Set Visit: TMNT (1/2)

To
be honest, I really didn’t know what to expect on my set visit to
TMNT. For those of you that
are unfamiliar with what those letters stand for, that would be TEENAGE
MUTANT NINJA TURTLES. No,
not the live action film that came out back in 1990, nor is it the
two sequels that followed. The
Turtles are back in a CGI animated full-length feature film that has
the Turtles battling a few beasties and each other.

When
I arrived at IMAGI Studios, all the journalists gathered in a room
waiting for the “reveal” to begin.
You see, usually a set visit requires a “set” and we were
certainly not on what you would normally call a set.
But the Turtles were all over and it included a pretty cool
vinyl poster hanging from the wall.

On
our way to a “secret location” (screening room), we were treated
to some amazing art work revealing images of what could be an
amazing film. There were many
drawings with the new look of the Turtles, and some of the other
characters from the film. They
surrounded us as we all glimpsed at what is up and coming for those
pizza loving turtles in a half shell… Ninja Power!

We
were then led into the screening room and we each found ourselves a
seat. What we were in for was
a 20-minute (give or take) preview of what to expect with TMNT.
And frankly, it looks like fun times for old fans and new.
The voices for the film include Sarah Michelle Gellar
as April, Chris Evans as Casey, and Patrick Stewart as
Max Winters. As for the
turtles themselves, well let’s just say, who needs stars when
you’ve got the Turtles.

It
included scenes of the half shell duders skateboarding through the
sewers to get to their secret hideaway, a hilarious battle between
Turtle and monster, some of which you see in the trailer,
and a pretty cool sequence with a monster climbing up a roof to do
kick some arse. And we also
get a glimpse at some bad blood between Turtles. 
It seems the family is facing a few battles amongst
themselves. And although
the film looks to be PG, it still looks like the old fans will be
treated to a highly entertaining hour and a half of TMNT.

After
taking a look at the movie, we got a chance to hang with Tom Gray,
the producer of the film who previously worked on the live action
films. Tom along with director
Kevin Munroe talked in detail about the problems they faced
while making the picture which was not complete at the time we met.
And they also talked about the casting of the film, yet did
not mention who the voices of the Turtles are going to be.
It looks to be unknowns taking on Raphael, Leonardo,
Donatello and Michelangelo. Truthfully,
if you are a fan, it looks like you may be in for a treat. Check out
the film’s official site HERE.

How have things been going since Comic-Con? What have been
the latest adventures?

Tom
Gray:  Latest adventures?

Kevin Munroe:  Less
and less sleep everyday.

TG:  Well,
the worst thing that happened to us would the Taiwan earthquake that
knocked out our T3 line going back and forth, so that means, that
when we get our information everyday, we have to send couriers back
and forth hand carrying files in everyday.

So the film is traveling on people’s laps?

TG:  Yeah.
Technology is a wonderful thing, it’s all front end here and then
you ship it overnight to Hong Kong, but when the whole earthquake
knocked out all the Trans-Pacific cable, which our T3 line is
connected to, then that is something we have to deal with on a
manually basis. It won’t effect the release date, but it certainly
effected the production, approval from Kevin and the process.

KM: 
Just when you think…

TG: 
Just when you see the delivery date looming something comes
in.

How far did you guys introspectively go back into the TMNT
franchise?

TG: 
I go back to 1988 when I first bought the rights, when I was
head of production at Golden Harvest. That’s how far I go back with
the project. I think Kevin goes to being a fan back in the early
’80’s.

KM:  I
found it like a year after it released. I found the first issue in a
used comics bin and just found issue one and just loved it and that
was great. I actually brought that issue one with me, to Peter
[Laird], when we first met.  Thinking
in worst case if I don’t get the gig I’ll at least get an autograph.
So after we spent the day together and I slid the comic across the
table and he signed it and said, ‘oh cool number 1.’ As we were
driving back to the airport in the rental car I opened it up and
there was a picture of Raf [Raphael] saying, "Kevin, make a
good movie or else!" I was like, that’s awesome! 

What are you hoping that people [in their early twenties now
maybe] are going to get out of this? They are going to have the
familiarity, but what’s new about it that is going to make them
happy and give them something new to watch?

