‘Most Wanted’ is based on the real story of one man’s conviction for drug smuggling and his 8-year prison stint in Thailand, and the subsequent scandal caused when it turned out that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service had set him up.
In this exclusive interview with Made in Hollywood, cast members Josh Hartnett, Jim Gaffigan, and Antoine-Olivier Pilon, and director Daniel Roby discuss bringing this story to film.
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Now back in theaters for its 40th anniversary “Apocalypse Now,” is both one of Francis Ford Coppola‘s most celebrated films and one of the most notoriously troubled productions in history.
It was released on August 19, 1979, more than three years after Coppola began shooting. What went wrong?
As Coppola said at Cannes, making the film was just like the U.S in Vietnam. “We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane.”
Here’s some of what went down in the Philippine jungle:
1. Original star Harvey Keitel was fired after six weeks
Coppola hired Harvey Keitel based on his work in Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets.” After he watched the first week’s footage, Coppola decided to fire him, yielding the first dramatic headlines of the production: “Coppola loses his beard, 38 lbs and Star Keitel.’ He was replaced by Martin Sheen. The only footage of Keitel that made it into the film is a shot of him from the back on the boat.
2. Martin Sheen was really drunk, and really bleeding, during his Saigon Hotel scene
In this excerpt from Eleanor Coppola‘s Emmy-winning documentary “Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse,” Sheen recalls shooting the scene where Willard smashes a mirror in his hotel room: “ I was so drunk, I couldn’t stand up, frankly. I was so intoxicated, I didn’t realize how close to the mirror I was.” Despite bleeding profusely, Sheen insisted on continuing filming. Eleanor adds that Marty was so unpredictable at that point, she thought he might lunge at the camera or attack Francis,.
3. Sheen had a heart attack and received the last rites
You’ve surely heard Sheen had a heart attack during production. What you might know is that he crawled out of his room at 2 a.m. and a quarter of a mile down the local highway before finding help. “He had suffered a serious heart attack and even received last rites from a priest who did not speak English,” Eleanor Coppola says in “Hearts of Darkness.” He took six weeks off and, not wanting to halt the already over-budget production, said that he had suffered from heat stroke.
4. Coppola didn’t want word of Sheen’s heart attack to get out
In “Hearts of Darkness, co-producer Tom Sternberg recalls he got a phone call from his secretary, who said “Marty’s had a heart attack and Francis doesn’t want to admit it.” Coppola is later heard on tape saying, “If Marty dies, I want to hear everything is okay, until I say, ‘Marty is dead.’”
5. Coppola mortgaged his house to finish the film
Coppola had financed the movie himself, thanks to his success with the “Godfather” films, but had already blown the $13 budget. To finish the movie, he mortgaged his considerable estate to secure additional money from United Artists. If the film hadn’t earned at least $40 million, he would have lost it all. (“Apocalypse Now” went on to earn more than $78 million during its initial release, as well as 2 Oscars, and shared top prize at the Cannes Film Fest.)
7. Filming took place in the middle of a real war
Coppola made a deal with Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos to lease his helicopters — if they weren’t needed in actual fighting. (The U.S. military refused to participate in a film about the Vietnam war). Because of the Civil War in the south, every day the Philippine government sent different pilots, who hadn’t participated in the rehearsals. Even worse, in the middle of a complicated shot, the helicopters would often be called away to fight the rebels in the nearby hills.
8. A typhoon destroyed several sets
In May 1976, the Philippines was hit by a typhoon that killed 374 people and destroyed many of the movie’s sets, including the Playboy Bunny set. The production closed down for 2 months to rebuild.
9. Coppola insisted on serving up a real French feast during the French Plantation scene
Before filming the French Plantation scene (which was cut for theatrical release but added back for “Apocalypse Now: Redux“), Coppola insisted that the white wine be served ice cold and red wine should be served at 58 degrees. “I want the French to say, ‘My God, how did they do that?,’” he says in “Hearts of Darkness.” He made the decision to cut the entire sequence right after shooting it.
10. Marlon Brando demanded a $1 million down payment — then almost didn’t show
After Al Pacino turned down the part, another “Godfather” star, Marlon Brando, agreed to play Willard’s target, the mysterious Col. Kurtz. He was supposed to lose weight for the role and read the novel “Heart of Darkness” that inspired the movie. He did neither. Instead he turned up 88 lbs overweight and completely unprepared. At one point, he threatened to take Coppola’s initial $1 million without ever setting foot on set.
