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Andrew Stanton Discusses the Making of "John Carter

Question and answer transcript - December 2011 -
provided by Walt Disney Studios:
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CONTENTS
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Page IX | Page X | Page XI | Page XII | Page XIII | Page XIV
What circumstances led you to want to make “John Carter”?
 “John Carter” is based on “A Princess of Mars,” which is a book by Edgar Rice Burroughs that was written almost 100 years ago.  I stumbled across the book at the perfect age; I was about 10 years old, maybe 11.  I fell in love with the concept of a human finding himself on Mars, among these amazing creatures, and finding that he has his own unique powers.  It was a very romantic aspect of adventure and science fiction.

One of my friends had a bunch of brothers who all could draw and I would go to their house sometimes and we’d share comic books.  I remember them always drawing this character with a sword, who was fighting these 9-foot tall, four-armed, green creatures with tusks.  I asked them what they were drawing and they explained to me that it was John Carter from Mars fighting Tharks.  It was the same time that Marvel comics had come out with a series based on the books, so I went the comic route first and then I came back and started reading the books.  I read the books all the way into my high school years and my friends use to make fun of me.

There are actually 11 books in the series and I have always thought it would be cool to see them realized on the screen.  I was really more of a movie fan.  I wanted to see the ideas in Burroughs’ books up on the screen so I could go and see them there, but I never thought that I would be the person behind the movie being made.


Edgar Rice Burroughs is most known for creating “Tarzan.” Were you also a “Tarzan” fan?
It’s funny, but I was never much of a “Tarzan” fan.  I knew of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “Tarzan” books like everyone else because Tarzan was really the character for which he was world-renowned.  Those books made him a very popular and rich man.  But he actually started this series of books, the John Carter Martian tales series, or “Barsoom” series as it is called, before then.
What drew you to the books back then and why are you still drawn to them today?
The thing that I liked about them when I was young was that they were so primal in their fantasy genre.  At the time it was my introduction to the genre.  What’s fascinating is that you can get caught up in something that’s written in 1910 and still think it has some merit.

When I returned to the material as a storyteller and a filmmaker and reviewed it again as an adult, it was very easy to see how clichéd a lot of the things had become and how one note the character of John Carter was.  It didn’t make for an interesting character arc or growth.  But what surprised me was that the imagination for these worlds and situations, these creatures and characters, was still very, very inventive.  And they evoked a lot of imagery.  And I think that was probably the strongest thing about it the second time around.  I wanted to see this world.  And I wanted to invest in these creatures and characters.

As a filmmaker looking at the material today, I know it’s all about being able to believe.  It’s all about just being tricked, so that for the two hours that you’re in the theater, you actually think you’re there and in the middle of it.


Was it difficult to get permission from the Burroughs’ estate to make “John Carter”?
We had to basically convince the estate, because they had had so many stops and starts with this property, that we were serious about producing it.  They were understandably skittish.  So we had to convince them that our approach had merit.

In preparation for going to the estate, we pitched the movie to each other and got all our ducks in a row with the treatment, brainstorming and making an outline.  We’re used to standing up in a room and telling the story as if we’d just walked out of the theatre and seen it already.  And that actually takes quite a bit of writing and rehearsal until you can perform it smoothly.  And that’s what we did.  So it went over really well with the estate and they were very happy with our approach.


How faithful is the film to the source material, Edgar Rice Burroughs’  “A Princess of Mars”?
I tried to be as faithful as I could, because I’m the biggest fan.  But I’m the first one to understand that if you literally put on the screen what’s written in a book, it doesn’t work.  So the last thing I want to do is make people go, “That’s a bad story.”  We took licenses wherever we felt it needed to happen.  But I think in the best adaptations, you should be able to watch the film and not be able to sense what’s changed.  Most important of all is that it carries the spirit of how you felt when you read the book.  Feeling, for me, is the huge thing about adapting a book that must be protected at all costs.
Did you do additional research to help you interpret the book or the world it depicts?
Yes.  We went over to what still exists of the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate in Tarzana, California.  He called his ranch Tarzana and that eventually became the name of the town.  At the time, there was nothing out there but his estate.  What’s left of the property is a very unassuming building between two giant commercial stores.  But what’s inside is such a treasure.  There’s so much history there. Burroughs was so prolific.  There are so many other things he’s written besides “Tarzan” and his “Barsoom” series, which is probably his next most well known work.
How did you envision making “John Carter,” since the source material is almost one hundred years old?
I’ve always been able to envision this early 20th century time period because that’s when the character of John Carter was created and that’s when the story takes place.  It was considered present day at the time the stories were published in 1912.  It’s very similar to what it feels like to read books by H.G. Wells or Jules Verne.  The view of science and of future technology and fantasy is very reflective of how people understood the world at that time.  I think that part of the appeal and charm of these books and of these characters is that they are not of our time; they’re of the post-Civil War era.  I wanted not only Earth but also Mars to have a bit of that flavor, to place it in its own category and not make it possible to even accidentally compare it to other, more current, science fiction films or fantasy films.