KM:  I think, as a movie,
it’s deeper. I think it runs just a little more believable. I’m not
going to say realistic because I don’t believe we are striving for
reality but I think we’re going for believable reality. The idea
that… I think the first movie does it really well in the sense
that it’s a very encompassing movie, you get in there and you are
submerged in that world and it just feels like they just actually
lived in the sewers to me, well at least that’s the memory of it.

But in this one especially important for us to concentrate on
family I think. They are a family, but you never get a really strong
family dynamic, like real tension between brothers and the way
brother’s fight and the way brothers make up and stuff. So, it’s
kind of nice to approach them as a family instead of just character
archetypes, you know, the funny one, the smart one, the leader, all
this other stuff and just go a shade deeper.

So I think, you know, for the older fans, you get that excitement
that you remember, you know when you may watch the old series and it
doesn’t hold up the same way that you thought it did, by the idea
this is just trying to tap in to what you still remember in your
head in terms of level of excitement, and then going a little bit
further. We’re trying to go a bit beyond the sort of in-jokes for
adults, the little wink-nudge to the mom and dad. There’s just
really no reason for it. There’s a level of fun to this movie that
will sort of hopefully bring in the older audience to this film.

Was there a thought to do another live action film before you
settled on CG?

TG:  No,
I think going back to being involved with the first three movies, I
think that what we saw was, there was an escalation of budgets going
up shooting live and the box office was going in the other
direction. So it was one of these, you know, it gets more expensive
and everything else. And today, I think if you were making a
live-action Turtle movie, with all the bells and whistles to compete
with all of the CG and special effects out there, this film would be
more than around 150 million dollars to do it, to make it stand up
on its own.

And
I think that when we started, the company started looking at it, we
said, you know, through CG, we can do all of that at a greatly
reduced price and still have the big scope of it that we couldn’t
possible afford. As our company is a small Hong Kong-listed company,
we couldn’t afford a 150-million dollar budget. So, as CG, because
of our labor rates in Hong Kong are so much greatly reduced than are
here, it made a lot more sense for us to push it as far as we could
to give a big, big look to the film without having to go into the
live-action thing. So, I think that was the total motivation. Plus,
we’re a CG house, so that was the obvious answer, let’s go do it CG.

Could we talk about the casting of Sarah Michelle Geller,
Kevin Smith, Chris Evans and all these people? And who are the
voices of the Turtles?

TG:  I
think what we wanted to start off with is the concept; first of all,
we didn’t want to touch the Turtles as far as… I remember we had
Corey Feldman way back in the day?  And
that was, kind of, the only person that was somewhat known.  And
we always felt that the Turtle don’t require getting Adam Brody or
someone like that to play Leonardo or whatever you wanted to do. If
we could hold back the Turtles, then we would say, OK, if you
require going with April or Casey or Max Winters in this case, then
we would be amenable to go out and look at actors.

Although,
we didn’t really want to do that, we wanted to get just really great
voices because our theory is, this is the kind of a movie where
we’re not drawing those characters to look like they are. Sarah
Michelle doesn’t look April. But we were somewhat encouraged by the
studios to say, we need to get a little more firepower out there so
let’s go get some so-called names to play the supporting actors in
it. We said, alright, as long as we don’t touch the Turtles. And of
course we had Mako to play Splinter, who, unfortunately passed away.
But we got, pretty much, 90 percent of his voice in there.

And
I think that, certainly, Kevin can elaborate on this, it just didn’t
seem to feel that we were trying to make a movie that was based on
star power because we thought that the Turtles transcend all of
that. The Turtles are the Turtles. They are types and they are
voices. So, I think that was the whole concentration, staying close
to what people will perceive they sounded like back in the ’90s.

So who is voicing the Turtles?

TG:  Sarah
Michelle Geller plays April, Chris Evans plays Casey, Max Winters is
Patrick Stewart, and Zhang Ziyi is Karai, who’s a new character from
the former ones. We have a cameo from Kevin Smith who, just, really
wanted to get into it. He came one day and just stayed the whole day
and laid there on the floor and said, "I want to do this!"
 And we have a narration
from Larry Fishburne, Laurence Fishburne, as well. It’s not a huge
cast but it is a good cast and it seems to work for this film.