(A Brando biographer disputes that the actor was unprepared and says that not only did the two communicate extensively about the character beforehand, Coppola was simply looking for a scapegoat at that point in filming.)
11. Brando spent his first days on set improvising his character
According to “Hearts of Darkness,” Coppola spent several days of the actor’s precious time in improvisation before shooting a single scene. He figured that getting Brando to start improvising (which he did throughout his scenes) was better than trying to get him to memorize a script. (On the “The Godfather,” cue cards were pasted all over the set because Brando often forget his lines.)
12. Real people played the severed heads — through 38 takes
The people who were playing the severed heads sat in their boxes in the ground from 8 in the morning until 6 at night: Coppola did 38 takes. Between takes, they were covered with umbrellas to shield them from the hot sun.
13. People were really doing drugs on set
Sam Bottoms, who plays surfing soldier Lance, admitted he dropped acid during filming, but not during the Do Long Bridge sequence where his character is tripping. “I was doing speed then. We were working lots of nights and I wanted a speedy sort of edge. We were bad, we were just bad boys,” he says in “Hearts of Darkness.”
14. Dennis Hopper and Marlon Brando hated each other
Dennis Hopper, who admits in “Hearts of Darkness” that his career was at a low point and he was happy to go anywhere and make any movie at the time, was only cast 2 weeks before his scenes. Coppola was afraid to put “crazy” Hopper with Marlon Brando in a scene and he was right: The two hated each other. They had to shoot their shared scenes in separate shots. When Kurtz throws the book at Hopper’s character and calls him a “mutt,” that was probably one of Brando’s many improvisations.
15. Coppola contemplated suicide or injury to get out of finishing the film
As he says at one point in “Hearts of Darkness,” “I’m going to be bankrupt anyway. I’m thinking of shooting myself.” He was so desperate to get off the film, he contemplated what kind of sicknesses he could get or how he could maybe injure himself by falling off a platform, so he could have “a graceful way out.”
16. Coppola convinced John Milius the film was going to win a Nobel Prize
John Milius, who wrote the original script, recalls that he was called in to put the script back together after Coppola’s extensive revisions. He was told by the frustrated crew to talk some sense into Coppola. Instead, Francis had him convinced this was the first film that would win the Nobel Prize.
You’d think after two huge box office hits — the last two “Mission: Impossible” movies — writer-director Christopher McQuarrie could get anything made. Anything. Even his passion project — the script he told me was his “favorite.”
Well, you’d be sorely disappointed.
In a recent interview promoting the release of “Mission: Impossible – Fallout” on Blu-ray Dec. 4 (the disc is AMAZING – buy ALL the copies), McQuarrie revealed that there’s one “mission” he wishes he could put on the big screen: His exceptional script for “The Last Mission.”
“That is my absolute favorite script, out of any of the scripts I’ve ever worked on,” McQuarrie said. And for those lucky few to have read it, it is easy to see why. “Last Mission” tells the harrowing and emotionally-taut real-life tale of the last night of WWII in the Pacific. So why can’t the director of “Fallout,” which grossed $791 million — the series’ highest grossing movie (not adjusting for inflation) — get this movie made?
“You know, the lesson I have learned is — the magic number is a billion [dollars]. If you make a billion dollars doing something, or $800 million doing something original, you may get more leverage to do something. And the truth of the matter is, I don’t have more leverage now than when I did when I wrote that screenplay for ‘The Last Mission.’ It is the quintessential dream movie of mine and no one will make it.”
Despite that harsh truth, there’s some light at the end of “Last Mission’s” tunnel — at least for the director who wants to make it.
“Look, the time will come,” McQuarrie said. “What I’ve learned is — look at “Valkyrie.” “Valkyire” and “The Last Mission” were written as sister projects at the same time. Nathan Alexander and I wrote those scripts together, and neither one of those movies should have ever seen the light of day. And we were very fortunate that Tom Cruise, you know, found “Valkyrie” and decided he wanted to do it. And someday, someone is gonna be looking for a kind of movie and — “The Last Mission,” in whatever form that is — it’s gonna fill that need.”
