HULK SMASH PUNY INTERVIEW! By George 'El Guapo' Roush on May 27, 2008 Hulk hate stupid interviews about Hulk! Hulk want to smash in face of puny Director Louis Letterier and tiny Producers Gale Anne Hurd and Kevin Feige. Read what dumb filmmakers have to say about new Hulk movie. Stupid humans talk about Edward Norton, Hulk enemy Abomination and about making Hulk movie. Director and Producers should have no opinion on Hulk!! Humans need to show Hulk more respect or Hulk will take foot and dropkick weak humans into outer space! Read interview before Hulk decide to crush puny website!!! From an outsider's perspective, if it ever got that bad for Bruce Banner had he ever contemplated taking his own life to end the curse of The Hulk? Feige: Funny you should ask that because the question is yes he did and no he can't. There's some great stuff in the comics where you see him attempt to it and The Hulk simply won't let him. The angst and anxiety in even attempting to do that will unleash The Hulk and a bullet or a fall isn't going to work. There are things that we're playing with now and there are scenes that we've shot that represent Banner's life and journey between when he runs out of that hospital which you saw in the title sequence and when we meet him in Brazil. We never say exactly how long it's been, but it's been a number of years and there'll be some things that we're unveiling online and on the websites. It's a fill in the blanks, if you will, of some of his story about his journey from the university where the incident occurred to Brazil. He went on a worldwide trek during that time. I thought it was just five months because I thought I saw a memo that said no sightings for five months or something like that. Feige: You might have seen that. The memo might've said five months, but it's all a part of the progression towards Brazil. There are a few scenes that aren't in the movie that you're putting online? Feige: There are a few scenes that we shot specifically to fill in that journey and that we don't want to talk too much about, but that we're going to be unveiling as part of the promotion and the marketing towards the release, some of which deal exactly with that very question. So, good call. You started this movie last July, right? Feige: Started shooting, right. 'Iron Man' seems like it had more time with it's CG. How tough has it been for you guys and can you believe that you made it and were there times you didn't think you would make the date? Hurd: Have we made it? Feige: We made it. Just barely. You never think that you're not going to make the date. The machine is in place to make sure that you do make the date, but keep in mind that Louis was hired the year before that and so we had been in prep for not quite a year, but a good ten months before we started filming and almost all of that ten months was spent designing the creatures. To put it into perspective, we didn't have a full three-d model of Iron Man until  - I'm not going to get it right and someone will call me on it – well after we'd finished filming before I saw the first ILM and Orphanage models of Iron Man. We had a full rendered three-d Hulk in January before we started filming in July for this very reason. We knew the post was going to be tight and we knew that was going to be by far the most important task that Louis had to undertake. This Hulk looks a lot different than the Ang Lee Hulk. What direction did you want to go when you were designing him? How long did it take to come up with the different design? Letterier: The design actually started before I was hired by Marvel. They were designing it and getting an idea for the skin and the texture and the surfaces and stuff. Also, there were models from the comic books that you refer to, those in the last ten years, where Hulk has evolved. He's less pudgy and he's more humanlike. He looks more like a super human, a perfect human. I have to say that I really loved Tim Sale's and Jeph Loeb's 'Gray Hulk' just because it was that sort of squarish and perfect, super comic bookish design and also Tim's framing is amazing. All these guys. Our Hulk is a sort of collection, the son of all these Hulk's together. If you assemble them all together and morph them all together they would kind of look like our Hulk. I decided to make him a little darker in terms of the skin just because in the daylight it doesn't look that good, bright skin doesn't look that good and you don't have the sub-surfaces that we needed too. He's got maybe two or three sub-surfaces like your real skin. It's like if you have green blood running through your veins you would look like this. What about The Abomination? Letterier: The Abomination I started in France with a different kind of design. I wanted to update the look. I didn't want to update the look which I really like, with the big ears which I really like, but I needed to justify why the Abomination, because we saw his transformation, his gradual transformation would look like this, and for me it was a little bit too reptilian, a little bit too fishlike like a creature from the Black Lagoon. I wanted to get something that could be an homage to this, but would be