Hulk: Much more than a Summer Blockbuster. ((Spoilers))*long*
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Hulk: Much more than a Summer Blockbuster. ((Spoilers))*long*
There's an interview here that was posted at Comic Book Resources
with James Schamus (longtime Ang Lee collaberator) and
producer Larry Franco. The reason I thought of posting it here,
is I noticed that a lot of the gripes about what people are saying
about the upcoming movie are addressed here. It's pretty long
but it answers questions like, "What's up with the Tank thing in
the trailer? Why show the Hulk in trailers at all? Will we see Hulk
Ass or (heaven forbid more)? Will we see gore?" Ect;
Unfortunately, no comments on the Shrek theory, although when
I saw Shrek for the first time, I thought to myself, "Look! a Hulk
knock-off!"
Remember there are a few spoilers given in the interview:
At a recent "Hulk" press junket, James Schamus and producer Larry Franco sat down to talk to the members of the media in a roundtable format interview. Schamus, who has collaborated with director Ang Lee on many movies, co-wrote the script and also served as producer on the project. Franco is also a producer.
At the roundtables, members of the press took turns asking the pair questions about the development of the film. Comics2Film/CBR News is please to present this edited transcript of that interview.
WARNING: THIS TRANSCRIPT CONTAINS SIGNIFICANT SPOILERS
Q: What kind of pressure did it put on you, adapting such an iconic character?
James Schamus (JS): The pressure is very much self-imposed. We knew we wanted to make a move that, in essence, paid real homage to "The Hulk" and to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's original vision. We also knew that we wanted to create a movie that nobody had ever seen before, both in terms of its language, the transitions and the multiple frames, as well as the place it takes you emotionally in this comic book world. So we kind of did it to ourselves.
Q: Was the multiple frames an attempt to give it a comic book feel?
JS: It's not simply to reproduce what a comic book panel and page looks like. That wasn't the point because that's kind of easy. It was actually to try to induce in a very seamless way, an entirely new way of telling stories that's akin to the intensity of the comic book experience that a kid would have when going into this world; the fracturedness of it. The forced perspectives. The incredible, sometimes aggression of the transitions. All those things. Really to make it part of the story-telling, not just a graphic design element.
Larry Franco (LF): It was also a tool to convey emotion too. There's a lot of stuff in there that you don't realize right away what it's doing to you. It's getting you. It's getting you angry, for one. It's getting you sympathetic sometimes, when you're trying to watch both. So, it's used for a lot of reasons.
Q: James what was your reaction when Ang said he was interested in doing "Hulk?"
JS: Well, it was exciting. To lobby him...and it was a very fast lobbying job for this film. He's extremely thoughtful but on this one he was decisive. A couple things helped along the way.
One was putting down a challenge for him, which you can't write on the page, which was: you're going to make a movie that's gonna to create, for a mass, worldwide audience, in a seamless way, an entirely new cinema language.
I mean, this film, me and Larry were just talking about this, you have more jump cuts in this movie since Godard's "Breathless," but it's not like you're watching an avant-garde movie, that's not the point. It puts you in the space of Bruce Banner and the Hulk. You're all over it. You're everywhere, but you're in it.
Number two was the psychology of it. One of the first things I did when we were talking about the movie and the possibility of making it was I screened for him Rouben Mamoulian's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" from 1932.
Isn't that the most amazing movie? It's incredible.
That' line in the movie, where Eric says, "the thing that scares me the most is I like it." That was inspired directly watching Fredric March become Mr. Hyde and he just loves it!
It's the sexiest and most creepy performance, I think, in Hollywood history.
It was before the code, too, by the way, and everyone thinks these movies are so quaint. It's like, "you ain't seen nothin'." This is like hard R.
So it was getting him involved in precisely that kind of intensity saying, "you can be there. You can do this."
Then, of course, I was completely scared.
Q: There was some talk about giving Hulk some nudity and whether or not his pants would stay on...
LF: There was a lot of though put into that, more than you want to listen to me talk about. We talked about it for a long time. We talked about a couple of things. The frontal nudity was a bigger issue than the back nudity. We struggled with that all the way.
In the dog fight, originally he had nothing on. After a few shots came in and we tried to darken that area and then we realized that, even if we darken it, the kids on the DVD, they're gonna want to crank that up. Somehow they're going to get to the point where they realize that there's no genitalia there and it's gonna blow the cover.
The other thing is, if we were gonna put genitalia there, what would that be? That opens another big discussion that we didn't want to talk about either, but I can guarantee you this: there is one of those animators or technical people up there at [F/X shop] ILM that has modeled and has animated some genitalia.
JS: And I'm sure there's gonna be a Hong Kong knock off in a few weeks...
