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Why can’t you aim for a PG-13 rating?
Producer Tom Gray: “Well contractually we have to deliver a PG. Again, we’ve had some preliminary talks with the rating board. You know, it’s funny. You can go and see Narnia and it’s really violent. They have different standards for us than they do for Narnia or any other PG. They said you can’t really whap somebody with the nunchucks. Throwing stars are definitely out. I remember they were making them in the UK and they were throwing them at football matches. They would launch these things and there was a huge thing, so we had to be very careful.
The Turtles are something that parents are going to trust that this is not going to be too far out there. We wanted to go far out there. If we had our way, we’d probably be making R or PG-13, but the forces that be in the marketplace tell you that you’ve got to push it a little bit because times are different. But you can’t cross that line into PG-13. We pulled back. It’s still going to be pretty out there.”
Writer/Director Kevin Munroe: “The biggest enemy is going to be intensity. It’s not violence. It’s never really glorified. It’s always done with the sort of Turtle’s spirit, which is cool. It’s not language or blood. It’s sort of just intensity where those fun peaks and valleys come from when you’re telling the story.”
How did you incorporate the Night Watcher character?
Munroe: “When you meet with Pete (Laird) he’s got his sort of 10 Commandments of what the turtles can and can’t do. There are a few things that are grey areas. One of them was can one of them have an alter ego? They’ve had other alter egos before. I think Mike was actually a superhero in the new animated series, and I think a couple other things they’ve done. It also comes from characters and the character-based conflict, and the idea that Leonardo wants to make the world a better place so he’s going out training and doing this. But, the idea that Raph is going after that same thing that Leo is, but he’s going after it in a completely different way and so how do you take all of that frustration and all of that desire to do good? So you just create a character out of that and he has this great alter ego that really becomes this personification of the sort of difference between Leonardo and Raph throughout the entire movie. Those were new creations specifically for the movie.”
And what about going to Latin America?
Munroe: “I think they traveled in some comic book. It’s really funny because when we started the story process, we came up with the screwiest ideas. It was like ‘Turtles in Space’ and at the end of it we came back to it just has to be in New York. The thing from the beginning with me is that it had to be about family with me. In a lot of the other incarnations, they touched on the idea that they’re brothers, but I wanted it to feel like they were actually brothers relating to each other and a family that’s sort of falling apart. We were trying to figure out just plot-wise and the franchise has been everywhere. I mean you come up with the dumbest things. They time travel to Aztec times and Pete is like, ‘Yeah, we did it in 1996.’ We can’t win and so we ended up with the Night Watcher and that’s where a lot of that stuff came from.”
Will you be including other monsters instead of just Shredder and his gang?
Munroe: “Pete was very big on the idea of having a new villain. He didn’t really demand it, necessarily. I think we all sort of felt that Shredder had been done to a good extent. Batman Begins just did it great when they did the kick off with the Joker. It’s a really good idea. Now when he comes back in the next one, that’s cool because now you know who this new Bruce Wayne is and you’ve got that whole set. To a lesser extent, I think it’s the same sort of thing for the Turtles. I think Shredder would make a much bigger impact in, I think, the second movie than he would in the first one because you’d sort of assume it for the first one which is kind of neat.
Pete is a huge monster fan and we always talked about the tone of the movie. I truly loved the tone of Ghostbusters. …Not necessarily chasing and hunting and all of that other stuff, but just that level of fun and that level of imagination. It’s still sort of grounded that as long as we go back to the family, there’s something that’s tangible and doesn’t get too silly. That was something we were really sort of cognizant of, too. Just making it feel not gritty, but believable.”
Is there any continuity with the live action films?
Gray: “The continuity would be the basic New York City is the backdrop. I think we had to go a little bit different, a bigger story from the first movie. The second movie was pretty small - within a neighborhood. This thing is taking on big proportions of extra terrestrial, out there, back in time, so I think scope-wise it’s much bigger. But the essentials of the Turtles are still the same. You don’t want to fool with that. Kevin certainly had to stay within the confines of Peter’s imagination. Every time he wanted to go out there, Peter would say, ‘No, they wouldn’t do that.’ We couldn’t push too far away from it.”
Munroe: “Yeah, it’s a continuation of that. The idea of that is that we didn’t want to tell an origin story all over again. The idea of it sort of being a rebirth story, so the idea that they’ve been through all of these adventures… There’s such a mass knowledge in a lot of markets of what the Turtles have been through and who they’ve been with and so forth. We’re playing off of that, the idea that they’ve been through all of these adventures and now they’re questioning what brings them together as a family and is it only a common foe that binds them as a family? In that respect, yeah, we sort of do play off the fact that they’ve had these adventures, and they travel back in time and they’ve done all of this stuff. But now Splinter is worried that his family is falling apart and can they come together without a common foe to sort of bind them. This movie sort of answers that and rebirths them a bit for a new franchise, which is kind of fun.”
