented to you?

RC: I take a page out of the philosophy that obstacles are surmountable opportunities. I'm pretty optimistic because things have gone well for me. Coming into "Avatar," I had only really been working with Spielberg and Zemeckis up to that point. That's twentysomething years. My approach is to orient myself toward the vision of the director and that becomes the sole thing I have to concern myself with. There are many decisions but the one challenge really is to fulfill that vision. Those guys are so strong as directors that it's nice because the process isn't diluted with other concerns, like executives from the studio or even public opinion, which can happen to some degree sometimes. Its about the director's vision, solely, and completing it and realizing it. And at the point where there isn't something there, the task is, "What can I offer? What can people in the art department offer?"

GB: Where did you begin on "Avatar"?

RC: Coming into "Avatar," it took me about 3 1/2 hours to read the script, even before I had the interview with Jim. I really wanted to take my time to "see" the movie. It was clear that what he was doing was not just about a literal translation; you couldn't just piece it together by thinking of things you had seen in other films because it was an entirely new world. As I started reading through it there was a part -- and it's a part, actually, that's not in the movie anymore -- but one of the alien characters says, "When you see everything you see nothing." And I stopped at that and thought, "What does that mean?" And I realized that the state that I was in reading the script was that I was so overwhelmed with all of what I was seeing that I was actually starting to see nothing. I was in a state of what I call whiteout, where everything is in there. I liken that actually to "Pinocchio" and wishing on a white star that comes down and fills the frame of the window and out steps the Blue Fairy and out of that something is created, Pinocchio comes to life. So in a very lyrical way I gave myself over to that idea that there was too much for me to see.

 

GB: So you mean that you have to surrender to the startling immersion we would feel on an alien world and not get caught up in a sort of piecemeal construction of it?

RC: Yes, I was giving myself over to that idea that there was too much to see so as I read I stopped trying to visualize things and I stopped getting caught up in how to accomplish these things. I was trying to understand all of it by stepping back and looking for what Jim was going for. And Jim is a very high-level visualist and filmmaker. I knew too that he was going to be detail-orientated and a perfectionist. The stories precede him...[laughs]

GB: This film arrives with the reputation as "a game-changer" as far effects technologies and approaches, too, which must have made for an interesting path. 

RC: Well we knew that the actual way of getting the movie done was not going to be known ahead of time. I worked on "Polar Express" where we created the motion-capture volume without real-time visualization and I know what that took. So bring that into the world where half the movie is being done with real-time visualizing in a motion-capture space that has to be integrated as a hybrid with live action -- I knew we were in new territory. There was no road there.

GB: Tell me about Pandora, the jungle moon that's the setting for "Avatar."

RC: In trying to understand Jim's vision of Pandora I had this notion that Jim had been to Pandora before; he had been at the bottom of the ocean so much with "Titanic" and "The Abyss" and "Aliens of the Abyss." Jim described nighttime on Pandora as "phantasmagoric." I'm probably one of the few people that went and looked up that definition, which means "As seen in a dream state."

GB: The bioluminescence of the jungle lifeforms gives everything a sort of dream-time feel, I noticed in the footage I watched...

RC: And he was evoking the question: What is it you see when you're really starting to get transported into this whole other dimension? Out of that came this notion that you've heard about that this was "The Wizard of Oz" only going back and forth between Oz and Kansas throughout the movie. That's where this whole "You're not in Kansas anymore" thing came from.

TOMORROW: RICK CARTER ON THE JAMES CAMERON-ROBERT ZEMECKIS RIVALRY

-- Geoff Boucher

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Photos: Zoe Saldana as Neytiri, and Sam Worthington as Jake Sully, sitting in front of his alien representation in “Avatar.” Credit: Fox 

Kelly Blatz, Weta Workshop and the creatures of 'Skyrunners'

Any project that involves Weta Workshop demands attention. When Jevon Phillips heard that the New Zealand outfit responsible for the memorable movie magic of the "Lord of the Rings" franchise was working with Disney XD, he picked up the phone to find out more. Here's his report:

The Disney XD television movie "Skyrunners" is the tale of two brothers who stumble across a downed UFO and decide to keep it -- please, kids, don't try this at home -- and then proceed to uncover an alien plot to take over Earth.

Kelly Blatz (of the hit Disney XD gamer series "Aaron Stone") and newcomer Joey Pollari star as the brothers. For Blatz, acting became a career path of choice after he fell in love with Steven Spielberg's films of the fantastic, among them "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial" and Blatz's favorite, "Jurassic Park."

Recently, as the 22-year-old actor-musician took a break from meeting with the members of his "vintage-rock" band, Capra, he talked about coming face-to-face with a Weta-created alien creature in "Skyrunners."

"It was amazing," Blatz said. "We walk in there and it's all dark. This thing -- no matter how close you are it still looks completely real.  So everyone [steps back] -- it was really eerie. Just the lighting and everything. They built this thing that was so unique and frightening.  It was just this transparent thing with a mouth full of teeth... And these people were so great and so talented and so passionate ... we were picking their brains about working on "Lord of the Rings" and everything. I mean, these people are Oscar winners."  Here's a podcast of a longer "Skyrunners" interview from Disney XD :

The program airs Nov. 27, so if you're not at some Black Friday sale, you may want to tune in. But you can also have the alien ships come to you;  there's a Google Maps program that the telefilm's online team cooked up that allows you to put in your address, access satellite photos of the area and get back a picture of a crashed spacecraft at your doorstep. Why look, there's a crashed spaceship next to The Times building on sunny Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles...

-- Jevon Phillips

Photo credit: Disney XD

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'Avatar': technologically advanced, even in the trailer

"AVATAR" COUNTDOWN: 25 DAYS

James Cameron's decade-long quest to deliver his sci-fi epic "Avatar" to moviegoers is nearing its climax. We're counting down the days to the Dec. 18 release with daily coverage here at the mighty Hero Complex. Today, an interactive trailer is introduced, allowing more access to behind-the-scenes work and character development.

The technology of James Cameron's "Avatar" is being called groundbreaking before it has even launched -- and now that tag can extend even to the trailer.

No, not that trailer -- the one where everyone seemed to form full and complicated opinions after viewing only minutes of the epic -- but a new one that just launched this morning. The "Avatar" Interactive trailer is actually more of a program or application than your usual run-of-the-mill teaser.  With Cameron's film taking years to complete, the trailer even took a while to develop, too, with a four-month creation time.

"We kind of look at it as the next generation of movie trailers because it allows users to interact and delve deeper into the content of the movie," says Fox's Jeffrey Godsick, executive vice president of marketing and digital content.

Built on Adobe AIR software, the application not only plays trailers, but also helps you keep track of news about "Avatar" through all kinds of social media. Like the Virtual Echo desktop for "Dollhouse" (RIP), AIR also can be made portable and not browser-based. Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube all contribute to the feed that will fill up your entire screen if you choose.

With all of that, the trailer is the centerpiece, and with it are other video pieces that give the user more insight into the creation of the movie. "Hots pots" during the trailer allow users to see vignettes about creature and technological designs and hear character profiles from many of the film's stars.

It can be a bit overwhelming when you first see it cover your whole screen, and for fans who are really anticipating the movie, the officialavatar tweeter pops up with updates even when the program is minimized. It's all a cool interaction, but I wondered how much input Cameron, the tech godling, had in the program's development.

"The incorporation of technology has always been really important to [Cameron]. He's really been supportive of the idea because it's cool, but also because it really does allow people to get involved in this world.  He and Lightstorm have actually been involved in the creation of some of the content pieces," says Godsick.

The program will continue to be updated as the movie nears. It was also mentioned that Cameron's Lightstorm is developing a Pandorapedia to launch in December that will give an even more in-depth look at the world "Avatar" has created.

To download the interactive trailer, you can do it via the film's official movie site (www.avatarmovie.com) and social network profiles on Facebook (www.facebook.com/officialavatar), YouTube (www.youtube.com/officialavatar) and Twitter (twitter.com/officialavatar), as well as through the Adobe.com website.

-- Jevon Phillips

Photos: Screenshots from the application.

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'Twilight's' Peter Facinelli likes to 'bite' people ... with his phone.

Even when he isn’t starring as Dr. Carlisle Cullen in the epic “Twilight” saga Peter Facinelli plays with vampires. He recently launched Vampire Transformer, an iPhone application (it's also compatible with the iPod touch) that allows users to morph anyone into a vampire with the simple touch of their finger.  If only Bella Swan knew there was a simpler way to transform — one that didn’t require a punctured epidermis and a life without a soul

“I’m literally addicted to it,” said Facinelli, minutes before taking part in a skit on the set of G4TV. “Everybody I come in contact with I’m like ‘let me transform you; let me bite you.’”

He’s currently filming the second season of Showtime’s “Nurse Jackie”—where he plays Dr. Fitch Cooper—in New York so his frequent plane hopping between coasts provides ample opportunities to hone his skills.

“This is what I spend my days doing,” he said, while browsing through his vampire gallery featuring images of his “bitten” daughters and wife. “While I’m waiting to board a plane. When I’m in between takes.  Anytime I have a free moment.”

The only “Twilight” co-star he’s been able to bite is Kellan Lutz, who plays Emmett in the series. His “Nurse Jackie” co-stars? They’ve all been bitten…well, almost all.

“I haven’t gotten Edie [Falco] yet,” he realized.  “She’s the one cast member I haven’t bitten. I’ll have to change that.”

--Yvonne Villarreal

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'Ninja Assassin's' James McTeigue aims for a 21st century 'film noir' take on ninjas

 

James McTeigue, the Aussie filmmaker behind the big screen adaptation of “V for Vendetta,” is back with "Ninja Assassin," which hits theaters on Wednesday. Korean pop sensation Rain plays Raizo, who was kidnapped as a child by the Ozunu Clan and trained to be a deadly assassin. The film, produced by Joel Silver and the Wachowski brothers — whom McTeigue worked with for many years on “The Matrix” trilogy -- was inspired by the ninja scenes featured in the Wachowskis' 2008 film "Speed Racer."  Hero Complex contributor Yvonne Villarreal spoke with the filmmaker.

YV: How did the project come about?

JM: I guess I got involved with it from standing around on too many movie sets, talking about what genre’s going to be good to shoot and revamp. But, seriously, I did some work on “Speed Racer” and I worked with Rain, who’s the main star of the movie, and thought if I was ever going to do a ninja movie that he’d be a perfect person to put in that vehicle. So we approached Warner Bros. and they were into the idea; they knew and liked Rain from “Speed Racer.” They gave us the go-ahead and put a writer onto it. Matthew Sand to start with it and J. Michael Straczynski came in and did a polish on the script. And then went off to Berlin to shoot it.

YV: Was this a genre you were hoping to tap into?

JM: Yeah. I sort of grew up with a confluence of American TV and Japanese serials and movies. And I was looking at taking the ninja movies from the '80s, and the stuff I grew up with, like Japanese shows like "Shintaro," "The Samurai" and "The Phantom Agents" and  Japanese anime … and just make this union of styles. I wanted to blend anime,  horror and film noir. I thought it’d be good to put elements of that into a ninja movie of the 21st century.

YV: Were you hoping it would develop into a film with mainstream potential?

JM: Yeah, that was kind of the goal. I mean, I think it sort of goes along the lines of graphic novels and comics. I guess one of those — the thing they used to be is subculture. But now … they are the culture. You got "Spider-Man," "Iron Man," "The Dark Knight"  .... They all started out as comics. I think ninja is a part of that sort of folklore. They’re interspersed — especially in "The Dark Knight," for example; the first one had ninjas in it. So I think people know and like ninjas. I think it was …  they were sort of unfairly maligned because of the no-budget, sort of cheesy movies of the '80s and early '90s. I thought it would be good to take a movie that was essentially in a B genre and give it the affectation of an A genre and see if it could cross over and hopefully it will.   

YV: What were some of the challenges in filming?

JM: I guess the challenges in filming stunts is always being well prepared. Of course, the biggest challenge is making sure you don’t hurt anybody.  I’ve worked with the stunt choreographers and also the second unit directors on this movie, Chad Stahelski and Dave Leitch, a lot over the years. I knew them from the "Matrix" movies and they became stunt coordinators on "V for Vendetta" for me. I think we have a short-hand and a symbiotic relationship. We know how to push each other to the next level. Hopefully that shows in the stunts in "Ninja Assassin."

YV: Do you have a favorite scene?