But if I were to make the book literally the way it’s described, it would come across as cliché or antiquated.  I felt the way to make it fresh was to make it feel even more authentic, to make it feel like a period film, but of a period we just don’t know about, so that it would have all the visceral believability of a very well-researched historical movie.  It just happens to be that we’ve made up this history.  For me it was all about authenticity, believability and transporting the audience to make them think they’re really there.

Because it’s science fiction seen through the eyes of somebody at the turn-of-the-century, there’s a cool old-fashioned feel that you can play off of.  I wanted to be in real locations and make it feel like I was really in that time, whether I was on Earth or Mars.

For environments, for example, we are actually shooting locations in Utah that have an otherworldly feel.  The thing about Utah is that it really was a dead ocean at one point, as is a lot of Martian  topography, so it is easy to just stand in certain areas of the state and think that you are on another world; that you are on Mars.  I wanted it to feel like a different world’s romantic period because one of the cool things I always remembered from the books was that everybody could sail on air.  It’s the equivalent of tall ships having the wind in their sails, but these “air” ships can actually propel off the light that bounces off the surface of the planet, much like an air-hockey puck, so I wanted that sort of graceful gliding that comes from that period where things haven’t been automated yet. It’s also fascinating to me because Mars is a dying planet and there’s something very romantic and eerie about the desert.


What was your approach to adapting the book?
I was such a fan of the books as a kid and as a young teen, but then I sort of fell away from them and just sort of lived off the memories of them all through my 20s.  Then I rediscovered the books in my mid 30s and read them again, now with the eyes of somebody that’s had to write their own stories and make films.  It made me not only appreciate what was still really great stuff in the books, but also how much needed to be altered or edited in order not just to make a better story, but to also  capture cinematically the feeling that you get from reading the books.  I think that’s really more the job of the filmmaker when they’re adapting a book.  It isn’t so much whether you’re incredibly faithful, it’s great if you can be, but more importantly, have you made the audience feel like what it felt like for the reader to read the book?

To me, that’s the sign of a good adaptation, so that’s what I’ve tried to do.  I’ve gone and looked in the other books in the series and sometimes found a character or situation that I felt might be better served to work in the first story and certainly added or embellished anything that I felt we wanted to explore more.  There are an insane amount of battles and fights in these books and it’s because the chapters were originally serialized.  You didn’t read a whole book, you read chapters in a magazine, and you waited until the next month until you could read the next one.  So every chapter had a cliffhanger that was equal in size to the end of a movie.

So, Mark Andrews and I, and Michael Chabon, all worked very hard at balancing it all out so that you would get a much better rhythm and arc of what you expect when you see a movie, while still retaining the best of what it felt like to read the book.


Do you feel like you’ve struck a balance between a story that feels authentic and believable and a story that’s fantastical with nine-foot tall, green, four-armed Martians?
Yes, I do.  When you describe the creatures and the ideas that Edgar Rice Burroughs came up with for these books, it seems like pure fantasy.  That was the thing I really tried to overcome.  How can you sell nine-foot tall, four-armed, tusked characters and have the audience completely accept it?  The audience just needs to think that maybe they really could exist.  I thought that the way into the film was not so much trying to be fantastical, but actually the opposite.  How can I make you believe that these things really follow the laws of nature and the rules of reality on another planet?

That’s the way we approached it.  To present this to you as if it’s another travel destination, an exotic location that’s in our universe, but we just didn’t know anything about it.  And that’s really how, through those eyes and through those rules, we’ve made any decisions on this film.


Please give an overall description of the movie.
“John Carter” is an epic, sci-fi action-adventure with romance and action and political intrigue.  Because the subject matter was written so long ago, it became an origin of those kinds of stories in the last century.  It was sort of a comic book before there were comic books; an adventure story before it became a whole genre of its own.  It was difficult to go back into this book and not look like you were being derivative of everything else because it’s been either literally ripped off or an inspiration for things for 100 years.

In a nutshell, the story follows the adventures of John Carter, a disillusioned Civil War veteran, who miraculously finds himself on the surface of Mars.  In his attempts to try and get back to Earth, he finds a second purpose for himself in life.


