If you’ve read Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, you know one of the biggest challenges for writer-director Gavin Hood was bringing the Battle Room to life.
When Ender (Asa Butterfield) is recruited by the International Fleet, he’s sent into space to Battle School to learn how to defend the planet against the Formics, an alien race that nearly decimated humanity and is expected to return. While there are classes in Battle School, the central element of the curriculum is actually a game.
While on the film’s NASA Michoud Assembly Facility set in New Orleans, producer Linda McDonough explained, “They have two different ‘gates.’ They accumulate points by hitting each other with these lasers. The lasers don’t injure you; they freeze parts of your suit. But if either team is able to get a man through the other team’s gate, they completely win the battle.” Now just picture all of that in a zero-gravity environment.
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How do you make a movie set in the future about a six-year-old recruited by the military to wipe out an invading alien race? If the answer were simple, perhaps Ender’s Game would have been adapted to film far sooner. Orson Scott Card’s novel was first published back in 1985, after which the rights sat at Warner Bros. for 12 years, the film never making it past the development stage. Finally, the rights lapsed and Linda McDonough and her producing team snatched them up to make the movie their way — independently. As she proudly points out, “We think we may be the largest independently financed film ever put together.”
Now You See Me may have opened at number two with a modest $29.4 million, but three months later, the film is still in theaters, has accumulated over $300 million worldwide, and earned itself a sequel. And that’s all before the Four Horsemen wow the crowds on home video. In honor of the film’s September 3 DVD and Blu-ray release, we take a look back at some of the best behind-the-scenes magic tricks, straight from the Now You See Me 5 Pointz set.
I’d like to bet a number of you at least wonder whether or not paranormal activities really go down. No? Are you a total nonbeliever? Perhaps you should look into the work of Ed and Lorraine Warren, a husband-wife team of paranormal investigators who’ve logged some incredible, out-of-this-world happenings including the infamous Amityville Horror.
Are you thinking Warm Bodies is Twilight with zombies? Or how about Twilight meets Shaun of the Dead? Let’s nix both concepts right away because that most certainly is not the case. And that assessment isn’t just coming from someone who’s a big-time fan of the book and truly believes it’s the fresh young adult supernatural romance we’ve been waiting for; it’s also coming straight from the Warm Bodies director, Jonathan Levine, and his cast.
We’ve already seen Alice in Wonderland and a double dose of Snow White, but with Maleficent, Pan,Sleeping Beauty, Pinocchio and possibly more fairy tales-turned-big screen epics hitting theaters in the coming years, perhaps Bryan Singer’s Jack the Giant Slayer will actually wind up slipping in at just the opportune time.
In a post-apocalyptic world ridden with zombies, the goal is always not to become one yourself. But c’mon, who hasn’t wondered what they’d look like lumbering around decked out in grimy zombie garb? Well, my day in the living dead spotlight finally arrived! I got the opportunity to hit the set of Jonathan Levine’s Warm Bodies, have the life sucked out of me and join R (Nicholas Hoult) on set for a run-in with the Bonies.
Sure, The Cell made its 2000 debut in 2,411 theaters and Tarsem Singh himself made waves when his epic of a passion project, The Fall, finally hit theaters after years of development and production (including 17 years of location scouting and a four-and-a-half-year shoot in 24 countries), but it wasn’t until Immortals arrived back in November of 2011 that Singh finally earned more widespread clout for his mesmerizing visuals.
Big movie means a big cast, and a big cast means an abundance of set visit interviews. Not only did we get to speak with the man in charge himself, director Tarsem Singh, but Stephen Dorff (Stavros), Freida Pinto (Phaedra), Luke Evans (Zeus), Henry Cavill (Theseus), Kellan Lutz (Poseidon) and Isabel Lucas (Athena), too. Rather than forcing you to ogle your computer screen for hours sorting through transcriptions, I bring you the best of the best of each.
“Dawn of War”? “War of Gods”? “Immortals”?