JM: I have a few. I love the sort of rite of passage in the bathroom scene — how kind of shocking that is… I also like the opening scene. I think it’s kind of fun and sets the tone of the movie.

YV:  People know you from "V for Vendetta." What did you carry over from that film into this one?

JM: I hope that by now I have a certain aesthetic or style. What I was trying to do with this movie … I mean, "V for Vendetta" was a comment on the times that we were living in. It was essentially about the morality of terrorism and why and how does it exist in the world that we live in. Even though that movie was written in the Thatcher period in the '80s, I thought those two administrations had direct parallels. The ninja movie is something much simpler. It’s trying to take something that is a genre film and give it story and give it characterization and some amazing action sequences. I think sometimes with action movies, stories and characterizations and narrative are sort of mutual exclusives. Hopefully, we give them a story that didn’t get in the way of all that. Yet you get some interest in what made the man.

YV: And you’ll be up against "New Moon," the latest installment in the "Twilight" saga.

JM: I think the audience for my movie is different from "Twilight." Obviously, "Twilight" is a behemoth. If you look at tracking for the new ‘Twilight’ movie [New Moon], the awareness is probably at about 98% at the moment.

YV: But a ninja could certainly beat a vampire, right?

JM: Definitely. Hopefully.  Especially if he were up against one of the vampires from "Twilight."

Photo: McTeigue on the set of Warner Bros. Pictures', Legendary Pictures' and Dark Castle Entertainment's action film "Ninja Assassin"; credit: David Appleby.

'Avatar' star Zoe Saldana says the movie will match the hype: 'This is big'

"AVATAR" COUNTDOWN: 26 DAYS

Our daily coverage leading up to the release of "Avatar" continues today with a chat with Zoe Saldaña, who may be the sci-fi actress of the year with her spirited turn as Uhura in "Star Trek" and now her "Avatar" performance. She talks about her role, her fellow cast members and also boldly declares that, with "Avatar," James Cameron has gone where 3D and motion-capture rival Robert Zemeckis has never gone before.

GB: Some of your costars have said their work on "Avatar" gave them the feeling they were part of Hollywood history because of all the film's innovations and ambitions.

ZS: Well it was amazing, yes, but for me I'd have to say I'm just excited that I got to work with an amazing director and a great cast and crew.

GB: You had to deal with learning a language that was invented for the film. Was that hard?

ZS: I was really concerned about it. I'm bad with languages, and I was worried about it. Jim created the words and then we worked with a linguist who helped us, and he figured out the language. One of the things that was even harder was figuring out how to speak English with a Na'vi accent, trying to decide what that sounds like. The actors are from all over and have different accents. My family background is from the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, CCH Pounder is the West Indies, Laz Alonso is Cuban, all of us with our own accents. We had to find a way to make this new accent, and all of us sat down and tried to meet in the middle.

GB: It's a big film in every way, but how would describe it from your personal point of view?

ZS: It's a beautiful love story. It's a story of a young man's self-discovery and growth. He belongs to two worlds and needs to figure that out.

GB: You're talking about Jake Sully, the character played by Sam Worthington, who comes to the troubled moon of Pandora on a military mission and inside a lab-created alien body. He meets your character, Neytiri, and finds himself questioning that mission. What can you tell us about her? 

ZS: She grew up as a rebellious little girl. She's a warrior, she wants to be off hunting and training for a warrior life. She doesn't want to be a princess and marry a prince.

GB: This has been quite the year for you after your duty aboard the USS Enterprise and now your major role in "Avatar. " You're going to a queen of the Comic-Con tribe...

ZS: I'm very happy about that! I can't think of better fans. These are people with a passion, and I love that. And science fiction is wonderful. We can't limit our imagination and that's what science fiction never wants us to do.

GB: Sometimes the genre can slip into hardware movies, but that was certainly not the case with "Star Trek." It doesn't seem to be the case with "Avatar," judging by the footage I've seen...

ZS: You look at some films and sometimes there is little that is human right now. All of the technology in this pioneering film is used in a story about the human heart. This is not an insensitive movie, it has very soulful messages, simple messages, the film is very soulful.

GB: The technology of the film includes what producer Jon Landau has been describing as emotion-capture instead of motion-capture. It's to get rid of the "dead face" problem with CG characters. Did it work?

ZS: Yes. Robert Zemeckis [director of landmark motion-capture film efforts such as "A Christmas Carol" and "Polar Express"] was unable to maintain that intimacy with actors. He was in a different room and the technology wasn't there. For "Avatar," they created these [miniature cameras mounted near the actor's jawline on] head rigs that captured all of our [facial] motions. And Jim was there, 3 feet away, and the technology never interrupted with performance or story or imagination. It was Jim, Sam and me there in our forest and it was like our workshop, our sandbox to play in every day, and we weren't interrupted by anything coming into our environment.

GB: Sam seems like he could be on the verge of major stardom, although no one can predict those things. Tell me what you found in him during your time in the sandbox.

ZS: He owns the same pair of boots he's had for years. He is so not into appearances or superficial things. He is a true artist. He is a selfless artist, willing to do anything to get to what's important in  the art. Jim and Sam and I were intimately connected for two years off and on, at such close range, and they are both so committed and talented. It wasn't always smooth. Sam and I would fight head to head when we saw things differently, but even then it was amazing. It was always for the film. And now finally we get to share this film with the world after 2 1/2 years. The anticipation is amazing.

GB: Don't take this the wrong way, but what if the film falls short of all that anticipation, either commercially or critically? It's a possibility considering the way the hype is ramping  up.

ZS: I remember watching "Star Trek" in Japan. ... Audiences everywhere are different, and in Japan they're very reserved, discreet and respectful. They watched "Trek" and they're just sitting there. And the movie did great. Then when 25 minutes of "Avatar" was shown there, there was clapping and cheering, which is unheard of. This is big.

-- Geoff Boucher

Photos, from top: Zoe Saldaña. Credit: Associated Press. With computer effects, Sam Worthington, left, and Saldaña become aliens in "Avatar." Credit: Fox / MCT. J.J. Abrams counsels Saldaña as Uhura on "Star Trek." Credit: Paramount Pictures. Saldaña and Sam Worthington in Tokyo for an "Avatar" press conference. Credit: Yoshikazu Tsuno / AFP/Getty Images

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"AVATAR" COUNTDOWN: 27 DAYS

James Cameron's decade-long quest to deliver his sci-fi epic "Avatar" to moviegoers is nearing its climax. We're counting down the days to the Dec. 18 release with daily coverage here at the mighty Hero Complex. Today we consider the sound of "Avatar," specifically the theme song by Leona Lewis.

 

In late 1997 and early 1998, as "Titanic" sailed into box-office history, there was no escaping the film even if you never walked into a movie theater -- Celine Dion's recording of "My Heart Will Go On" was a massive hit and spent 10 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard radio airplay chart.

"My Heart Will Go On" won the Oscar for best song and also won Grammys in the marquee categories of song of the year and record of the year. The melodramatic hit, the biggest of Dion's platinum-plated career, propelled the film and vice versa -- and now Cameron and the "Avatar" team are hoping for a similar sort of synergy with the Leona Lewis recording of "I See You," the theme that will play over the closing credits of the sci-fi epic.

It's hard to imagine anyone could catch that "Titanic"-style lightning in a bottle twice, but Cameron has some familiar faces helping with the attempt. Oscar-winning composer James Horner (who shared the songwriting credit on "My Heart Will Go On" with lyricist Will Jennings) was brought into the studio as a producer on the Lewis recording, as was Simon Franglen, who was one of three credited producers of the "Titanic" track.

Lewis is a 24-year-old British singer with considerable success -- she is a three-time Grammy nominee, one in the prestigious record of the year category for her hit "Bleeding Love" -- and she was in London last week filming a video for "I See You" with U.K. director Jake Nava. Nava has worked with artists as diverse as the Rolling Stones, Britney Spears, the Cranberries and System of a Down but may be best known for two of Beyoncé's signature hits, "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)" and "Crazy in Love." Lewis  has been in Los Angeles this week for an especially busy trip, with appearances Thursday on "The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien" and "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" and Friday on the outdoor stage of "Jimmy Kimmel Live"; tonight she will sing on the American Music Awards on ABC.)

I haven't heard the song yet but I do know that "I See You" gets its title from an expression of respect and connection used by the Na'vi, the tribe of giant blue-hued aliens who lived on the troubled moon of Pandora in "Avatar."  We'll have an interview with Horner here at the Hero Complex later this week and get some details about the Lewis sessions and the song, as well as his score for the off-world adventure. The album "Avatar: Music from the Motion Picture" goes on sale Dec. 15.

-- Geoff Boucher

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"AVATAR" COUNTDOWN: 28 DAYS

James Cameron has big aspirations for "Avatar," and here at Hero Complex we're stepping up with some epic coverage plans: a 30-day countdown. Today's topic: Hero Complex contributor Gerrick Kennedy reports on the Ubisoft video game that hopes to take the fans of the sci-fi epic on an entirely different adventure.

Security is intense these days at the Montreal offices of Ubisoft where more than 200 employees are working overtime to put the final touches on the new James Cameron's Avatar: The Game, which is due to hit store shelves Dec. 1.

"The bunker" is how Patrick Naud, the executive producer of the game, referred to the area for the team dedicated to the creation of a 3-D gaming experience that matches Cameron's ambitious film project. Cameras, guards, extra locks and some fairly scary employee contracts have all been put into place to protect the game that looks to be one of the most intriguing releases of 2009.

“We’re just finishing the last production for the PC version,” Naud said. “From then on it’s just waiting for the game to come out. We’re hoping people get as excited about the game as we are.”

Cameron has been on a quest to make the "Avatar" film for more than a decade and there's plenty of curiosity considering the massive success of his last feature film, "Titanic" in 1997, and the industry chatter about the film's innovations in 3-D and visual effects technology. Naud and his team hope to create a video game that is also a potential “game-changer,” as the film is being billed by industry observers.

“We met James three years ago," Naud said. "That first meeting was so that he could approve us. We wanted to expand the world and we didn’t want to do a game of the movie. We didn’t want to have the boundaries of having to follow the film.”

Naud, like many of the collaborators working with Cameron on "Avatar," spoke with excitement in his voice about the director and his years-in-the-making epic. Ubisoft, though, has followed a different path through the alien jungles created by the Oscar-winning director's script and film.

“We had an idea what we wanted to do," Naud said of his company's pitch. "There were two main concepts: doing the game of the world, not the movie, and giving the players the choice to choose sides. We felt in the beginning of the project there is a big part of the story that’s not told.”

The film follows the adventure of a Marine named Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) who is sent to the distant moon Pandora, where, given control of a towering, blue-hued alien body, he is supposed to gather intelligence about an alien race who lives atop valuable natural resources. After learning the ways of the Na'vi tribe, though, Sully finds himself wondering which side of the impending conflict he belongs on.

With Cameron’s blessing, Ubisoft Montreal created its own storyline set two years before the events of the film. In the game, players take on the role of Abel Ryder, a code breaker sent to Pandora. There they enter the Avatar Program, which creates the alien-human hybrid bodies, like the one used by Sully in the film. Players are then faced with a choice: Side with the noble Na’vi or work for the Resources Development Administration, the armed human enterprise planning to mine Pandora's coveted minerals.

Naud said game developers wanted to challenge themselves more after Cameron asked why the game couldn't be 3-D like the movie. Although Naud assured gamers it’s not needed for game play, he says gamers who do have a DLP setup that supports 3-D vision, or a 3-D-vision capable flat-screen TV, will have the bonus of experiencing the game much like they would the film.

Nintendo users will also experience the game differently as the Wii and Nintendo DS games follow their own story lines, separate from the other platforms.

“Play as a young Na’vi warrior whose village and family have been destroyed by the RDA, you’re seeing it from this different perspective,” Naud said. “It uses the Wii balance board and the MotionPlus that was released this summer. Something we felt was a nice addition.”

Naud said that Cameron realized the potential the video game has to strengthen the “Avatar” brand and that the filmmaker approached his relationship with the game creators in a collaborative manner that Naud said is far from the norm in the film-based game sector.

“It’s not the type of relationship we have with a licensor," Naud said. "Some studios might want to be more protective of their characters. It’s not everyone that sees it as an extension of the brand. Some see it as a way to get more revenue. We had the liberty to create new characters, new worlds. He knew of games, but he didn’t know what made a game great. He trusted us. He told us to 'go all in.'”