Were there elements that you knew from the start had to be in this movie?
There are so many scenes that I’ve always wanted to see.  For example, just the idea of Carter waking up on Mars and finding out that he can jump 50 feet in the air was so strong in Mark’s [Andrews] head and mine that we went straight to storyboarding it before writing it in script form.
Can you talk about the character of John Carter and his dilemma?
The thing that fascinates me the most about the story is that it’s about a stranger in a strange land and a man who suddenly becomes, against his choice, extraordinary.  It’s the analogy of somebody who is given gifts and has to decide whether to use them for the betterment of others or keep them to himself.  John Carter is a man who’s at a crossroads with that choice.  He’s this Civil War veteran who has lost the point of living and is very jaded.  He goes to Arizona and tries to make his fortune so that he can basically isolate himself and tell the rest of the world to go fly a kite.  In the course of this, he stumbles across this larger universal infiltration that’s happening that suddenly sends him to Mars.  There, he miraculously finds that he can leap almost 50 to 100 feet because of the difference in gravity with his bone density, also giving him more strength, probably the strength of three or four men.  He comes across a world in the middle of a crisis where the scales are going to get tipped in a direction that’s not good for the planet and he realizes he can play a key role to bring the scales the other way.  The question is will he or will he not.

I like the idea of a damaged character, who has morals and values, but because life’s dealt him a bad hand, does not want to go back into the world again as the person he was before.  What it takes for John Carter to engage again is to leave Earth and find his humanity among the Martians.


Can you talk about other cultures on Mars, like the Tharks, and how you brought them to life?
One of the most memorable characters in the series of books, besides John Carter, is a character named Tars Tarkas, who is the leader of the green men tribe known as the Tharks.  These creatures are described in the book as anywhere from nine to 15 feet tall with tusks and four arms.  It’s pretty fantastical, so one of the first things we attacked on the film was how to make them feel believable and indigenous to the desert, like a natural species from the planet Mars.  So, we actually designed the physiology of these creatures using desert-dwelling people of Earth as a guide.  We looked at the aboriginals; we looked at Masai warriors; we looked at the Bedouins.  We made the Tharks very thin and very ropey, as if they have spent their whole life surviving in the desert and now they’re in tough times and their whole existence is in jeopardy.

There are a lot of multi-limb creatures on Mars.  There’s a ten-legged pet, called a Calot, that’s sort of like a bulldog lizard.  There’s the eight-legged Thoats and the four-armed White Apes, which are a big set piece of the movie, so getting the physiology right on the Tharks helped us find the smart physiology for all the other multi-limbed characters.  Hopefully, as you’re watching the film you’ll never even think about it.  You’ll just accept it like you would any new species that you might find somewhere else in the world.


Can you talk about the Martian airships and how you designed them to be reflective of the time period you were creating?
The airships relate to our world in the tall ships era.  Therefore, in thinking of the materials that they would have been made of to be equivalent to that period of history, we used old porcelain and wood materials, nothing manufactured.  There’s no electricity on Mars, but there is an element called Radium, which is this very rare resource that they can use to sort of ignite energy, like a car battery would.   As a result, everything in these ships is run by manual power.

The fun of it was to come up with the routines of how these ships are actually manned and flown and navigated.  We created a whole language for it and a plan of how everybody works together as a crew just to give it that much more authenticity.


There are two warring cities on Mars and John Carter gets drawn into their conflict. Can you describe the two cities, Helium and Zodanga?
The red men, Heliumites and Zodangans, are a warring species who have a culture of tattoos that are red-based, depicting their station and rank.  The two warring cities have been fighting for centuries.  Heliumites, who display a blue flag, take a long-term view that they’ve got to do something to bring their planet back or it will die.  The Zodangans, under a red flag, have taken the attitude that it’s every man for himself.  Their city is always moving; it’s sort of like a moving refinery that just goes to different locations and drills for Radium, which is a resource that is getting depleted.  The city picks a spot, hunkers down, takes what it wants and then moves on.

In a sense, Zodanga is a city of haves and have-nots.  You’ve got the majority of poor citizens who live wherever they can within the superstructure, just trying to make do, and than you’ve got the few elite, who reside up in the Palace; whereas the city of Helium is the opposite of Zodanga: it’s much more invested in the well-being of its citizens.  Helium is described very well in the books because it plays a recurring role throughout the series.  It’s the city where Dejah Thoris comes from, as well as her father Tardos Mors and another major character named Kantos Kan.  Helium is a very grounded place, constructed of stone, very solid with high towers.  There are two sections actually, Greater Helium and Lesser Helium, linked by a bridge.  The Palace of Light is its centerpiece at the base of the city’s highest tower.


Please talk about the visual look of the film and what you tried to create visually.
The answer always seems to come to me if I look at it as a fan of going to the movies as opposed to being a filmmaker.  What would make this feel fresh for me and not derivative of other things?  My goal is to believe it.  I want to believe it’s really out there.  So I thought to treat it like a historical film, like a period piece, where we’ve done all our research correctly and it has a gritty reality to it.  There’s dirt, a patina and a wear and tear to things that make it feel believable.  I want the “Martian history” on this film to be done so well that it feels like some sort of remote place that you just didn’t know about.  So that’s how we’ve approached it.   Just that dirty, dusty, reality.

We went looking for landscapes where the rocks already had centuries of erosion and then did just the tiniest bit of computer work on them to give the illusion that they were constructed ruins.  We added things like windows, doors and stairwells.  Hopefully, if we did it right, people will look at the finished product and go, “Where did you find that man-made ruin?”


