By Fred Topel | Image property of respective holders.
Inkheart
Forgive me for saying this, New Line, but Inkheart sounds like the Last Action Hero of the book world. Shoot, I could have said Purple Rose. Oh well. Characters actually come out of books when they are read aloud. Then they proceed to cause trouble in our world. Putting all this on screen is director Iain Softley, and he wasn't talking about what this "reading out" of books will look like on screen.
Set Visit: Iain Softley on Inkheart
"Oh, I can't give that away," he said. "It's not really a visual effect, in terms of a complicated visual postproduction film. I mean, a lot of the things that we tried to do are more to do with optical illusion, the sleight of hand and we're doing a lot of things for real on the set."
Softley favors the practical approach to the more popular modern CGI tools. "It feels very organic and very real, and I actually think it makes the magic more effective because I think that there is a sort of discounting that goes on in the minds of an audience when they know that it's sort of a computer world or a digital world. It's like, 'Oh, they can do anything. They can press a button for however many weeks they need at a machine.' Whereas if you actually get the sense that it's something more like the craft of illusion, I think that it's more magical actually."
Based on the book by Cornelia Funke, actors as acclaimed and diverse as Andy Serkis, Brendan Fraser, Helen Mirren, Paul Bettany and Jim Broadbent are bringing Funke's characters to life. "I couldn't imagine doing it any other way. I've been lucky that I've always worked with wonderful actors, and that makes my job easier. So, I feel very blessed with the cast that we have. To work with Helen is an ambition that I've had for a while and we have other, very wonderful actors and they're all very different with Paul Bettany and Brendan [Fraser] and Jamie Forman and Eliza [Bennett] who is wonderful. There's a new actress Rafi [Gavron] who is a great kid."
Getting such a cast together represented the diversity of the novel itself to Softley. "One of the things that appealed to me about the story was that it was this very sort of dysfunctional group of people who were fighting the good fight. We have all these characters and different actors, and everyone really melds together in the way that the story requires them to."
Inkheart movie page coming soon.
More Inkheart set reports coming soon on CanMag.Com.
Add to Heffee!
