TMNT
Kevin Munroe on a New Story for TMNT
“When you meet with Pete [Laird] he’s got his sort of 10 Commandments of what the turtles can and can’t do,” said director Kevin Munroe. “There’s a few things that are gray areas. One of them was can one of them have an alter ego? They’ve had other alter egos before. I think Mike was actually a superhero in the new animated series and I think a couple other things they’ve done. It also comes from characters and the characters based conflict and the idea that Leonardo wants to make the world a better place so he’s going out training and doing this. But, the idea that Raph is going after that same thing that Leo is, but he’s going after it in a completely different way and so how do you take all of that frustration and all of that desire to do good? So you just create a character out of that and he has this great alter ego that really becomes this personification of the sort of difference between Leonardo and Raph throughout the entire movie. Those were new creations specifically for the movie.”
Airline travel is a bit complicated, as Leo rides the landing gear for his flight, but it’s allowed. “I think they traveled in some comic book. It’s really funny because we sat we started the story process. We came up with the screwiest ideas. It was like turtles in space and at the end of it we came back to it just has to be in New York. The thing from the beginning with me is that it had to be about family with me. In a lot of the other incarnations, they touched on the idea that they’re brothers, but I wanted it to feel like they were actually brothers relating to each other and a family that’s sort of falling apart. We were trying to figure out just plot wise and the franchise has been everywhere. I mean you come up with the dumbest thing. They time travel to Aztec times and Pete is like yeah we did it in 1996. We can’t win and so we ended up with the night watcher and that’s where a lot of that stuff came from.”
The turtles will not battle Shredder in this CGI adventure, though Munroe has not ruled out the famous villain for sequels. “Pete was very big on the idea of having a new villain. He didn’t really demand it necessary. I think we all sort of felt that Shredder had been done to a good extent. Batman Begins just did it great when they did the kick off with the Joker. It’s a really good idea. Now when he comes back in the next one, that’s cool because now you know who this new Bruce Wayne is and you’ve got that whole set. To a lesser extent, I think it’s the same sort of thing for the turtles. I think Shredder would make a much bigger impact in I think the second movie than he would in the first one because you’d sort of assume it for the first one which is kind of neat.”
Their current foes are a slew of aliens and mutant monsters. “Pete is a huge monster fan and we always talked about the tone of the movie and I truly loved the tone of Ghostbusters. I think it was one of the big things from it and one of the fields we wanted to go. Not necessarily chasing and hunting and all of that other stuff but just that level of fun and that level of imagination. It’s still sort of grounded that as long as we go back to the family, there’s something that’s tangible and doesn’t get too silly. That was something we were really sort of cognizant of too. Just making it feel not gritty, but believable.”
While no reference is made to Vanilla Ice, it would be possible to watch the CGI TMNT after a marathon of the animatronic trilogy and feel it fits in. “The continuity would be the basic New York City is the backdrop,” said producer Thom Gray. “I think we had to go a little bit different, a bigger story from the first movie. The second movie was pretty small within a neighborhood. This thing is taking on big proportions of extra terrestrial out there back in time so I think scope wise it’s much bigger, but the essentials of the turtles are still the same. You don’t want to fool with that. Kevin certainly had to stay within the confines of Peter’s imagination and every time he wanted to go out there, Peter would say, ‘No they wouldn’t do that.’ So I think the lore of this is something that became sacrosanct. We couldn’t push too far away from it.”
That said, we don’t start over with the origin of the boys. “The idea of that is that we didn’t want to tell an origin story all over again,” said Munroe. “The idea of it sort of being a rebirth story so the idea that they’ve been through all of these adventures. There’s such a mass knowledge in a lot of markets of what the turtles have been and who they’ve been with and so forth. We’re playing off of that, the idea that they’ve been through all of these adventures and now they’re questioning what brings them together as a family and is it only a common foe that binds them as a family. In that respect, yeah we sort of do play off the fact that they’ve had these adventures and they travel back in time and they’ve done all of this stuff. But, now Splinter is worried that his family is falling apart and can they come together without a common foe to sort of bind them. This movie sort of answers that and sort of rebirths them a bit for sort of a new franchise which is kind of fun.”
TMNT opens to theatres on March 23rd, 2007. More preview coverage coming shortly.
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