Until that time, “Fallout” will just have to tie fans over.
“Mission: Impossible – Fallout” is available now on Digital HD and arrives on Blu-ray, 4K, and DVD Dec. 4.
Twenty years ago, one of the strangest cinematic showdowns occurred, between Pixar’s “A Bug’s Life” and Dreamworks’ “Antz.”
Both movies star computer-generated insects and both battled for box office supremacy. And while these days, both movies are hardly remembered aside from the unfortunate fact that they both star widely-accused sex offenders (yikes), the behind-the-scenes tumult that surrounded their production and release remains as fascinating as ever. “A Bug’s Life” and “Antz” weren’t just conspicuously similar animated features, they were mastheads in a violent battle between warring corporate entities.
Let’s start at the beginning. In 1995, “Toy Story” was released to a rapturous response. Not only was it a technological breakthrough, serving as history’s very first fully computer animated feature, but it was also an emotionally resonant and artistically sound creative accomplishment, too. A year before the film hit theaters, a then-nascent Pixar started developing its second feature, then called, simply, “Bugs.” But in the years since “Toy Story’s” celebrated release, Jeffrey Katzenberg, a top Disney executive who was chiefly responsible for bringing Pixar to Disney, defected, ultimately forming DreamWorks SKG with pals Steven Spielberg and David Geffen.
By the time “Toy Story” was in post-production on the Universal lot, DreamWorks had already set up shop nearby, and “Toy Story” director John Lasseter had stopped by the new office to talk about their follow-up project (“Bugs”) and get some friendly creative input from his former boss. A Business Week article from 1998 noted that, “Lasseter left the meeting with no sense of concern.”
Hindsight, though, illuminates a lot.
In Walter Isaacson’s “Steve Jobs” biography, Lasseter said, “I should have been wary. Jeffrey kept asking questions about when it would be released.” And the when of it was incredibly important.
Lasseter had told Katzenberg that Disney and Pixar hoped to have “Bugs” (finally “A Bug’s Life”) ready by the fall of 1998. That was the same timeframe that Katzenberg had earmarked for DreamWorks’ first animated epic, a splashy biblical tale called “The Prince of Egypt” that featured a starry vocal cast (among them: Val Kilmer, Ralph Fiennes, Sandra Bullock, and Jeff Goldblum) and creative principles all mined from Disney (lyricist Stephen Schwartz, composer Hans Zimmer, and co-director Brenda Chapman). Katzenberg wanted “The Prince of Egypt” to be a sensation and was noticeably concerned about going up against Pixar’s sophomore feature, so he quietly put a second, computer-animated project into development: “Antz,” with the animation being handled by Pacific Data Images, a studio closely associated with Pixar.
Supposedly, it was PDI chief Carl Rosendahl who broke the news to Lasseter about the development of “Antz.” Rosendahl laid it all out for Lasseter: DreamWorks had agreed to purchase 40% of the struggling PDI, but only if the studio could deliver “Antz” before “Bug’s Life.” (“Antz” was originally scheduled for the spring of 1999, but it was then moved to October 2, 1998.)
In terms of the official story, Lasseter claims to have read about the film’s development in the trades.
David Price’s book, “The Pixar Touch,” recounts that Katzenberg gave PDI “rich financial incentives” to make sure they could beat Pixar to the punch. In the Business Week article, Lasseter said that he called Katzenberg and said: “Jeffrey, how could you?” Lasseter went on: “[Katzenberg] started talking about all this paranoid stuff about conspiracies — that Disney was out to get him…. He said he had to do something. That’s when I realized, it wasn’t about me. We were just cannon fodder in his fight with Disney.” (This was during the time that Katzenberg had engaged in a costly legal battle with Michael Eisner over profit sharing — the court would ultimately rule in Katzenberg’s favor.)
Shortly thereafter, Katzenberg offered a deal: He would cancel production on “Antz” if Disney would move “A Bug’s Life” away from “The Prince of Egypt.” Lasseter, somehow, was even angrier, storming into Pixar CEO Steve Jobs’ office. In the Business Week article, Jobs said that he told Lasseter, “There’s a word in the dictionary for this, it’s called extortion.”
Katzenberg then called Jobs. Jobs didn’t budge. Katzenberg later denied that those phone calls had taken place.
