The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn

[polkablues]

All right, I haven't gotten my hands on the actual magazine yet, but I managed to come across shitty scans of three pages from the middle of the article.  Whether or not anyone besides myself actually has an interest in reading them, I'm transcribing them anyway.

... Bell.  "I think, bizarrely, he's looking for stability in something that's very shaky.  Also, Haddock is looking for the same thing.  Tintin is emotionally unavailable to some degree.  So they are both searching for these primal things from each other."

Haddock is played by Andy Serkis, the Laurence Olivier of performance capture.  Given his groundbreaking PC work as Gollum and King Kong, it would seem obvious that Serkis was a Jackson shoo-in.  Not so.  It was Spielberg's idea to have Serkis bellow the Captain's trademark esoteric outbursts, such as "Blistering barnacles!" and "Thundering typhoons!"

"Andy understands how to express himself through every pore," says Spielberg.  "He is brilliant at extending himself just to the point of burlesque and farce, but never crossing that line.  He had the courage to take Captain Haddock as far as we felt he should be taken."

With Quint in Jaws, Spielberg is the creator of cinema's greatest seadog -- "Here's to swimmin' with bow-legged wimmin" -- yet Haddock presents a whole different challenge: he is an unapologetic alcoholic paired with a young man at the centre of a Hollywood tentpole release.

"I think that audiences today are certainly mindful enough to know that Captain Haddock is not anyone's example of how to walk a straight line," says Spielberg.  "His affair with the bottle never embraces alcoholism as a comic tool, but was certainly a 19th century and 20th century value to tell stories about the town drunk.  In this case, it ends up with the town drunk finally coming to his senses."

Beat.

"I'm not sure he'll stay sensible after the film."

GIANT STUDIOS, The capital of performance capture, 2009

The very same Captain Haddock is running in a serpentine shape across a palatial Arabian hall on a huge monitor, as Andy Serkis does the very same around a huge, white space.  It is February 24, 2009, and Steven Spielberg is just out of a lunchtime editorial meeting about Empire's 20th Birthday issue and back in 'The Volume'.  This is the crucible of performance capture, the much-misunderstood process of using Tron-like bodysuits and headgear to harness the precise nuances of a performance as the basis for 3D animation.  Or that thing what Avatar did.

Tintin shifted from live action to performance capture under Jackson's auspices and seems to be the key to the entire project.  Perhaps the biggest factor in Spielberg's prevarication over Tintin were the limitations of live action to do justice to Herge's vision.  The notion of an actor sporting Tintin's gravity-defying quiff or his baggy plus fours is too close to Robert Altman's Popeye for anyone's tastes.

"With live action you're going to have actors pretending to be Captain Haddock and Tintin," says Jackson.  "You'd be casting people to look like them.  It's not really going to feel like the Tintin Herge drew.  It's going to be somewhat different.  With CGI we can bring Herge's world to life, keep the stylised, caricatured faces, keep everything looking like Herge's artwork, but make it photo-real."

There are swarms of technicians buzzing around -- think the end of Close Encounters without the flares -- but there is no doubt it is the actors who are injecting the humanity into Herge.  Performance capture means Simon Pegg and Nick Frost can play identikit idiots Thompson and Thomson ("When people first heard that bit of casting they thought that we'd gone barking mad," says Jackson) with all the chemistry and comedic talent the pair bring.  "The Thompson Twins can't be clones of each other," says Spielberg.  "Nick and Simon provided all the differences we needed to be foils for each other.  They have a wonderful moment in the movie where they start to have an argument about whose sidekick is whose."

Equally importantly, Herge's artwork is also given due care and respect.  All around The Volume, panels from Tintin are on hand for instant inspiration.  While Spielberg will be homaging specific images ("If you look at some of the frame grabs in the Sahara desert, they are right out of The Crab With The Golden Claws"), he has filtered the author through a lens darkly.  "The first part of the film, which is the most mysterious part, certainly owes much to not only film noir but the whole German Brechtian theatre -- some of our night scenes and our action scenes are very contrasty.  But at the same time, the movie is a hell of an adventure."

Unlike other Spielberg adventures, Tintin has not been at the mercy of a mechanical star that didn't work, Harrison Ford's turista, a hurricane on set or anything other than the director's muse.  Performance capture has allowed Spielberg a measure of directorial control he has never had before, both over his visuals, and his cast.  "You're not watching a monitor miles away, you're right in The Volume,' he says.  Spielberg operates the virtual camera himself with what looks like a souped-up Xbox controller.