Can you describe the huge Palace of Light set that you are using for the wedding scene?
The wedding scene in the Palace of Light is our big finale of the movie and is probably one of the largest sets we had on the shoot.  The reason it’s called the Palace of Light is because it’s all glass and about ten stories high.  There will be an entire wedding going on with about 300 Heliumites and Zodangans filling up the balcony and the floor of the set.

The wedding party will be on a dais that floats in the middle of the ceremony.  There is a big mirror in the palace roof that reflects the combined moonlight of the two moons of Mars, which then creates a shaft of light that hits a receptor on the dais, allowing it to float all the way up to the balcony level.

When you have a set this big, it’s a bit overwhelming.  But you realize it’s something the audience will enjoy seeing on screen.  People go to see these big action movies hoping there’ll be something they’ve never seen before, some element of spectacle that hopefully is very fresh, but still story related.

So, we did what we call pre-vis.  We actually built the set in a virtual world, shot the sequence and cut it together just like a movie.  Then we broke it down exactly where the camera would be in every single shot.  We had many, many meetings about how we would shoot each of these moments.  Once you start to break it down into bite-size pieces, it becomes less daunting, less intimidating and more manageable.  It’s sort of that old adage, “How do you eat an elephant?”  You eat an elephant one bite at a time. And that’s pretty much how we’ve been attacking the sequences.


You paid close attention to costuming in this film. How did Mayes Rubeo reflect your vision?
The thing I love about Mayes [Rubeo] is that she’s very culturally aware of what’s out there in the world from a fashion standpoint, not just the cloth, but jewelry and hairstyles.  And not just in today’s terms, but also in historical terms, so she was able to sort of mix and match and just go off on tangents that might best invent what could exist in another world.

For as fictional as it is, we’re trying very hard to make this world feel like an authentic historical period and costumes are an important part of that.  The costumes need to make us feel like we’re watching Martian history.  And I believe we created that look and feel with Mayes’ costuming.


Can you give a sense of what goes into creating the creatures that we eventually see on the screen?  Is motion capture the beginning and end of the process?
No, it isn’t. Many people mistakenly believe that with motion capture you put on a suit, it records your movements and then the data is applied directly to a computer model, and that’s the end of it; it’s suddenly finished.  The truth is, anytime you’ve seen motion capture done well, there’s been a talented animator in the middle of that process who has been finessing that data, or more often fixing or supplementing the source material to really bring it to life, to a place that shines.

It’s the pairing of a great actor with a great animator that gives you the performances that you’ve been the most impressed by so far with CG characters and live action.  And that’s not that different than fully animated movies.  On an animated film, you get great vocals from an actor and sometimes we even record that actor on videotape to get references for their actions and gestures, but it all goes nowhere without an animator putting it all together into a great performance.

I’ve applied about a 50/50 ratio to the process of creating the Thark characters.  I actually need much more of the physical performance of the actors and the physical reference of what they’ve done with their faces and what they’re doing in the physical space when they’re acting on the set, but I’m still dependent on a certain degree of the animator coming in and running with that captured information and taking it to the end.  It’s not a competition; it’s these two great performers working together in concert making the perfect hybrid performance so that, hopefully, at the end of the day, you’re not thinking it was Willem Dafoe or Samantha Morton and you’re not thinking that it was an animated creation.  You’re just thinking it’s the character.  That’s really always the way to tell that you’ve done the best job possible.

I’m really pretty much using the same philosophies and approaches that I would have used on a Pixar movie on “John Carter,” but I’m just much more cognizant and appreciative of the material that I’m getting from the amazing cast playing our Tharks.


Who is on your filmmaking team?
I’ll start with my comfort zone—the producers that I started this journey with.  First it was Jim Morris and Lindsey Collins, who were both producers on “WALL•E” and then we brought on board Colin Wilson, who has extensive experience in producing live-action movies as well as big effects movies.  He was the perfect complement to the other strengths that Jim and Lindsey brought to the table.  Lindsey comes from the world of computer animation, so we felt, and she felt, that it was better if she ran all the animated stuff that was in nearly 50% of the movie and consumed all of our focus for the last year and a half of production.

Then there’s Mark Andrews.  This whole project started from a conversation between Mark and me while working at Pixar.  We discovered that we both had been childhood fans of this project.  We even still had our childhood drawings of John Carter to prove that we had loved these worlds since we were kids.  Very soon after, we brought on Michael Chabon to help complement our writing (who also had childhood drawings).  And that was the base of our little team.

Next was Nathan Crowley, the production designer, whom we brought on early in the process.  It was really interesting because he and I sort of came together right at the height of all the awards season that was going on for “WALL•E” and “Dark Knight” and it was exciting to be working with each other, based on the hype of everything that was going on with our latest films.

