The 2007 San Diego Comic Con kicked off with a bang as Paramount Pictures premiered the second reel of the 3-D performance capture movie Beowulf to a packed crowd at a downtown San Diego theater. Screenwriters Neil Gaiman (MirrorMask, Stardust the novel) and Roger Avary (The Rules of Attraction) were on hand to introduce the footage as well as answer a few questions from those lucky enough to be in the first audience to see the footage.
After showing the film's trailer, Gaiman and Avary set up the footage being screened by explaining the plot leading up to the second reel. The footage shown to the preview audience picked up after Beowulf (Ray Winstone) crossed the sea with his crew of 14. Stripping off his weapons - and clothes - Beowulf goes one on one with Grendel, killing the creature by chopping off his arm.
The scene screened began with Beowulf and his comrades celebrating the end of Grendel's reign of terror. But Beowulf soon learns killing the beast only serves to incite Grendel's mother (Angelina Jolie) into action. Beowulf is forced to journey to her cave to confront the grieving mother.
While Avary explained that he wanted to tell this story in order "to make it easier on future generations" forced to read the historic poem in high school, let's just say the footage screened was not your typical Beowulf story. The performance capture technology has progressed light years beyond the work of The Polar Express and the fantastic elements of Beowulf, which would have been cost prohibitive to bring to life on the screen in normal circumstances, are beautifully rendered using the improved performance capture technology. Those improvements, and the use of 3-D to tell the classic tale, should set Beowulf apart from other epic films.
Even if the Beowulf story isn't your cup of tea, the visuals are so engaging and extraordinary the story itself comes across as secondary. Draped in barely there glimmering gold paint, Angelina Jolie emerges out of the water as one of the most sensual creatures captured on film. Grendel is portrayed as a skeletal beast, and the heroic Beowulf has a physique equal to the studly warriors of 300.
While the performances are 100% the actors, the movie is entirely motion capture. Working in that virtual world allowed certain physical attributes of the actors to be enhanced (specifically Winstone's body). But Avary and Gaiman were both quick to point out that the technology takes nothing away from the work done by the actors on the set.
Gaiman said the actors worked on the movie two years ago in Los Angeles, wearing suits with dots on them and looking, according to Gaiman, "an awful lot like Tron." He went on to describe the melding of the actors' work and the performance capture technology as "digitally enhanced acting." Gaiman admits he's even been thinking about the possibility of Hopkins getting nominated as supporting actor for his role as King Hrothgar. It's Hopkins' voice, his facial movements, his entire performance, but the snag is it's a performance capture film. Gaiman compared the process the actors went through to doing Shakespeare in the round. "A scene would be started and the scene would go all the way through," explained Gaiman.
Asked how they came to be involved in Beowulf, Avary said he was hooked on the story after having to read it in high school. "Monsters, dragons, guys with swords... What's not to love?" After getting hired and then fired from Sandman, Avary was looking for something to do and Beowulf was a story he'd always had a desire to tackle. Avary said the story reminds him of a game of telephone tag where one person whispers something to the person next to them and by the end of the line, the story is completely different from the original version. He also admitted he's always believed there was something "a little dodgy" about Beowulf. The idea of Grendel dragging men back to his mother so she could sire more monsters fascinated Avary.
Hooking up with Gaiman, the two set off to Mexico to write the script. "Don't know why. I would have gone to Iceland," joked Gaiman. Avary recalled that a man was serving them margaritas while they were there working on the script, but Gaiman has a totally different recollection of the events. According to Gaiman it was cheap Mexican beer that kept the twosome going.
Avary said they wrote the screenplay "very, very, very quickly." Robert Zemeckis came onboard as a producer and backed Avary to direct the movie. But as they got deeper into pre-production Zemeckis became available to direct. And then the decision to go with performance capture and do it in 3-D changed Avary and Gaiman's approach to the script. Gaiman said that before deciding on the 3-D performance capture route, "We had the cheapest possible dragon fight at the end." Zemeckis told the duo to "write whatever you want" and Avary and Gaiman took that advice to heart. They even thought they'd gone too far, but Zemeckis told them that no matter what they came up with, no matter how far they wanted to push the fight scenes, it would cost him about a million dollars per minute. On working with Zemeckis Avary said, "It was really, really a blessing for him to make this movie."
Avary and Gaiman revealed the biggest challenge during the early stage of the script was figuring out a way to age Beowulf. He's 20 at the beginning of the story and in his 50s by the end of the film. That would have been difficult to do in a standard format, but with performance capture aging an actor is no problem at all. "Technology really liberated us," said Avary.
Despite the sexy Jolie dripping wet and the violent content of Beowulf, the filmmakers and studio are aiming for a PG-13 rating. "We've been talking about that since the very beginning," said Gaiman. They're hoping to avoid an R rating by making the blood green and using swear words appropriate from the Beowulf era.
Next up, the writing team plans on taking on Charlie Burns' Black Hole.
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Beowulf hits theaters on November 16, 2007.