"I saw somebody who is used to traditional filmmaking and who obviously has a intuitive grasp of cinema just take control of motion capture and own it," says Jackson.  "It's been great watching Steven make this film.  We're finally getting him into the 21st century."

LOS ANGELES, The capital of movies, 1994

Back in the 20th century, Steven Spielberg first met Peter Jackson at the kind of meet-and-greet that makes Hollywood go round.  Jackson's much-fancied Heavenly Creatures was getting good buzz Stateside, and the director flew the 6,714.23 miles from Wellington to Los Angeles for what Jackson describes as a "quick, half-an-hour, get-to-know-you meeting."  Their next was under slightly different circumstances -- in front of 1 billion people.

"I handed Peter the Academy Award for Best Picture for The Return of the King," remembers Spielberg.  "Then we went backstage together for Peter to do the press room.  I spent a long time talking to Fran (Walsh, Jackson's wife and co-collaborator), getting to know her."

The friendship started to bond when, impressed with Weta's work on Gollum, Spielberg contacted Jackson about the possibility of creating a CG Snowy for a live-action Tintin.  If he wanted proof of what a big fan Jackson was, the clincher came when, in the comfort of Amblin's swish screening room, Spielberg sat down to watch Weta's test of Snowy.

"Peter had put on Captain Haddock's costume and a big beard and performed with the digital Snowy in the test.  Peter's a good actor.  I love that he does stints in his own movies.  I don't have the courage to do that.  I'm not a very good actor.  I'm not anywhere near as good as Peter.  I would just humiliate myself and my fellow cast-mates.  So I don't go there."

"I've got a horrible premonition that that will end up on a DVD somewhere," rues Jackson.

It would be glib to say the classicism and derring-do of Spielberg (say, Raiders) plus the nutty energy and absurdity of Jackson (Braindead) equals Herge's Tintin.  After all, Spielberg's back catalogue is filled with inventive pratfalls, just as The Lord of the Rings sings with traditional heroism.  Something feels right about the two titans coming together on Tintin, a collaboration built on similar backgrounds and shared sensibilities.  Both men made precocious home movies as kids, fired up by Forrest J. Ackerman.  Both worshipped Harryhausen, Hitchcock and Connery's Bond.  Both are technical virtuosos with an underrated skill with actors.  Both (like Herge) helped legitimise the unfashionable genres they mastered.  Now both stand as the public perception of their national cinemas.

Collaboration with a big-name director is obviously nothing new for Spielberg.  His partnership with George Lucas is the stuff of movie lore ("George and I have the completely daft arguments that kick up some dirt, but somehow we wind up agreeing with each other"), but that was a friendship for at least ten years before it became a professional partnership.  This was two Oscar-winners getting to know each other in the hothouse of making a movie.

"Peter and I instantly had a collaboration," offers Spielberg.  "We just literally worked together without ever giving a thought that I was collaborating as a director with another director.  I can't separate the creative sharing on Tintin.  I simply don't remember who had the idea that wound up in The Volume."

"There is no ego," is Jackson's take.  "I don't care if my ideas are taken on board or not, and Steven is the same.  The problems with collaboration, in my experience, only occur when one of the parties is insecure or has an ego.  That's what creates the problem, and that's not really true of Steven or me."

After Spielberg had decided on performance capture as an MO, he proposed a triptych of Tintins, to be directed by Jackson, Robert Zemeckis and himself (Zemeckis dropped out after signing an exclusive deal with Disney).  As a co-author, Jackson spent the first week in The Volume bedding in the new technology.  The rest of the time he would appear over iChat -- "It would be five or six in the morning for him," ...

[Sleepless]

[Stefen]

Those two names at the top sure don't mean what they used to.

[polkablues]

Sadly, no, but the three names toward the bottom should be encouraging.

Still, none of this means shit until we get a trailer.

[Pozer]

[72teeth]

ay yo polka: first teaser.

[Pubrick]

man that punch was weak.

and the way he jumped through the doorway was awkward too.

and americans are still saying "tin who?"

[Pas]

Looks pretty awesome though

[Champion Souza]

Except for the last shot.  It's really too bad they went for that creepy uncanny valley look.

[polkablues]

Sure, I'd watch that.

[Sleepless]

Watching in low res at work, but that early shot of him walking down the street looks almost just like the book. Much of the rest is pretty naff, but at least I have time to temper my expectations before this comes out. Still excited.

[MacGuffin]

International Trailer

[Pubrick]

Can't really see how that's different from the teaser..

Oh except that international audiences are like "yay le tintin!"

[Fernando]

The Secret Of The Unicorn Full Movie Trailer

[Stefen]

It looks great.