realistic. He's a soldier who eventually becomes this thing. He didn't fall into a – like in 'The Fly' – a teleportation thing with a fish. So I needed to justify why he would become like this. His look was an evolution. We were searching for ideas and everything and Avi Arad said, 'What about the bones and stuff?' I thought that was a great idea and so the design that was more of an exoskeleton became more of an endoskeleton based on Avi's idea. Feige: Which is why you'll see in the design that we've got he's got these sort of shards coming out of the back of his elbows, out of the back of his ankles and his chestplate – Hurd: His vertebrae in the back. Feige: Yeah, the very cool vertebrae that pop out of the back. A lot of it was designed, Louis was designing it knowing that we were going to encounter one of the biggest brawls certainly that we'd ever put on film for the third act of this movie. It was going to be two creatures going at it with fisticuffs. So a lot of the designs and a lot of the reasons that he has these pointy things is so that he could use them in battle. One of the final reasons, and it was a big discussion that we had about the ears which are quite iconic for Abomination – that's what it came it down to. Letterier: [laughs] It's in the fight. Feige: In the choreography you would see that Hulk was purposely not going for the ears. Letterier: Yeah, that was my thing. He's fighting and goes, 'Ah, I cannot fight him.' He'd just take the ears and rip them out. Feige: Because they go at it and that's going to be nice. It's not a gore fest, ripping their ears off. I read that the end fight is like twenty minutes? Letterier: Actually, we're in the midst of this thing, and I didn't say this exactly. The end piece is twenty minutes, where everyone knows where he is, twenty six minutes. Everyone knows where he is and they converge and eventually – we'll show you some stuff. But the fight is pretty long. It's like ten or fifteen minutes long. It's a big fight. Feige: Very satisfying. Letterier: It's definitely the longest fight that I've ever choreographed. Feige: People who are expecting a twenty six minute 'they live' homage, it's not quite that. In regard to how the serum is used, is that dependent on how it's administered or a person's personality? How Tim [Roth] turns into The Abomination and Bruce turns into The Hulk? What are the variables? Feige: Well, it's a very different process from the accident that occurred for Bruce which was based almost entirely on gamma radiation when he was in that chair experimenting, trying to bring out the strength within in someone and then the injection that Blonsky gets. But absolutely, I think with any Marvel character it's always the personality of the person. What if somebody else had been bit by the spider? What if someone else was hit by the cosmic waves? And you see at the end of 'Iron Man', what if someone else had that suit? It's very much dependent on the personality and usually and traditionally and especially in the case of Bruce Banner in this film it's usually the person that least wants it. Bruce wasn't sitting in that chair to get strength, to become super powered. He was in that chair to experiment and to prove a theory that he had and in doing so he opened Pandora's Box and he spent all of the intervening time, between the title sequence and meeting him in Brazil, and even the first half of this film, trying to close it again, trying to lock it up, trying to keep it at bay. Over the course of the movie, as you've heard us say ad nauseum about him, becoming Hulk as a hero. He learns that in the right hands, particularly, and it's only until he sees it in the absolute wrong hands that he realizes that he perhaps could be someone to control it for good. Hurd: And that contrasts with Blonsky who is very much about getting that kind of power. I noticed in 'Iron Man' that he had a kind of Marvel creative team, a consultant team that's credited at the end. Did you have something like that for this film, where the actual creators could come in and give their two cents? Feige: Yeah, it was the same team involved during the development and production of both. Letterier: It helps me. I'm not an idiot savant who knows all these comic books by heart, but there are a couple of these in the Marvel vault that I can ask, 'Give me a name for the base –' and they'll know that. Also you can be sure that here and there you're going to make a faux pas that's going to offend fans, 'The Hulk' fans and so these guys are our safeguard for not doing that. Also from Joe Quesada who's been writing forever and also Sid Ganis who's on the board, it's great to have that spectrum of people. Dan Alan who's like a toy guy. So it's good to have a good panel about what these movies are meant for. How different did you want the relationship of Ross and Banner to be from the first film? Letterier: It wasn't a subject in the first one. The treatment was a little different of it than in ours. The base is still the same though. They know each other and he's still the father of Betty Ross and Betty Ross is the love of Bruce Banner's life and he's still a general. So you've got that. I respect