Andrew Stanton Discusses the Making of "John Carter
Question and answer transcript - December 2011 -
provided by Walt Disney Studios:
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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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