In 1998, Lasseter said that the dust-up caused by the competing productions had “completely changed the community.” After all, they were so friendly with PDI that the two studios would co-host parties at the industry trade show SIGGRAPH. But now they were locked in a battle orchestrated by competing corporations and the men with very big egos behind those corporations.
Still, it stung Lasseter personally. “The whole idea was to draw us into a bugs vs. bugs war, so they’d get compared to us,” Lasseter told Business Week. According to “The Pixar Touch,” Lasseter had referred to “Antz,” with its muted color scheme and more rudimentary animation, as the “shlock version” of “A Bug’s Life.” At the time of the film’s release, Jobs told the Los Angeles Times that, “The bad guys rarely win.”
Sure, “Antz” beat “A Bug’s Life” to the box office and brought in a respectable $90 million domestic and $81 million foreign, which is even more impressive when you consider that it inadvertently wound up being the first animated feature from DreamWorks (and PDI). But when “A Bug’s Life” flew into theaters a few weeks later, it racked up $163 million domestic and another $200 million, it handily squashed “Antz.” If DreamWorks and PDI were the bad guys in the scenario, as Jobs had suggested, they certainly didn’t win.
Yet what Katzenberg knew — and when he knew it — remains the biggest mystery. According to the Jobs biography, Katzenberg reached back out after the smash success of 2001’s “Shrek.” That film, which largely lampooned Disney, was an undeniable sensation, even if large swathes of it were stolen from a Disney animator at the time (that’s a whole ‘nother story). It was after “Shrek’s” success that Katzenberg told Jobs, again, that he had no idea about “A Bug’s Life” while working at Disney and that if he had known about it, he would have made more money thanks to his lawsuit and the associated profit participation owed him, than actually producing “Antz.”
Jobs didn’t buy it and Lasseter remained incensed.
In fact, when DreamWorks Animation was up for sale a few years ago, Disney could have easily bought the studio and folded those characters into its already-bursting portfolio. But it was Lasseter who stopped any deal from going forward. He was still stung by “Antz.”
It goes without saying that one expectation of the upcoming sequel to “Mary Poppins” is the inclusion of incredible dance numbers. At first glance “Mary Poppins Returns” achieves those same trappings, but on closer inspection Gary Marshall‘s interpretation of P. L. Travers’ books takes things a step further.
Moviefone was fortunate enough to be on set at Pinewood Studios in London, England during the filming of the musical number for “Trip A Little Light Fantastic,” one of the songs in the film which happens to include an ensemble, live action, choreographed dance number.
Disney recently released a special featurette which includes brief moments from “Trip A Little Light Fantastic” which only further outlines the sequel’s desire to take the storied character and her tale to new heights.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLXBXtWdlBw
At 0:51, 1:08, 1:18, 1:26, 1:31, and 1:36, we see glimpses of this performance. The foggy London streets act as the backdrop for the segment, utilizing the light emanating from the lamplighter (also called “leeries”) tools both with physical movement and aesthetic illumination. And that’s only one element of the action. Overall the dance includes bicycles, ladders, and enough street light swinging to both bring you back to your youth and make you a touch nauseous. After all…it’s swinging from a streetlight…one of life’s simple joys.
Lin Manuel Miranda does a lot of heavy lifting in the scene, with Emily Blunt‘s elegant charm being apparent throughout. If “Trip A Little Light Fantastic” is any hint into the types of musical acts we’ll see throughout the film, we’ll be first in line when “Mary Poppins Returns” comes to the screen.
Be sure to check out the film when it hits theaters December 19th.
A few weeks ago, at the beautifully redesigned Walt Disney Animation Studios campus in Burbank, we were treated to a special screening of select footage from “Ralph Breaks the Internet,” the sequel to 2012’s hit videogame-themed comedy “Wreck-It Ralph.” And let me tell you, it looks stunning.
The basic gist of the sequel is this: There’s trouble at Litwak’s Arcade. Sugar Rush, the kart racing game that counts Vanellope von Schweetz (Sarah Silverman) as one of its racers, has a broken steering wheel. This leads Wreck-It Ralph (John C. Reilly), the videogame ogre with a hart of gold, to launch a mission to get a new steering wheel; otherwise, the game will be unplugged and Vanellope, his best friend, will go poof.
And where do they head to find that steering wheel? That’s right: the Internet.