Ang's movie tremendously and I love Ang's movie. I just didn't want to do the same thing. I'm asking because people are going to be curious. Letterier: Yeah, and it's a good question and why we have to all try together to make people understand that this is really not the sequel to the first movie, but it's not a reboot of the first movie where you do the same thing. Hurd: It's not another origin story. Letterier: It's not another origin story where you wait for forty minutes for Bruce Banner with his nutty bicycle helmet to come in. Everyone knows that and Kyle's credit sequence explains that tremendously. Nowadays comic book fans and TV watching people, you give them two images and they understand the origin. It was very important to understand that in beginning and for the longest time we scratched our heads and then all together we came up with the idea of doing this credit sequence which would expose everything that you needed to know. For the longest time he was doing flashbacks and it was very confusing. We were going forward to nowhere land and you'd be like, 'Who's this guy? Am I watching the sequel? I don't understand?' So we said, 'Lets put everything, let’s shove everything upfront and also make it really beautiful.' We also used some of the stuff that we'd shot that we didn't know where we were going to use it, the chair and all of that stuff. Are there any hints to other heroes in the movies at all? I know in 'Iron Man' there's the thing with the Captain America shield in the background. Feige: Well, we've already talked about the Super Soldier Serum which is directly referenced in the film and so that sort of hints at the same character. We've announced a release date for that film as well, and so the idea is that two or three years from now you can look back at all the movies and see how they're all interconnecting. There are a number of points in this film that will connect to that bigger Marvel universe. To go back to your question about Ross and Betty and Bruce, it goes back to what you're saying about the comics. It's really the same source material and it's really trying not to ignore that or to redo it or to choose different characters. Betty Ross and General Thunderbolt Ross were the core relationships in Bruce's life and we wanted to continue to explore that. What I think throughout the course of the film people will that it's a real emotional type situation. We also know that The Hulk talks in this movie. I know in some of the recent comic books he can talk in complete sentences and paragraphs. Feige: Oh, yeah. So he's not at that level in this, but what's the level of dumbness (not my question, people! Don’t e-mail me saying I called Hulk stupid!) of The Hulk in this movie? Feige: He's never dumb. Speaking or not speaking I'm not sure that The Hulk was ever dumb. He is not verbose in his linguistics. Letterier: You get an understanding, and as I was talking to you as we met about this that was just my stupid French guy analogy of that. Let’s say Banner has Hulked out nine times, three times, five times since we've met this guy and when we see him for the first time onscreen. It's like a five day old baby therefore. Hulk is a new creature, a five day old baby. Hulk, like a baby, every time he opens his eyes has people shooting at him or hitting him, everything and so he becomes a reactive and aggressive creature, a defensive creature. In this movie he gets to Hulk out a few times and he gets to learn things along the way, meeting people, different characters and opponents. That's why in the beginning he's very primal in his way of fighting, but once he fights Abomination at the end he has learned new trick and new things. So his evolution is quite important. That's really what it is. Banner's evolution in our movie, we get him at a certain point and bring him to another one and the really interesting evolution to follow is the evolution of The Hulk and how the two of them together. In the comic book Banner hates The Hulk and The Hulk hates banner. We start from this and that's the beginning of our movie and then we take it somewhere else. The evolution of these two characters bring us to the finale. That's it. I hope you get all of that because it was deep, man [laughs]. There's so many years of history with 'Hulk'. Assume there's success with this film, would that be the direction that you want to pursue, keeping it grounded more in a TV series reality? Feige: I think there are a ton of good stories from the book and here I talked about 'Hulk Gray' by Jeph Loeb, who by the way was a part of our discussion groups on this, and the FX team and Louis always had in their back pockets a copy of 'Hulk Gray' which is not to say that there is Hulk Gray in this movie. Hulk Gray is not just a color. He's almost like another Hulk, another character of Hulk, but in Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale's comic there was great stuff with Thunderbolt, with Betty, with Hulk and in particular a sequence with Betty and Hulk in this grotto, in this cave which was a direct inspiration for a big scene in the center of our film. When Louis was framing shots and when the animators were animating