Comic-Con 08 Live: 20th Century Fox Panel
12:11PM - Screens show the Fox logo, then go to static
Then we hear Klaatu Baradu Nikto. And Keanu Reeves steps out to immense cheers!
12:13PM - Mentions that they have two clips and a trailer to show all of us today. Everyone else from the film comes out on the stage, including the director Scott Derrickson and Keanu Reeves and Jennifer Connelly.
12:15PM - First question - you had a close encounter with Robert Wise? Derrickson made a short film and he went to the program director and asked him if he could meet Robert Wise. He set up a private dinner as a film student, which was a "seminal event" for him. He told him that The Haunting and Day the Earth Stood Still were his two favorite films. And he told him he wanted to make his first film a horror film.
12:15PM - Producer's story: after Speed had been released, he was in the president of production's office and behind his desk was a poster for the 1951 Day the Earth Stood Still. And he said, forget about what I came into here to talk about, let's do this movie re-imagined with Keanu as Klaatu. Fifteen years later a draft showed up on his doorstep.
12:19PM - Derrickson: "If you're going to remake any film, you have to have a good reason to do it. For me, it depends on the particular movie and why. In this case, it was the script, it already existed in some form and still had a ways to go. When I read it, the original was so a product of its time
it commented so well on that early Cold War era and what was happening with humanity at the time and was such an interesting and original film. The idea of updating it made sense. The issues that the first film was dealing with are not as pressing as now. The story opened up some opportunities to do some things we haven't seen before, like the first one did. And it's such a good story
What was amazing is how few people have actually seen it and a majority of the moviegoing audience deserved to see it again. It's basically about an alien who comes to Earth and assesses humanity."
12:20PM - There are few movies where we see ourselves as aliens or we where see things through the point of view as an alien. That's what is unique about this story. First scene being prepared and introduced
12:21PM - The interrogation scene
Part of what we've seen in the trailer. Eventually he shocks the guy asking questions and wears his suit and walks out of the room. Looked fantastic! Very thrilling, a lot of intensity in a very short clip and trailer, seems like it will keep moving.
12:24PM - Keanu: "He was an entity trapped in a human body." Talking about playing Klaatu and why he wanted to take on the role.
12:25PM - Producer explains that he's trapped in a human body, so when he emerges from the spaceship, he may not look like he did in that scene. Hinting that he comes out as an alien of some sort and eventually takes over the Keanu Reeves "body" that we see later. He walks out in a space suit, as the director just said, and it's "not human." Derrickson: "We tried to come up with visual design to support that idea" from the original that these things like the spaceship and space suit were not human at all.
12:27PM - There is an intricate story of a family being in trouble. Asking Jennifer Connelly to talk about her role and the story about her family as the experience the events as they unfold. "The relationship between Helen and her son is much more deeply explored." They used the interaction between them to provide an illustration for Klaatu about how humans treat each other. In the beginning, they're in a lot of conflict and what is the evolution of their relationship - they spent a lot of time talking about this. "I think it really grounded the film." We have all this
but at the core it's about something, a film about the human spirit, about how we care for each other.
12:30PM - Small scene to give us a taste of the relationships
A quick scene of talking between Keanu and Jaden Smith in the back of a pick up truck. Very interesting scene about the relationship between the kid and Keanu. At this point "he's having a little bit of a conflict with a decision he made earlier in the film." Maybe they're starting to think humans aren't so bad any more (at this point in the movie).
12:32PM - Derrickson: "It really wasn't still I started cutting it together
that I saw it was a story about an alien becoming human
What it is about humanity that's remarkable. And to capture that is difficult, but I think we have it in this movie." One of the biggest questions is about Gort. What can they tell us? Will it remind us if the 1951 one?
12:34PM - Gort is definitely in the movie. It wouldn't be The Day the Earth Stood Still without him. Big questions were about how to update Gort and they went through hundreds of images of possibilities. They ended up coming back not far from the original in the concept. Weta is doing all the visual effects and they're still in the process of doing all the visual effects and getting the details down.
12:35PM - For the space ship design, you didn't go with the standard design. The idea of the space ship, the space suit, and Gort, the idea of them having an organic biological base starts to make sense
These other civilizations may not be into industrialization like we are. So the ship is based more in a biological system
That's not anything new ti sci-fi literature, but new to sci-fi cinema. Final clip of several minutes of footage
A majority of the visual effects aren't done yet, but he wanted to give "this audience" something that they wanted to see - so it's a full reel to give us a fair representation of "what the movie feels like."
12:40PM - Awesome extended trailer! Very thrilling, very epic!
Watch the first The Day the Earth Stood Still trailer here.
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