Far from the way that the internet has normally been visualized (in something like “Hackers“); this isn’t dense columns of ones and zeroes. Instead, it’s a living, vibrant city, and you can tell that much of the art department carried over the lessons they learned on “Zootopia,” in terms of bringing an entire metropolis to life. One of the scenes we saw had Vanellope bidding on a velvet cat painting on eBay, which, in the movie, looks like a typical auction house.
Another scene, which serves as something of the emotional fulcrum for the movie, saw Ralph — after rising in popularity as an instantly meme-able personality — reading negative comments about himself, his large heart breaking. (Co-director Rich Moore said the Internet was the perfect dramatic place to put Ralph, a person whose entire sense of self is based off what other people think of him.)
And, of course, there was the princess sequence, which has been screened at D23 and teased in recent promotional materials, wherein Vanellope comes face-to-face with all of the classic Disney princesses (everyone from Snow White to Moana). It’s still a hoot and as the production works to complete the sequence, has become even more visually stunning and comically precise.
We were also lucky enough to sit down with Moore, co-director and co-writer Phil Johnston, and producer Clark Spencer, but, alas, there was some kind of malfunction in the recording and only a few minutes were saved. Lucky for me, I’ve got a great memory, and can recount some of the awesome anecdotes that the team shared with me.
First and foremost, in the princess sequence, they approach a glowing version of the Walt Disney Animation Studios campus, sorcerer’s hat and all. At the top of that building, there’s an animated sorcerer Mickey, posed like he was in Walt Disney’s experimental classic “Fantasia.” It turns out that none other than Mark Henn, the legendary Disney animator who worked on Belle, Princess Jasmine, and Mulan (Jeffrey Katzenberg once called him “the Julia Roberts of animation”), was responsible for that little snippet of classic 2D animation. And that is very, very awesome.
They also told me that major videogame elements would be woven into the narrative, taking up much of the third act. (All the footage we saw was from the first and second acts.) This was, of course, before Disney announced that Gal Gadot would voice a character named Shank from a hardcore racing game called “Slaughter Race.”
Overall, the footage that we saw and the conversation that I had with Moore, Johnston, and Spencer, let my jaw on the floor. This is some seriously next-level stuff. And like “Zootopia,” it’s not just a visual feast. There were moments we saw, like the one with Ralph reading all of the mean comments, that were genuinely affecting. We can’t wait until November, when we can see the whole movie. On pins and needles over here.
Moviefone: You started working on this sequel back in 2014 and it got sidelined by the production of “Zootoptia.” When you came back to it, did you start over or pick up where you left off? [Clark nods yes to the “starting over” comment.]
Spencer: We had to take a big step back.
Johnston: I had written a screenplay before “Zootopia” and we really liked it and started working on it. We then went off to do “Zootopia” for a year-and-a-half, came back, read that script, and went — “meh.” There are parts of that script that are good, one huge part we completely threw away and now we put it back in like three years later. But we can’t tell you what that part is. So nothing fully ever goes anywhere. It’s the circle of life, man.
Moore: All the parts of the buffalo!
What was the biggest change from those earlier versions of the movie?
Moore: There was definitely a part where, we knew we wanted to explore social media as an aspect to the story. So there was a back-and-forth about who was going to be roped into it — was it going to be Ralph or was it going to be Vanellope? Initially, we said: “It’s got to be Ralph. He’s got the total personality of, ‘Please tell me you like me, I will define myself by the way you feel about me.’” That seemed obvious. But we thought, are we doing ourselves a disservice? Because Vanellope, who you think wouldn’t be susceptible to that, is actually the one who gets swept up in social media. We pursued that idea for a while and it seemed pretty good, but at the end of the day, it didn’t feel genuine. It didn’t feel like her character, like she would make those decisions. It didn’t feel like her character anymore.
Johnston: That was the very first draft, actually, where she became susceptible and started buying into that. But that comment scene we showed you guys, [it] happened to Vanellope. That idea was in there and there was a later version where they got captured and they became a meme. But we found as they were chasing fleeting fame, it felt like the audience was ahead of them. Like, We know this is a bad idea. It felt like schmuck bait. Like lazy storytelling.
Moore: And it seemed like would you just get to the point.
Check out the new trailer below!
“Ralph Breaks the Internet” is everywhere on November 21. We’ll have more from the long lead day before then.
