By thechrisbrown
Things I have learned over the last couple of years going to San Diego for Comic-Con is that it seems to be worth it to arrive on Wednesday night as any number of catastrophes can keep you grounded and delayed from missing those earlier activities on Thursday. This year American Airlines found it absolutely pertinent to keep us on the tarmac in Chicago for two hours due to lightning. I guess that's a good thing, but in the meantime my stomach started to eat its own inner lining, and of course they weren't serving anything on the flight. But the major setback is missing a panel for a film, when you have to interview the director later in the day.
So, I missed the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles panel and had to walk into my interview with Kevin Munroe knowing less than nothing about his film. All I have is, "The posters look fantastic."
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So, we began to talk Turtles, and it became apparent that Kevin Munroe, while not a name that was being thrown around as much as say, Jon Woo, is definitely the right man for the job. He talks fast and is extremely excited about Turtles. He feels bad that I missed the panel and directs my attention to the Apple.com trailers site where the footage was immediately posted after the panel. I know, everyone's seen it by now, but look at it again. It's fun.
Munroe describes how he became attached to the Turtles with a lot of enthusiasm, "I met the guys at Imagi. They were doing this movie called Cat Tail, which is like this sweet cat who thinks he's a dog kind of thing, and they wrote a comedy punch up. And then they told me they were getting the license for Turtles and I said, 'Dude do you know what a Turtles movie could be? This ...' And we talked about it and I said, 'This is what I would do with a Turtles movie, I would make a believable world, I would add family dynamic, I would go and make the action bigger than anything we've seen before. I want to make ... and there were comic books and I'd done a few comics before I did this. You fill in so much information between the panels that there's no way a movie could ever really live up to in live action. In CG I want to fill in those blanks and create that kind of overall experience. And the cool thing is they called me like a week after and said, 'Do you want to do it?' and I was like, shit yeah, so they flew me to Northhampton to meet with Peter Laird. He's like the Godfather of Turtles."
"Peter runs the franchise and was very intimately involved from the beginning, he looked at the treatment and everything ... We're kind of going back to the original world of the comics, but we're not telling those storylines, but we're sort of picking up where the second and third films leave off. Having defeated Shredder and coming apart, then coming together in a sort of rebirth."
He's constantly smiling and excited about the Turtles. Our conversation was late in the day, but he wasn't slowing down one bit. He gets a great big grin on his face as he talks about the effort put into lighting the CG Turtles and his attempt to get that believable world.
"We went in and lit the movie as a black and white movie before we added any color to it. So, we had like 1,000 lighting keys where we went and took films like Third Man, most notably, it's a beautiful black and white film, so well lit. And we had a lighting department in Hong Kong, right, and we sat them down and screened Third Man, like, and we'd stop it and say, 'Right there, see that? The specularity on that shot, that's what we need to get.' So the cool thing is that we're really achieving it and so that was the sort of look we really wanted to go for, that moving graphic novel kind of thing. People throw that out so readily just to say, 'That's a moving comic book.' Seriously, I want to be able to go through this movie and you just get stills and just do a letterbox comic. That to me would be, I'd be more proud of that merchandising than anything else, the toy line, the video game, I just want to get a book of the stills and go, oh, okay, it looks like art."
While aiming for that comic book feel, Munroe does say, "No, not the Ang Lee Hulk stuff, just in terms of the staging and the actual layout itself. What we're doing with the Turtles is it's treating it like it's live-action plus. So we've got a big camera, big sweeping moves, a lot of drama in the camera, but at the same time, it's everywhere and it's like all for drama, which is really fun. It's not a Fellini film or anything, but it's really fun and it all complements the action, which is really cool, but I'm doing another film, it was just announced a couple of weeks ago, called Gatchaman. We're doing Gatchaman as a big CG ..."
Battle of the Planets? G-Force? In CG? That was the really exciting news of the day for me and I can't wait. In saying there was no place in Turtles for Ang Lee-style framing, he adds that, "Yeah, Battle of the Planets, it's great, I'm writing and directing it, and THAT we're playing with a lot of the framing. We're gonna go in and I just want to like cut on the screen. It's gotta be like a Tony Scott film, but like CG, but make it hip and cool. Things we couldn't do with the Turtles, I think Turtles is that first step with two different movies, but then Gatchaman goes on with that ... It will benefit us when we come back to do TMNT 2."
It sounds like Kevin Munroe certainly has a passion for the comic book/ cartoon genre and describes his early CG experience as, "... just action stuff. If you want to sell action figures, go get that Kevin guy, he'll come and do a pilot for you. It was all just rip-offs of Battle of the Planets and Gatchaman, which ... it was just my frustration from wanting to do Gatchaman."
Well, it sounds like we've got the right man for the job. I can't wait to see Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and I think I'm going to re-watch the trailer. And looking forward to that Gatchaman movie ...
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