Perhaps one of the most exciting things for me to see this year at Comic-Con is Steven Spielberg’s first ever appearance at the San Diego convention. He was presenting his film The Adventure’s of Tintin.
Before he was brought out, a very powerful montage of his best movies (also Hook and The Lost World) was played and he was presented with an Inkpot Award for his contributions in film. During his brief acceptance speech, he talked about how he’s still a kid inside, just like everyone else in the room an he quickly sat down and got straight into the impetus for making Tintin.
He was introduced to Tintin in 1981 when people kept comparing Raiders of the Lost Ark to Tintin and fell in love, even though the copy he got his hands on was in French.
Most of this will read as a Q and A:
Q: Where do you start with casting?
A: The way you’d cast a normal movie, finding the best actor for the part. You don’t identify with Daniel Craig, but you’ll see every nuance of his performance through the thin skin of animation.
6 years ago I asked WETA to see what it would look like to see a digital dog next to a real actor and so I commissioned a test. They sent me back this. We have that video here.
(The video showed was of Peter Jackson playing Captain Haddock, interacting with Snowy. It was a pretty impressive test.)
Then Peter Jackson showed up and joined the panel, talking about how fantastic Spielberg is. Spielberg got the rights to Tintin in 1983 and he was looking forward to Steven’s Tintin movie… for a quarter of a century. “You can imagine the mindblowing moment when Steven asked me to work on it.
Spielberg explained, “We’re both Tintin fans and that’s why we decided to collaborate on this project. We wanted the movie to look like the drawings in all the Herge albums and books. We love art so much we wanted to honor Herge to get characters as close as we could to his art.”
Jackson continued: “We also wanted to make it as much of a hybrid as animation and live action as we could. Even though we have these faces you’d never find in a real human being, that it almost looks like live action. We wanted to create a version of animation and mo-cap to let the filmmaker, Steven, to step into the virtual world. Steven could shoot the movie, but this is like a hybrid and he had a virtual camera and could step in and film it like it was a real film. This is the film Steven personally shot, he had the camera in his hands the whole time.”
Spielberg: “It was like a Playstation controller with a giant monitor in it and I could see a rough animation on the set that the actors were working on.”
He says he felt more like a painter doing this.
‘This is a much more direct to canvas art form.”
PJ asked about the Hobbit: “I’m enjoying it more than anything. I’m having a blast. Done 60 days of shooting, almost 200 to go. They’re resuming in 3 weeks. This break is enforced by Martin Freeman’s Sherlock schedule.”
Steven: “I operate on about 5 or 6 different tracks in the same direction. I find when I do more than one project at the same time, it creates clarity and I can come back and see what I can change and whatnot.”
They showed another clip from the film and to be honest, all of my worries that I had with the motion capture on this film have melted away. We saw Tintin in action with Captain Haddock, Snowy and the rest of the crew. It was cartoony enough to be believable to me, but real enough to be stunning. It was fantastic.
Then it was opened up for audience questions:
First question was asked by Andy Serkis in disguised. He asked if it’s true when Daniel Craig met Clint Eastwood he wasn’t wearing mo-cap tights…. It didn’t make much sense but everyone seemed to laugh.
Question: About Jaws, you had an idea for a scene that might have appeared in a sequel, can you share that?
SS: I don’t want to give Universal any ideas, they’d take it and make it themselves without me.
Q: How did people in your childhood affect your movies?
PJ: How much of your own child do you use to make your films? I’m totally a kid still. Everything I loved from age 6-17, train sets, movie making, Ray Harryhausen, I’m still obssessed by it. I literally haven’t had any new interests since I was 17. When I make movies I make them for the kid I was and still am.
Q: How do you compare the CGI in Beowulf to Tintin
SS: The evolution of this technology is that we can be photorealistic character where the animator can slide the face into position, but they create a musculature and nerves that reacts as we do. It’s exactly lifelike. We have evolved from The Polar Express to the Na’vi in Avatar.
Q: 6 year old asked, “What your favorite movie to make was?”
SS: The most important personal thing to me that happened where a movie was concerned, which makes it my favorite, is ET. When we finish making a movie, we’re like a family with a crew, everybody gets really close and I get to go home alone. When I got to the end of production and I didn’t want to end. I realized for the first time after that film that I wanted to have children. I have seven now, thanks to E.T.
Q: Peter, are you going to make more bloody funny movies?
PJ: I’d love to. I’m in early conceptual design things for the future. So, yeah, aboslutely.
Q: Of all the movies you’ve produced, which one would you have liked to have directed.
SS: Because the second you answer the question the director says, “My god, I didn’t know my job was in jeopardy.” But the one I gave away that I wish I directed was American Beauty. That was the one that got away, but it got away to the right director.
PJ: Tintin. But I’m really happy Steven directed it.
SS: My favorite is producing. I just hire a director and go away. And that’s what producers SHOULD do. My happiest movie producing was Bob Zemeckis’ Back to the Future movies.
Q: What keeps you inspired?
SS: You guys. If it weren’t for you, I’d stop. We cannot make the audience movies we make without the fact you guys like them and see them over again and you’re honest in your feelings about the movies. Take us to task when you feel like it. Please. It keeps us honest.
Q: Jurassic Park 4. Is it happening?
SS: We have a story I can happily announce right now. We have a writer working on a treatment. Hopefully it will be in all of our forseeable futures in the next 3 or 4 years.
Q: What made you film the Secret of the Unicorn instead of the other stories?
PJ: There are 24 Tintin adventures and they’re all different, but we wanted to start the cinematic life of Tintin with a story that brought him and Captain Haddock together. We felt that was important. It was chosen because it was a great plot and great story and we came up with ways to expand it. Also, having developed this relationship, the Secret of the Unicorn goes into his back story and that appealed to us. It just made sense.
Q: What do you think makes a great short film?
SS: I look at a lot of short films. We never had Youtube, so we had to go door to door with an 8mm projector to try to get work. I love the amount of freedom technology gives .
I look for something that isn’t a send up of someone elses stuff. You can’t just believe in movies, but what do you have to contirbute to the conversation. Yes, style, content, telling a story. It’s more than a lot of quick cuts. It’s where’s the beef.
PJ: What you’re looking for is to react to the film in a way that excites you and gives you a sense that the people behind have an ineherent understanding of storytelling. It’s there or not. Or you see a kernel of it, maybe. But the best thing is to make a short film. Over the years, so many people contact to get into the film industry and the only thing I tell them is, “well, make a film.” If you want to become a filmmaker, grab a camera and start shooting.
And then, a fellow came up to ask a question, but was wearing a shirt that read, “If possible, if I met Steven Spielberg, I’d love to shake his hand and say thank you very much.”
At that point, Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg brought him on stage, they all shook his hand and took lots of pictures and that was the end of the panel.
All in all, the movie looks stunning and it was the treat of a lifetime to see Spielberg in person.