-- Gerrick Kennedy

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"AVATAR" COUNTDOWN: 29 DAYS

James Cameron has big aspirations for "Avatar," and here at Hero Complex we're stepping up with some epic coverage plans: a 30-day countdown. Today's topic: The USC professor who found himself on an unexpected Hollywood adventure when he was hired to create the language spoken by aliens on Cameron's distant planet of Pandora.

This modern era of moviemaking has plenty of peculiar challenges for actors -- on green-screen sets, for instance, they have to watch a ping-pong ball hanging from a string and convince the camera that they actually staring down some magical beastie -- but for the actors auditioning for "Avatar" the biggest challenge may have been reading a sheet of paper with words invented by a USC professor named Paul R. Frommer.

Frommer, a linguistics specialist, was brought in by "Avatar" writer-director James Cameron to create an entire functioning language for the tribe of 10-foot-tall blue aliens who inhabit Pandora, the setting for the film's conflict. Frommer tackled the project with glee -- "How often do you get an opportunity like this?" -- but the actors who had bend their tongues around the invented vocabulary and syntax were slightly less charmed by the experience.

"Oh, it was so hard and I was really concerned about it," said Zoe Saldaña, who portrays an alien named Neytiri in the sci-fi adventure that opens in theaters Dec. 18. "I didn't think I could get through it. I'm not good with languages. All the actors, we worked together. It was the only way."

Frommer has spent four years laboring on the language of the Na'vi tribe and his work will not end on the day of the film's release. He plans to keep expanding the language until he's, well, blue in the face.

"I'm still working and I hope that the language will have a life of its own," the professor said. "For one thing, I'm hoping there will be prequels and sequels to the film, which means more language will be needed. I spent three weeks in May, too, working on the video game  for Ubisoft, which is the name of a French company. That's not a French word, though, I don't know where they got Ubisoft."

Frommer is clearly delighted by his unexpected excursion into the Hollywood dream factory, which has the buttoned-down academic working side-by-side with movie stars and hobnobbing with an Oscar-winning director of Cameron's stature. Sitting on a concrete bench near the bustling center of USC campus, he recounted his Tinseltown labors with verve; the only time a hint of disappointment crept into his voice was when he explained that his alien language was limited by the terran larynxes of Sam Worthingon, Saldaña, CCH Pounder and other cast members who spoke the Na'vi language.

"The constraint, of course, is that the language I created had to be spoken by humans," Frommer said. "I could have let my imagination run wild and come up with all sorts of weird sounds, but I was limited by what a human actor could actually do."

Between the scripts for the film and the video game, Frommer has a bit more than 1,000 words in the Na'vi language, as well as all the rules and structure of the language itself. "I'm adding to that all the time," said Frommer, who says he would like to see the new tongue catch on in the way that Klingon has become a studied language among especially, um, engaged fans of "Star Trek."  

"Oh, I'm very aware of Klingon," Frommer said the way a sports coach might analyze a rival with a long winning tradition. "It was created by a linguist [named Marc Okrand] and it is very, very well put together. I actually once developed a problem for students in analysis using data from Klingon. When I started working on this, though, I deliberately did not look at Klingon so I wouldn't be unconsciously influenced by it."

Frommer's fondest wish is that the language takes off and that fans of the film use the Internet and conventions to spread the sound of Pandora. "It's definitely doable for people, and so many people have learned Klingon, so there could be an interest," he said. To some ears, Klingon sounds like a cross between Russian and crawfish, but the Na'vi language is far more gentle on the ear. "Cameron wanted something melodious and musical, something that would sound strange and alien but smooth and appealing."

Frommer is a linguist by trade and got his PhD at USC, but after he finished his doctorate he left acadmeia for the business world. "I really wanted to teach, though, and came back." He ended up on the faculty of the Center for Management Communication at the Marshall School of Business and teaching in the area of clinical management communication -- but he concedes that, deep down, his true love is still for language and pure linguistics.

When "Avatar" producer Jon Landau and his company, Lightstorm, approached the linguistics department at USC with Cameron's proposition about creating an extraterrestrial tongue, the request quickly found its way to Frommer, who had once collaborated on a workbook that collected data from 30 languages.

"The e-mail that came my way that said they were looking for someone who could create an alien language for a major motion picture directed by James Cameron, but the name of the project at that time was Project 880," Frommer said. "As soon as I saw that e-mail I pounced on it."

Frommer didn't start completely from scratch; Cameron had come up with about three dozen words of the Na'vi language at that point in his project document, which was like a quasi-script or a long treatment ("They called it a scriptment," Frommer said, "and that was a new word to me")  but most of the words  were character names.

"It gave me a sense of the sound that he was looking for and then I expanded it. Given these sounds and the possible combinations, what further structure could I bring to the sound to make it interesting," Frommer said. "That was the starting point. Probably the most exotic thing I added were ejectives, which are these sorts of popping sounds that are found in different languages from around the world. It's found in Native American languages and in parts of Africa and in Central Asia, the Caucasus. "

Frommer prepared three "sound palettes," which were collections of words and phrases that did not have meaning but did have the cadence and feel of languages. Cameron mulled over the sound files and picked the third as the best fit for the world he wanted to hear. He did not want tonal differences and variations in vowel length, for instance, but he loved the ejectives.

Then came the heavy lifting -- nailing down the sound system, word construction, the rule of syntax -- and Frommer immersed himself in the thousands of decisions required, many of them deciding what goes in and what goes out. The Na'vi language, for instance, does not have the sounds buh, duh, guh, chu, shu, and by restricting the sounds, Frommer said, a characteristic shape of the language begins to distinguish itself.

"If you allow everything and the kitchen sink, you get a mishmash, it sounds like gibberish," Frommer said. "An analogy is cooking and deciding how you are going to spice up a certain dish. If you put everything you have on the shelf, you get a mess. If you are judicious you get something good. In language, sometimes things are defined by the absences."

The finished product sounds, to some ears, vaguely Polynesian, while others hear the rhythms of African languages in it. "Someone said it sounded German to them, someone else told me Japanese, and I think that's good. If everyone were saying one single language then it would be bad," Frommer said.  

Frommer worked with the actors at the studios of dialect coach Carla Meyer, whose credits include all three "Pirates of the Caribbean" films, "Angels & Demons" and "Erin Brockovich" as well as "Air Force One," in which she helped Gary Oldman shape his hijacker's Eastern European accent. Frommer was impressed with the actors' intensity of focus.

"I was surprised they all did very well, and it gave me hope, too, that other people will try to learn it and speak it," Frommer said. "I'm excited because there is going be a Pandora-pedia online and a lot of material for people to learn more about the planet. There's this incredible devotion to detail. It's been fascinating to me. It's almost academic in its approach."

Frommer finds himself walking the campus sidewalks and talking to himself in the language. He has attempted to write poetry, too. It wouldn't be surprising if some of his couplets were forlorn -- it's lonely being the only person speaking a language. "I just wish," he said, "that I had someone to talk to."

-- Geoff Boucher

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Taylor Lautner on Rob Pattinson: 'Sadly, we don't hate each other'

In May, Hero Complex contributor Gina McIntyre traveled north to Vancouver, Canada, to visit the set of "The Twilight Saga: New Moon" and talk to the creative minds behind one of the most anticipated films of 2009. This week, as we count down to the release of the vampy sequel -- which is now screening everywhere -- McIntyre gives us daily dispatches from her trip. Today's final post in the series is a Q&A with Jacob Black himself, 17-year-old actor Taylor Lautner.

 

 GM: I understand you did a lot of your own stunts in the film. 

T.L.: Yeah, I’m very lucky. I’m thankful that the stunt coordinators have some interest in me and they actually trust me. I got to do all my dirt bike riding. A lot of times I’m just standing on set and I’m looking around going, "What can I do that will look really cool and will give me some action in this film?" I’ll usually just find things and ask them if I can do it. They’re like, "Taylor, you can’t get hurt, but OK, go ahead." That’s where most of the stunts come from, but I’m really surprised they let me do all the dirt bike riding myself.

GM:  Had you done that before?

TL: No, not really, I did it when I was a little kid like once but then when I heard that they were wondering if I knew how to dirt bike ride before I came up here, I met with a friend of mine in L.A. who has some dirt bikes and did two practice days. I had a couple of practice days up here with the stunt guys and then just shot it. I don’t know how cool it looked, but I didn’t get hurt.

GM: What other stunts did you dream up for yourself?

TL: Jacob, in the books he’s described pre-transformation as very clumsy and he trips over his own feet. As soon as he transforms [into a werewolf] he becomes very agile. That’s what I wanted to show in the film. At first he’s just a normal kid, jogs up to Bella, then when he transforms all of a sudden he’s just hopping around the place, has incredible balance, can do cool things. So if we’re in the middle of a forest, I’ll be like, What can I hop over? What can I hop off of? How can I show Jacob’s agility after his transformation into a wolf?

GM: How distressing was all the talk of whether you’d come back for in the role for "New Moon" and when did you start taking steps to prove that you could continue on as the character?

TL: I knew when I was filming "Twilight" that Jacob’s character goes in a different direction. He transforms not only mentally and emotionally but physically as well. As soon as I was done filming "Twilight," I literally got home and that day I went into the local gym and was like, I need a trainer because I need to get to big. I moved around gyms quite a bit and moved trainers and finally found one that I worked with the whole time almost. It required a lot of dedication, the fans and the whole series and the character motivated me, and I did it. It was a lot of hard work. I had to be in the gym a lot and I had to eat a lot, but I’m very thankful that I did it because it’s definitely worth it now.

GM:  How long did it take?

TL: About a year.

GM: How many hours a day did you work out?

TL: It kind of differed. Now, it’s best for me just to do about an hour and a half at most a day because there was this one period of time where I put on a lot of weight and then all of a sudden I started losing it. I was dropping weight and I was like, "What’s going on, why am I losing all this weight I put on?" What I found out is that I was actually overworking myself. I was not taking days off. I was just going seven days in a row and I was in the gym for 21/2 hours a day. I was just burning more calories than I was taking in, so I was losing weight and that’s definitely not what I needed to do.

GM: Were you on a specific diet?

TL: At one point, my trainer was literally like, "We need to get some fat on your body so then we can transfer that fat into muscle." I was 71/2% body fat and we just couldn’t build upon that. He would be like, "Eat as much as you can. We just need to get calories in your body." That was for a short period of time. Definitely when it got closer to filming, it was strictly meat and protein and vegetables, egg whites. It’s not that bad at first, but when you have to have it every morning, then it starts becoming disgusting. And you have to be eating every two hours. It’s horrible. Everybody’s like, I’d kill for that job, to eat as much as possible. I’m like, go for it. For a year, you have to eat every two hours and very specific things; you try, see if you like it.

GM:  What else did you do to prepare for the role?

TL: I think the best way possible to prepare for the role is by reading the books because that’s what we’re going off of and we should be going off of those because that’s what the fans love so much. I read the book a couple of times before filming and I was really excited because Jacob’s character in "New Moon," he’s like a split personality. Half of the time, toward the beginning, he’s pre-transformation Jacob, where he’s just very sweet, very lovable, very outgoing. As soon as he transforms, he becomes a totally different person. I wanted to bring both of those sides of him to life. Also, it’s described in the book, he has three faces. That first face, the second face and his third face is called the combined face, that’s where he is the new kind of conflicted Jacob. But Bella sees through him to what he used to be and what she would love him to come back to. You have to bring all three of those faces to life.

GM:  How challenging was that?

TL: The most challenging part was some days I’ll actually film all three faces on one day. I’ll have to, in the morning, pop the wig on and be happy-go-lucky little Jacob and then after lunch I’ll have to rip the wig off and take all my clothes off and become scary, mean, conflicted Jacob. I’ll have to switch on a dime. That’s probably the most challenging part, but all actors love challenging themselves with their roles. Jacob’s definitely a great role to do that.

GM:  How much of yourself do you put into the character?

TL: I’d say a lot. What’s crazy is you actually become the character. It helps being surrounded by such talented actors, Kristen [Stewart] and Rob [Pattinson], and having an amazing director in Chris Weitz. It really helps.

GM:  Would you say that you have a lot in common with Jacob?

TL: In some ways. Jacob loves people, he loves being around people. I would say that’s similar to me.

GM:  What was it like to work with Chris Weitz on "New Moon" after working with Catherine Hardwicke on "Twilight"?

TL: Chris is so amazing. All the cast thinks so. We all get along so well and he’s so talented. It’s so relaxed. We’re not stressed and worried, but at the same time the outcome is great. Chris is so talented and easy to work with, I’d work with him for the rest of my life if I could. We did tons and tons of rehearsals with him, diving into the script... The fact that I was surrounded by Kristen [Stewart] and Chris and everybody behind us was a major help for those extremely emotional scenes.

