Posted by Chris Jensen |
Apr. 15, 2008 07:09AM PST
| 331 views
|
FILED UNDER: Interviews. Movies.
M. Night Shyamalan was once heralded as the next big thing, the heir apparent to Spielberg and Lucas after The Sixth Sense wowed the box-office. Unfortunately, the acclaim was a little premature, as M. Night has had a rough go of it ever since, and, in my opinion, his movies have become steadily worse with each new effort, culminating in the laughably bad Lady in the Water, released in 2006.
Shyamalan's next movie will be out later this year, titled The Happening, which it may or may not be. While The Happening is wrapping things up in post-production, M. Night is busy putting together another film, Avatar: The Last Airbender, based on the children's animated TV show of the same name. He took some time to yap it up with Empire Online about this new endeavour.
"The actual plot is in a place where there are four tribes of people. And these people each have people within their tribe that have mastery over one element: water, earth, fire or air. They all live in a balance and harmony and once every generation there is born an individual who can bend – that is manipulate – all four of those elements and thereby keep a balance between all. They are kind of a Buddha figure to some extent. The story is about how, in this particular time, this avatar is born into the airbenders and disappears. Then all hell breaks loose and the fire nation basically commits genocide and eradicates the air tribe in the hopes of killing the avatar and taking over control of everything. This child then re-emerges, which is the beginning of our story. He reappears having been frozen in the ice — there is a whole story about how that happens — a hundred years later and this world is all fucked up and he is the last airbender, but he doesn’t want this job. He’s forced into the position of putting the world back together again. It actually has a lot of Shakespearean overtones to it. There’s lots of family angst, and fathers denying sons in different storylines."
Read More
(Source: Empire Online)
Tags shyamalan, airbender, avatar
Posted by Chris Jensen |
Apr. 11, 2008 07:02AM PST
| 239 views
|
FILED UNDER: Interviews. Movies.
Remember when James Cameron had geek-cred? Dude made one great science fiction movie after another, from Terminator to Aliens to The Abyss, promptly hucking it all away when he made Titanic, the last movie I walked out of. Yes, I'm a Titanic hater, sue me. I think I walked out when one of the characters was running around a sinking ship firing a gun. Ugh. After the monumental success of Titanic and his ego-maniacal speech at the Oscars, James spent the next decade making little documentaries while trapped in a submersible. Finally, after what seems forever, Cameron is poised to reclaim some additional geek-credits with his forthcoming 3-D movie Avatar.
Variety has posted a lengthy interview with Cameron that focuses entirely on shooting in 3D, a technique many have tried but none have turned into box-office gold. The interview covers a lot of ground and gets pretty technical at times, but it appears obvious that Cameron is consumed with this new project, which bodes well for the final result.
From Variety:
Someone told me that "Citizen Kane" was a great example of how to shoot for 3-D: great depth of field, wide-angle lenses, etc.
I think it's a myth that you want deep focus in 3-D shots. I find the opposite is true. Selective focus, created by working at low f-stops with longer lenses, evolved as a cinematic technique to direct the audience's attention to the character of greatest narrative importance at a given moment. With 3-D, the director needs to lead the audience's eye, not let it roam around the screen to areas which are not converged. So all the usual cinematic techniques of selective focus, separation lighting, composition, etc., that one would use in a 2-D film to direct the eye to the subject of interest, still apply, and are perhaps even more important. We all see the world in 3-D. The difference between really being witness to an event vs. seeing it as a stereo image is that when you're really there, your eye can adjust its convergence as it roves over subjects at different distances.
Read the whole shebang by heading here.
Read More
(Source: Variety)
Tags aliens, terminator, 3-d, avatar, james cameron