After 54 years, the wait is finally over.
Disney dropped the latest”Mary Poppins Returns” trailer this week, giving viewers some much-anticipated new insights into the world of the Banks family years after the magical nanny flew out of their lives. And if this preview is any indication, we won’t need a spoon full of sugar for this medicine to go down.
In the spring of 2017, Moviefone was invited to the set at Pinewood Studios in London, England. We were able to speak with producer Marc Platt, production designer John Myhre, costume designer Sandy Powell, actress Emily Blunt, and actor Lin-Manuel Miranda to learn exciting details about the new twist director Rob Marshall is putting on the old classic. Here are 11 must-know facts from our visit across the pond:
1. “Mary Poppins Returns” Is a True Sequel in Every Sense
The follow up takes place over 20 years after the original film, and pulls story elements from several of the seven follow-up books in the P. L. Travers “Mary Poppins” series. Despite the cheery nature of the film, it takes place in Depression-era London, following a grown-up Jane and Michael Banks (Emily Mortimer & Ben Whishaw), and Michael’s three children.
Michael’s life further mirrors his father’s, working at Fidelity Fiduciary Bank under Mr. Dawes, Jr. (Dick Van Dyke) and the bank’s president, William Weatherall Wilkins (Colin Firth). When Mary Poppins (Emily Blunt) reenters their lives, she has not aged since we last saw her. She herself “lives outside of time” as explained by Marc Platt. Poppins returning via kite follows the opening events of the second book “Mary Poppins Comes Back.”
2. The New Banks Kids Will (Mostly) Be The Focus
Yes, Michael Banks is down on his luck, but Mary Poppins is truly there to take care of the new Banks batch (twins Annabel and John Banks, as well as youngest brother Georgie Banks, played by Pixie Davis, Nathanael Saleh, and Joel Dawson). Their adventures are aided by friendly neighborhood lamplighter Jack (Lin Manuel Miranda), and takes them everywhere from the animated “Royal Doulton Music Hall” inside a ceramic bowl to deep beneath the sea via bathtub.
The producers described it as a “healthy dose of childhood.” Not to say that the film won’t follow the escapades of it’s supporting characters, which include….
3. Meryl Streep Basically Plays Ms. Frizzle
Well, not really, but the aesthetic is definitely there. Meryl Streep joins this epic story as Topsy, the wacky cousin of Mary Poppins.
Her flowing dress and necklace made of colored pencils accentuate a zaniness best exemplified in “Topsy’s Upside Down Room,” a living space that defies gravity. They execute this in the most literal sense. The whole room was built right side-up with everything secured to the floor, then completely flipped. Its taxidermy, ancient statues, and other vintage hardware make the whole thing feels like an antique store on steroids. We’re very much here for it.
Similar to the kite entrance, most of Topsy’s story is pulled from the second “Mary Poppins” novel.
4. There’s More Practical Effects Than You Might Think
In addition to “Topsy’s Upside Down Room,” many of the street and set pieces were built physically as well, with the hope of creating “a world within a world.” The vibrant colors of their clothes during the animated sequences were actually achieved in part by costume designer Sandy Powell directly painting onto white clothing. They attempted to match the same visual of Cherry Tree Lane, all the way up to Admiral Boom’s nautical home.
While paying homage to the style of the first film (they built out a full animation map for the park sequence), the film stands apart with a well executed and fun vision.
5. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Character Is A “Protégé” of Bert
Despite the jokes surrounding Dick Van Dyke’s previous attempt at a British accent, “Hamilton” star Lin-Manuel Miranda will be giving it a go as Jack, a local lamplighter (sometimes called a “leerie”) who is a “protégé” of Bert from the previous film. He is aware of the existence of Mary Poppins, and thus is the perfect companion for her and the Banks children.
While Bert and Jack have similarities (they’re both public servants with a propensity for song and dance), Miranda’s take will likely involve a subtle touch of what made “Hamilton” so popular (maybe even a little rapping?). Miranda was a huge fan of Rob Marshall’s “Chicago,” and the actor’s charismatic charm shined both on and off camera.
6. Don’t Worry, There’s Plenty of Dance Numbers
We were fortunate enough to watch the “Mary Poppins Returns” team film a dance number for the song “Trip a Little Light Fantastic” and it was, well, fantastic.