You
go overseas and it doesn’t matter, we are going to dub in over 17
languages so it’s all about domestic. Again, do these people go on
Oprah and talk about it? I don’t think so. To me it’s almost gilding
that lily, you really don’t need it. There are so many voices in
this business that are perfect. But, then again, you are always in
the position of, well, if these people can go and help market the
film, why not? It doesn’t pull back, you see, as long as the
Turtles… the Turtles are unknown. 

How long did it take you guys to figure out what the look of
the movie was going to be in terms of making sure that it was
faithful to the comic book or the original design of them, deciding
between that and a photo realism that is now achievable in CGI?

KM: 
It was certainly planned from the beginning. You head down a
certain path of what you want it to look like. Our production
designer comes from live-action, a guy called Simon Murton, and he’s
worked on the past two Matrix films, JUDGE DREDD, he art-directed
THE CROW and he’s got a pedigree in that, sort of that genre, cool,
gritty realism. And we sort of knew from the start, it was funny to
read web traffic and stuff when we first announced the Turtles and
everybody sort of assumed they knew what it was going to look like.
The whole idea was to have it make it not look like what people were
going to assume right out of the gate.

So,
I mentioned it again at Comic-Con, I’m trying not to repeat myself,
but we lit most of the film in black and white before we even added
a stitch of color, which was really something. We sort of went back
to like  THE THIRD MAN
and  really good high
contrast movies instead of just going and copying like a Frank
Miller look, like going back to when black and white film was a real
great art form. So, it just sort of grew from there. We shot
ourselves in the foot because, in a good way, like when we started
adding stuff like wet downs and specularity and little highlights
and all these little details and you realize why they are not in
every little CG film because it’s really hard to do. Especially,
once we’ve got one sequence working really great with it, it really
stuck out and we had to make the rest of the film look like it. It
was little bit of an evolution, but the final look is pretty much we
intended from the start.

I
just didn’t realize it was gonna look quite so, that we were gonna
be able to follow through quite so much. We’ve got a lot of
production keys, just hundred of them and it always seems to me
that’s it’s the 100 percent that you aim for and you always have to
sort of realize that you’re gonna hit 75 and you’ll just have to
make it work, but, Hong Kong is just amazing with how they can
actually implement and how they can actually implement whatever
direction you give them. We wound up really close. We were color
timing last night until 3:30 in the morning and we were looking at
the film and there are so many shots where you’re like, that looks
just like the painting that we did, so we ended up pretty close, so
it’s cool.

How much of the film is already completed?

KM:  Well,
we’re done animation. We’re basically about 90 percent completed
I’d say. We’re doing color timing right now, just on the visuals,
and doing just some last-minute renders and some more effects
tweaking, so, that’s the stuff that’s coming across on people’s laps
across the Pacific. And then from there we still have to color time
it and we’re still doing sound effects. We’re in the thick of post
right now.

How long did it take you from start to finish, in your
involvement?

KM: 
I was involved in October 2004. I started on the story and
the treatment process. We worked really closely with Peter Laird,
and just that alone took quite a few months. Just to get the story
down and working on how to implement it all. We started actual
design just a couple of months after that. Even just the couple of
us that were working on the story, we had sketchbooks and we we’re
starting as we were talking about the story, just gave us something
to do with our hands.

Is this a PG-13 movie or PG?

KM:  Its
close, it’s gonna be PG. It’s tight and you guys know because you’ve
seen it now but our biggest enemy is intensity. I mean, it’s not
because we want to be graphic with any of the violence, blood or
language, it’s just sort of that feeling that you want to feel
real peril, and that’s sort of the benefit of Spider-Man or
Batman. It actually feels like those characters are gonna die. How
can you push that without pushing too far? So, you push until you
get hit and then you pull it back and we never intended it to be a
sort of a very G friendly sort of movie so you know, we knew we’d go
too far for that.

TG:  We
would love to do it rated PG-13. But you can’t really. You know when
we first started setting this up and we went to the studio they
said, no way you can do PG-13 because everybody lives in the
quadrants, the 7 to 11 and then the older one. So we tried to get a
compromise where we could shove it up a little bit and get close to
it without getting a PG-13. We had to pull back on several items
that are really taboo, which are the throwing stars, the shurikens;
to a certain degree nun chucks — certainly in the UK and
Scandinavia — are forbidden. And those are the toys of the Turtles.