LF: But you answer your question; yeah, there was a lot of discussion about it and there were a lot of reasons why we didn't do it and that's one of them, because there just got to be too many things we had to hide in the shadows and throwing a dog in front of it and all that stuff that Mike Meyers did so well.
We decided that somehow, we had to figure out how he was going to have clothes on most of the time. Now they get ripped and you can see a piece of his ass and all that stuff, but yeah, it was talked about enough.
Q: In spite of all the destruction there aren't that many casualties in the movie. Was that because of the ratings?
JS: Ang and I, from the very beginning, knew that we were going to make a movie that would be PG-13 for the psychological intensity and the reality of the emotion that this character was going through, but we're not that interested in representation of gratuitous violence. This is a mythic and epic hero. We wanted the intensity of the experience of that kind of mythology, that kind of epic feeling to be predominant with the audience, and not a kind of gore fest.
LF: Also, the only place that your can say that it's violent is probably in the dog fight, and they're not dogs, for one, they're monsters. They're mutant horses more than anything else. And it's good versus evil at that point in the movie, so it's not gratuitous at all.
And as you probably didn't notice, but there's no one gets killed throughout the course of the movie, except for Talbot. Most of the pedestrians all get out of the way in time and a lot of cars get...
Q: What about that security guard?
LF: You know, he's alright.
JS: He got some back problems.
LF: "Give me a fatality report," whatever Ross says.
"We're all cool. Don't worry about it. We're OK. Somebody come get us."
That sort of feeling about "The Hulk."
Q: He comes from the comics, but is The Hulk a super hero?
JS: That's a great question. No. You know, he is and he isn't. Unlike most super heroes who get in the long underwear and go save kids on the bus from the bridge, the Hulk, as we know, has a hard time keeping his clothes on.
But the reason for that is that he's also a monster. That, for Ang, was a huge reason to get involved: that he's both a hero and this kind of monstrosity. More importantly he's us. He's our monster. He's what's in all of us.
LF: He does save that F-22 from going into the bridge, don't forget.
JS: He does. No, he does things but he's an innocent. He's like a kid. A two-year-old has a temper tantrum and they're just screaming and gurgling and hyperventilating and hulking out. That's Hulk. There's the Hulk, right there.
At the same time it's a kid. Now most kids can't smash you with their thumb.
But he is that kind of innocent. That's why I think we put so much emphasis, and why Ang, I think, was the perfect director for the film, on the face and his emotions and his feelings.
Q: In the comics, Hulk would always say something along the lines of, "Hulk wants to be left alone." In the movie it wasn't really emphasized as much as in the comics. How come he didn't speak. He only had like two lines.
JS: Once again, we went back to the early, early Hulk. For inspiration I went right back to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the first cycle and he was not a speaking character at that point. He picked up his Hulk-speak over the years. He's been around for forty years, so there's been many iterations, including gray Hulk, of course, who's in Las Vegas having a good time.
We have a lot to play with if, God willing, we end up doing "Hulk 2" you hear a little bit more dialogue.
Q: What was it like jumping into the world of CGI, particularly in the screenwriting?
JS: With the screenwriting, it made it easy because I could just cook anything up and it would be Larry's problem.
LF: But that's the way it should be. The whole creative process, from the writing to the directing has to be that way. The writer has to be able to write what he feels he should write, and he shouldn't be restricted by the fact that it's gonna cost $700 million to make the movie, because they'll figure it out. Somebody will figure it out. There's a way to do it and you just have to kind of like do it.
And Ang has the same issue. That first dog fight storyboard was 200 shots long. Well 200 shots was practically our whole budget for the movie, so it went from 200 down to 100 down to 70 down to 60 down to 40 down to whatever.
So it's a process but it starts with allowing the creative people their space at first and then working it within the boundaries that you're dealt with.
JS: When Larry first put us together with ILM and was before we even started working on it...because Ang has that dual approach which is, "I know nothing but you're gonna do the best work of your life because of that."
So, we'd be talking to them and we'd hear this lengthy explanation as to why what Ang wanted was impossible to do and the technology wouldn't be created for another 300 years. Ang's response was often to put his hands out and start wiggling his fingers and go, "well can't you just type something into the computer."
Indeed, by the end of the show...
LF: ...and indeed you can.
JS: I think ILM, they themselves realized a vision that they never knew they could achieve.
Q: What about King Kong?
JS: Certainly he hovers around with the Hulk in terms of scope and size and all that, and you see certain moments, especially on the bridge...
Q: ...and when he picks her up...
JS: Absolutely. These are homages. These are moments out of the culture that are grafted genetically into us, that "The Hulk" has access to for us.