That choice turned out to be a real godsend because Nathan Crowley doesn’t come from the world of fantasy.  He’d never done a fantasy project, but he’d always wanted to.  So he brings a real fresh eye and original perspective to rethinking architecture and just designing the functionality of a world that is so different from ours.

Soon after that we got our cinematographer, Daniel Mindell, who is quite eclectic.  It’s a little hard to pin down exactly what look and style he has.  He’s done a range of films, from “Enemy of the State” all the way up through “Star Trek.”  He came highly recommended from people in the effects world who had worked with him because he really understood that the principal photography part of production isn’t always the be all-end all of a large scale special effects film like “John Carter.”

Then there’s Peter Chiang, who runs Double Negative, which is a big effects house in London.  We had to figure out who was going to do all the computer-animated characters for the film so we met with him and his team.  Their group really reminded me of how Pixar felt in its early days, so it was good match.


How did you and co-writer Mark Andrews get together?
Before the film was even green-lit, I found out that Mark Andrews was a fellow lover of the books at Pixar.  Mark was the head of story on “Ratatouille” and “The Incredibles.”  We were considering him as another potential director at the studio, and he asked me, just as a favor, to be his test case for hearing some of his ideas he might like to direct.  In the middle of hearing them over lunch, I said, “That one’s sort of like John Carter.”  He stopped everything and said, “You know John Carter?”  And I said, “Yeah, I grew up with the books, loved the books, loved the Marvel comic books in the ’70s.”  Neither of us had ever met anybody else at Pixar who knew those books, so we were geeking out.  And then it turns out we both knew, from a fanboy standpoint, what was going on and what historically had gone on with the books being developed as a movie.

We made this weird little pinkie swear, thinking nothing would ever come of it, and said, “If ‘John Carter’ ever falls in your lap or my lap, we’ve got to work on this together.”  That was back in 2005 and then, lo and behold, ’06 comes around and another studio’s then current movie deal with the Burroughs estate falls through and suddenly the rights to the stories fall in my lap.  I turned to Mark right away and said, “You and I are writing this together.”


What’s the transition been like for you from animation to live action?
It’s not as extreme as I thought.  I knew that the stamina demand would be incredible and that there would be incredibly long days.  But I must say that I’ve gotten used to the groove.  The translation from animation to live action has mainly been taking everything that I’m used to doing in about 2 ½ to 3 years and concentrating it into 6 months.  But it’s not as hard as you think, as the conversations I have with my live-action crew are extremely similar to the ones I have with my team at Pixar.  I have a DP at Pixar.  I have a costume designer.  I have props.  I have sets built.  The roles are basically the same in each medium; it’s how they execute their jobs that’s different.  I don’t work with computers at Pixar.  I work with 200 craftsmen that are the best at their job.  And it’s really the same with live action.  The luxury in live-action is that I can have the conversation with all of the crew in the same room and we can actually see the result on the same day instead of six weeks later.

The comforting thing is that making movies virtually isn’t as different as people think it is from making movies live.  Certainly there are a lot of obvious differences, but the fact is that in both scenarios you’re still trying to make a great image on the screen that captivates you and moves the story forward.

And, to my surprise, I actually loved being outdoors and in a different environment every day.  It’s a nice changeup from being in the same hallways and offices for years.  I don’t mean to say one’s better than the other; they certainly each have their pros and cons.  But it’s been a nice change-up after a long time of making movies in a certain environment.


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Interview II: Andrew Stanton
Ref: http://collider.com

Question:  It seems like the mini-sandstorm outside has kind of quieted down.
ANDREW STANTON: It’s kind of overcast now. We’ve switched to setting up for dusk.

Isn’t that a good thing?
No, because you can always change — You can’t add shadows. If you really want to get dimensional lighting, you want nice, hard shadows. Overcast isn’t our friend. You can always make the sky a little different or tone it down, but you can’t do that much. We wait for bright sunlight. Hard, hot Martian sun.

I think you’re the first person we’ve talked to that’s not completely beaten up.
Really?

And you seem so energetic. How do you keep that up with everything that’s going on?
Everyone says that and I think you caught me actually a little less energetic. But I don’t know. I just sort of accepted my fate before I went onto this that it was going to be hard as hell. It’s sort of like saying, “Okay, we’re going to go sail around the world.” There’s nothing really easy about that and there’s something mental about just accepting that up front. I’ve been through blizzards in the UK and volcanoes delaying staff and cold nights and hot mornings. It’s been fine.

