Post by Bobby on Feb 28, 2006 0:42:46 GMT -5
From SHH;
Meeting Superman
By NIKI CHEONG
The railway track rattles violently as the sounds of a train chugging away at an enormous speed fills the room. It’s not going quite as fast as a speeding bullet, but you can tell that it’s going way faster than it should. Suddenly, it crashes through a barrier, and misses a stop. As it approaches the next, you can see the station vibrating. Then someone falls onto the track, and the train runs him, or her, over.
The train just keeps circling the metropolis; its speed increasing and buildings are vibrating. Boom. Cut to a bunch of people standing on what looks like a subway platform. The floor cracks, then the wall splits in two. The group of people take a quick step to the side. They look at each other. Kevin Spacey, sorry, Lex Luthor, smirks.
The scene pauses. I turn to my left where Superman Returns director Bryan Singer is seated in the Warner Hollywood office in West Hollywood, California. He looks back, with the exact same smirk. You can tell he’s quite happy with the looks of awe on our faces.
“Want to see more?” he asked.
Clark Kent (Brandon Routh) shares a paper with a stranger in an elevator in Superman Returns. It looks like Superman has made the headlines again.
It was hard to imagine that less than an hour before that smirk, four journalists from Malaysia were panicking about being late for an interview. A toilet break had taken longer than expected, and the guard at the studio where the post-production work of the movie was being done took some time trying to identify us.
As we sped from the car park to the studio, one of us asked, “Can we ask him questions about Superman?” After all, we were in Los Angeles to interview Singer about his new mini-series The Triangle, which is due to air on Star World in a couple of months.
“Sure,” the answer came and we were all elated.
Confession time: I grew up a comic geek – but while most of my friends were crazy over X-Men and the marvels, no pun intended, of Marvel Comics’ characters – I was always a DC boy. The Justice League of America were my heroes – Batman, Flash, Green Lantern and of course, Supes himself.
Walking into Singer’s office was like walking into a Superman capsule. On the left was a picture of him throwing a Frisbee with Stephan Bender (who plays the young Clark Kent), with the latter in mid-air.
Other Superman posters float about, and the one that caught my eye was the metallic blue poster with the “S” symbol in the middle of it with the words Returns 2006 at the bottom. The pre-publicity poster – this was real!
Singer walks into the office (with a friend, who looks eerily like actor Brandon Routh before he put on the 9kg for his role as Superman) and as he sits, he hums the classic John Williams Superman theme.
“Nice tune you’re humming,” I joked.
“Ah, no,” Singer laughed as he pointed in the direction of the editing suite. “We were just going through the music.”
The young Clark Kent (Stephan Bender) tests his super strength.
Of course, our entourage knew that already. We were signing in to get our visitor’s tag awhile earlier, and we heard the exact same tune blasting loudly from one of the rooms. Singer’s assistant, who escorted us in, just winked at us at that point and said: “Well, I guess we all know what’s happening in there.”
For someone who is making what is probably the biggest movie of his career, Singer seems surprisingly calm. While there is a sense of nervous energy radiating off him, one gets the feeling that this is more from the excitement of getting on with his work than actual anxiety about having to face the press.
He has, after all, just finished shooting the long-awaited story of an American, if not the world’s, superhero and having to fill the shoes of great actors such as George Reeves and Christopher Reeve.
“Superman’s shoes,” he corrected me. “I couldn’t have felt comfortable going into making the movie if I didn’t feel like I had Superman.”
Kate Bosworth steps into the shoes of Lois Lane in Superman Returns.
But while the pressure to bring the greatest superhero in the world back to life was “terrible”, it was stress of a different kind that actually got to him.
“The physical exertion,” Singer explained. “It doesn’t seem like it because you’re in the director’s chair, you’ve got your tea, and you’ve got your box of Kleenex and your assistants but the reality is, day to day, the decisions you’re making, the multi-million dollar decisions you’re making every five minutes, all day long, for 16 hours a day ...,” Indeed, a US$250mil budget is no joke. That’s just about twice the budget that Singer had when filming X2.
“I spend about 12 hours on set and then I am in the editing room for three hours at night, every night for 143 days of shooting,” he went on. Of course, that is almost half a year of constant shooting. Singer had not, in his calculations, added in the time spent in pre-production, script development and of course, post-production that is currently going on, of which he has “about four more months to go.”
So intense was this project that after the 110th day, Singer uncharacteristically stopped shooting, went on a three-week break before coming back to finish the movie. While this method of taking breaks in the middle of shoots is not common, others have been known to use it.
“(George) Lucas ... starts shooting and then he takes a break, then he comes back to shoot the other half,” Singer explained.
Of course, despite all the pressures, he still found the time to produce The Triangle and even pop over to Wellington, New Zealand, to assist King Kong director Peter Jackson direct a scene from the movie. Still, that was all the time he could spare, much to the disappointment of X-Men fans who had hoped for Singer to direct X3, after two successful movies.
