Thursday, August 8, 2002

COMIC-CON INTERNATIONAL: THE HULK MOVIE PANEL

By Rob Allstetter / The Comics Continuum

SAN DIEGO - Of the Marvel movies scheduled for release next year, The Hulk is shrouded in the most mystery. Heck, the title character hasn't even been seen yet.

Director Ang Lee, who kept a closed set, broke the silence a little on Saturday at Comic-Con International. Lee - joined by producers Larry Franco, Gale Anne Hurd and Avi Arad -- brought along two dozen slides to show the crowd of 4,300, and discussed the film, which remains on track for a June 20 release.

Following is a rundown of the filmmakers' comments:

* Lee's opening comments: "I'm having a blast here working with the finest in Hollywood, with no restrictions that to the producers' support. I felt like I was working the best possible foundation. It feels like an independent film to me, except it's like the biggest movie I could imagine. If it doesn't work, it's all my fault. A lot of pressure.

"We're still 10 months away from releasing it. As you know, there are CG characters. There's a lot of work to be done - even after production."

* Lee on how Bruce Banner becomes the Hulk: "The gamma ray accident makes our hero our hero. We're not doing a period piece. This is 40 years later. We're doing an updated version. So still, we're dealing with cutting-edge science today. We want to take the heritage of the gamma exposure."

* Lee on working with cinematographer Fred Elmes, a frequent collaborate: "The film has great art. The artistic value is a pretty high standard, although it is a highly entertaining movie."

* Lee on the color scheme: "The color is very much taken from the printed color from the earlier comic-book eras. Great American art, illustration, some of the best American art has to offer to the work."

* Lee of special effect supervisor Dennis Muren: "They say it's very hard to get him on set because he only does post-production work, but in this show everything would have effects-created shots, so he's on the set most of the time. He's very enthusiastic, almost like kid. He's very excited. He kept saying, 'We're the real deal. We're the real deal.'"

* Lee on the computer-generated Hulk: "The intelligence they're put, the state we've seen him in is pretty incredible, but we have still yet to bring him to life. I think it's going to be real exciting."

* Lee on a kid showing up in a slide of the Gamma Sphere, next to Banner: "The kid next to him is the kid he will save. That's one thing that Avi said to me that's important. He saves the kid's life and gets zapped."

* Lee on the difference between comics and films: "Movies are very photogenic. It's not like a drawing, where you're thinking and staring at it, (so) that you can get into your fantasy. When you're watching realistic images, it's going on in a narrative form, linear form. So it's a very different media. I think to give you the satisfaction of reading the comics when you translate to the movie, it has to be done somewhat in a movie."

* Lee on Josh Lucas' Major Talbot: "This is the one, the handsome guy you'd love to kill at the end of the movie. I loved working with him, Josh Lucas, totally charming."

* Lee on Nick Nolte, who plays Bruce Banner's father: "I have seen some of the most brilliant performance from him. I think it will be a wonderful, wonderful surprise for you. I think you're going to enjoy him very much. A very psychological, complex performance of the old man."

* Lee, while showing a slide of Bruce and Betty in the desart, on the film's draw: "The first element of the Hulk that interested me was the psychodrama. The comic book deals with the absolute truth; it's the reality. This is one of the scenes that really touched on that alter ego that darker side of all of us. It's a fantastic set, I think. Quite poignant scene. Very intense. To me Bruce Banner is like most of us but Hulk is the other side, is the truth that will be hiding."

* Arad on a question about Hulk dogs or the She-Hulk appearing in the movie: "No She-Hulk."

* Hurd on Lee: "It's something that people don't realize, how much stamina it takes to make a movie. What I've observe here, as I observed with Jim Cameron, is someone who can maintain a vision all the way through.

"Filming is all about knowing which compromises to make and which ones to resist. And I can absolutely vouch that Ang Lee has preserved The Hulk - which I've been working on with Avi for 12 years. It's better to make it right than to make it fast and I can't tell you how stunning Ang's vision is for this film. It's true to the comic book. It's true to the characters. And true to everything that makes the movie great, which is not only character, but absolutely fabulous action. It's fun, but it's about something."

* Lee on partner James Schamus: "We're best friends. We started working from the first movie on. He writes or rewrites my scripts. So I never really have experience working with other writers. James is a film professor. To me, he's a filmmaker, rather than a writer to me. He provides great inspiration and brainstorms with me. We talk about what kind of film we're making; we talk about visions. It's less about the script that's written for studio executives, but for filmmakers, a blueprint for possibilities. So we have that very healthy relationship for about 10 years. There's no need to change that. We still worked together on Hulk. After Crouching Tiger, I was approached to do this. To me, it just him me as a great idea. It seems to me that Hulk is my Green Destiny, if you remember the sword in Crouching Tiger."

* Lee on how Banner keeps his pants on as the Hulk: "I've revealed one version (of Banner in the slide show, with ragged purple pants). That's his first Hulk Out. From then on, anything's possible. He Hulks out quite a few times, so we do variations of what that will. He Hulks out several times in the movie, and you seem all. But it's a PG-13 movie, we try to make."

* Lee on if Tobey Maguire, who starred in Spider-Man and also in previous Lee films, would appear in Hulk: "Not in this one. He's Spider-Man. He was Spider-Man when I started casting. He's one of my favorite actors. One day he came to the set, and that was very sweet of him of to stop over. I met him and I said to him, 'I have a great idea for a Hulk 2 and then Spider-Man 3.' He said, 'How do you think the studios are going to divide the profits?' I love him as an actor, but not in this movie."

* Lee on if the Absorbing Man is in the movie: "There's no Absorbing Man in this film, the character you know as Absorbing Man."

* Arad, following up: "As he said, there's no Absorbing Man in this movie."

* Lee on Lou Ferrigno's apperance: "While we were shooting that, it was funny. He's the nicest man I ever met in my life. I was sitting in a car and do this, (growls). It was so real, for two seconds I thought…"

* Hurd on why it took 12 years to bring the Hulk to the screen: "First thing, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Marvel Comics, to Avi Arad and Stan Lee, without whom none of this would ever happen.

"It's interesting if you think about it. I said before, it's better to make it right than fast. For a while, it was really frustrating because I thought that this is a great property. It's not really a super-hero. This guy doesn't change into a costume and save the world. It's really about inner demons.

"We also didn't have the technology, literally, until right now to bring this to the screen properly, to have the character of the Hulk who can emote. Because of ILM and Dennis Mirren's terrific abilities, we are now making the movie at the right time with the right filmmaker at the helm. And that had never happened up until now.

"The preliminary discussions were about a year-and-a-half ago, and he has been a man on a mission ever since. The mission is to bring you the very best Hulk anyone could ever imagine."

* Arad, following up: "I like to add one more thing to this. It's a great tribute here to a very group at Universal Studios, the management who understood The Hulk is a character piece, it's not just an action-adventure film. It's about the vision it takes with an amazing filmmaker, it's about dreams, about psychology, about science."