 

GM:  How would you characterize your relationship with Kristen?

TL: It’s so funny. We have such a similar relationship to Bella and Jacob. We’re very close. We get along so well. We’re so open with each other. We can talk about anything. We can be completely open and honest with each other and discuss anything and everything whenever we went. We were always discussing Jacob and Bella’s relationship.

GM:  What about the other members of the wolf pack? Did you do some pack bonding?

TL: We did a few nights. They weren’t up here a ton, but when they were we went out to dinner, I went out to a movie with them and they’re really great guys. They are a lot of fun. They keep the set alive. They’re funny, they got energy.

GM:  And Rob?

TL: Sadly, we don’t hate each other. We definitely can switch that on and off. It is fun. I have nothing against the guy, I think he’s great, but when you’re living Jacob and I’m experiencing that pain and I know that he’s in the way of what I want, then it’s really not that hard to be pretty [annoyed] at him.

GM:  Have you gotten accustomed to the frenzied fan reaction that the series inspires?

TL: I don’t know if you can get used to it. You can’t really get surprised anymore because you’ve seen just about everything. We understand and have seen all of the passion and dedication in the fans so it’s not like we’re going to see something crazy and be like, "Wow, we have crazy fans." We know that. It’s fantastic. We wouldn’t be here without them but they’re everywhere. You’re always experiencing the fans. Sometimes it does get a little overwhelming. I don’t know if you get used to it or not.

GM:  How many times have you been asked about the status of the "Breaking Dawn" movie?

TL: A few times, and I wish I could give an answer. I really do.

-- Gina McIntyre

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Giovanni Ribisi pretty much loves Jim Cameron

"AVATAR" COUNTDOWN

It's 30 days until the opening of James Cameron's "Avatar," and here at Hero Complex you will find more insight and information about the film than anywhere else; today marks the start of our daily countdown coverage leading up to the much-anticipated epic adventure. Will the film live up to the industry billing of "the game-changer" for Hollywood special-effects movies? Today we start the countdown with a conversation with Giovanni Ribisi, one of the stars of the movie, who could not talk enough about director Cameron.

GB: This is feeling like a movie that people have circled as something that has a chance to be very special. What was the feeling during the making of it?

GR: It's been an extraordinary experience within all aspects of the film. As far as filmmaking goes, and I hate to sound pretentious about it, but this movie is kind of historical. For Jim to pull this off and the amount of time he spent on the technological aspects, the story, it's relevance to today's world -- all of it. It was an incredible thing to be there down in New Zealand. And it's one of the best countries in the world, so that was amazing too, to be down there for five months.

GB: You were in "Saving Private Ryan," another film that was a massive canvas, major spectacle and had a long running time. That film was judged a success by most people because it held on to its humanity and life stories in the middle of those huge moving parts. Do you consider that the challenge of "Avatar" as well?

GR: I think from a director's point of a view and a production company, it's one of the various parts that make up the actual final whole. There's music, there's editing, there's lighting, acting, there's directing, choreography -- films are this all-encompassing medium. With this film, all of the technological aspects and how advanced the 3D is and how futuristic the computer graphics are, all of that loses its importance if you don't have a good movie. I think that's one of the great things about Jim; one of the reasons I respect him is that he is unrelenting in making it a good movie, even setting aside all of those things. From what I've seen it's incredible on an emotional level and on a storytelling level. Jim is a visionary on that level as well, which is why I wanted to work with him.

GB: You were in "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow," one of the first "digital backlot" films. Does that suggest you have an interest in seeking out movies that reach for the "next" tech in visual storytelling? 

GR: For me it's not about genre. I don't really care about that. For me, it's the story, the script and the people involved in making the movie. That's the most important thing. For any of the hundreds of people working on it, making a film is a large commitment out of your life and you have to have your interest maintained, whether it's two months or two years for "Apocalypse Now" or 12 years for Jim on "Avatar." And he's set a standard that others, I hope, will try to meet.

GB: What can you tell us about your character, Selfridge?

GR: Without giving too much away, it's obvious from the trailers that we as a company have gone to colonize another planet to exploit its natural resources. Essentially, I can give you two viewpoints on my character. The character's viewpoint on himself,  and my viewpoint. He is a cog in a machine but he considers himself the pharaoh of this new world. He's running the ship and it's all a statistical thing for him; he's about results and numbers. He has the sickness of what our capitalistic, corporate version of the American dream can become.

GB: He has ledger fever ...

GR: Yes exactly, the ledger fever.

GB: Cameron has said he looked to classic tales by Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad and more modern epics such as "At Play in the Fields of the Lord" and "Dances With Wolves" to construct a story for "Avatar." That's interesting to consider...

GR: Yes, absolutely. In storytelling there is a basic structure that you can trace back. If you analyze Shakespeare and his plays, the foundation is Aristotle's "Poetics," and that treatise that Aristotle wrote 2,500 years ago still resonates on such a human level. There are essential, elemental parts to storytelling and drama. And there's something about "Avatar" that really sort of articulates all of that and gives it an emotional resonance. And I don't think anybody really does it quite like Jim. When something is epic, it's epic in a way that you've never quite seen before and you feel an emotional attachment to the characters. It doesn't matter if they're CG or live-action, you're right there with them. 

GB: You mentioned the time spent in New Zealand working on the film -- can you give me a snapshot memory from the set or perhaps even sort of an emotional memory of working on the project?

GR: It's funny, Jim likes to say that New Zealand is the country that America always wanted to be in its early days. Now I don't know how people are going to take that, how offended they're going to be -- I don't know how many letters you're going to get. But I agree with him. They literally have commercials on television that tell people to get out of the couch, turn off the TV and get outside. Everything about the place -- the education, on a cultural level, socially, the landscape and their awareness of the environment and their effect on it. It's not a country steeped in litigation and lobbyists.

GB: One last thing: You've worked with directors like Steven Spielberg, Michael Mann, Sam Raimi and the late Anthony Minghella. It's an impressive list. When you consider a project, do you find you give more weight to who the director is in comparison to other factors? And are there directors in particular you'd like to work with?

GR: In process, you start with the script usually because that's normally how you become aware of a project. But a picture is only as good as the director is talented, and a picture is only as good as a director's vision for it. It is definitely the most important thing to me. For me, the people I'd love to work with, well, Jim would be at the top of the list. Working with Jim again. And ... well, just Jim, I think that'd be my answer to that.

-- Geoff Boucher

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Photos: Giovanni Ribisi in "Avatar," and then shown with co-star Sigourney Weaver. Credit: 20th Century Fox.

NOTE: DUE TO AN EDITING-PROCESS ERROR, A PREVIOUS VERSION OF THIS POST WAS PUBLISHED WITH NUMEROUS TYPOS. WE APOLOGIZE.

Missing Nemo: Berkeley Breathed says new movies are missing magic and drowning in pixels [UPDATED]

GUEST ESSAY BY BERKELEY BREATHED

Last week, at the precise moment on screen that millions of screaming, tanned Angelenos tumbled down into a mile-deep cataclysmic crack in the planet’s exploding crust along with their high-rise condos and labradoodles,  a man’s phone rang in the row of seats behind me. In a voice rising even above the sound of continental plates and Hummers scraping on each other, he discussed dining options with his caller.

“Szechuan!” he spouted. “It’s spicy!”

I looked around at my fellow multiplexers.  I’d need help strangling him.  I only had licorice twists. But the others didn’ t seem to notice his conversation. Worse: They didn’t care.

As I studied their faces, lit up with the shockingly realistic images of their own burning city disappearing down into the bottomless black depths of both hell and the accounting department of Columbia Pictures, I spied a common expression on them all. No, no, not rapt fascination or terror.  But not exactly boredom either. Something else.  It took me a moment to identify: Numbness.

Then this thought:  HungryBoy behind me would not have taken that call in 1954 if he’d been watching the tentacles of a giant squid wrapped around the riveted tail fin of the Nautilus submarine, yanking James Mason toward its snapping, slobbering maw amidst a howling Technicolor typhoon. Sorry. No way.

In 1954, the only numbness in that theater would have been in beguiled eyeballs, extended out from skulls an inch more than normal.

With the release of “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" 55 years ago, Walt Disney stumbled upon a mostly unexplored emotional response from movie audiences.  This unique feeling had been lurking in cinema’s murky, black and white depths, waiting to emerge and attack moviegoers and their imaginations in a way that tears, laughter and fear – the emotions of radio, theater and books -- could neither match nor compete: Awe.

As in Awesome. 

Awe as in slack-jawed and struck dumb: The Red Sea parting before C. Moses Heston.  Steven Spielberg’s mothership rising behind Devil’s Tower, reducing it in scale to an overturned Frappuccino.  The Imperial Star Destroyer lumbering over our heads in the first seconds of "Star Wars." Each provoked a collective, adolescent “whoooa” from dazzled audiences.  Remember that sound? I do. Heard it lately? Many of you just watched Africa slide over and smash into Brazil on screen last weekend. What’d you hear?

I heard, “Szechuan! It’s spicy!”

Awe.  From the latin Awesemonus, or Aw, man did you see that? A subjective reaction to visual stimulus that would, like that giant squid — the most tenacious of sea beasts — wrap itself around the Hollywood blockbuster until finally, reluctantly letting go in the late 1980s. It was hit square between the eyes with not a harpoon but something far deadlier: A pixel.

The blockbuster remains busting ever bigger blocks every weekend.  But with the smothering ubiquity of magical computer effects in even commercials selling products to battle talking toe bacteria, too often we emerge from the modern action spectacular pummeled and numb,  the only residual awe being in yawn.  Or awful. Or prawfits.

 By now, we and our children — flooded daily with pixels — have simply seen it all. Yawn.

Or too much. Numb.

The old school, spine-tingling adolescent movie wonder may have had its last gasp somewhere in the neon-lit hallways of  Darth Vader’s Death Star… but I submit that it was born, fresh, new and exciting,  in the dank blue steel passageways of Captain Nemo’s Nautilus, decades before.

Now, it’d by churlish not to suggest that lots of respectable, fantastic stories had found their way to film by then.  I’m sure you remember 1951's “Flying Disc Man from Mars.” And no, I don’t forget 1933’s King Kong. Nor do I forget Willis O’Brien’s smudge of lunch peanut butter on Kong’s two inch shoulder in one shot. I can see it. Please don’t write me.

Without real movie stars, without meaty themes of war and loss and villainous angst, without saturated color and Cinemascope, without the budget, the exotic shooting locales and sweeping elegiac score and without much concern to hide the black wires holding the spaceships up … neither awe nor wonder nor even atomic-powered Victorian submersibles could fully surface below the lid of cheese that capped that era’s typical science fiction cinema.

That in mind, Walt Disney and director Richard Fleischer risked the entire fate of the Disney studio, as well the plans to build Disneyland, in rolling the budget dice -- flinging them, really -- at Jules Verne's classic but plotless novel.  It was Walt’s first live-action picture, his inexperience reflected by a talky, episodic script that couldn’t, for the first time, fall back on the crutch of a comedic sidekick cricket or dwarf.

All forgiven though, with the other cinema luxury he delivered that was otherwise unseen in the fantasy genre up to that point: razor-cool production design. Nemo’s outrageous ship, spontaneously carved from a foot-long piece of pine by Disney designer Harper Goff one inspired spring day.  That marvelous, malevolent submersible of anti-war vengeance that looks like what every kid knows a proper submarine should resemble but does not: A pissed-off fish alligator. 

Fifty-five years later, it’s what everyone remembers. Poor Kirk Douglas.

My mother -- who remembers nothing from film --  thinks that “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” is a motto on cans of tuna fish.  And she swears on the lives of her dogs that Spartacus simply could NOT have kissed a seal in any movie.

But she knows she’s seen that submarine before.

Kirk may have chewed up the scenery in every shot, but he couldn’t take a bite out of the dominating profile of Goff’s wonderful underwater sub -- native warriors leaping off its electrified cannibal-repelling hull as it sliced through both the Pacific ocean and the movie-soaked cerebellums of young boys like me.

Full disclosure: The home office in which I’m presently writing this has been fashioned after the interior design of the Nautilus – all paneled colonial cherry wood, faux arched steel I-beams overhead, steam tubes, rivets, red velvet upholstery and flickering Victorian lights.  A suitable creative environment for an  arrested adolescent but one also compelled to cook up fantastic stories and call it respectable work. 