How does it compare going from the studio to the outside world where you can’t control the elements?
Well, again, I knew that was going to be the case and certainly that’s the biggest change. But it’s not as different as I thought it would be. People think — and I know they don’t really think this, but their unconscious knee-jerk reaction is — “Oh, you work with computers. Therefore you don’t work with people.” The truth is that I work with 200 artists every day that are incredibly talented at their jobs and they’ve been good at it for two decades. I have great DPs, great costumer designers, great set designers, great actors and I’ve had to speak the language and move lights around, move sets around. All that stuff that you have to do out here. It translates pretty much directly out here. It’s just how they do their job is different. But what I have to do in telling them what to do and how the shot should look when it’s actually on frame in the camera, is not that different. They’re actually quite impressed that I can hold so many elements in my head because it has yet to challenge me to the level of Pixar. There’s something about CG animation where nothing comes together for weeks or months. You have to hold all these disparate jigsaw puzzle pieces for such a long time. You’re the only one who is hoping and crossing your fingers that this is what the picture will look like when it all comes together. I’m only asked to do that for a couple of hours here or a day. Then I get to see what we’ve all come up with. They’re very impressed with that mental strength or capacity. All the other animation directors are like, “What’s it like? What’s it like?” and I go, “Guys, you’d be fine.” Pixar is like a massive boot camp for that. They’re also very shocked that we can picture images in our head before seeing anything. Before we see rehearsal or anything like that. That’s all we’ve ever had the option of doing. We have to come up with it before we make it. I didn’t realize that it was such a weird muscle to have. It’s been very advantageous on something like this. But I’ve also been incredibly spoiled. I realize that one of the reasons that it’s easy is because I’ve been given some of the best people in the industry on the crew. I couldn’t have a better, more talented and more cooperative cast. They’ve made what is a very, very hard shoot seem doable and sometimes downright fun. I’ve lucked out on that and I can’t take credit for it other than saying yes to accepting all these people.

What’s been a challenge for you, then?
It’s interesting to see the system and how the live-action system works. It’s based on a lot of things that maybe made sense in the day or decades ago or are holdovers from the studio system. It’s unionized and there’s a lot of rules that don’t make a lot of sense logically. Pixar has none of that. I realize that one of the reasons it’s Nirvana is that we didn’t realize how a movie was made and just used — god forbid — logic. We figured that if we made a movie the way it should be made, that was the way they were being made. Our system is very logical and we keep improving upon it. We criticize ourselves and we have post-mortems every movie to improve the system. Out here, nobody questions the system. It’s just the way it is with all its faults and everything. We don’t have unions. Steve was very smart. He said, “Let’s give them why there was unions. Let’s give them great healthcare. Let’s treat them extra special and there’s no reason to have that.” There aren’t these weird byproduct rules that actually cause problems in one area when they think they’re helping another.

We have a very clean system, Pixar. After you’ve worked in that, it becomes very obvious how things should work and very obvious how things don’t work the right way here. I get a little frustrated at the haphazardness of it. The world of moviemaking, since the studio system broke down — and this is my guess — lives and breathes off of triage. It lives off disaster planning. People feel comfortable in the disaster. “Oh! I know how to deal with this. This is chaos. Somebody’s on fire. Let’s run and get an extinguisher.” That is not Pixar. Pixar is planning to avoid every disaster possible. It’s a very opposite experience to the extreme and that took my awhile to get used to, the embracing of the chaos. There’s a certain level of it that I feel is necessary. I feel like a parent having their first kid and I can’t wait to have to the second one because I’m going to do the parenting a bit differently. I’m somewhat half observer and half participant in watching how this whole things happens.

This film has an extensive post-production phase –
I don’t call it post. I call it “Principal Digital Photography”. Once you look at it like that, you realize, yeah, I’m not done with this shoot at all when I finish in June. Four of my leads are CG and I’d say three or four supporting cast members are CG. Then half the world — not half literally, but the extension of worlds and the extension of sets. These things that are so massive and fantastical that you can’t build them — have to be done. The movie always was planned to be half CG and half live action. Not in look, but in the attempt to build this vision we had. Hopefully, if we do it right, when it’s all done, nothing will look CG and you’ll just accept it. That’s all I ever wanted. I always came to this just as a fan. I’ve spent 40 years of my life just wanting to see somebody make this movie and just see it as a fan and only four realizing, “Oh my god! I can maybe be the one to do that.” All I ever wanted was to just believe it and see it on the screen. That’s really my goal, to not be showy or spectacle for as much as there is, but just believe that I’m really there. Because I’ve spent a whole lifetime just wanting to go there.

Can you talk about approaching it as a fan and what it meant to be able to bring it to life as a super-fan of the property?
Well, I’ve been a fan of movies longer than anything else. One thing I learned a long time ago is that you can’t translate a book literally to the screen. It won’t work because it’s a different medium. And it would be the same in reverse. There’s this naive belief by some people that, if you do exactly what’s in the book, it’s going to be good. I would say that that’s false thinking. I would say that even movies you think are great adaptations of the book, if you were to compare them, you would suddenly realize, “Oh my gosh. They changed a lot.”