it was almost always going directly back to that comic for stylistic and framing inspiration. Letterier: It's a great comic if you want to get accustomed to the world of 'Hulk' for someone who's a novice and doesn't know. That's a great comic to get because it's not so convoluted and complicated as some of the more recent comic books are and also it's modern in its way of storytelling. So that's the one that after I met Kevin for the first time, in April of 2006, that I went around to this old comic book store in Silverlake and that was the only 'Hulk' comic that they had. For the longest for me I remembered the old Hulk, he was quite complicated and I wanted something that was more basic, but I didn't want to go back to the army testing of a gamma bomb. I wanted to really get into the exploration of the Hulk's psyche and I got that in 'Hulk Gray'. Feige: But there are a lot of comics and a lot of stories that we liked. I would like to do 'Hulk Gray' someday though. We were talking the other day about 'Red Hulk' which is in comics now and how cool is that? So there are lots of stories to tell. Just from the bottling plant that we see, how much shit is he destroying in this movie? Hurd: A lot, and that's just the beginning because one of the things that people always wanted was, 'Okay, why don't we put him in a big city?' I want him leveling buildings. Feige: You'll get that. Letterier: That's why I'm a director. Is he more of a direct ‘rampaging’ Hulk? Hurd: Only in response to a threat from someone or something. Letterier: Yeah. He Hulks out for some reason. I see trailers where he's just ripping cars apart. Letterier: Yeah, but that's in reaction to something and he uses it as a weapon. He's not aggressive. That's also something that we were very conscious of, not to make Hulk a villain that eventually gets a conscience. Feige: Well, he's not. In that bottle factory sequence, if you notice, he's trying to get away. He's trying to get out and that's what he ends up doing, bashing his way out finally. Gale, you worked on the first movie. So here we are, five years later, and it's rare to have a reboot, or not a reboot – what is it? Hurd: It's a reboot. Letterier: Your job is to find the right term [laughs]. Hurd: The reason that reboot is kind of wrong because that implies an origin story like 'Batman Begins'. So it's kind of a hybrid, and if you guys can come with a term that'd be great. So, the new version, sometimes it takes many years to do that. 'Batman' took ten years or eight years. Who was it that stood up and said, 'Okay, we can make this again?' Hurd: Marvel. Feige: Yeah, when we got our slight funding and we looked at what characters we wanted to bring to the screen first it was Iron Man because we'd just gotten that character back from New Line and we spoke with Universal about bring Hulk back. Five years, in terms of a full reboot is a little shorter than 'Batman', about the same time as James Bond from 'Die Another Day' to 'Casino Royale'. It's about the same there. Five years. In terms of franchise pictures it's a very long time. It's the longest that we've ever had between movies that had responding sequels. The first 'Hulk' was a success product wise. It was a success with the merchandise. It was a success with all of the ancillary components. It was really something that we were interested in doing again and 'Hulk' is second to 'Spider-Man'. So we knew the stories and we knew how much more we could do with the character. So we did dip our toe in a little bit. We met with filmmakers to see who would be interested. We met with Universal to see if they'd be willing to give it another go. We met with big retailers and promotional partners to see if they would slam the door in our faces or not. People were a little bit cautious and were sort of like I think audiences have been over the last few months. Louis turned us down the first time. Letterier: I said, 'I'm a genius.' Literally, I came in because I knew these guys and I really liked them and I thought that because my agent hadn't presented it to me in the right way that they wanted me to do the sequel of Ang Lee's movie. I said, 'Are you kidding? Are you sure?' Then they presented it to me. They have to do the same thing with everybody, with Burger King. Hurd: With a cast. Letterier: The cast met me, but they were about to walk out and I said, 'No, no. Let me explain the story to you. Let me show you some panels.' We had to get people for ten minutes and get them interested and hooked in the meeting that we were having. Feige: It's very scary when you start a movie, no matter what it is. You sort of have an idea in your head about it and people share that idea of it and you go out and you're selling it while it doesn't exist yet. You get people to agree with it and you get people excited about it and you get people motivated to be a part of your vision – you don't know until it's done, and this is ninety nine percent done and show you the final one percent, but we have started screening it for a lot of those people that we were having meetings with two years ago and asking them to sign on to this new vision. The greatest thing that's happened in