Where better, I ask, than within the romantic innards of the Nautilus?

A padded cell, my wife would answer.

Alas, no pipe organ, but my outer studio doors feature a child-repelling electric current that is always switched on. (This is wholly believed within the family and I’d like to keep it that way.)

Ever anxious to bury an ironic lead, I should add that with the 55th anniversary of "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea," Disney’s new studio head Rich Ross just sank the nearly-to-production revival of Captain Nemo.

It would have been stuffed like a haddock, no doubt, with CG spectacularityness. I sort of suspect it would have been all Disney could do to resist the temptation of showing Captain Nemo destroying, in photo-real detail,  the entire solar system.

And maybe, just maybe, they sensed this. And maybe they came back up to the surface to take a breath and rethink just exactly whence the wonder of their new Nemo movie should flow: From the dazzling story, characters, production design and — did I mention story?

Or from its CG images of computer-processed, over-the-top liquid action?

Go.  Hold your breath and dive deep, Disney.  But remember, we’ve pretty much seen it all before.
And probably in a Depends commercial.

-- Berkeley Breathed

Berkeley Breathed is a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, illustrator, novelist and screenwriter. A Disney adapation of his book "Mars Needs Moms!" will be released in 2011. He lives in Santa Barbara, and, in a home office designed in homage to "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,"  looks out on the sea and waits for Nautilus to surface.

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Photos: Vintage images courtesy of Disney. Bottom: Berkeley Breathed and his dog and his bike. Credit: Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times.

UPDATED: An earlier version of this post misidentified the author of "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea," but an angry squid fixed it.

'New Moon' review: The movie misses Robert Pattinson ... and Catherine Hardwicke

"TWILIGHT: NEW MOON" COUNTDOWN

It's almost here, Twi-hards. Today, in our ongoing daily countdown to "The Twilight Saga: New Moon," we bring you the review of the film by Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan, who believes the film suffers from the absence of Robert Pattinson and the mad-love sensibilities of Catherine Hardwicke.

 

"This is the last time you'll ever see me," Edward Cullen says to Bella Swan. As if.

Spoken early on in "New Moon," that promise is one of the least likely to be kept in movie history. With most of that film still to unfold, and two more adaptations of Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight" series in the works, the next due out as soon as next summer, the world is going to see as much of Kristen Stewart's melancholy Bella and Robert Pattinson's undead Edward as it can take. Maybe more.

In the short term, however, Edward is as good as his word, and "New Moon" suffers as a result. Constrained by the plot of the novel, the film keeps the two lovers apart for quite a spell, robbing the project of the crazy-in-love energy that made "Twilight," the first entry in the series, such a guilty pleasure.

"New Moon," which has been grandly titled "The Twilight Saga: New Moon" in honor of that first episode's huge success, marks the franchise's entrance into the self-protective, don't-rock-the-boat phase of its existence, which is inevitable but a bit of a shame.

In place of "Twilight" director Catherine Hardwicke, a filmmaker of intense, sometimes overwhelming and out-of-control emotionality who seemed to feel these teenage characters in her bones, "New Moon" has gone with the more polished Chris Weitz.

A smooth professional whose credits include such adaptations as "The Golden Compass" and "About a Boy," Weitz makes the vampire trains of Melissa Rosenberg's capable script run on time, but he almost seems too rational a director for this kind of project. This lack of animating madness combined with the novel's demands give much of "New Moon" a marking time quality.

Yes, I know, "New Moon's" emotional energy is supposed to come through Bella's putative attachment to newly buff best friend Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner). But though audiences gasp when Jacob uses his shirt to staunch Bella's blood (don't ask) and reveals a torso that would make Charles Atlas swoon, the connection between these two is so self-evidently non-romantic that it turns out not to be much of a diversion.

More interesting is Jacob's discovery that as a member of the fierce Quileute tribe he is prone to turning into an exceptionally large wolf at a moment's notice, a wolf whose main objective in life is to safeguard humans from vampires. In addition to pining for Edward, Bella suddenly finds herself in the middle of age-old and bitter enmities. This is one hard-luck young woman...

THERE'S MORE, READ THE REST

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Photos: Top, Kristen Stewart and Taylor Lautner in "New Moon" (Summit Entertainment); bottom Launter and Stewart arrive for the film's Westwood (Matt Sayles /Associated Press).

The complex notion of destroying the world in '2012'

Scene Stealer

Liesl Bradner has interviewed many of the masters of Hollywood effects in our Wizards of Hollywood section of Hero Complex and today takes a look at a particular moment during "2012" in this installment of Scene Stealer.

The disaster film "2012" reunites director Roland Emmerich and visual effects supervisor Volker Engel, who first worked together 13 years ago on another end-of-the-world movie, "Independence Day." How apocalyptic times have changed. The key destruction scenes in that earlier film consisted of 90% miniatures, a common practice when things need to be blown up, leaving only 10% of the elements to be computer-generated.

By comparison, nearly half of "2012" is visual effects. Because of the complexity of the destruction scenes it was impossible to use miniatures.

"The limo-in-earthquake was the most challenging scene, as it could not be shot at all but had to be completely created in the computer with inserts of the actors reacting to the mayhem," said Engel from Berlin, where he is collaborating with Emmerich on "Anonymous," a quiet Shakespearean drama.

Except for a few shots of a real limo filmed against a blue screen, the five-second crane shot in a residential neighborhood was completely virtual. The bird’s-eye view of the neighborhood buckling with every crumbling house, swaying palm tree, fence, car, sidewalk, garbage can and the limousine were all computer-generated because each one of those elements had to be simulated to shake, break or tumble.

-- Liesl Bradner

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Is Percy Jackson's mythology too close to Harry Potter's magic?

Here at the Hero Complex, we've circled "Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief" as a project to watch next year, so we'll bringing you lots of coverage of its odyssey as a Hollywood venture. Today, Rachel Abramowitz has a report on the similarities between two magical youngsters, one named Percy and the other named Harry.  -- Geoff Boucher

In February, moviegoers will get a chance to meet a character who is already a titan of the bookshelves: Percy Jackson, the rebellious 12-year-old hero of Rick Riordan's bestselling novels, who discovers that he is the demigod son of the Greek sea god Poseidon. But will newcomers to the saga find themselves thinking of a certain boy wizard who discovered his own supernatural heritage within the walls of Hogwarts?

The first Riordan novel, "Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief," was published four years ago, but it remains a hot gift for youngsters this holiday season. It starts off the tale of young Percy, a kid with a flair for sarcasm, getting in trouble and bouncing among schools. He also has been diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia and has a somewhat defeated attitude about his future. It turns out, though, that his brain is wired differently because of his secret heritage: In this story, the Greek gods are alive and well and living on Mt. Olympus, which is now located on the 600th floor of the Empire State Building.

Instead of Hogwarts, this boy hero is shuttled off to Camp Half Blood on Long Island, where he communes with other young demigods. Once there, he’s wrongly accused of stealing the thunderbolt of Zeus, and if he doesn't find it, there will be a bloodbath among the famously quarrelsome clan of immortals. In the odyssey that follows, Percy discovers his own powers and faces down a bevy of beasties from Greek mythology. The studio executives working with the film are prepared for comparisons to "Potter," but they say they're confident that this adventure hero has plenty of his own unique magic to offer.

“We found it was a fresh arena," says Fox 2000 President Elizabeth Gabler, whose division is releasing the film. “It also deals with a lot of issues that kids and young people go through. Self-realization, breaking with the family, becoming more independent, finding out what your parents are, feeling a bit like an outcast and making yourself strong. There’s also an element of this which is a monster movie. The [kids] come up against Medusa, the Hydra, the Minotaur, Hades – people who are wild and extreme.”

Young Logan Lerman plays Percy, while Kevin McKidd ("Rome," "Grey's Anatomy") stars as Poseidon. The cast also includes Uma Thurman ("Kill Bill," "Pulp Fiction") as Medusa and Sean Bean ("The Lord of the Rings" films, "Troy") as Zeus, the king of the gods. The centaur Chiron, played by former James Bond star Pierce Brosnan, runs the activities at Camp Half Blood. Catherine Keener ("Capote," "Being John Malkovich") plays Percy’s mortal mom, Sally, whom he must rescue from the clutches of Hades, played by Steve Coogan, whom many moviegoers will remember as Octavius in the popular "Night of the Museum" films.

As the trailer makes clear, this film is directed by Chris Columbus, the director of the first two "Harry Potter" films and a producer of the third. Gabler said Columbus first heard about the books from his kids and then approached the studio, which owned the rights.

“He of all people was aware that there are some similarities to 'Harry Potter,' " Gabler said. "Who better than Chris to keep it away from that. He’s very sensitive to not repeat what they did in those films, and to bringing out the best of what these stories can be.”

-- Rachel Abramowitz

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'New Moon' director says film was inspired by ... David Lean and Akira Kurosawa?

"TWILIGHT: NEW MOON" COUNTDOWN

In May, Hero Complex contributor Gina McIntyre traveled north to Vancouver to visit the set of "The Twilight Saga: New Moon" and talk to the creative minds behind one of the most anticipated films of 2009. This week, as we count down to the Friday release of the vampy sequel, McIntyre gives us daily dispatches from her trip. Today it's a Q&A with director Chris Weitz:

GM: I understand the scheduling on this film has been difficult.

CW: The thing is, you want to shoot in sequence if possible. The ideal movie, you would be shooting each scene in the order in which it occurs in the movie. But of course you have to go back and forth to locations and you'd rather shoot everything in the same place once you're there. One of the nice things about "Twilight," the first movie, was that all these kids got all this exposure so they get other movies to do and then we have to very carefully try to do this jigsaw of fitting people in when they're available. You end up shooting things crazily out of schedule, which is hard on the actors because they have to remember, Oh, this scene that I'm shooting actually takes place after scenes that we're going to shoot in two weeks and I'm supposed to be in this emotional state which follows that. It all gets very hard to organize mentally. In that sense it's one of the more erratic schedules that I've worked with but it's working out so far.

GM: With the werewolves coming to the forefront of the story in "New Moon," there are a number of visual effects in the movie. Your previous film, "The Golden Compass," also was very heavily dependent on computer-generated effects. Were you excited to tackle that aspect of this production?

CW: I have to say, I watched "Hellboy 2" the other day, and I thought, 'Wow, this guy really loves visual effects and he really, really, really knows how to stage them.' I'm not that guy. I know the right people who know how to stage them. I can't say that I relish them to the same degree that somebody like Guillermo del Toro does. That's not my thing. My thing is working with actors. I have been kind of hazed into the world of VFX, so I understand how to do that -- or at least who to trust -- and I get what it is that they're trying to do. I think that with the right visual effects supervisor, I can direct animators who are animating creatures, who are like actors in that sense. It's just that their performances are being done over the course of months. Each five-second shot takes months to develop. That stuff I like very much, but I wouldn't say that I'm either an expert or kind of a savant as far as that goes. That's Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro and Sam Raimi. That's not me.

GM: What most intrigued you about directing this film?

CW: It's kind of like the return of the repressed, this whole fantasy thing that's come along. I started doing comedies and then me and my brother [Paul] started veering towards drama and then "Golden Compass" came along and I just loved the book. With "Twilight," I'm not sure it's as much the fantasy per se as the emotionality of it. To me, it's kind of about loss and longing and breakup and reunion and all those sorts of feelings. The visual effects stuff and the fantasy stuff is great and it has to be done right, but it's not going to matter at all if it's not about people. Even the vampires are people. The moment you stop thinking about them that way, you just lose it and then you're making a tent-pole blockbuster movie. That's fine but that's not really my interest.

GM: What's it been like to come in on the second film in the series?

CW: For one thing it saved me the horror of auditioning -- I find auditions incredibly mortifying because it puts me in this really false position of judging people and I don't like doing that. I don't like saying no to people. I really feel for actors and the position they're in when they're auditioning for something and you have to say no to 95% of the people who come in. I hate that. So I inherited this really great cast and the cast to me is the strength of the movie. I also got some opportunities to go after some wonderful people I thought were great, and I also got some opportunities to cast people who hadn't been seen before -- like a lot of the kids who are playing the werewolves, some of them are doing it for the first time. One of the guys kind of walked in off the street, didn't even know what he was auditioning for and got a part, which is cool. Also I'm really grateful to ["Twilight" director] Catherine Hardwicke for having selected these amazing players and also for doing this movie that has so much interest attached to it. It's a really rare and wonderful feeling to know that people are going to want to see what you're making. The fear sometimes when you're making a film is that you've gotten everybody all dressed up with nowhere to go. What if nobody wants to see it or what if it's going to bomb? Certainly there is the possibility that I can really, really drop the ball and everyone's going to hate this and hate me for the job that I've done with it. But at least people are going to go and see it.