What would you say that, at the core, was the most important aspect to maintain?
Well, the books were serials. The thing that people don’t realize is that the books were originally written as serial chapters in magazines. They all had a three act structure in each chapter. You can’t make a movie like that. It’ll just be this episodic series of train cars going together and it’ll annoy people. How can you keep the spirit of what it felt like to be in the book and to be in these scenes and to be with these characters and to make it work in a three act structure for an overall film. That’s where I came at it. Believe me, there’s a million scenes that I just imagined in my head reading a million times over in the book since I was a kid. Now that I’m older, I still want to see them and I’m trying my hardest to see that they exist in the film, but the thing that has got to work first and foremost is that the story overall works. And that I invest in the character. To be honest, I never actually invested in Carter 100%. He was always a kind of Prince Valiant, did-it-right-from-the-get-go kind of bland, vanilla guy. I think it was his situation that was more fascinating to me. It was a stranger in a strange land, guy thrown out to circumstances. Also, there’s the oddity of the time period. I really love that somebody from the Civil War gets thrown into what we would consider the antiquated past of Mars. That’s been something that I’ve really tried to embrace on this and give it its special thumbprint.

Its been such the touchstone for so many things since 1912. It inspired, either directly or indirectly, things like “Flash Gordon”, “Star Wars”, “Superman” all the way up to “Avatar”. If you literally made the book, people would think I was ripping off everyone else and that’s the catch-22 about it. So I thought, “What’s the spin into it that will make it feel fresh and stand on its own ground?” The approach that I finally decided on was that it should feel like a period film. It should feel like it’s historically accurate to everything that really does happen on Mars, as odd as that sounds. It’s the same way that I might watch a film about a civilization that I didn’t know about in the deep regions of South America or the Middle East of Asia. If it’s done in the right way, maybe I’ll go, “Wow! Maybe that’s how it really is on Mars.” I’ll sense these layers of history that go behind it and that go unexplained. I’ve already gotten to see a bit of what it’s like to juxtapose New York City in 1888 against suddenly cutting to Mars and cutting to Arizona in the same time period. It really has a nice, period spin on it. Cross my fingers, I hope it’ll go in that direction if not nail exactly what I was going for. I think that’s what’s needed to make it stand out on its own. If you really nail out the bones of it, it’s a structure that many films have done.

Burroughs goes into great detail about the setting and the creatures. How loyally did you follow those designs?
Well, he’s very description, much like Tolkien. Sometimes to a fault. I remember reading “The Lord of the Rings” and getting to a whole chapter about a hill. But it’s really helpful for us for our direction and how we want things to look. Again, what I would do is try to follow the basics, but what was really the rule book was, “Do I believe it? Do I believe it really exists?” I don’t want anything to look — for lack of a better term — fanboy. I don’t want it to look like it’s something that I’ve been drawing on my notebook my whole life while ignoring the teacher and now I finally get to put the Arnold Schwarzenegger bicep guy up on the screen. To me, I roll my eyes just at the thought of that. I want to go, “What would nature really create if that was the case with Tharks and beasts with multiple legs? What would the architecture have to be for a world that is so arid and desert?” Always using the framework from the book as a jumping off point, but tweaking it the moment we felt it was fantasy for fantasy’s sake. For example, I made the Tharks in the height range that they’ve been described a little bit lower. In the book, they’re been nine and fifteen. I made them between nine and ten. But I made them very thin and very ropey because I looked at all the desert-dwelling tribes that we’re aware of — the aboriginals and the Maasai warriors and the bedouins — nobody’s thick. They’re all down to the sinewy muscles and just the essentials. They’re the definition of the word “essential”. That’s what I felt they should be. It was a great exercise because, if we’re taking the physiology that literal and trying to make it look like arms weren’t just stuck on — How would your pectorals be if you actually had a second set of arms and what would their function be? They ended up coming across as a very noble-looking creature and first impression is a very huge thing, even for the character of Carter when he lands on the planet. That really got us inspired to always take that approach on everything.

We were talking to the dialect coach and she was mentioning that the Barsoom language was concocted the same way Na’vi was.
Well, one of my producers, Colin Wilson, was one of my producers on “Avatar”. He had a connection to the same dialect coach. I was a little nervous about it, because I didn’t want to be ripping off or stealing or anything like that.

Are you worried about people making the comparison?
Well, there’s nothing we can do. That thing was on reels for a long, long time, but this book has been around for 100 years, I just want to see it. I’ve had the same pressure with other films I’ve had to make. “Oh no, someone else is making one just like it!” All that stuff. It all lasts for about three months — it used to be six — and it cycles before nobody gives a crap. It’s about “is it a good movie and am I going to pull it off the shelf and watch it again?” I’m in it for the grandkids and I always am. I’m not in it for the short term. I’m in it for who might watch it after all the B.S. about box office and anything else controversial that can be created goes away. And it goes away almost faster than you can say it now. It’s not worth getting caught up in. I’ve got a book that has held the test of time and I’m going to make a great movie out of it and hope it sails.