Q: Did you have to go back and look at the comic books a lot?
JS: We did. I know when I was writing I looked at a great deal of it. I think Ang was very much inspired and there're specific panels from the classic books that Ang was really involved with.
LF: We had actually big, huge blow-ups of certain comic book pages that struck him as he went through. We had an art department full of those sorts of inspirations.
Q: Any specific that you remember the most?
LF: There's one tank thing...
JS: There's the tank, right there. [pointing to a nearby poster-sized rendering of a Hulk cover]
LF: Not that one, but the one I remember the most, there's a huge tank and it's a big, giant angled panel, and there's like four or five panels on [the page] with a tank. That was one that really struck him. The tank sequence was really dear to Ang and I must say I tried, once or twice to say, "Ang, you know what? I don't think he should go after these tanks. I think he should leap from his house, over to San Francisco because everything we're doing is so high-tech. These helicopters are beyond the capabilities of American helicopters, air force and these jets are gonna be five years from now, and we're still fighting these Abrams tanks." I said, "I don't think that it's right."
At the same time I'm trying to save myself a couple million bucks. To me, now, the most engaging sequence is that tank fight. The very one that I tried to talk him out of because at the time I though we were going so high-tech we shouldn't be dealing with these old Abrams tanks, but it's a moment in the movie where you really feel, "you son of a bitches."
It was based on that one comic book page that he felt strongly about.
Q: What about the feeling that people were looking at the trailer and saying...
LF: You know what? This is a question that we're getting a lot and I can answer pretty simply.
The marketing people have an impossible task with this movie, because not only is it what you kind of see in that trailer, which is "Hulk smash," it is an engaging, engrossing psycho-drama. So there's all this stuff that they have to do in thirty seconds or sixty seconds.
On top of that this Hulk is a computer generated character. It's not a computer generated effect. It's a character. There's no question about that. That's one of the things that we stepped beyond in this picture. We referred to that as "he" not "it." That's a big step, which hasn't ever been done before.
So, it was the character that we were after. In order to do that you have to really believe in the roots of it.
For instance, that shot in the trailer at Super Bowl, is not the shot. You saw in the movie last night: he runs all the way up. He throws the tank. It picks up momentum and he heaves it across the desert. He's standing there going "rahrrrrr!"
That's thirty seconds in itself, so there goes your trailer. So what happened there, they had to compress that action. They wanted to see the tank fly across the desert and it had to happen quickly. So one of the things that happened, they had to shorten it so that swing, it's twenty percent faster than it is in the movie. The shot is probably half as long as it is in the movie. So right off the bat it doesn't convey what it should have conveyed.
JS: The hardest thing to convey in visual effects, which is, I think, the greatest breakthrough for ILM, is twofold. One is Hulk lives in our world. Every other CGI character you've ever seen lives in a fantasy world, so you're much more forgiving on a purely subconscious level, you're cuing off of that character, based on cues of the fantasy surroundings.
Hulk lives in our world. He's sitting right here and then you have to cue off of him as if you're cuing off of a real person. That's almost impossible.
The other thing is weight. The digital effects are airless. They're just zeroes and ones and the biggest thing that I think ILM brought to the table, aside from all the artistry, aside from all the finesse that they did with Ang, was this Hulk weighs an enormous amount, and when he lands, he lands. Doing that with zeroes and ones, I've never seen it before.
Q: Do you think it might have been better to keep the image of the Hulk a secret?
JS: No. You know why? Then it's all about, "What does the Hulk look like?"
LF: Everyone's sort of second-guessing it. It'd be hard to do that.
JS: No, but it's more fundamentally, and this is why I think they're doing actually a very good job, because, no, it's not about it. The other day and you see the new spots just this week, that've kicked in which are much closer to the vision of the film. Now you're really getting...it was part of the plan all along. Start with this "Hulk" and then go into Ang "Hulk". And now it's the thickening, the resonance, the emotion as people are comfortable with this image.
One of the great things, we're opening this movie in about a month, is that by the time the movie opens, nobody is going to show up going, "I wonder what the Hulk looks like? Let's see. What color green is he? What is the --?"
Who cares? What you want to go, what you want to hear people say is, "what's this experience going to be for me emotionally? How can I get into it?"
That's a big difference.
Q: I have a silly question. Why isn't it "The Incredible Hulk" or "The Hulk?"
LF: It's not that silly. It took a lot of discussion about that.
The reason it's "Hulk" and not "The Incredible Hulk" is because "Hulk" is cooler. It's more hip.
The reason it's not "The Hulk" is, try to make a mark, a logo, whatever, that's "Hulk." Where do you put the "The?" Where does that go?
"The Incredible," yeah. Maybe. But "Hulk"...that's the answer. It's cooler. It's more hip. It's neat.