GM:  Is that frustrating to know that you won't be doing the next film?

CW: You grow fond of people as you work with them and feel as though you would like to carry them on in their journey on the one hand. On the other hand, you also grow exhausted by the sheer grind of making a film and I think I need a rest. By the end of a movie and especially one that's being made at the kind of pace that we're doing it, I'm just going to be pummeled. I have a family and time has to be spent with my wife and kid. The whole family makes a sacrifice to make a film. As it happens, the way that things are scheduled, they're going to be going into pre-production while I'm still in post-production. There'd be no way for me to do it anyway, so there's that as well. It's kind of knowing that I'm here to carry the bowl of water and hand it on without spilling too much. It's OK. It's kind of what they did with [the] "Harry Potter" [franchise] where each film sort of had its own separate stamp but there's an aesthetic that ran through it and a cast.

GM: Did "Twilight's" visual aesthetic at all shape your approach to the look of "New Moon"?

CW: I wanted to approach it fresh. There is a point where it links up, which is in the school life of the main character, where we do maintain some of the hand-held quality of the camerawork. But I'm kind of old-fashioned in terms of my references. I go back to much more composed romances that I love. Those are my influences rather than what I think is a more pop contemporary sensibility that Catherine Hardwicke has. I don't think I'm very contemporary or cool. What will result is probably a much more romantic, classically framed old-fashioned epic for this one. We're going to these big sets and Italy, the world expands, the mythology of the piece expands. It fits better in a way with a sweeping approach, although one uses these metaphors really loosely. Sweeping, what does that mean? One hates to quote filmmakers who are great because it sounds like you're comparing yourself to them and I'm not at all, but David Lean and Kurosawa who composed on this grand level, that's the inspiration for this movie. It kind of has been for the last couple of movies for me in terms of building the visuals. "Golden Compass" was a biggie.

GM: How have your experiences with young actors on "About a Boy" and "Golden Compass" affected your approach to working with this cast?

CW: When you're working with Kristen [Stewart] and Rob [Pattinson], in a sense you're working with young actors but you're working with people who have worked quite a lot. Kristen's been working since she was a kid, so it's really like working with very experienced competent actors, which is a pleasure. Dakota Fanning, she's young but she's done more movies than I have. With Kristen too, she's extraordinarily aware of at what point in a scene you might cut in or out of something and that kind of thing. It's not like I'm working with coltish young people. They know what they're about.

GM:  I understand that you put together a 20-page pamphlet that you gave to the actors at the outset of filming to help explain your ideas for "New Moon."

CW: I put it together about a week before the actors started arriving. It suddenly struck me that actors kind of get landed in a movie sometimes like paratroopers in a war zone and they’re just expected to fight their way out of it -- hey, this is the set you’re going to be on, this is your bedroom, this is the school that you go to, this is the forest that you live in. They don’t get time to acclimatize at all. I wanted to give the actors an insight into what I was thinking about the way it should end up looking, what the visual inspirations were. In part it was self-serving because you don’t want to have to explain what the heck is supposed to be going on when you could be shooting it. Part of it was just the sense that actors deserve a fair shake and to know what it is they're getting themselves into beforehand, what kind of world they’re going to inhabit because they’ve been working on their characters the whole time, which is great but they’re not necessarily attuned to the environment.

You hopefully have enough time to rehearse with your principals so you either feel comfortable with the script or you’ve been able to modify the script in ways that make them feel comfortable. But also I think it’s helpful for the people who are coming in for short periods even for smaller roles to know what it is that they’re going to be part of. They know the tone that’s been set for the movie as well. That it’s not jokey, that it’s not hyper stylized, that it’s fitting within a certain range. They even know what palette the colors of the movie are going to be in, which doesn’t necessarily impact upon their work, but they get the sense that people have been thinking a lot about what they’re going to be doing. We worked very hard to try to prep things for their arrival, they work hard to prep their characters and you want to meet in the middle.

GM: It might surprise most moviegoers to know that a director creates a color palette for a film.

CW: Nobody ever leaves the movie thinking, "That was a great color palette." People maybe think, "Oh that looked cool." But I think the devil is in the details or God is in the details, if you prefer, and I tend to hire on to work again and again with people who are obsessed with details so that even little things, things that are not surface, things that will be missed on first viewing, things that will be missed on second, third and fourth viewing, are gotten right. Because then you know if you’ve gotten even the minute details right then the stuff that’s right in your face is going to be right as well.

We had a set which functions for about 20 seconds – Jacob Black’s house that Bella storms through. Our production designer and his art director went down to La Push and met with the community there, so that when we constructed Jacob’s house, it looks like the kind of house that is on the La Push reservation. When the kids who were First Nations kids -- in America we call them Native American -- who were playing the wolves, first went and saw it, there was this kind of spooky moment. The guy playing Sam Uley told me, "It really kind of threw me because it looked like the house I grew up in. I was expecting my dad to come around the corner." That is really satisfying. I think the accumulation of detail is parallel to when you have a really good actor and they’re putting together a performance scene by scene and line by line. They think about it very carefully and we have to think about the visuals very carefully as well.

GM:  You even used the camera differently to depict the characters' relationships ...

CW: The camera moves differently for different relationships. When we play scenes and Kristen and Taylor with Bella and Jacob, a friendly organic thing, those shots are all on Steadicam. It gives you a freedom from rigid axes, and it means you’re not always moving in straight lines, you’re always kind of fluidly moving around. As much as possible when she’s with Edward, we go on rails, on dollies, which means you’re moving in a straight line, you’re moving on an axis and the camera tilts or pans on specific axes as well. You might end up with the same kind of shot but behind it unconsciously -- and I think that people are so used to watching movies and TV now that they feel things even when they don’t necessarily know what it is that they’re feeling -- there’s a sense of rigidity to it and restraint. Then sometimes we would go hand-held with Bella’s relationship with her friends, which they did in the first movie.

In the first movie, a tremendous amount of it was hand-held. I’m not a huge fan of hand-held except in certain circumstances. I am a huge fan of Steadicam because it allows you incredible freedom. We also have one of the greatest operators in the world working with us, David Crone. There’s a grammar of camera movement if you wanted to be pretentious about it, which I guess I am being, that I also wanted to lay out at the beginning as well. It’s about detail. Anything down to the choice of the length of the lens you’re going to use actually affects the way that everything’s going to look -- whether or not you notice it, you’re going to see the degree of resolution of the background or not. There’s also the fact that we’ve been fighting the weather this entire shoot. We’re supposed to be shooting in a very rainy, gray environment and sometimes the sun is out, so sometimes we’re having to put up huge flags to cover entire bits of forest and then the one day where we want sun, it refuses to come.

GM:  What has most surprised you about the cast?

CW: Their maturity surprised me the most given their age but on reflection I shouldn’t be because [Kristen and Rob] both have been working for a long time. But they’re remarkably clever and they keep me on my toes. They’ve thought about every line. Not that it’s my inclination to ever say, "Look, just do it, it’s a movie," but you can’t get one over on them. The surprising thing is that even though they’re playing vampires and werewolves and a girl who’s in love with a vampire, they still actually want to think about them as people, which is good, but their intelligence requires me to bring up my game quite a bit, which I’m willing to do. 

GM:  Have they had a lot of input into the script then?

CW: I sort of promised the actors at the beginning that no matter what, we would have time to discuss every single line. So that if things weren’t feeling right we would talk it over. We had a pretty nifty script to start with from Melissa [Rosenberg] but I can kind of work on the fly as well a bit because I’m a writer-director, which is helpful. I don’t feel stuck or panicky when an actor is not down with a particular piece of dialog.

GM:  Does it impact you having Stephenie Meyer on set?

CW: Surprisingly positively, I say surprisingly because you’d think it would be terrifying to have the writer of the book on set – oh God, I’m going to get it wrong today. But she’s been remarkably kind of cool. I think she comes to the set as a fan of movies more than anything else. Early on, we had extensive and good exchanges. I believe she felt that I wanted to bring the book to the screen, not to make the second movie in a franchise. I’ve been adapting books for a long time now and that’s my main concern, this is a literary adaptation, it’s not a movie.

GM: Your last three films were literary adaptations. Is there something that draws you to stories originally told in novel form?

CW: I think it’s a lack of confidence in my own creative powers. I don’t believe my characters.

-- Gina McIntyre

PHOTO GALLERY: "New Moon," A to Z

'New Moon' premiere shines in Westwood

'Twilight' producer: Lautner is going to blow people away with his acting

Robert Pattinson, object of obsession

'Twilight' screenwriter says second film is better

Stephenie Meyer breaks silence on 'Oprah'

'Twilight: New Moon' exclusive: Three-dozen photos from the set

Stephenie Meyer and the future of 'Midnight Sun'

Robert Pattinson talks about his career 'backup plan'

PHOTOS: From top, Chris Weitz; Weitz with cast members during filming;  Taylor Lautner and Weitz on forest set of "New Moon." All by David Strick, Hollywood Backlot. At left, Lautner and Kristen Stewart arrive for the premiere. Credit: Matt Sayles /Associated Press

Losing Nemo: Disney deep-sixes McG's '20,000 Leagues' revival

Remember McG's plan to bring Sam Worthington beneath the waves for a huge revival of Captain Nemo and "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea"? In a shocker, the whole film has been scuttled by Disney; Claudia Eller and Dawn C. Chmielewski have the latest at our sister blog, Company Town. Here's an excerpt:

In one of his first major creative moves as Walt Disney Studios' new movie chief, Rich Ross has made the costly decision to pull the plug on the planned $150-million production of "Captain Nemo: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" -- the last project approved by his predecessor, Dick Cook.

The movie -- which was a high-priority project for Disney and envisioned as a potential franchise along the lines of the "Pirates of The Caribbean" series -- was scheduled to begin shooting in February in Mexico. Disney had already spent millions of dollars hiring crews and building elaborate sets in Rosarito Beach, which will now have to be struck and workers laid off. The studio will also be shutting down the film's production offices on the Burbank lot, where dozens of people were doing prep work for the movie.

Just a few weeks ago, Disney spent generously to hire writer Michael Chabon to quickly rewrite the script. The studio had recruited Chabon, author of "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay," to rework "Nemo" after he had recently written a draft of its forthcoming production "John Carter of Mars," the first live-action film to be directed by Pixar Animation Studios director Andrew Stanton.

As recently as late last week, the production of "Nemo" appeared to be full speed ahead...

THERE'S MORE, READ THE REST

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McG photo by Al Seib / Los Angeles Times.

'Twilight' mania hits Westwood with the premiere of 'New Moon'

"TWILIGHT: NEW MOON" COUNTDOWN

Yvonne Villarreal and Claudia Eller covered last night's big premiere for "Twilight Saga: New Moon." Here's their report...

 It was a premiere so highly anticipated even the wolves came out. Literally.

About 3,000 people were invited to the premiere of "New Moon," the latest installment in the "Twilight" saga, held Monday at the Mann's Village, Bruin and Regent theaters in Westwood Village. But even the uninvited came out in droves. Thousands of screaming fans -- holding signs and snapping pictures -- crammed the sidewalks hoping for a glimpse of their favorite fang-toothed (or brawny, in the case of the werewolf fanatics) characters. Rob. Kristen. Taylor -- last names needed only for the uninitiated. They each made a point of approaching the screaming masses -- taking pictures, signing posters and shaking hands -- before making their way through the red carpet media frenzy.

The frenzy would pick up again once the ending credits to the sequel in the "Twilight" franchise, based on Stephenie Meyer's bestselling novels, began rolling. Between 1,800 and 1,900 invited guests filtered out of the theater and walked to the premiere's after-party, held at the nearby Hammer Museum. The modern space was transformed into a "Twilight" wonderland.

The film's St. Marco's Festival, celebrating the expulsion of vampires from Volterra, Italy, was re-created in the museum's interior space. Red lanterns dangled from the ceiling. Servers donned red cloaks. Even the menu took an Italian cue; the affair was catered by Wolfgang Puck -- naturally. There were even cupcakes with vampire teeth sunk into the frosting.

Meyer. Dakota Fanning. Ashley Greene. They all took in the sights of the make-believe Italy. Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart and Taylor Lautner? They did too. But with security and velvet ropes to shield them from the masses.