But,
you know, it’s one of those things we would love to graduate, maybe,
if this thing is successful; take it to another level of PG-13.
Because personally, for me, I always thought when we got involved in
this and had an early discussion and I said, "I don’t care
about the little kids; I want to satisfy the alums." Which were
with us back in the day in the ’90s. And I said, ‘If we can make
them happy, I don’t care.’ The little ones are gonna get it off
the television and they run around and they’re lookin’ at the toys.
But, those alumni that really made this thing happen in the
beginning, those are the ones you really gotta…

The comic book was much more adult.

TG:  Exactly.
Exactly. For me it was one of these travels that when I bought it in
June of 1988, I wasn’t completely sold on the concept myself. I was
coming from a company that made all the Kung Fu movies in Hong Kong
— Jackie Chan and Jet Li and earlier Bruce Lee. I said if we could
take the Ninja Turtles and throw them in some suits and put out
stunt guys into it and put Phoebe Cates into it, we could get our
money back in Japan. I have that letter saying that we could make
this for 3 million bucks in our studio in Hong Kong, if we make any
money outside of that… terrific. And that became the origin of why
we originally decided to green-light the project.

And
as we started bringing in elements like Steve Barrett who was coming
in off some very hot music videos, he suggested we bring in the
Henson’s.  And Brian
Henson became the second unit photographer. 
A creature shop out of the UK brought in all of the build and
this thing kind of escalated from three upwards to nine and of
course, it’s legendary here, I don’t have any money to make this
movie, I had to go find the money and make it and nobody wanted it
in town and finally New Line [Cinema] stepped up and really, the
rest became history so it was not easy to get this film set up. And
admittedly, I always thought it would make money. I never thought it
would be as big as it was. This time coming around it wasn’t easy to
set up again.

Because
the wisdom was, there’s X-Men, there’s Spiderman, there’s other
superheroes now and the Turtles really don’t have any fantastic
things that they do, they don’t fly or do other stuff. And it was
out of the belief from Warner Bros. and The Weinstein Company. I
remember Harvey [Weinstein] was in Hong Kong and we showed him a
trailer and he came out of his chair and said, "I missed it the
first time, I gotta have this now." And he said, ‘I want this
movie.’ So, there’s never, it’s not an easy project because says,
it was post HOWARD THE DUCK in the beginning, when everybody said,
if George Lucas can’t make money on a comic book how can you or
nobody? And I said, well, George Lucas never had toys and he never
was on syndication, so it’s often time what happens in this
business. People that are in the business don’t see it for whatever
it is.

But,
they don’t go and employ their research departments; they don’t
listen to their research departments, who could tell you that this
thing was really selling on the shelf. When Kevin and I were
schlepping around town trying to make presentation, what really sold
the people was that he cut a really phenomenal trailer, which was
very crude in the beginning but once they could see how these
Turtles would look, then it started to become a reality. And the
price that we were making this film at, everybody said, how bad
could it be? You know, these things are, I don’t know, I’ve lived
large off of this for a long time and I think it’s not so much me,
it was the fact that I always felt there was an audience that is…
was with us, is still going to be with us and then we have the new
group. So, if we execute in a halfway decent fashion, we should make
some money. 

So as far as the nun chucks, they aren’t in the movie at all?

TG: 
No, they are in the movie, you know, nun chucks are OK in the
UK if they are in the belt or you don’t see somebody get whacked
with it because what happened, and also the throwing stars, kids
were going into metal shop in the UK and they were making these
things and they were going to football matches and launching them
into Manchester United, so they outlawed these things. And then, you
get into the Scandinavian countries where violence is totally taboo
and they don’t want to know about it. Bruce Lee was banned for years
and years in Scandinavia.

There
are levels around the world of censorship. But we are kind of
victimized by the fact that we have three pictures out here, so the
Motion Pictures Association had said to us, "Well, you’re
rather special because the parents will say, ‘Oh the Turtles are
benign, they’re not gonna be bad.’" And some of the action that
we have in it is pretty strong and they said you guys are walking on
a little bit of tightrope here, pull back a little bit. I think,
when we’re pulling back we’ll do it more with effects and music, it
won’t be as dramatic and everything else. So, it will still have
power. Kevin and I were just scratching our heads and saying you go
look at [THE CHRONICLES OF] NARNIA and some of the movies out there
that are far more violent, but we come with that preconceived idea
that parents will take their kids.

Let
me know what you think. Send
questions and comments to [email protected].

Stay
tuned for part 2…