JS: And you love the power of it.
LF: "Hulk." It's big.
Q: Why do you think the Hulk is such a cultural icon?
LF: I'll tell you why, because it's everybody. Everybody's The Hulk. You've had your moment. You've ended up with a broken toe or a broken pinky or something, but you've Hulked out, and at that moment it felt great. That one second, or even a nanosecond. It's after that that we all have to deal with which is, "oh, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have done that." You have to apologize to a hundred people, or you've wrecked your car, or whatever you've done.
The Hulk just wakes up and doesn't remember that that's what happened to him. It's every man. It's all of us.
*whew* I wonder how many of you actually read the whole thing...?
Jason
with James Schamus (longtime Ang Lee collaberator) and
producer Larry Franco. The reason I thought of posting it here,
is I noticed that a lot of the gripes about what people are saying
about the upcoming movie are addressed here. It's pretty long
but it answers questions like, "What's up with the Tank thing in
the trailer? Why show the Hulk in trailers at all? Will we see Hulk
Ass or (heaven forbid more)? Will we see gore?" Ect;
Unfortunately, no comments on the Shrek theory, although when
I saw Shrek for the first time, I thought to myself, "Look! a Hulk
knock-off!"
Remember there are a few spoilers given in the interview:
At a recent "Hulk" press junket, James Schamus and producer Larry Franco sat down to talk to the members of the media in a roundtable format interview. Schamus, who has collaborated with director Ang Lee on many movies, co-wrote the script and also served as producer on the project. Franco is also a producer.
At the roundtables, members of the press took turns asking the pair questions about the development of the film. Comics2Film/CBR News is please to present this edited transcript of that interview.
WARNING: THIS TRANSCRIPT CONTAINS SIGNIFICANT SPOILERS
Q: What kind of pressure did it put on you, adapting such an iconic character?
James Schamus (JS): The pressure is very much self-imposed. We knew we wanted to make a move that, in essence, paid real homage to "The Hulk" and to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's original vision. We also knew that we wanted to create a movie that nobody had ever seen before, both in terms of its language, the transitions and the multiple frames, as well as the place it takes you emotionally in this comic book world. So we kind of did it to ourselves.
Q: Was the multiple frames an attempt to give it a comic book feel?
JS: It's not simply to reproduce what a comic book panel and page looks like. That wasn't the point because that's kind of easy. It was actually to try to induce in a very seamless way, an entirely new way of telling stories that's akin to the intensity of the comic book experience that a kid would have when going into this world; the fracturedness of it. The forced perspectives. The incredible, sometimes aggression of the transitions. All those things. Really to make it part of the story-telling, not just a graphic design element.
Larry Franco (LF): It was also a tool to convey emotion too. There's a lot of stuff in there that you don't realize right away what it's doing to you. It's getting you. It's getting you angry, for one. It's getting you sympathetic sometimes, when you're trying to watch both. So, it's used for a lot of reasons.
Q: James what was your reaction when Ang said he was interested in doing "Hulk?"
JS: Well, it was exciting. To lobby him...and it was a very fast lobbying job for this film. He's extremely thoughtful but on this one he was decisive. A couple things helped along the way.
One was putting down a challenge for him, which you can't write on the page, which was: you're going to make a movie that's gonna to create, for a mass, worldwide audience, in a seamless way, an entirely new cinema language.
I mean, this film, me and Larry were just talking about this, you have more jump cuts in this movie since Godard's "Breathless," but it's not like you're watching an avant-garde movie, that's not the point. It puts you in the space of Bruce Banner and the Hulk. You're all over it. You're everywhere, but you're in it.
Number two was the psychology of it. One of the first things I did when we were talking about the movie and the possibility of making it was I screened for him Rouben Mamoulian's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" from 1932.
Isn't that the most amazing movie? It's incredible.
That' line in the movie, where Eric says, "the thing that scares me the most is I like it." That was inspired directly watching Fredric March become Mr. Hyde and he just loves it!
It's the sexiest and most creepy performance, I think, in Hollywood history.
It was before the code, too, by the way, and everyone thinks these movies are so quaint. It's like, "you ain't seen nothin'." This is like hard R.
So it was getting him involved in precisely that kind of intensity saying, "you can be there. You can do this."
Then, of course, I was completely scared.
Q: There was some talk about giving Hulk some nudity and whether or not his pants would stay on...
LF: There was a lot of though put into that, more than you want to listen to me talk about. We talked about it for a long time. We talked about a couple of things. The frontal nudity was a bigger issue than the back nudity. We struggled with that all the way.
