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Beowulf Press Conference
Crispin, you’d worked with Robert Zemeckis before on Back to the Future.
Crispin Glover: “That’s right. I worked with him one time before on the first Back to the Future film about 20 years prior to working with him on this. And it was interesting working from one technology to this different technology, in terms of the style. Of course, he was a 20 years younger man, and myself as well. But I remember everything was very particularly storyboarded and there were very exacting things that had to be done, for working on Back to the Future, which was all excellent.
I noticed, though, a definite change in the style of how the direction was done because things were not so necessarily exacting, but I liked more this way of working, where you were finding it as you were going through it. You kept going further into the thing and finding more as you went along. But it’s rare that I’m in a film that I actually like, that I’m in. I guess I shouldn’t say that. (Laughing) It’s true. But I’m really excited about this film. I just saw it the other day and it feels like a strange hallucinogenic experience. It has been an excellent experience.”
Angelina, your character’s the mother of a monster. How did you approach her?
Angelina Jolie: “I was excited I got a call that I was going to be working with Bob Zemeckis, and I was pretty much saying yes to anything. Then I was told I was going to be a lizard (laughing). Then I was brought into a room with Bob and a bunch of pictures and examples, and he showed me this picture of a woman half painted gold, and then a lizard. And, I’ve got kids and I thought, 'That's great. That's so bizarre. I'm going to be this crazy reptilian person and creature.' I was very excited. And then I met with Crispin and we had a great time, and just amazing scenes. Then I saw the poster, and saw a few other things, and I realized I'm not just a lizard (laughing).
But I'm very excited about it. It was just great. She's one of those fun characters. She's evil and she's temptation and she's very fun to play. Again, we had a great time and I got to work with great actors.”
Was one of the attractions of working on this the short work schedule? How are you able to balance all of these different aspects of your life?
Angelina Jolie: “I'm not the only one on this panel with children (laughing). This was a two and a half day shoot for me, and I was three months pregnant.”
You wouldn’t know…
Angelina Jolie: “You wouldn’t know. Well, we did the mapping of my body before. But no, it was a pleasure. But yes, the fact that it was short, it was that much easier to not have to work too much.”
What was your motivation for changing the original Beowulf story?
Neil Gaiman: “The biggest motivation was creating a film that would be satisfying as a story. Beowulf is a remarkable, powerful story. It’s the oldest story in the English language that we have. But it’s always been considered incredibly problematic, from a literary and critical point of view, in that it starts with young Beowulf coming in and rescuing [the Kingdom] from Grendel and from Grendel’s mother, and then we cut in 50 years later and he fights the dragon and dies. That’s the poem. What we were trying to do was keep the events of the poem while giving the events a reason to have happened. As we wrote it, we tried to be very faithful to the poem and to the characters in the poem, whilst assuming that maybe there were things that were happening off stage, and that maybe some of the things that were being told had eroded over time, or sometimes people had lied.”
Roger Avary: “I’m not entirely sure that our version of Beowulf wasn’t the original version.”
Neil Gaiman: “Oh, I am (laughing).”
Roger Avary: “If you read it, keep in mind that it existed as an oral tradition for maybe 700 years before it was written down. And when the Christian monks put it down onto the document, they added their own flare to the storytelling. They added their elements of Christianity to it. What we did was look at the existing translations and realized that there were hints and elements of the story [that were left out].”
Neil Gaiman: “For example, when Beowulf goes off to fight Grendel’s mother, he heads down into that lair all on his own, disappears, is gone for eight days fighting her, and comes back with Grendel’s head. Eight days is an awful long time to fight a monster, and why didn’t he bring her head back? And so we are actually very faithful to what happened. We’re just implying that maybe there was other stuff that happened as well.”
What do you think about the changes? Did you know the original story?
Crispin Glover: “I just think it was very playable. In the story, Grendel doesn’t speak. He speaks in the film so that helps. But on top of it, psychologically, they’re delving into the characters. And I do think they’re being faithful to the original story structure, but they’re getting into the depth of it - which really isn’t a violation, I don’t think.”
Ray Winstone: “Well, I told Robert Zemeckis that I knew the story, but I didn't (laughing). Where I went to school we read about Al Capone and things like that, so Beowulf was very, very new to me. All I knew about Vikings was Tony Curtis and Kirk Douglas. In a way, that was a good thing because I read the script not knowing the story. It seemed to me that, when I read it, and I spoke to the boys about it when it came down, it's kind of a modern story as well. It’s about ambition and greed and hate, and then love, at the end, and that finding what you really wanted was there all the time, right in front of you, your son. It kind of reminded me of Hollywood, in a way, and the ambition in people. That's exactly how I approached it, from the off, really. When I spoke with the two guys, that's how I pitched it. They went, 'That's exactly what we thought.' (Laughing) You were lying as well, weren’t you?”
Neil Gaiman: “Actually, the very first thing that Ray said to us was, ‘You know what I like about this script?’ We said, ‘No.’ And he said, ‘All the swearing.’ (Laughing) And we said, ‘We just had to take that out.’”
Page 3: On the Performance Capture Technique
