12:59 - Mila: I got to kick ass, learn how to take apart guns, and kick some ass in 5 inch heels. I had some weapons training with the automatic, the baton, I get to beat Mark up.
Mark: She enjoyed beating me up.
Moderator asks Mila to say some words about John in Russian.
John: “What’s Russian for “Oh fucker?”
Mark starts speaking Russain. “I learned it for another movie and I didn’t get to say it. You want to hear it again?” Girls squeal.
Ludacris: I don’t speak Russian.
Mark: I came from the music world, so I’m always a little suspect of guys, and how much they commit, but [Ludacris] is the next big bright shining star to come out of hip hop. He’s taken on a role that was really written for an actor, and he’s done an outstanding job.
Mark: Originally, his role was written for a 60 yr old white guy…
John: Originally, it was Robert Downey Jr. He went the other way with Tropic Thunder. We turned a white guy into a black guy.
12:54 - First clip of Max Payne:
Gang in a subway, Chicago. Max goes in the Mens room. Washes hands. Gang follows.
Gang leader threatens him for his watch. Mark turns around and shows his badge. Gang leader pulls out a gun, “You a cop or something?”
Mark: Not tonight.
They approach Mark. He kicks their asses. One guy gets away and jumps on the subway tracks, tries to outrun the train. Mark shoots at one guy until he’s crouched by a toilet. He pulls out a photo, with a gun to the guy’s chin, “You ever see this woman?”
End clip
12:51 - Director, John Moore: Isn’t that the point of playing the game — that you feel like Max Payne? So I thought, lets kick the shit out of the camera, so that you feel like the character, and that was pretty much the technique.
Mark: this is like doing a concert in Japan, you dont really say anything and they’re like “Oooh.” Now I know why The New Kids wanted to go back. You start missing that kind of thing, it makes you feel warm in the pants.
I read the script after doing Invincible, Lovely Bones and The Happening, and I wanted to kick some ass again. I thought, with my street cred, my arrest record I was credible enough to play this role. This guy is really one of the happiest guys in the work, he has a beautiful wife, beautiful child, and once that’s taken away he doesn’t really have any hope.
It’s a dark ugly world, and I think people are going to be very happy seeing him wreck havoc.
(Rolling the first clip…)
12:47 - Start of Max Payne panel:
Some girl: Mark I love you!
Mark Wahlberg: Thank you, I love you!
The girls like him way more than Keanu, but the boys cheered more for Ludacris than Wahlberg or Mila Kunis.
12:43 - Final reel of TDTESS presentation:
FBI goes to Dr Benson’s door. Army base. Jon Hamm is an FBI guy. He shows Helen, Klatu.
Voice over, Kathy Bates: The less advanced civilization is exterminated. Unfortunately, in this case, the less advanced civilization is us.
Jennifer in spacesuit. Big fireball in the middle of a city. Text on screen, “The skies will go dark, the cities will go quiet, the earth will stand still.”
Lots of destruction shots — blackouts, storms, fires, spacesuits.
(It might be a slightly new trailer, but it doesn’t look that different from what’s been online.)
12:39 - “Keanu, what’s Klatu’s view of humanity at that point?”
Keanu: He’s starting to have a little bit of a conflict about a decision that he made. He’s coming into a more human understanding, and being able to be affected. He has a little bit of ambivalence…and maybe he’s starting to think they’re not so bad as he thought they were.
Moderator: What can you tell us about Gort?
Scott: Somewhere along the line there developed rumors that there was no Gort — there is definitely Gort. It wouldn’t be TDTESS with no Gort. We went through various visualizations…at least 100’s of possibilities. We ended up coming back not far from the original in the concept. I began to see the simple brilliance of the human form chosen by this alien. They’re still working on him — WETA is doing it.
The spaceship, Klayu’s spacesuit, Gort — the idea of them having an organic, biological base, this idea is making its way into Sci-fi cinema. This idea that advanced civilizations are not into industrialization as we are because we’ve seen the effect of that. We’ve seen that that has it’s limits.
Setting up final video footage reel. They don’t come out until 12/12, so the visual effects are mostly not done. “I wanted to be able to give this audience what you’re here to see…”
12:35 - Scene w/ Jaden Smith and Keanu Reeves:
They’re in the back of a pickup. Looks like Keanu hitchhiked out of the containment facility.