In the dog fight, originally he had nothing on. After a few shots came in and we tried to darken that area and then we realized that, even if we darken it, the kids on the DVD, they're gonna want to crank that up. Somehow they're going to get to the point where they realize that there's no genitalia there and it's gonna blow the cover.
The other thing is, if we were gonna put genitalia there, what would that be? That opens another big discussion that we didn't want to talk about either, but I can guarantee you this: there is one of those animators or technical people up there at [F/X shop] ILM that has modeled and has animated some genitalia.
JS: And I'm sure there's gonna be a Hong Kong knock off in a few weeks...
LF: But you answer your question; yeah, there was a lot of discussion about it and there were a lot of reasons why we didn't do it and that's one of them, because there just got to be too many things we had to hide in the shadows and throwing a dog in front of it and all that stuff that Mike Meyers did so well.
We decided that somehow, we had to figure out how he was going to have clothes on most of the time. Now they get ripped and you can see a piece of his ass and all that stuff, but yeah, it was talked about enough.
Q: In spite of all the destruction there aren't that many casualties in the movie. Was that because of the ratings?
JS: Ang and I, from the very beginning, knew that we were going to make a movie that would be PG-13 for the psychological intensity and the reality of the emotion that this character was going through, but we're not that interested in representation of gratuitous violence. This is a mythic and epic hero. We wanted the intensity of the experience of that kind of mythology, that kind of epic feeling to be predominant with the audience, and not a kind of gore fest.
LF: Also, the only place that your can say that it's violent is probably in the dog fight, and they're not dogs, for one, they're monsters. They're mutant horses more than anything else. And it's good versus evil at that point in the movie, so it's not gratuitous at all.
And as you probably didn't notice, but there's no one gets killed throughout the course of the movie, except for Talbot. Most of the pedestrians all get out of the way in time and a lot of cars get...
Q: What about that security guard?
LF: You know, he's alright.
JS: He got some back problems.
LF: "Give me a fatality report," whatever Ross says.
"We're all cool. Don't worry about it. We're OK. Somebody come get us."
That sort of feeling about "The Hulk."
Q: He comes from the comics, but is The Hulk a super hero?
JS: That's a great question. No. You know, he is and he isn't. Unlike most super heroes who get in the long underwear and go save kids on the bus from the bridge, the Hulk, as we know, has a hard time keeping his clothes on.
But the reason for that is that he's also a monster. That, for Ang, was a huge reason to get involved: that he's both a hero and this kind of monstrosity. More importantly he's us. He's our monster. He's what's in all of us.
LF: He does save that F-22 from going into the bridge, don't forget.
JS: He does. No, he does things but he's an innocent. He's like a kid. A two-year-old has a temper tantrum and they're just screaming and gurgling and hyperventilating and hulking out. That's Hulk. There's the Hulk, right there.
At the same time it's a kid. Now most kids can't smash you with their thumb.
But he is that kind of innocent. That's why I think we put so much emphasis, and why Ang, I think, was the perfect director for the film, on the face and his emotions and his feelings.
Q: In the comics, Hulk would always say something along the lines of, "Hulk wants to be left alone." In the movie it wasn't really emphasized as much as in the comics. How come he didn't speak. He only had like two lines.
JS: Once again, we went back to the early, early Hulk. For inspiration I went right back to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the first cycle and he was not a speaking character at that point. He picked up his Hulk-speak over the years. He's been around for forty years, so there's been many iterations, including gray Hulk, of course, who's in Las Vegas having a good time.
We have a lot to play with if, God willing, we end up doing "Hulk 2" you hear a little bit more dialogue.
Q: What was it like jumping into the world of CGI, particularly in the screenwriting?
JS: With the screenwriting, it made it easy because I could just cook anything up and it would be Larry's problem.
LF: But that's the way it should be. The whole creative process, from the writing to the directing has to be that way. The writer has to be able to write what he feels he should write, and he shouldn't be restricted by the fact that it's gonna cost $700 million to make the movie, because they'll figure it out. Somebody will figure it out. There's a way to do it and you just have to kind of like do it.
And Ang has the same issue. That first dog fight storyboard was 200 shots long. Well 200 shots was practically our whole budget for the movie, so it went from 200 down to 100 down to 70 down to 60 down to 40 down to whatever.
So it's a process but it starts with allowing the creative people their space at first and then working it within the boundaries that you're dealt with.
JS: When Larry first put us together with ILM and was before we even started working on it...because Ang has that dual approach which is, "I know nothing but you're gonna do the best work of your life because of that."
So, we'd be talking to them and we'd hear this lengthy explanation as to why what Ang wanted was impossible to do and the technology wouldn't be created for another 300 years. Ang's response was often to put his hands out and start wiggling his fingers and go, "well can't you just type something into the computer."