“I can’t split myself,” he said. “If I could split myself, I would have done X-Men 3 and Superman.”
However, luck was on the side of James Marsden (who plays Cyclops in all the X-Men movies), who managed to be featured in both movies. In Superman Returns, Marsden plays Richard White, the guy who appears to have stolen Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth) from Clark Kent after he (and of course Superman) literally disappear from the face of the earth for several years.
That’s right folks, this isn’t your average Superman-saves-the-world-and-courts-Lois-Lane-and-they-live-happily-ever-after movie. Lois Lane even has a child!
“I feel good about it,” Singer said, when asked how he feels now that the movie is shaping up. “It’s a different film than anything I’ve made before. It’s funnier, more romantic, so I’m happier about that.”
After the interview, as he walked us out of the office, he turned to us with a child-like grin on his face: “Do you guys want to see something?”
Does Kevin Spacey have what it takes to play the ruthless Lex Luthor? We’ll just have to wait and see.
We all thought that he was going to show us some drawings; after all, he had brought in a mock-up of the new Superman Returns poster just as we finished the interview. We followed him, our hearts thumping and not saying anything, as he led us into the room where we first heard the theme song come out of.
And there it was. On the huge television hooked up to the editing machines was a young Clark Kent running through the farm as he discovers his incredible powers. He takes a slight leap and ends up on a huge water tanker.
The look of shock on his face matched ours. We couldn’t believe what we were watching. We were possibly the first few – if not the first Malaysians – to watch actual footage from the movie.
“You want to see more? Maybe I should show you ... nah, maybe not,” Singer teased. Pause. “Oh, why not,” he said as he dragged the mouse looking for another scene. He obviously knew what he was looking for. We, on the other hand, didn’t know what else was in store.
We heard a click only to see something flying across the screen. It wasn’t a bird, but it sure was a plane ... heading to crash into a baseball field.
The look of horror on the faces of the people sitting in the stands was priceless (again, not unlike ours) until a swoosh flashed across the screen and something in blue and red grabbed hold of the nose of the plane and tried to slow it down as it dove towards the pitch. Would it crash?
Singer stopped the footage just before we could see if Superman had indeed saved the day.
In fact, we didn’t get to see Superman doing much at all on screen.
But if the countless of hours of hard work that went into making the movie, the beautiful footage that we witnessed, and his passion for bringing the man with the red underpants back to the big screen after a 19-year absence was anything to go by, then we had already met Superman that day.
original story;
www.star-ecentral.com/news/s...0846&sec=movies
Meeting Superman
By NIKI CHEONG
The railway track rattles violently as the sounds of a train chugging away at an enormous speed fills the room. It’s not going quite as fast as a speeding bullet, but you can tell that it’s going way faster than it should. Suddenly, it crashes through a barrier, and misses a stop. As it approaches the next, you can see the station vibrating. Then someone falls onto the track, and the train runs him, or her, over.
The train just keeps circling the metropolis; its speed increasing and buildings are vibrating. Boom. Cut to a bunch of people standing on what looks like a subway platform. The floor cracks, then the wall splits in two. The group of people take a quick step to the side. They look at each other. Kevin Spacey, sorry, Lex Luthor, smirks.
The scene pauses. I turn to my left where Superman Returns director Bryan Singer is seated in the Warner Hollywood office in West Hollywood, California. He looks back, with the exact same smirk. You can tell he’s quite happy with the looks of awe on our faces.
“Want to see more?” he asked.
Clark Kent (Brandon Routh) shares a paper with a stranger in an elevator in Superman Returns. It looks like Superman has made the headlines again.
It was hard to imagine that less than an hour before that smirk, four journalists from Malaysia were panicking about being late for an interview. A toilet break had taken longer than expected, and the guard at the studio where the post-production work of the movie was being done took some time trying to identify us.
As we sped from the car park to the studio, one of us asked, “Can we ask him questions about Superman?” After all, we were in Los Angeles to interview Singer about his new mini-series The Triangle, which is due to air on Star World in a couple of months.
“Sure,” the answer came and we were all elated.
Confession time: I grew up a comic geek – but while most of my friends were crazy over X-Men and the marvels, no pun intended, of Marvel Comics’ characters – I was always a DC boy. The Justice League of America were my heroes – Batman, Flash, Green Lantern and of course, Supes himself.
Walking into Singer’s office was like walking into a Superman capsule. On the left was a picture of him throwing a Frisbee with Stephan Bender (who plays the young Clark Kent), with the latter in mid-air.
Other Superman posters float about, and the one that caught my eye was the metallic blue poster with the “S” symbol in the middle of it with the words Returns 2006 at the bottom. The pre-publicity poster – this was real!
Singer walks into the office (with a friend, who looks eerily like actor Brandon Routh before he put on the 9kg for his role as Superman) and as he sits, he hums the classic John Williams Superman theme.
“Nice tune you’re humming,” I joked.