The lush forests of Forks, Wash., also made an appearance. Off in the tented area, moss-covered rocks and leafy foliage filled the space. There were no signs of tree-climbing vampires. But two wolves (with wranglers) were prowling (behind a barricade) the scene -- keeping the vampires at bay.

-- Claudia Eller and Yvonne Villarreal

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Photo: Taylor Lautner and Kristen Stewart arrive for the premiere. Credit: Matt Sayles /Associated Press

'Twilight' producer: Taylor Lautner is going to blow people away with his acting

"TWILIGHT: NEW MOON" COUNTDOWN

In May, Hero Complex contributor Gina McIntyre traveled north to Vancouver to visit the set of "The Twilight Saga: New Moon" to talk to the creative minds behind one of the most anticipated films of 2009. This week, as we count down to the Friday release of the vampy sequel, McIntyre gives us daily dispatches from her trip. Today, it's a Q&A with producer Wyck Godfrey, who's overseeing all the movie adaptations of Stephenie Meyer's novels.

 

GM: Stephenie is here on the set today -- has she been present for the majority of the shoot? How involved is she in the day-to-day production?

WG: In terms of authors being involved with their works as they turn into movies, she’s definitely on the more involved end of it, and that was a very purposeful thing on our part. When you do a beloved book and turn it into a movie, you’re beholden in some sense to the fans to really get it right. From our standpoint having her constantly there during preproduction, during the script stage, coming to production four or five times for really pivotal scenes, you have her as the person who created it constantly there telling you, "Know what? We might be missing this." It’s just great. She’s always supportive. It’s been a good presence. Whenever you make your decisions about directors or actors, you have Stephenie telling her fans, "I love this idea," and that means a lot to them and us.

GM: Did she have specific concerns about "New Moon"?

WG: The major thing is trusting that Jacob comes to the forefront in this movie. You need to have Edward depart so that you can allow Jacob to be that life preserver that he becomes for Bella, that friend that sort of pulls her out of her deepest despair. The instinct sometimes as a filmmaker, it’s like, OK, we’ve got Rob Pattinson, we need to put him in the movie as much as possible. In reality, the design of the book from a narrative standpoint works. The heartbreak of losing Edward in the first act, you won’t have it if he’s constantly present through the rest of the movie. Keeping the movie subjective, keeping it from Bella’s perspective [is important] because that’s how you experience it when you’re reading the books. That’s what everyone loves about the books. It’s really about Bella’s emotions and what she’s going through, those universal emotions that every girl and boy in some sense goes through at that age.

GM:Were you worried about Rob not being in the movie enough?

WG: Early on, there was that kneejerk reaction of, how are we going to work him into the movie? And we let go of it really quickly. At the end of the day, this is a movie about loss, about that greatest heartbreak ever. And you can’t have heartbreak if you keep the person around. Once we got the first draft of the script in, we realized, this is the right structure, this is fine. When you start to analyze it, he’s in a lot of the movie. He’s in the first act, he’s in the third act, it’s all still centered around her love for Edward.

GM: There had been some talk about whether to recast the role of Jacob because of the physical transformation the character undergoes between "Twilight" and "New Moon." But you opted to keep Taylor Lautner in the part. Why was that the right call?

WG: It was always the right call to keep him from a character standpoint because people connected to Taylor as Jacob in the first movie. The only thing that ever stood in our way was the physical description of Jacob in the second and third book. Taylor when we were making "Twilight" wasn’t the same Taylor that showed up when we were ready to start making "New Moon." He said, this is what I’ve done to work myself and do everything I can humanly do to make myself appear as the Jacob that is described by Stephenie Meyer in "New Moon." When you saw him and saw that he had physically transformed himself to a great degree – people will look at this movie and go, "Oh my gosh, I can’t believe that’s the same guy that was in 'Twilight.'" And that was really all that we needed to make sure happened because that is what happens in "New Moon." She does go, "Holy cow, Jacob, you look like a different person," and he’s like, yeah, well, it’s a growth spurt. It was one that from a practical standpoint we had to acknowledge as an issue when we were deciding to make "New Moon." It was going to be an issue, but he made it less of an issue by doing the work. It’s a real testament to his passion for the role, his commitment as a kid to do everything he physically could to become Jacob in "New Moon."

GM: Are you using any tricks to make him look bigger?

WG: There’s a lot of things you can do in terms of putting him in the foreground, raising him up, putting him on higher ground in certain scenes. From a body mass standpoint, we don’t have to do anything. He’s ripped like, to date myself, Marky Mark in 1991. At the end of the day, will people go, wait a minute, Jacob is described as 6’5’’ in the book and he’s clearly not 6’5’’? That’s movie license. At some point, you just have to go with it, but as a spirit, he’s embodied the change and I think that’s what’s important from a character standpoint. You see a transformation in Taylor as an actor from "Twilight" to "New Moon," which is, I think, going to blow people away.

GM: Catherine Hardwicke directed "Twilight"; Chris Weitz is directing "New Moon" and David Slade is directing the next movie, "Eclipse." What was the reason behind choosing different directors for each film in the series – was it simply a practical necessity to get the movies completed as quickly as possible?

WG: It’s also aesthetic. You’re locked into cast, you’re locked into location, you’re locked into the Pacific Northwest. The one thing you can do as a filmmaker is change directors and give it a different look, a different style, a different shooting style. The movies and the books are all very different in terms of what the core themes are. For us, the first one was obviously the hard one. The movie worked, Catherine’s great, how do we figure out how to hold this together? When that didn’t work out, we found fortunately a great director for "New Moon." Chris has been fabulous. He’s totally different from Catherine and great in his own ways. This movie will feel very different from "Twilight," but it’s still the world of "Twilight." It’s still the Pacific Northwest, it’s still your actors, all of that stuff which makes you connect to the consistency, but you allow for something exciting to happen to the audience because it’s a different style.  With Chris moving onto David Slade, that is just purely practical. Chris can’t possibly cut the movie and have it ready for Nov. 20 and have the next one ready for June 30. We knew we needed a new director right away. David is going to embrace and embody the growth of narrative that happens in "Eclipse," the fact that it becomes the whole world crashing in on Forks, the Volturi, the newborn army in Seattle, there’s a lot of action that happens in that book and a lot of action that happens now that Edward’s back and all the Cullens are back. Edward and Jacob and Bella are in direct contact in a way that’s got much more tension. I think David was the right guy for that. He directed an amazing performance out of a young actress in Ellen Page in his first film "Hard Candy" and he also can handle the action and the style of action that we wanted to accomplish with "Eclipse."

GM: You mention "Hard Candy," which is an extremely edgy, R-rated film. Was there any concern that David Slade's sensibility might be too extreme for the world of "Twilight"?

WG: For me, no, because ever since I saw "Hard Candy," I was obsessed with him as a filmmaker. I’ve offered him five different movies. That’s a female point of view movie and it’s very different than the average female point of view movie. She’s incredibly empowered and yet she starts off as a victim. It’s a really well done narrative. He’s also done tons of videos that are female friendly, he has some teeth to him, too, which I think is good for the franchise. A movie franchise and a book franchise has to age with its audience. The same thing that works in "Twilight"... the girls that read "Twilight," by the time you’ve made "Eclipse" and have it in theaters, they’re older. You need the film to mature in the way the books mature. By the fourth book, Bella's getting married, getting pregnant, having babies.

GM: Speaking of the fourth book, what's the status of a "Breaking Dawn" movie?

WG: We all want to make "Breaking Dawn." We still have to get there. We’re focused right now on "New Moon" and "Eclipse," but everyone involved in the movies wants "Breaking Dawn" to happen. There are a lot of challenges to making "Breaking Dawn," and I think Stephenie’s at the forefront of really acknowledging, guys, let’s really be clear that we know how to do this before we move forward. I think it’s smart. It’s a little overwhelming to really think in a detailed manner of how we’re going to crack this but we have every intention to.

GM: What's the most interesting change you've witnessed on the part of the cast during the course of shooting "New Moon"?

WG: What’s really interesting is to watch how comfortable the actors have become in the characters' skin. A lot of the tension on the first movie was dealing with actors who were approaching these characters for the first time and in a weird way not knowing them as well as they now know them. I think Rob and Kristin and Taylor all feel pretty comfortable, they know the characters, they know the story. That’s been great. Taylor’s a real revelation in this. I think people are going to be excited about his performance. Kristen has taken it to a whole new level in terms of her commitment and her insight into the emotional nuances of the character.

You forget how emotional "New Moon" is. It’s not about plot. It’s about inner turmoil and despair and how do you handle that on a day to day basis. It’s been a really difficult role for her. I was just talking to the studio and saying there are going to be like five different scenes where you’re going to have to hand out Kleenex in the movie theater. There’s going to be five different scenes where people are going to be crying. It’s just so emotional. Everyone can relate to having that first, most vital love taken from you. To watch her go through it, puts you right back into that place where you first had your heart pulled out of your chest and stomped on. The movie and the book you get to see her reawaken and out of that comes growth, which is ultimately what "New Moon" is about.

-- Gina McIntyre

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Chris Columbus is 'like a proud parent' watching 'Harry Potter' stars from afar

 

It's been a long time since director Chris Columbus was the cinematic headmaster at Hogwarts but he said it's been a joy to watch Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint graduate to bigger and better things.

"My biggest pride is seeing the pictures now, and watching the three of them from a distance, and seeing them do an entire scene in one shot," said the director of the first two "Harry Potter" films, which were released in 2001 and 2002. "Seriously, I know that sounds funny, but in the old days -- and, you know, the old days meaning eight years ago -- and in that first picture in particular, it’s filled with cuts because they couldn’t really get beyond the first line without either looking into the camera, laughing or looking at the lights."

I was talking to Columbus recently about his next film, "Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief," which is the adaptation of a series of novels about a young boy with an outsider spirit who discovers he has a magical heritage and then must fight against powerful foes with the help of his friends. Yes, it does sound a bit familiar, doesn't it?

"I know, I know, it’s the inevitable question on this picture," Columbus said with a chuckle. "We obviously would be fools not to hope for the same type of audience." He went on to explain the many differences between "Percy" and "Harry" but you can read about all of that in our coming-soon coverage of the "Lightning Thief" and its considerable aspirations. Today I'm focused instead on Columbus and his Hogwarts legacy.

The first two films are about to be front-and-center again too. On Dec. 8, two lavish new home-video collections hit stores: "Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone" Ultimate Edition and "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" Ultimate Edition, which arrive with a bundle of extras, including never-before-seen screen tests of the cast members and the first two installments of the new eight-part documentary "Creating the World of Harry Potter."

Columbus launched a franchise that has, in less than a decade, accounted for more than $5.3 billion in worldwide box-office, not to mention the billions more made at retail and through licensing deals. Columbus isn't hailed as a founding father by many fans, though; as the franchise has grown darker, more stylized and better-acted (if only due to the maturation of its young stars), the perception is that the Columbus films have not aged all that well. To me, they do feel overly quaint now and, at some wincing moments, have the soft-glow aura of a Hallmark commercial. I'm sure that sort of appraisal will sound a bit unfair to Columbus and his supporters -- they weren't trying to make "Let the Right One In" after all, it was a film for kids and about kids.

I remember earlier this year, "Potter" franchise producer David Heyman told me the best way to frame those first two films is to judge them by their pioneering impact, not as rivals to their sequels. "Chris Columbus was the exact right director for those films," he said, noting that Columbus is "unrivaled" in his ability to work with young children as stars. Indeed, Columbus may not have the storytelling chops of current "Potter" director David Yates but part of his job on the first two films was making sure his young stars were kept safe in the eye of the storm.

"Having done the 'Home Alone' pictures, I realized that we needed to start casting kids based on their families and the security that their families could give them at this particular time in their lives -- that was particularly the case with the "Potter" kids, who were about to become three of the most famous kids in the world," Columbus said. "So David Heyman and I made sort of a pact that we were gonna cast the families as well as the kids.  And in interviewing Dan’s family and Rupert’s family and Emma’s family, they surrounded themselves with a really solid group of people. Their parents were very supportive, their parents were there for them all the time."

I told Columbus that the most amazing thing about the "Potter" stars may be how level-headed and thoughtful the trio are in the face of fame that has now lasted for half of their lifetimes. There's not a Britney in the bunch, I told Columbus and he agreed.