Indeed, by the end of the show...
LF: ...and indeed you can.
JS: I think ILM, they themselves realized a vision that they never knew they could achieve.
Q: What about King Kong?
JS: Certainly he hovers around with the Hulk in terms of scope and size and all that, and you see certain moments, especially on the bridge...
Q: ...and when he picks her up...
JS: Absolutely. These are homages. These are moments out of the culture that are grafted genetically into us, that "The Hulk" has access to for us.
Q: Did you have to go back and look at the comic books a lot?
JS: We did. I know when I was writing I looked at a great deal of it. I think Ang was very much inspired and there're specific panels from the classic books that Ang was really involved with.
LF: We had actually big, huge blow-ups of certain comic book pages that struck him as he went through. We had an art department full of those sorts of inspirations.
Q: Any specific that you remember the most?
LF: There's one tank thing...
JS: There's the tank, right there. [pointing to a nearby poster-sized rendering of a Hulk cover]
LF: Not that one, but the one I remember the most, there's a huge tank and it's a big, giant angled panel, and there's like four or five panels on [the page] with a tank. That was one that really struck him. The tank sequence was really dear to Ang and I must say I tried, once or twice to say, "Ang, you know what? I don't think he should go after these tanks. I think he should leap from his house, over to San Francisco because everything we're doing is so high-tech. These helicopters are beyond the capabilities of American helicopters, air force and these jets are gonna be five years from now, and we're still fighting these Abrams tanks." I said, "I don't think that it's right."
At the same time I'm trying to save myself a couple million bucks. To me, now, the most engaging sequence is that tank fight. The very one that I tried to talk him out of because at the time I though we were going so high-tech we shouldn't be dealing with these old Abrams tanks, but it's a moment in the movie where you really feel, "you son of a bitches."
It was based on that one comic book page that he felt strongly about.
Q: What about the feeling that people were looking at the trailer and saying...
LF: You know what? This is a question that we're getting a lot and I can answer pretty simply.
The marketing people have an impossible task with this movie, because not only is it what you kind of see in that trailer, which is "Hulk smash," it is an engaging, engrossing psycho-drama. So there's all this stuff that they have to do in thirty seconds or sixty seconds.
On top of that this Hulk is a computer generated character. It's not a computer generated effect. It's a character. There's no question about that. That's one of the things that we stepped beyond in this picture. We referred to that as "he" not "it." That's a big step, which hasn't ever been done before.
So, it was the character that we were after. In order to do that you have to really believe in the roots of it.
For instance, that shot in the trailer at Super Bowl, is not the shot. You saw in the movie last night: he runs all the way up. He throws the tank. It picks up momentum and he heaves it across the desert. He's standing there going "rahrrrrr!"
That's thirty seconds in itself, so there goes your trailer. So what happened there, they had to compress that action. They wanted to see the tank fly across the desert and it had to happen quickly. So one of the things that happened, they had to shorten it so that swing, it's twenty percent faster than it is in the movie. The shot is probably half as long as it is in the movie. So right off the bat it doesn't convey what it should have conveyed.
JS: The hardest thing to convey in visual effects, which is, I think, the greatest breakthrough for ILM, is twofold. One is Hulk lives in our world. Every other CGI character you've ever seen lives in a fantasy world, so you're much more forgiving on a purely subconscious level, you're cuing off of that character, based on cues of the fantasy surroundings.
Hulk lives in our world. He's sitting right here and then you have to cue off of him as if you're cuing off of a real person. That's almost impossible.
The other thing is weight. The digital effects are airless. They're just zeroes and ones and the biggest thing that I think ILM brought to the table, aside from all the artistry, aside from all the finesse that they did with Ang, was this Hulk weighs an enormous amount, and when he lands, he lands. Doing that with zeroes and ones, I've never seen it before.
Q: Do you think it might have been better to keep the image of the Hulk a secret?
JS: No. You know why? Then it's all about, "What does the Hulk look like?"
LF: Everyone's sort of second-guessing it. It'd be hard to do that.
JS: No, but it's more fundamentally, and this is why I think they're doing actually a very good job, because, no, it's not about it. The other day and you see the new spots just this week, that've kicked in which are much closer to the vision of the film. Now you're really getting...it was part of the plan all along. Start with this "Hulk" and then go into Ang "Hulk". And now it's the thickening, the resonance, the emotion as people are comfortable with this image.
One of the great things, we're opening this movie in about a month, is that by the time the movie opens, nobody is going to show up going, "I wonder what the Hulk looks like? Let's see. What color green is he? What is the --?"
Who cares? What you want to go, what you want to hear people say is, "what's this experience going to be for me emotionally? How can I get into it?"
