Run for Your Life and Watch a Pair of Clips from Jack the Giant Slayer

Steve Barton   |  

Feb 10, 2013

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While we wait for Monday’s premiere of a new trailer for Jack the Giant Slayer, a pair of clips have hit the Net from the flick, one from Warner Bros. and another from MTV, who also chatted with director Bryan Singer about adapting the classic tale, bringing giants to life, and more.

Why did he decide to work on the film?

I felt it was a chance to expand on an old myth and tell it for real, for lack of a better term. What would it be like if there was actually a beanstalk that went into the heavens? What would it be like if giants existed? Also, I was a big fan of the Ray Harryhausen pictures when I was a kid, so this was a chance to make a modern-day film like that, but with the technology now in the place where it’s at — with motion capture, performance capture, I could finally enter that space and work in it, so that was something I wanted to do as well.

What kind of changes did he make from the original script?

If a movie’s gonna be called “Jack the Giant Slayer,” we really can’t have too much sympathy for the giants. There was a dangerous ambiguity in the original script between sympathy for the giants, what they were, and their previous relationship with humanity. I needed to redefine that, so I brought Chris in for a rewrite, a very significant rewrite during the pre-production. Then Dan Studney came in, an old friend of mine. He was the prep/on-set re-writer, and we crafted a kind of different film.

Was motion capture used for the giants? Might we see some spillover from what he’s learned here in the next X-Men?

We performance-captured the giants first on a volume stage. The challenge that we had, that Avatar did not, was that you’ve got real actors interacting with giants. This was my first 3D movie as well, and I took a lot of care with the stereo. But to do a fully animated kind of thing? I definitely want to use this technology again, and I might even be using some of it in a different way in X-Men. I don’t wanna say how yet, but I’m definitely using some of this technology on X-Men, which I never used in any of the other X-Men films.

Hit the link below for the full Q&A, and be sure to check back on Monday for the new trailer.

Nicholas Hoult, Eleanor Tomlinson, Stanley Tucci, Ian McShane, Bill Nighy, and Ewan McGregor star in Jack the Giant Slayer, which hits theatres on March 1st.

Synopsis
Jack the Giant Slayer tells the story of an ancient war that is reignited when a young farmhand unwittingly opens a gateway between our world and a fearsome race of giants. Unleashed on the Earth for the first time in centuries, the giants strive to reclaim the land they once lost, forcing the young man, Jack (Nicholas Hoult), into the battle of his life to stop them. Fighting for a kingdom, its people, and the love of a brave princess, he comes face to face with the unstoppable warriors he thought only existed in legend–and gets the chance to become a legend himself.