the last few weeks is that people having seen the movie are calling us and sending us emails saying, 'You did it. Everything you said you were going to do two years ago for the franchise, for the character you've done.' That's been encouraging and that's why I just can't wait for people to see the whole movie and each TV spot and you guys seeing more scenes and things like that. I think the reality of what this is and what this can be – even before Louis came onboard, just when we used to sit around at Marvel and talk and go, 'You know what we need? We need a "Wrath of Kahn".' It wasn't Star Trek The Motion Picture that launched five more series and nine more movies. It was 'The Wrath of Kahn' and that's what we need. It's not throwing the baby out with the bath water and tapping into what people really, really like about the franchise and I hope that's what we've done. What was the decision to cast Ed Norton like, that process, and how did it come about? Feige: We decided that we did want – we knew that we were going to redesign Hulk from the first film. We knew that tonally it was going to be a big shift. Was there any interest in Eric Bana returning? Hurd: Then it is a sequel and becomes more confusing. Feige: I love Eric and we did have conversations with Eric, but ultimately we both sort of decided that 'Star Trek' – You wanted to start fresh. Feige: We did want to start fresh and it was the comics and the TV series that we were really tapping back into which is why we kept the same characters and revamped the look and the tone of things. Hurd: You look at Edward Norton's body of work and you think about someone who has the intelligence, the intellect to play someone who's a scientist, someone who isn't a bodybuilder guy, but someone who looks like an average person. Also, playing the duality that's inherent in the character you can look at Edward Norton's film from 'Primal Fear' to Fight Club' and you realize that there really isn't anyone more right for the role. Letterier: He was tough to convince. Obviously he'd been up for other superhero movies before and he said he always turns them down because he's always found them gadgety in a way. Although, he always regrets having enough with 'Spider-Man'. He said, 'That's the one I wanted.' So this one we had to come back to him a few times and eventually he came back and said, 'Yeah, actually I see the vision.' I remember a little dinner in New York with Edward. We sat down with him and he said nothing. He said nothing. I was like, 'And then at the end the explosion!' He's like, 'I'm going to have to go home. I'll see you later.' He goes home and I said, 'That was horrible. That was the worst meeting that I've ever had.' Hurd: But it wasn't. Letterier: It wasn't. He came back. Hurd: He came to L.A. He wanted to walk through and see the imagery that Louis had talked about. You're sitting there in a dark restaurant in New York City and talking about all this great stuff and so he came to L.A. and wanted to see it. Letterier: It was actually really funny. Very early on we talked about the fights and the fighting style and Edward and myself, in the middle of the Marvel offices, pushed all the furniture back and I was like, 'Then Abomination stabs him with this thing!' It was Mr. Intellectual Actor rolling around with me and studying with each other. 'And he tears the bone!' Feige: It was the Bill Bixby shoes that we really wanted to fill that we can never really fill, but we wanted to come close to that. Even in the few clips that you've seen Edward is not the kind of person that you expect to see running across rooftops and dodging bullets and being hunted by the military. He's not. Just like Bill Bixby, just like Bruce Banner he's a scientist. He's supposed to be in a classroom, working in laboratory, teaching kids. This is where he's supposed to be and the fact that this affliction has overcome him he's forced into these scenarios and that helps with that pathos that you had in every episode. You said that it was sad in every episode and it sort of was at the end. He would come to town and take an odd job because he wanted to try to get into a laboratory for reasons that you'll discover while watching the film why he's working in that bottling factory, trying to get access to things. He's trying to work on this cure for himself. Can you talk about Edward's involvement as a writer and we've all heard the rumors that he wasn't happy with the project? Can you address those two sides of Edward Norton? Feige: Well, the writing was something that as Louis started talking to him about it and as we were meeting with him early on and he was getting more and more excited and enthusiastic about what we were doing and about what the film could be it was at a point where Zak [Penn] had gone off and was going to direct or promote – he was finishing 'The Grand'. We needed a polish anyway. We needed a rewrite anyway. Edward said, 'We've all been talking for hours and hours and hours over days and days and days, could I have a shot at doing the next rewrite?' That's what we agreed to and that's what we did and he did a very, very good job of it. All the rumors of the fighting and