Jaden: “You don’t look like an Alien. Why do you look human”
Keanu: “So I can talk to you.”
“I told Helen we should kill you. I didn’t mean it though.”
“So what’s going to happen to us?”
“I was just wondering the same thing.”
End scene
12:33 - Jennifer Connely plays Dr. Helen Benson (Crowd cat calls Jennifer.)
Scott: “The relationship between Helen and her son is deeply explored. We talked about how we could use the relationship between the two of them to be an illustration for Klatu as to how human beings treat each other, how they treat the planet.”
Jaden Smith plays her stepson.
“One of the things I love about the Wise film…it’s a film about the human spirit.”
Setting up scene of Jaden and Keanu together.
Scott: “Well get to the big, exciting movie stuff at the end–this is a smaller scene.”
12:30 - “Keanu, talk about becoming Klatu. What was your proccess?”
Keanu: “He just objectified everything he looked at…he was kind of an entity trapped in a human body. He came to see, to judge, so when he looked out, he just kind of … looked out.”
In the original, Klautu was kind of warm and fuzz, more human than human… I’m not that guy. (Giggles)
Scott: I watched original film quite a few times…I wanted to understand the essential things that made it work. That film really takes place in the real world, it’s not an overly fanciful movie, except for the alien elements. We tried to come up with a visual design that would support that idea, but the trick with the update was to look at the 1951 film as a product of that technological revolution. Sci-fi is now turning to higher ideas, and ecology and biology. That was very interesting to all of us. We tried to create something that was organic and paid homage to the original but wasn’t the same hard laser, spacecraft stuff that we’ve seen.
12:23 -First clip from The Day the Earth Stood Still:
This is a scene where Jlatum played by Keanu (girls scream) is being brought to A compound. He wants to speak to the world leaders, but he’s been denied. And is going to be interrogated. Keanu in a wheelchair, hospital scrubs, gets strapped to the chair and sensors put on his forehead.
Big, empty room… a lie detector test.
Control questions: Are you currently in a seated position?
Yes.
Are you human?
My body is.
Are you aware of an impending attack on the USA?
You should let me go.
Keanu gives tester a massive electric shock with his brain and then hypnotizes him into telling him how to escape. Keanu steals his suit, brain numbs all the guards, and walks out the door.
(Crowd goes apeshit.)
12:20 - “Why remake it, Scott?” asks moderator.
“If your gonna remake a classic, you’ve got to have a good reason…for me, it was the script. When I read it, what occurred to me, the original was so a product of its time, that commented so well on that early cold war era, and the visual effects were so ahead of its time, and the idea of updating it made sense because times have changed. We have different issues. This film seemed like the perfect venue to address some of those.”
He says story opened up chances to try new things with effects. “The idea of an Alien who comes to earth and assesses human nature from an outside perspective is such an interesting thing.”
Scott introduces first clip…
12:18 - Moderators first qustion for Scott: First film, directed by Robert Wise, “You had a close encounter with Robert Wise, tell us about that.”
He made a short film that got into a festival in Indiana, Wise was getting a Lifetime Achievement Award, he managed to get a private dinner with Wise, told him his fave films of his were The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Haunting. Wise told him that if he was into genre films, his first film should be horror. He took that advice and made The Exorcism of Emily Rose.
The producer was making Speed with Keanu, and he saw a poster at FOX for The Day the Earth Stood Still. while he was waiting for the President of Production to come in, he saw it and said, “Forget what I came here to pitch to you –– we should remake DTESS with Keanu.” But that exec was soon fired. 15 years later, a draft of the script showed up on his doorstep.
Keanu says he remembers that. Girls scream.
12:14 - Lights go down completely. Loud white noise on screen. Keanu Reeves comes out. Theyr’e going to show two scenes and a trailer from The Day the Earth Stood Still. Intros Scott Erickson, director, Jennifer Connely
producer moderator Michael Grode (sp?). The mics arent on. Girls are yelling “Keanu, we love you!”
12:10 - Director of Programming for comic con comes out, Eddie Ibrahim. Welcomes us to Comic-Con 2008, warns us not to videotape any of the trailers, etc. Sort of threatens that if we put anything on YouTube, the studios wont come back. Everyone claps at that. (This year they have true HD in Hall H.)
Originally posted on:
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