The soundstage was dressed for a foggy London evening, with a collection of streetlights for the rag-tag leeries to swing and dance from. The upbeat song also featured ladder tricks and zipping lamplighter bicycles for good measure. And if you looked closely, you saw a dash of modern flare in the dance choreography. Rob Marshall was heavily involved with the choreography of the film, and his meticulous approach was ever present during the several rehearsals and takes we witnessed.
7. They Built Their Own Big Ben
While it would have been great to shoot at the real Great Bell, the iconic clock tower at the Palace of Westminster is under renovation. But even if it were available, as Production Designer John Myhre pointed out, it’s not as though one can “shut down Big Ben” for weeks of filming. So the crew was tasked with building a replica of it (to scale and all) on a soundstage, with some small help on the background from the Visual Effects department.
The setting is critical to one of the climactic scenes of the movie. Both the VFX team and the set team were able to visit the tower several times to get the proper measurements. Even while knowing their Big Ben was a phony (fun fact: it’s actually a fully functional clock!), it’s size and accuracy was humbling in person.
8. Dick Van Dyke Isn’t The Only Hollywood Vet in the Cast
In addition to Van Dyke lending his talents to the role of Mr. Dawes, Jr. (very meta considering he played Mr. Dawes Sr. in the original film, along with his principle role), “Mary Poppins Returns” will be graced with the presence of Angela Lansbury playing The Balloon Lady. Another original character from the novel, Lansbury helps to fill out an already stellar cast which boasts a swath of Emmys, Grammys, Tonys, Golden Globes, and an Oscar to boot.
9. Emily Blunt May Have Been A Perfect Choice
From the get-go Blunt stated that she was not trying to “outdo Julie Andrews,” which makes her performance that much more genuine. Instead of copying the character, she was afforded the opportunity to recreate it, singing and dancing to original songs that ultimately her version of Poppins will own.
Everyone we met sang her praises, and despite the demanding nature of the job (acting, singing, and dancing ALL while sporting crazy costumes) she seemed more than up for the challenge.
10. The Props Are No Joke
In addition to the practical effects, many of the props were meticulously crafted. The advent of 3D printing makes itself apparent with the design of the bird umbrella, and polka dots are a motif that run rampart throughout Mary Poppins’ style.
They also have to account for the wear and tear some of the props experience. At the time of our visit, they had already gone through eight versions of Mary Poppins’ magical bag, which — given its detail — make recreating the design quite the task. The overall look is played at a reasonable level, as the team bridged the gap between staying true to the time frame while not turning it into a “BBC period drama.”
11. The Movie’s Aim Is To Bring You Joy
Throughout the visit and the countless conversations we had with the filmmakers (and, of course, Emily Blunt herself), the one word that was spoken over and over was “joy.” They are aiming to bring a familiar yet new happiness to what some consider a tumultuous and dark time in our own lives. The dreariness of the time period serves as a metaphor for the era we’re in now, with the presence of Mary Poppins speaking to the need for finding something lovely and optimistic despite whatever negativity is swirling around us.
No one emulates that exuberant joy more than Miranda, who Marshall described as “a bright pure spirit.”
All in all, we are more than excited for the next iteration of Mary Poppins. Be sure to check out the film when it hits theaters December 19th.
Check out the new trailer here:
Jamie Lee Curtis, the original Scream Queen, is back. And so is The Shape that’s haunted her for 40 years — Michael Myers.
Director David Gordon Green‘s “Halloween” picks up where John Carpenter’s 1978 original left off, with Curtis’ Laurie Strode now a grandmother suffering from the type of emotional trauma one would expect after having survived Michael’s killing spree.
But this older, extreme-survivalist version of Laurie is not a victim, and she’s much more than just a survivor, too, especially in how she turns the tables on Michael in the film’s nail-biter climax. This very timely and emotionally-charged take on the Strode character was not lost on either the star who plays her or on the film’s crew.
Moviefone recently sat down with Curtis, director Green, and producer Jason Blum (the head of Hollywood’s Horror Industrial Complex, Blumhouse) for an all-timer of an Unscripted, where Curtis revealed her favorite behind-the-scenes moment as she brought her iconic character back to the big screen. Watch it below:
“Halloween” slashes into theaters Oct. 19.