What was it about the book that has kept you so involved in the characters?
Again, not to diss anything, but it was almost in spite of John Carter that I liked the books. That was where we put a lot of our work in. How to make him somebody to root for, not that I wouldn’t. But it’s not that unique to just this story. It’s often that the hero is the least interesting person and that the interesting characters are the people around him. I felt like I’d rather watch damaged goods than somebody who has their act together. I went for someone who pretty much resigned himself to the fact that his purpose in life was over and sort of went with the thinking that it’s not for us to say what our purpose in life is. You may think it’s done or finished or ended or been missed, but life’s not done with you sometimes. It may take awhile to figure out what your other purpose is or what your greater purpose always was. That’s sort of the tact I took with Carter and it’s really what made Carter perfect to play the role. He’s the bad boy/wrong side of the tracks and that really worked a lot better.

Are you able to include any of the quote/unquote savagery that Carter had in the books?
I used to laugh because it seemed like, in every chapter, there was the sentence, “And then I fought the greatest battle of my entire life.” I went, “That can only happen once, technically!” We decided, Hey, it’s an action movie. It’s probably going to be two hours, two hours plus. I don’t want to bludgeon the audience. I don’t want to make it a gorefest. I don’t want people to check out. I want every single battle to move the story forward. I want every single conflict to feel like it’s different from another and special. You certainly want it to compound and feel like you haven’t blown your wad early. You don’t want the best thing to happen in the middle of the beginning of the film. We worked really hard to make tentpole scenes of conflict and saved or combined things to make them that much stronger. Because there was a lot of fighting to choose from. But we’re trying very hard to make them feel like they felt in the books. For me, it was equal amount thrill of adventure and equal amount romance. At the end of the day, I felt like it was a romance. I’ve really tried to make that the bigger thread through the whole thing.

What have you done to the Deja Thoris character to make her more three-dimensional?
That was my concern because we don’t need another, “Yes, I’m a nuclear physicist.” And yet I’m sure this book inspired people to do exactly that. I thought that I couldn’t hide that she’s technically a princess, but I can make sure she has as much investment and drive and as much of a goal if not more than Carter for why she’s in the story. That’s what I tried hard to do.  But I wasn’t going to hide from the femininity. I feel like that would be a knee-jerk, small-minded, male way of approaching it. I went for the tougher one of saying, “I’m going to embrace the sexiness, but I’m going to go at it from an almost asexual approach of, “Why? Why is she doing everything that she’s doing?” Fortunately, someone like Lynn was a huge win because she brings such passion and strength and integrity to the thing. If the moment didn’t service it, we had to bring it up to that when I was working with her. It’s always a fine balance. You can’t please everybody. I do, every now and then, peek on these blogs and see everyone saying, [Geek Voice] “Are they naked?! Are they naked on Mars?!” Use your brain! It’s a Disney film! [Geek Voice] “Are they going to lay eggs?!” They might! Some might. Not everyone is going to be happy. I’m going to make it as solid a story as I can using as many elements as possible. Because they were introduced to me as a series as a kid — which is a little ironic. I’m the guy at Pixar who is saying, “I don’t want to do a sequel. I don’t want to see a second ‘Nemo’. I don’t want to do a second ‘WALL-E’” — But I’m the guy saying, “I would love to see a series.” Because that’s how it was introduced to me. I’ve tried very hard, me and Mark and Michael Chabon, too, to think wider from the get-go before we ever set out on the first film. So in, touch wood, the event that this film is good enough that they ask for another, we have a plan. It’s a good TV show that has meta issues that can evolve. But we also worked really hard to give it closure. Nothing bugs me more than a cliffhanger with the hubris to think that there is going to be a second one. It’s been interesting. It’s been fascinating to have that going in to something.

Where are the second and third films at this stage?
We outlined three altogether. But the nice thing about not doing anything in tandem is that we can learn from the first and go, “Ooooh! I like that guy. I like that situation. Let’s see if we can tweak that into the second and third.” We’re constantly growing and constantly adapting. We’re trying to stay ahead of it. We’re writing the second right now while we’re working on the first… You know the cool thing we’re doing is Nathan Crowley, who’s our amazing production designer — he did ‘Dark Knight’ and all of Nolan’s films — we came up with this idea of going around and finding geographical rock structure that already look like ruins and would just need a tiny bit of CG work to suddenly add a stairwell or a few window holes. It would flop into your eyes and look like a whole ruin, like Petra. We’re making it look like it’s bleeding off this whole mesa. That whole mesa is going to look like a city. And it you drive over to where we’re shooting right now, that will be the entire city in a big, empty harbor basin. We won’t need to do more than 20 percent CG work on top of the physical photography. Your eye will see 80% reality. Hopefully people will say, “Where the hell did you find that and where did you shoot it?” I thought it was a very clever way of grounding it reality and not in fantasy.


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