we've said it and I hope it's been put to rest for the most part, but the conversations that we've had between the three of us and between Edward in production and in post was no more or less passionate or argumentative than any other film we've done. The difference was that he's a movie star. He's a movie star who has reputations from other movies for whatever reasons and the press just latched onto it. But if the press was in the cutting room on 'Iron Man' or in the cutting room on 'X-Men' one, two or three or with us and Sam [Raimi] and Sony on the 'Spidy' movies, there's always something to write about. There are always disagreements. There are always new ideas and there are always changes. It becomes a story when it's someone of the caliber of Edward Norton. I think he's done an amazing job at sort of setting it to rest, supporting the movie and he's making a number of appearances coming up that I don't think have been revealed yet. So I don’t want to say what they are. What is the final run time on the film? Hurd: One fifty, one fifty two. Something like that. How much did you guys leave out? Hurd: It's never that really because you're constantly refining it. So it's not like there was a running time that was the running time that we started with to get to this point. It's always an evolution. Feige: I'm sure on every film that you've both worked on and with every one Marvel has done, every movie has had it's three hour cut, it's hour and forty five minute cut, it's two hour and fifteen minute cut and then comes to live anywhere in between one fifty and two ten. 'X-Men' one was ninety two minutes. Hurd: Because there are some visual FX sequences coming in, there are shots coming in, all of that changes the mix as you're going through postproduction. Literally, I have to tell you that Louis has been up four days straight. Letterier: Actually, last week I was up all week long. I was up Saturday night and I went back to sleep yesterday, two days ago. Feige: He's not exaggerating. Hurd: But that's what it takes and you're refining it. It's a twenty four hour a day job. Letterier: On diet coke. Hurd: It's not as clinical as there is this version and then you consciously follow across that to get to another version. It's completely organic. It's been poised to be the surprise of the summer. People have low expectations and it looks really good. So it's set to be a big surprise, but on your slate I don't remember a 'Hulk II' when you announced. Feige: In the next three years, no. We announced 'Iron Man II'. We announced 'Thor', 'Cap' and 'Avengers'. So is the plan not to do a 'Hulk II' and wait until 'The Avengers' and then years down the road do another 'Hulk' or would you have a secret lot that you put in and aren't announcing yet? Feige: The four films that we announced we needed to lock up release dates which we've done. The whole idea of a crossover that we talked about, 'Hulk' will pop up very soon. You'd make it work? Feige: Yeah. Louis, are you working with the DVD release in mind at all? Letterier: Next week that's what I'm doing, yeah. Full on, yeah. Hurd: When we're dubbing he listens to the crash down because he wants to make sure that the sound is right for the DVD. He's been doing that constantly all the way along. Letterier: Yeah, because your movie lives for like three weeks, a month and a half if you're lucky in the theater. Then for the rest of its life it lives on DVD and now we're the first Universal Blue Ray DVD and so we're really putting everything into it with multi-layers. So everything, all this stuff – there's no secret – that was cut out of the movie will be put onto the DVD. It's a lot of stuff. Actually, we save time by doing the Kyle Cooper stuff in the beginning, all the sequences like the lab transformation, finding Banner – all of that stuff was like little flashbacks spread out throughout the film. That was one of the things that we took out of the film and so I'm going to unravel this thing and put them in there in their full length scenes on the DVD. I don't think it'll be like a long edition of the movie. I don't like because I think the movie now is in its perfect shape. Really, it's perfect shape as a movie. We've dropped some images but we've not dropped entire scenes. Initially we maybe dropped one or two scenes. These are scenes that'll be on the DVD, of course, but also the long version of these scenes that we compacted. I just don't think that I want to do a longer version of 'The Hulk', a two and a half hour version of this movie because for these kinds of movies, these chase movies I've done a few and I don't think it works. I think that you sort of, the audience gets out of breath after a while. That went an hour and fifty two minutes with the credit sequence and it's the longest chase movie that I've seen in a long time without losing it's pace. It's just really fast. So you'll get a whole lot of Hulk and you see a whole lot of scope. You start in the arctic and then you're in Brazil and then you go throughout America and you finish in New York City. It's huge. HULK SMASH KEYBOARD IF PUNY HUMAN DOESN'T E-MAIL: GEORGE@LATINOREVIEW.COM!!!! Source: Latinoreview Comments