Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs Press Conference
Are there any new challenges coming back for a third time?Ray Romano: "Well, the same challenges as always, just recording without the other actors being there. We had to do one scene, particularly, the laughing scene because Manny never really laughed before. That was a little [difficult]."
Director Carlos Saldanha: "I had to tickle him."
Ray Romano: "Yeah, yeah. The hardest part was just the physicality of it, standing in front of the microphone and pretending that you're wrestling with a dinosaur. It's kind of weird. You've got to get used to it."
How tricky is it with a lisp?
John Leguizamo: "The whole thing is pretty tricky. This one, I was trying to…I was a single mom, representing single moms - two jobs, three kids, T-Rexes are like teenagers - so it was trying to find that vulnerability. I guess it's easier being alone in that room, if you guys have been there. I don't know about everyone's vulnerability. It's kind of embarrassing to be that soft, whatever. But it was cool to go that far. What Ray said, it's always really hard to make that voice really pop on screen so it feels alive. So when you're getting hit and choked and all that, to get yourself really in that physically agitated state so that it really doesn't get flat, doesn't feel kind of like…"
Ray Romano: "I got a question. Can't they invent, because that's what it is… it's so hard, you've got to pretend like you're running and you fall down a thing, and then if you move like this [to the side], then that guy over there starts yelling at you. Can't you record it with one of those things that Madonna wears? Or you can't do it because you need the big boom mic?"
Carlos Saldanha: "The Madonna recording technique? The tricky part of it is sometimes if you have many people there, you have to have the quality of the recordings be perfect. Any little noise, I remember, I don't know if it was one of John's sessions or one of yours - there's some banging."
John Leguizamo: "Oh, the construction."
Carlos Saldanha: "You could hear a little bit of it but then the sound designer guy, the sound technician was saying that little sound already is going into the voice. So it has to be clean. That's the difficulty. We're always thinking about that because we get a lot of other questions from the talent, just, 'It would be great if…'"
Ray Romano: "We could move."
Carlos Saldanha: "Exactly."
John Leguizamo: "Have a treadmill so you could be running."
Carlos Saldanha: "Yeah, you're falling down, you're running down the scene."
Ray Romano: "Because every other scene we're falling down something."
John Leguizamo: "Screaming, getting smacked."
Carlos Saldanha: "But you guys did it yourselves perfectly."
Queen Latifah: "Probably the only difficult thing for me was trying to be pregnant and in labor but hide it from these guys at the same time. So it was like, 'Ooh, oh, everything's okay. Just go on.' Fake these labor sounds and the difficulty and pain that's involved in that, but other than that it was good."
How did you decide to acknowledge the timeline and let dinosaurs exist in the film?
Carlos Saldanha: "That's funny because when we did the first movie, we went to the museum and did the whole research and all that stuff. We were talking to this very great guy from the Museum of Natural History, the paleontologist. He was saying, 'When you do the Ice Age, everything's good. But there were no dinosaurs in the Ice Age.' So we knew it. So when the third one came, when the concept came through, discovering this world of dinosaurs, it's not so much that dinosaurs lived in the Ice Age. The concept was more they discovered this world of dinosaurs that nobody knew existed. So we tapped into that. We weren't going for the Discovery Channel-kind of accuracy. We were going for the fun of like what if these two worlds lived in the same spot and how much fun we can have with that. Also, we played through the whole thing about Manny as a character was always the biggest thing on earth. That was some of his lines in the first one. We had it again on the third one and we said, 'Okay, let's play with that.'"
"Part of the character story of Manny in this movie was about him overcoming his own fears and him also thinking he could control the world. He could have the baby and make the world perfect for the baby. So the dinosaurs created this ginormous obstacle that put him back into this like, in a way, it made him realize that he needs much more than just his, in a way, ego that is there to have this life with the baby and have a life with the friends and all that stuff."
Ray Romano: "Also, in your defense when you say dinosaurs weren't in the Ice Age, well, animals don't really talk either."
Carlos Saldanha: "Yes, technically. We created, too. We took creative liberty to make something that was entertaining, fun, and not trying to go for the scientific accuracy. We just created this parallel world that they never collided until this movie."
Ray Romano: "By the way, 90% of the population doesn't know that dinosaurs didn't exist during the Ice Age so don't tell anybody."
