It’s a standard January evening in Piccadilly; cold, mildly breezy, but thankfully free from the rain that might have made everything that much worse. Disney have organised something of a gathering of film journalists together at the Apollo Cinema on Regent Street to show off their latest blockbuster epic, JOHN CARTER, and THN was there.
Subject to a fairly apt level of publicity even before tonight, JOHN CARTER is the film adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ classic tales of John Carter Of Mars, which first appeared in magazine serials exactly one hundred years ago, in February 1912. The stories tell of the eponymous hero transported from the middle of the American Civil War, as a Confederate soldier from Virginia, to the world of Barsoom, a vision of the planet Mars in decline. Something of a prototype for adventure stories ever since, the exploits of John Carter have been largely untouched by the Hollywood adaptation machine until now – aside from a low budget direct-to-DVD film entitled PRINCESS OF MARS was released by the notorious Asylum studio in 2009. JOHN CARTER producer Kevin Kurtz, who gave a short presentation, describes Burroughs’ stories as:
‘The science-fiction fantasy Rosetta Stone, particularly for a number of filmmakers, a number of authors to come. The inspiration from these [books] are far-reaching, and I think, hopefully, you’ll identify a number of those.’
An idea of what JOHN CARTER is trying to achieve can be seen within these words; director Andrew Stanton, fan of the John Carter stories since he was a boy, is trying to reach back into the elemental nature of early science-fiction and adventure storytelling, before the science and technology we now have informed the way we thought about sci-fi. Burroughs’ Mars is a romanticised place, informed by the now-outdated theories of the turn of the century astronomer Percival Lowell; the stories are not so much about the settings and the science, but rather the plot, which clearly speaks to Stanton’s own filmmaking approach. Kurtz describes three of the main threads that Stanton builds the film upon:
‘There’s the friendship between a man and a Martian. There’s the story of a boy and his dog. And the romance between this man from Earth, and the most beautiful woman on Mars.’
Stanton, one of the luminary figures at Pixar with two Academy Awards for Best Picture under his belt, and nary a mediocre film on his CV, is clearly keen to bring what he has learnt from working in animation to live-action filmmaking. Along with fellow John Carter fans Mark Andrews (director of Pixar’s June release BRAVE) and Michael Chabon (Pulitzer-winning author and screenwriter), the script was borne from a shared love of the source material. Kurtz shows pictures that each of the co-writers drew as children, of John Carter on his adventures (Andrews, being a born artist, clearly shows early talent). Of course, a project like this requires acting talent to match it, and the coveted lead role is carried by Taylor Kitsch, of FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS and X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE fame. Kurtz describes Kitsch as:
‘Someone who could bring a dark complexity to the role of John Carter. At the same time, Taylor needed to bring a little bit of humour, a little wry sense of humour, almost in the Indiana Jones spirit; and Taylor definitely has that in spades.’
The lead female role of Dejah Thoris, the Princess of the Martian city-state Helium and Carter’s love interest, is played by Lynn Collins, best known as Kayla Silverfox in X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE (making this the second feature she and Kitsch have worked on together) and Dawn Green in the first season of HBO’s TRUE BLOOD. This effects-heavy film also features Willem Dafoe (SPIDER-MAN) and Samantha Morton (THE MESSENGER) as computer-generated Martian characters Tars Tarkas and his daughter Sola, respectively. Mark Strong (TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY) also features as the villainous Matai Sheng.
Stanton himself was not able to attend the presentation, but the series of clips Kurtz’s talk introduces are all introduced by the director himself in pristine video form. It’s hard to feel sorry for the director shown at the Skywalker Ranch in gorgeous California, but it is nice to see him addressing the attendees.
The first clip shows Carter on Earth, trying to escape from civilisation in order to strike it rich in the gold pans of Arizona; unfortunately for him, he gets picked up by a detachment of the 7th United States cavalry, led by Bryan Cranston’s Colonel Powell. Carter attempts escape a few times, each one thwarted by the soldiers present; it’s played for comedy, and the audience laughs. There’s a nice balance between light-hearted entertainment value and emotional depth in the scene, as Powell accuses Carter of being a deserter, whilst Carter explains himself and his disillusionment with the way his world has ended up. It’s gritty and authentic, in necessarily stark contrast to the rest of the film; JOHN CARTER is, if anything, a period science fiction film.