That's a big difference.
Q: I have a silly question. Why isn't it "The Incredible Hulk" or "The Hulk?"
LF: It's not that silly. It took a lot of discussion about that.
The reason it's "Hulk" and not "The Incredible Hulk" is because "Hulk" is cooler. It's more hip.
The reason it's not "The Hulk" is, try to make a mark, a logo, whatever, that's "Hulk." Where do you put the "The?" Where does that go?
"The Incredible," yeah. Maybe. But "Hulk"...that's the answer. It's cooler. It's more hip. It's neat.
JS: And you love the power of it.
LF: "Hulk." It's big.
Q: Why do you think the Hulk is such a cultural icon?
LF: I'll tell you why, because it's everybody. Everybody's The Hulk. You've had your moment. You've ended up with a broken toe or a broken pinky or something, but you've Hulked out, and at that moment it felt great. That one second, or even a nanosecond. It's after that that we all have to deal with which is, "oh, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have done that." You have to apologize to a hundred people, or you've wrecked your car, or whatever you've done.
The Hulk just wakes up and doesn't remember that that's what happened to him. It's every man. It's all of us.
Jason
06-06-03, 09:53 PM
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Re: Hulk: Much more than a Summer Blockbuster. ((Spoilers))*long*
Originally posted by jasonbird
*whew* I wonder how many of you actually read the whole thing...?
Jason
*whew* I wonder how many of you actually read the whole thing...?
Jason
06-06-03, 10:01 PM
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Re: Re: Hulk: Much more than a Summer Blockbuster. ((Spoilers))*long*
Originally posted by lesterlong
I don't understand your Shrek theory?
I don't understand your Shrek theory?
Jason
06-07-03, 12:02 AM
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I disagree as they look nothing alike except for the whole green aspect. To me thats like saying all members of a race look the same because they have the same skin tone.
Trying to read the whole thing now
Trying to read the whole thing now
06-07-03, 08:57 AM
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Originally posted by Tarantino
Actually, it's not. The Hulk looks like a mad, greener, Shrek. There's no joke to it, it's just fact.
Actually, it's not. The Hulk looks like a mad, greener, Shrek. There's no joke to it, it's just fact.
an ignorant comment. It only shows the age of the poster being
very young and unaware that Hulk has been around for over 40
years. And if it's not a joke, then it should be said that Shrek
looks like a smaller, gayer, lighter green version of the Hulk.
Jason
06-07-03, 09:40 AM
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I believe the whole point of the Shrek comment was the obvousness of the CG, which works fine in a pure CG movie but not when it's supposed to interact with "real world" scenery. Maybe it would be more to the point if the original compairer had called Hulk "Who Framed the Big Green Roger Rabbit".
06-07-03, 10:28 AM
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Originally posted by Darren Garrison
I believe the whole point of the Shrek comment was the obvousness of the CG, which works fine in a pure CG movie but not when it's supposed to interact with "real world" scenery. Maybe it would be more to the point if the original compairer had called Hulk "Who Framed the Big Green Roger Rabbit".
I believe the whole point of the Shrek comment was the obvousness of the CG, which works fine in a pure CG movie but not when it's supposed to interact with "real world" scenery. Maybe it would be more to the point if the original compairer had called Hulk "Who Framed the Big Green Roger Rabbit".
may have evolved into that kind of statement (for some at least).
we both know that judging cgi before it's completed is pointless.
Some of the complaints of the trailers by people on this board
are addressed in the interview which is why I posted it here.
Jason
06-07-03, 11:38 AM
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Originally posted by jasonbird
Actually, it is. It's been used since the very first trailer, and it's
an ignorant comment. It only shows the age of the poster being
very young and unaware that Hulk has been around for over 40
years. And if it's not a joke, then it should be said that Shrek
looks like a smaller, gayer, lighter green version of the Hulk.
Jason
Actually, it is. It's been used since the very first trailer, and it's
an ignorant comment. It only shows the age of the poster being
very young and unaware that Hulk has been around for over 40
years. And if it's not a joke, then it should be said that Shrek
looks like a smaller, gayer, lighter green version of the Hulk.
Jason
I disagree. I'm 39 years old, I've been reading Marvel comics since I was 12. I see the comparison. It's no joke. The CGI Hulk looks stupid. Reminds me of Shrek in a big way.
06-07-03, 01:01 PM
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Originally posted by Surf Monkey
I disagree. I'm 39 years old, I've been reading Marvel comics since I was 12. I see the comparison. It's no joke. The CGI Hulk looks stupid. Reminds me of Shrek in a big way.
I disagree. I'm 39 years old, I've been reading Marvel comics since I was 12. I see the comparison. It's no joke. The CGI Hulk looks stupid. Reminds me of Shrek in a big way.
