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Clash Of The Visions

CLASH OF THE TITANS directed by Louis Leterrier, written by Travis Beacham, Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi based on Beverley Cross’s screenplay, with Sam Worthington, Mads Mikkelsen, Gemma Arterton, Ralph Fiennes and Liam Neeson. A Warner Bros. release. 106 minutes. Opens Friday (April 2). For venues, trailers and times, see Movies.


Los Angeles – Just outside the Four Seasons Beverly Hills, the sun is beating down on thousands of people running the L.A. Marathon. Inside, in a climate-controlled room, the makers of Clash Of The Titans are discussing a different kind of challenge: in an age of monster hits like the Transformers movies and Avatar, how do you build the perfect blockbuster?[rssbreak]

Warner Bros., the studio behind the remake, had an idea: 300 with monsters. The filmmakers demurred.

“That was a big argument with the studio,” says producer Basil Iwanyk. “They read the script, and they came back and said, ‘Good news, it’s greenlit! We think it’s 300 with monsters. Shoot it in Montreal with green-screen.’ And we thought, ‘300 did that so well, and we’re already going to be compared to the first Clash Of The Titans. We want to stay as far away from 300 as possible.'”

Iwanyk went back, asking for a budget big enough to allow the production to shoot all over the world.

“We wanted to go to real locations and put the monsters in deserts and mountains,” he says. “And to the credit of the studio, they came around. But that was a very big and important conscious choice that we made early on to make it feel and look as realistic as possible – as much as you can with giant scorpions.”

On paper, the 2010 Clash does look like a massive hit. It’s got Sam Worthington, the star of Avatar, and Mads Mikkelsen, the villain of Casino Royale, battling hordes of digital monsters to save the city of Argos from the wrath of Liam Neeson’s Zeus and Ralph Fiennes’s Hades. It’s a remake of the 1981 sword-and-sandal epic best known for putting Harry Hamlin in a skirt and pairing him with stop-motion effects by master animator Ray Harryhausen.

“There are some pictures that you don’t want to remake,” says executive producer Richard D. Zanuck. “They’re so good and classic that you’d better not tread in those waters. But pictures that have a lot of scope and are memorable should be remade, I think. You’re dealing with different generations of audiences. The people who saw this and loved it the first time are probably a little younger than I am now, and so hopefully you get those people back and develop a whole new audience.”

Another way to hook the audience? Release your movie in 3-D. Clash Of The Titans was originally slated to open last week, against the DreamWorks CG adventure How To Train Your Dragon. But when it became clear that Avatar’s premium-ticket 3-D and IMAX screenings were selling out faster than its conventional engagements, Warner decided to push Clash back a week and digitally convert it to 3-D.

“There wasn’t one word written, or one frame shot of this movie in consideration of 3-D,” Iwanyk says. “This was a movie that was shot in 2-D, shot as a quote-unquote ‘regular movie,’ and we all determined, ‘Okay, 3-D could actually just make it feel more fun.'”

For his part, director Louis Leterrier (The Incredible Hulk) says he got to make the movie he wanted to make, regardless of studio attempts to push him in the direction of whichever film was biggest at the box office at any given moment.

“When you’re making a movie and there’s a success [somewhere else], the studio’s instincts are, like, ‘Oh, Avatar! Let’s all do Avatar stuff!’ And then six months later, ‘Oh, Alice! Do more like Alice!’ And then there’s whatever comes next.

“Everybody jumps in every direction all the time, but if you know you have a good movie, you can take all of this into consideration. Frankly, the movie that’s on the screen is the movie I’ve always had in mind. Alexa Davalos is in the dress I wanted. Sam’s in the armour I wanted.”

Interview Clips

Louis Leterrier on his love of “entertainment cinema”:

Download associated audio clip.

Leterrier on casting the gods:

Download associated audio clip.

Leterrier on losing the love story for the remake:

Download associated audio clip.

normw@nowtoronto.com

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