The second clip shows Carter’s first awakening on Mars; it’s a barren desert, bringing to mind images of the badlands of Utah and Colorado, and the frontier edge seen in the earlier clip clearly carries over somewhat. Carter crawls over to a large incubator and looks inside, to see a vast number of eggs hatching, bizarre but reassuringly adorable baby aliens spilling out. He is then set upon by a small squad of Barsoomian warriors, led by Dafoe’s Tars Tarkas, who approaches Carter with curiosity. They meet, each sizing the other up; Carter introduces himself as ‘Captain John Carter, Virginia’, and Tarkas assumes his name is actually Virginia. Audience chuckles. Also, Carter can jump immensely high, due to the reduced gravity on Mars.
The most striking of all the clips is a battle scene, with Carter facing down a vast number of Martian warriors in order to allow Tarkas and Dejah Thoris the chance to escape. He fights with skill and deftness, leaping from fray to fray with the great height he can achieve on the red planet. The scene is intercut with Carter’s discovery of his dead wife, in the ruins of his home in Virginia, and his subsequent burial of her. It’s a wonderful emotional counterpoint, as he is offered a chance at redemption for his inability to save the first love of his life. When exactly this scene occurs in the film is unsure, as is the circumstances surrounding it. Suffice it to say, it’s an emotional climax of some magnitude.
Other clips shown include a gladiatorial showdown between a pair of giant white ape monsters and the disadvantaged team of Carter and Tarkas, and Carter’s encounter with a bizarre but endearing monstrous dog-like creature who can run as fast as Carter can jump high. Finally, a 3D trailer of the film is shown, including various shots included from trailers released earlier. No sign of Samantha Morton’s character in the clips shown, nor of Mark Strong, but the clips are encouraging: the CGI is unobtrusive, expressive and frequently gorgeous, the story progression seems to be placed at least on the same level as the visuals, and Kitsch manages to portray Carter with a depth of character often lacking in similar outings of this nature (Jake Gyllenhaal, we’re looking at you).
All this is followed by a Q&A session with visual effects supervisor Sue Rowe, animation supervisor Eamonn Butler, and Taylor Kitsch himself.
Taylor Kitsch on meeting Andrew Stanton for the first time:
‘You walk into this room and it’s literally floor to ceiling with preparation. Not only just the visuals that we’ve just seen now, but, more importantly to me, the character John Carter: the arc he goes through, the emotional toll and whatnot. Then you leave, completely inspired by that energy he’s had since he was eight; you envelope yourself with those books. It’s a testament to Stanton in the sense of how collaborative we were together in shaping Carter; it’s a very empowering thing, to have a director with a vision like this.’
Taylor Kitsch on the story:
‘It’s truly an origin story about where John is from. For me it’s, you know; when you’re in these situations, obviously you can’t relate to being on Mars, or dealing with the Tharks or the Matais, but it’s the Civil War, the family and the honour that’s truly grounding, and that’s something I definitely held on to throughout the whole thing.’
Eamonn Butler on motion capture:
‘It was pretty difficult; we knew, going into this movie that we were going to use motion capture, and facial capture. You really want to have all that data when you’ve got Willem Dafoe and Samantha Morton, great performances. We also knew that the characters were an abstraction of sorts; we needed to go from the real to the visual level. There’s elements of them in there, but there still needs to be some kind of interpretation, so we knew we’d need really talented animators to come in and work on that data as well. Probably the biggest challenge for me in setting this up from the beginning was sort of political, actually. It was convincing [the crew] that using these things was good, as there’s kind of a thing going on in the industry where motion capture gets a lot of credit for stuff, but this is really a film where we needed really strong artists as well, and it took a while to create a bridge that the artists would willingly come over.’
Sue Rowe on the environments of the film:
‘Quite a challenge: what does Mars look like? Some of the sequences were very strange. We shot in Utah, which was an amazing place to go; I’d never been there before. The light there, the environment, the rocks, the sand, the dust; it was great being there because we noticed so much, how light travelled, how dust was kicked up. We took all those things back and made sure that when we had to apply it to our digital environments, it was replicated.’
‘[We had] blue skies. We didn’t go for the sort of red skies that people traditionally seem to think that Mars would look like; in fact the sunset on Mars would be purple. That’s how geeky I’ve turned out to be!’
Eamonn Butler on Andrew Stanton as director:
‘The man is extremely well prepared. If you didn’t have an answer, he’d trust you to come up with a solution, or he’d find a way to get there very, very quickly. He’s very aware of how the budget will be spent and kept in check. […] About going from animation to live-action, there certainly were a lot of clenched buttocks, from the visual effects side; […] but what we realised very quickly is that Andrew isn’t just an animation director, he’s an architect with one of the most successful film companies in the world [Pixar]. They have a method; animation just happens to be the medium they’ve chosen to work with. He slotted into the live-action world very quickly.’
Taylor Kitsch on moving up to the big screen:
‘I just act harder!’ (Audience laughs)
JOHN CARTER is released 9th March 2012.
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