If you're coming in late, we recently posted parts 1 and 2 of our exclusive interview with 'Incredible Hulk' director Louis Leterrier. In this third part we talk about some of the alleged controversies and ask him to address our own disappointment in the big-screen redesign of Hulk's villain.
Read on...
C2F: As a real Hulk fan, I loved the way the classic Abomination looks in the comics, with the bumpy head and the heavy brow and the green skin...
Leterrier: He has the heavy brow! He's got sort of bumps on his head. What he doesn't have is the ears, and that scaly reptilian thing.
I swear to God, I tried so hard to make it work. It just looked ridiculous. It didn't look movieish. It looks great on the page...
You know what it looked like? It looked like those dinosaurs from 'Jurassic Park' the ones that have the floppy ears.
As a technical thing, on the comic book panel it's very easy to say, "OK, the two monsters, they punch each other," but I have to draw 24 comic book panels per second.
And these monsters, they're not dumb. This Abomination design was done before the Mike Tyson/Evander Hollifield fight, and we now know that ears, in a fight, are not the best thing to have! Hulk would take the ears and just rip them off and that's the end of the movie, you know?
It's an interesting design. It's a very 1960s reference to the 'Creature from the Black Lagoon', mutated monsters and stuff like that.
The monsters today have to be more brutal and vicious. He's a fighting machine, and he has to have an armor, which he had with the scales, but the armor should also be an attack system. That's what we tried to do with the bones.
Stuff is sticking out of his body but it's bones, not ears.
As a fan I did feel, "oh my God, they changed the character I love the most," but who knows? He's not dead. He might come back.
C2F: Will we see some of those earlier, failed designs on the DVD perhaps?
Leterrier: Yeah. Why not? I do think so.
I've done all the extra stuff from the movie but I haven't done the design stuff so yeah, I'm sure you'll get to see that. If not on that DVD you'll get to see it eventually.
C2F: There was some controversy about the edit of the movie. Will we see a directors cut and maybe an Edward cut?
Leterrier: No. You'll see this cut, because that's the cut that all of us worked very hard to put on screen.
But you know what, the "argument" was never an argument. It was just a conversation that we had, not about the final cut, because we just locked the picture two or three weeks ago.
It was more about the first cut. Which direction are we taking this movie in? Was it more like a drama like Ang Lee's was, or was it more like a thriller, or a super comic book movie like this version is? Or is it more funny, because we had lots more funny, but that made it seem more like the 'Fantastic Four'. It was not the Hulk I remembered. Hulk was becoming more like the Thing, you know?
I think this is the perfectly-balanced cut, so this will be the cut that will be released on the DVD.
And also when you see various cuts on DVDs they're never well done because they never had time to do the proper visual effects and proper color timing and proper mix.
You know what's going to be good? I did a new mix for the DVD and the sound for the DVD and the color timing for the DVD is absolutely amazing.
This is the first Blu-ray for Universal so we just went crazy on it. The sound is impeccable. So that's a little different from what you hear in the theater.
So because it's Blu-ray you'll get to see tons of stuff. You'll get to see the designs and tons of storyboards of action scenes that didn't make it into the movie.
There's a great seven-part making of, of like everything: becoming Hulk. Becoming Abomination. The Making of the movie. Shooting around the planet.
C2F: Have you started thinking about the sequel?
Leterrier: Yeah, I was thinking about the sequel throughout the movie and all the stuff I couldn't do because of the money or the technology I though, "OK, we'll save it for the sequel".
The sequel will be amazing, I can tell you, action-wise.
I've never thought about a sequel this early, and I've done some, you know the sequels to 'The Transporter', just because they were successful movies and people were asking for them. I don't think you can impose a sequel on somebody because if the movie is not successful most people won't want to see that sequel.
If the Tomato-meter keeps on rising and the audience is huge this weekend, maybe we'll start talking about the sequel.
'The Incredible Hulk' is in theaters now!
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