“Ah, no,” Singer laughed as he pointed in the direction of the editing suite. “We were just going through the music.”
The young Clark Kent (Stephan Bender) tests his super strength.
Of course, our entourage knew that already. We were signing in to get our visitor’s tag awhile earlier, and we heard the exact same tune blasting loudly from one of the rooms. Singer’s assistant, who escorted us in, just winked at us at that point and said: “Well, I guess we all know what’s happening in there.”
For someone who is making what is probably the biggest movie of his career, Singer seems surprisingly calm. While there is a sense of nervous energy radiating off him, one gets the feeling that this is more from the excitement of getting on with his work than actual anxiety about having to face the press.
He has, after all, just finished shooting the long-awaited story of an American, if not the world’s, superhero and having to fill the shoes of great actors such as George Reeves and Christopher Reeve.
“Superman’s shoes,” he corrected me. “I couldn’t have felt comfortable going into making the movie if I didn’t feel like I had Superman.”
Kate Bosworth steps into the shoes of Lois Lane in Superman Returns.
But while the pressure to bring the greatest superhero in the world back to life was “terrible”, it was stress of a different kind that actually got to him.
“The physical exertion,” Singer explained. “It doesn’t seem like it because you’re in the director’s chair, you’ve got your tea, and you’ve got your box of Kleenex and your assistants but the reality is, day to day, the decisions you’re making, the multi-million dollar decisions you’re making every five minutes, all day long, for 16 hours a day ...,” Indeed, a US$250mil budget is no joke. That’s just about twice the budget that Singer had when filming X2.
“I spend about 12 hours on set and then I am in the editing room for three hours at night, every night for 143 days of shooting,” he went on. Of course, that is almost half a year of constant shooting. Singer had not, in his calculations, added in the time spent in pre-production, script development and of course, post-production that is currently going on, of which he has “about four more months to go.”
So intense was this project that after the 110th day, Singer uncharacteristically stopped shooting, went on a three-week break before coming back to finish the movie. While this method of taking breaks in the middle of shoots is not common, others have been known to use it.
“(George) Lucas ... starts shooting and then he takes a break, then he comes back to shoot the other half,” Singer explained.
Of course, despite all the pressures, he still found the time to produce The Triangle and even pop over to Wellington, New Zealand, to assist King Kong director Peter Jackson direct a scene from the movie. Still, that was all the time he could spare, much to the disappointment of X-Men fans who had hoped for Singer to direct X3, after two successful movies.
“I can’t split myself,” he said. “If I could split myself, I would have done X-Men 3 and Superman.”
However, luck was on the side of James Marsden (who plays Cyclops in all the X-Men movies), who managed to be featured in both movies. In Superman Returns, Marsden plays Richard White, the guy who appears to have stolen Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth) from Clark Kent after he (and of course Superman) literally disappear from the face of the earth for several years.
That’s right folks, this isn’t your average Superman-saves-the-world-and-courts-Lois-Lane-and-they-live-happily-ever-after movie. Lois Lane even has a child!
“I feel good about it,” Singer said, when asked how he feels now that the movie is shaping up. “It’s a different film than anything I’ve made before. It’s funnier, more romantic, so I’m happier about that.”
After the interview, as he walked us out of the office, he turned to us with a child-like grin on his face: “Do you guys want to see something?”
Does Kevin Spacey have what it takes to play the ruthless Lex Luthor? We’ll just have to wait and see.
We all thought that he was going to show us some drawings; after all, he had brought in a mock-up of the new Superman Returns poster just as we finished the interview. We followed him, our hearts thumping and not saying anything, as he led us into the room where we first heard the theme song come out of.
And there it was. On the huge television hooked up to the editing machines was a young Clark Kent running through the farm as he discovers his incredible powers. He takes a slight leap and ends up on a huge water tanker.
The look of shock on his face matched ours. We couldn’t believe what we were watching. We were possibly the first few – if not the first Malaysians – to watch actual footage from the movie.
“You want to see more? Maybe I should show you ... nah, maybe not,” Singer teased. Pause. “Oh, why not,” he said as he dragged the mouse looking for another scene. He obviously knew what he was looking for. We, on the other hand, didn’t know what else was in store.
We heard a click only to see something flying across the screen. It wasn’t a bird, but it sure was a plane ... heading to crash into a baseball field.
The look of horror on the faces of the people sitting in the stands was priceless (again, not unlike ours) until a swoosh flashed across the screen and something in blue and red grabbed hold of the nose of the plane and tried to slow it down as it dove towards the pitch. Would it crash?
Singer stopped the footage just before we could see if Superman had indeed saved the day.
In fact, we didn’t get to see Superman doing much at all on screen.
But if the countless of hours of hard work that went into making the movie, the beautiful footage that we witnessed, and his passion for bringing the man with the red underpants back to the big screen after a 19-year absence was anything to go by, then we had already met Superman that day.
original story;
www.star-ecentral.com/news/s...0846&sec=movies