06-07-03, 02:26 PM
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Originally posted by Surf Monkey
I disagree. I'm 39 years old, I've been reading Marvel comics since I was 12. I see the comparison. It's no joke. The CGI Hulk looks stupid. Reminds me of Shrek in a big way.
I disagree. I'm 39 years old, I've been reading Marvel comics since I was 12. I see the comparison. It's no joke. The CGI Hulk looks stupid. Reminds me of Shrek in a big way.
comics when you were twelve? You've read the Hulk? How
much? (just trying to see how much weight to give to your
comments) While I can see you complaining about the cgi, the
rendering of the Hulk is very faithful to the comic. Sure, there
have been different carnations, just as each penciler seems to
render the Hulk differently. I agree with you on one point, the
Hulk in the (early) trailers looks unfinished. I don't think your
saying the Hulk in the trailer looked bad, thus the Hulk in the
final product will look bad. But then again, if your saying the
Hulk looks like Shrek then I really can't respect what your saying.
Either your saying the Hulk actually looks like Shrek (in the
actual rendering) or your saying that the cgi looks the same, in
which case you've seen the finished product (Shrek) and a
early preview (Hulk). So are the Gamma pumped up dogs actually
supposed to be Donkey?
Heck they're not even the same color green!
Last edited by jasonbird; 06-07-03 at 02:31 PM.
06-07-03, 04:11 PM
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So, I suppose that Gollum...
...is simply a shriveled up, raspy-voiced version of Jar Jar?
...or Dobby?
...is simply a shriveled up, raspy-voiced version of Jar Jar?
...or Dobby?
Last edited by jarofclay73; 06-07-03 at 04:52 PM.
06-07-03, 04:29 PM
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well, Hulk will probably fail miserably at the box office, because it seems so many people today are quite lazy and unimaginative.
this is the kind of movie that is going to require the audience to excercise a little imagination to 'blur the seams', as well as meeting the material half-way.
however since so many moviegoers seem to be the kind of passive slugs that just lie back and expect to be amused like a spoiled 15th century English prince, then the film is going to have a hard time.
this is the kind of movie that is going to require the audience to excercise a little imagination to 'blur the seams', as well as meeting the material half-way.
however since so many moviegoers seem to be the kind of passive slugs that just lie back and expect to be amused like a spoiled 15th century English prince, then the film is going to have a hard time.
06-07-03, 05:00 PM
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Well, if the Hulk has enough elements of a good action movie AND a good psychodrama, this could have some legs through the summer.
I watched the Hulk television premiere on DVD and that was good. Even better was the second season's first episode "Married" which was also on the DVD. Great stuff.
I watched the Hulk television premiere on DVD and that was good. Even better was the second season's first episode "Married" which was also on the DVD. Great stuff.
06-08-03, 10:52 AM
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Good article, and was always planning on seeing Hulk. Interesting that yet another Hulk thread turned into "he looks like Shrek....no he doesn't...the CGI sux!" debate. 
06-08-03, 01:28 PM
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He looks like Shrek! The CGI sux!
Honestly I'm really looking forward to this. I'm done with the CGI convesation, I think it looks fine, but what really excites me is to see a large scale drama. Perhaps fantasy drama, but nonetheless a riveting drama set against the landscape of an incredible creature? With Ang Lee at the helm? Not to mention the fact that they realy seem to want to take some risks with this...I'm really excited. Hopefully what we have here is not a summer blockbuster, but a damn fine movie or at least one that aspires to be. Most summer blockbusters try to be nothing more than empty spectacle...which can be ok, but when EVERYTHING is like that, it gets old.
Honestly I'm really looking forward to this. I'm done with the CGI convesation, I think it looks fine, but what really excites me is to see a large scale drama. Perhaps fantasy drama, but nonetheless a riveting drama set against the landscape of an incredible creature? With Ang Lee at the helm? Not to mention the fact that they realy seem to want to take some risks with this...I'm really excited. Hopefully what we have here is not a summer blockbuster, but a damn fine movie or at least one that aspires to be. Most summer blockbusters try to be nothing more than empty spectacle...which can be ok, but when EVERYTHING is like that, it gets old.
06-09-03, 05:30 AM
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06-09-03, 12:11 PM
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As for the idiotic Shrek comments, than you for destroying them jason. It's the kind comment you'd expect from an AICN talkbacker with a 14 year old mentality.
06-09-03, 10:34 PM
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Originally posted by Terrell
It's the kind comment you'd expect from an AICN talkbacker with a 14 year old mentality.
It's the kind comment you'd expect from an AICN talkbacker with a 14 year old mentality.