"There wasn’t this obsession for fame," the 51-year-old director said. "It all sort of happened -- particularly with Daniel Radcliffe -- reluctantly. With  the other two kids it seemed accidentally – they weren’t expecting it.  And I think as a result of that, because they had that sense of support from us at the beginning, and from their parents throughout, they’ve really turned into terrific adults.  And that being said, they’ve also turned into terrific actors, you know. "

Debate, if you will, the quality of Columbus as a director but don't doubt for a minute his value to the franchise that is now a towering part of Hollywood history. "Boy, I’m telling you, to see them grow as actors and actually having the opportunity to see Dan in [the stage play] 'Equus'…I was just really, really impressed. It was the feeling of a proud parent."

-- Geoff Boucher

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PHOTO: Rupert Grint, Daniel Radcliffe and Chris Columbus on the set of the first "Potter" film (Warner Bros.) 

'Twilight' screenwriter says 'New Moon' is better than first: 'I know who I'm writing for'

"TWILIGHT: NEW MOON" COUNTDOWN

In May, Hero Complex contributor Gina McIntyre traveled north to Vancouver to visit the set of "The Twilight Saga: New Moon" and talk to the creative minds behind one of the most anticipated films of 2009. This week, as we count down to the Friday release of the vampy sequel, McIntyre gives us daily dispatches from her trip. Today it's a Q&A with screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg, who was brought in to  adapt Stephenie Meyer's novels.

GM: So director Chris Weitz seems to run an incredibly relaxed set...

MR: This is a happy set. I was with him after delivering the first draft, we had a couple of meetings on the second draft and he was the same guy then as he is here on set. He didn’t suddenly turn into some maniac, stressed out and crazed. He’s really impressive. He’s just capturing every moment with the actors. I haven’t seen one wrong moment with the actors.

GM: What changes did you make to that first draft of "New Moon"?

MR: There was a lot of honing down, cutting down and eliminating certain scenes and pulling out certain elements of the story just to have it move faster.

GM: How challenging was it to adapt this book with the character of Edward Cullen being absent for so much of the story?

MR: Going in, that was going to be the issue. Not only Edward but the entire Cullen clan disappears, the vampires who you’ve come to know and love disappear throughout the middle of the book. In the book, Bella very much keeps them alive in her mind. He is a presence and because it’s all inside her mind, the reader is with him. The challenge here was how do I do that in a movie. I think we have found a way to stay true to the tone of the book and true to the intention of the book but to have him remain a physical presence as well. And you’re starting a whole new relationship with Jacob. Yes, there was a relationship with Jacob in "Twilight" but this is when it happens.

GM: What are some of the strengths of "New Moon" on the page?

MR: What’s so great about this story is Stephenie really explores complex emotions. You could boil it down to girl loses boy, finds boy, but she doesn’t do the easy, black-and-white moves that a lot of young romances do. It’s very complex -- [what happens when] you develop feelings for a friend, romantic love versus platonic love. These are very sophisticated emotions that are very real but also very hard to translate into a film where everything is usually very simplistic and easy to follow. How do you keep that sophistication and complexity? Because that's the book, that's what makes it interesting.

GM: So, how do you do that?

MR: Examining each moment for the character and keeping alive different facets. Of course, you have great actors who can play a lot of different colors. It’s really bringing to life and translating those different colors. You might have to cut down on a couple of those colors. When you’re writing a book you can have it be that in any one moment, Bella experiences 10 different things and does 10 different actions. OK, well, you’re going to have to choose, in that moment, maybe a couple of those colors and a couple of those emotions. You need to be able to track throughout the movie where she’s going. It’s hard to articulate because so much of it is just sort of instinctual -- does that feel right? I’m very much a structuralist. I think story is structure is story. If you have the correct structure, the moments of the story happen at the right time and you build those characters to those moments.

GM: How many different drafts of the screenplay did you write?

MR: You do so many drafts over the course of a script. I do very, very detailed outlines, like 25-page outlines. I’ll do any number of drafts and get feedback from a very big circle of writer friends and associates. Finally, I’ll have a draft that I think works. Then I give it to the producers and they give me notes and feedback. For me, a lot of the work happens in that outline stage because that’s when you’re going from blank page to here’s what we’re doing. Then, writing the script, you do more drafts. Again, I’ll have 10 different writer friends read it at any one given time. By the time the producers get it, it’s actually been honed quite a bit. It’s a lot like what directors do with test screenings to see how people respond to certain moments. I do a lot of that. I don’t know that all writers do that. It may be a habit from TV, just from working collaboratively with a lot of people, I’m used to getting instant reaction.

GM: You're also the executive producer of the great series "Dexter" on Showtime. Is the experience of writing these scripts at all like working in television?

MR: It becomes much more like writing for television where "Twilight" was the pilot and "New Moon" is the first episode. For instance, in "Twilight," I had no idea who was actually playing the roles. I tend to lean toward a lot more humor and I sometimes can go a little bit broad and quippy, or like "Dexter," the dark one-liners. I had a lot of that in the "Twilight" script and when it got onto the actors it wasn’t right for the tone. Some of that got pared out. I had not quite found the tone for "Twilight." There was some adjusting that had to be done as we went along. With "New Moon," it was much closer, the adjustments have not been as dramatic – not that they were that dramatic to begin with – but they’ve been subtler. I hope that for the next one, they’ll be even less dramatic. I think I’ve found my footing and I know who I’m writing for and the tone of the world.

GM: Did that make it easier to adapt "Eclipse"?

MR: "Eclipse" was hard – it took a while to break that, but part of that might have been that I was just so tired. I went from "Dexter" overlapping with "Twilight" to jumping back on "Dexter" to overlapping with "New Moon" and doing five days a week on "Dexter" and two days a week on "New Moon" and did that for months and months and went into "Eclipse." By then I was pretty burned. It took a while to stoke the fire again, and it’s a hard story to tell. You think it’s going to be easy because there’s all this action, but you realize that Bella is reactive a lot of the time. You can do that in a book because everything’s from her point of view so she’s very much present. But in a movie, you can’t have her just reacting. She has to be driving the action. Ultimately it may end up being the best of the three. You never know. I like to think that I improve with every round; it doesn’t necessarily always pan out that way.

GM: Do you feel free at all to take artistic license with the story?

MR: There are definitely scenes of my creation, but it’s become very hard to differentiate because so many of the scenes are compilations of five different scenes condensed into one. I’ll invent a scene and use a piece from something else. Or I’ll use something as a jumping-off point. I couldn’t tell you where the line between Stephenie and me is. I have to dive into the mind-set of her mythology to make sure that if I am inventing, it’s born out of her mythology and it’s not going to violate it. Her mythology is very tight, it’s very well thought-out. When you’re doing sci-fi or fantasy, the rules have to be very, very defined. But within those rules you have tremendous room for invention, that’s why it’s so fun. But that’s the difference between a successful fantasy or sci-fi series and an unsuccessful one is are the rules defined.

GM: Would you say that you have a close working relationship with Stephenie Meyer?

MR: In the first book, with "Twilight," I don’t think I even met her until I was well into a draft and I was worried about meeting her because she was the 500-pound gorilla, she was the heavyweight. I was really protective of my process. I was afraid. I didn’t know her from Adam, and I was afraid of getting run over and of not being able to create what I wanted to create or in some way have my voice stifled. When I met her, I realized, "Oh, that’s not going to happen at all." But she was cautious too. She was looking at me going, "Are you going to butcher my child?" By the time I finished "Twilight," her reaction to it, it was still one of the great moments of my career, having the author say such wonderful things about the script. From that moment she relaxed about can I deliver and I relaxed about inviting her into my process. I didn’t have a director of "New Moon" until I was finished, so on "New Moon" I became much more involved with her, and with "Eclipse" I was getting her notes on the outline. With "Eclipse," because I was taking some liberties with the storytelling, it was really important to me that I stay true to her mythology, her voice. She gave me notes as far back as the outline and on every draft since. We’re very tight and very much in each other’s world.

-- Gina McIntyre

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PHOTOS: Top, Edward and Bella from "New Moon" (Summit Entertainment). Middle, Melissa Rosenberg last month at 4th International Rome Film Festival (Getty Images). Bottom, Taylor Lautner, Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson at Comic-Con International (Chelsea Warren/Wire Image)

'Avatar' director James Cameron as cinema prophet: 'Moving a mountain is nothing'

Epic or epic failure? Game changer or the Great Hype Machine? All eyes are on "Avatar," and two of the top reporters in Hollywood, John Horn and Claudia Eller, check in with a survey of the sensation in a story that ran on the front page of today's Los Angeles Times. Here's an excerpt. -- Geoff Boucher

Inside a dark mixing stage at 20th Century Fox a few weeks ago, writer-director James Cameron, surrounded by nearly a dozen colleagues, stared at a clip from his upcoming movie, "Avatar," unhappy with the look of the precipitous peaks on the horizon.

Circling the summits with a red laser pointer and speaking to his computer-effects team at Weta Digital in New Zealand via videoconference, Cameron came up with a Muhammad-like solution: Shift the mountains to the left.

"Moving a mountain," the 55-year-old filmmaker said, laughing, "is nothing."

Such bravado might be expected from the man who declared, "I'm the king of the world!" during the Academy Awards 11 years ago, when his last feature film, "Titanic," collected 11 Oscars. It was the highest-grossing movie in cinema history.

Throughout his career, in films such as "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" and "The Abyss," Cameron has used eye-popping digital effects to create worlds and characters. But he never has attempted anything as creatively and commercially ambitious as "Avatar," a groundbreaking combination of 3-D filmmaking, photo-realistic computer animation and live-action drama that opens Dec. 18.

"Avatar," a futuristic thriller, may be Hollywood's most expensive movie ever, and many in the industry fervently hope it will transform 21st century moviemaking the way sound and color did decades ago.

The film business, struggling with flat theater attendance, collapsing DVD sales and the serial firing of top executives, certainly could use a game changer -- an immersive moviegoing experience that delivers more than anyone can get from their HDTV or home computer screens. But though "Avatar" might be all that, it also defies conventional Hollywood wisdom that today's blockbuster movies need to be "pre-sold" as bestsellers ("Harry Potter," "The Lord of the Rings"), comic books ("Batman," "X-Men"), toys ("Transformers," the upcoming "Battleship") or based on other movies (every sequel ever made).

Thus the novelty of "Avatar" could also be its biggest liability. And some wonder if the film's plot -- dense with action sequences and special effects, but also featuring a love story between two 10-foot-tall blue aliens -- will resonate with a wide enough audience to steer the movie into profitability.
 

Hollywood has tracked "Avatar" closely. Many of Cameron's friends -- members of a filmmaking elite that includes Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson and Ridley Scott -- made pilgrimages to his Santa Monica production house and the Playa del Rey hangars where he worked on the film.

"I was blown away," said Guillermo del Toro, director of "Pan's Labyrinth" and the upcoming "Hobbit" movies. "The creation of this technology is what allows a movie like 'Avatar' to exist."

Said Jim Gianopulos, co-chairman of Fox Filmed Entertainment: "He gets to the edge of the envelope, and then goes as far past it as possible."

To observe Cameron directing "Avatar" is to witness filmmaking as it's never been done before. Whereas most movies add all of their visual effects in post-production, Cameron was able to see fully composited shots in real time: The actors he was directing may have been performing in front of a blank green screen, but Cameron's camera eyepiece -- not to mention giant 3-D television monitors -- immediately displayed lush, synthetic backgrounds.

The filmmaker has spent the better part of a decade developing the technology used in "Avatar," which is set on a distant moon under siege by humans determined to pillage its natural resources. It required the reinvention of bulky 3-D cameras, which had to be downsized to fit into smaller spaces and move with fluidity, and lengthy experimentation with improvements in motion-capture animation, which superimposes animated characters onto real actors, as in the current Disney version of "A Christmas Carol."

As part of his research and development, Cameron directed the 3-D documentaries "Aliens of the Deep" and "Ghosts of the Abyss," which visited the Titanic's underwater wreckage. To overcome what many critics regard as the great flaw of motion-capture animation, the "dead-eye" appearance of characters, Cameron mounted tiny cameras above the faces of his "Avatar" actors, recording their smallest facial expressions and most intimate eye movements.

"What had been missing in motion capture was the 'E' -- the emotion," said "Avatar" producer Jon Landau.

THERE'S MORE, READ THE REST.

-- John Horn and Claudia Eller

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Photo: Filmmaker James Cameron with actors Sigourney Weaver, Joel Moore, center, and Sam Worthington. Credit: Mark Fellman / 20th Century Fox