By Fred Topel | Image property of respective holders.
Helen Mirren
Fresh off her Oscar nomination for The Queen, Helen Mirren was hard at work on the set of Inkheart. Playing Elinor Loredan in the film based on Cornelia Funke's book, the Hollywood royalty herself stopped by to share what she's working on.
Set Visit: Helen Mirren on Inkheart
"We were shooting the wonderful scene where the group of our friends are taken in to meet Capricorn for the first time," Mirren said. "It was brilliantly played by Andy Serkis. Absolutely amazing. It's a wonderful scene because you see the whole sort of Inkheart world and then these elements get read out of books and so you see that all happening as well. So it is a great scene."
The story has characters from books coming into the real world when certain characters read aloud. And all of the chaos that ensues is achieved with minimal CGI. "We have very, very little, hardly any blue screen or green screen. We're always acting within a real context. We have the most incredible location in Italy, just brilliantly found. When I walked into it my jaw dropped. It was just like walking into the book. It was amazing. To have that real as opposed to something fantastical, it's just great."
Perhaps that's how they attracted such an acclaimed actor to the project. "It's a huge difference, all the difference in the world, and the same with walking onto a magnificent set. So it's a great pleasure for all of us actors."
Mirren is used to recreating history with all her period pieces. Still, working in a fantasy world wasn't such a change of pace. "The whole business of film is to try and transform something that is very technical and very unreal into a reality on the screen that the audience believe and can engage in. Whether it's a story like The Queen or it's a story like this there is really no fundamental difference. You're just trying to deal with an intensely technical way of making something. You try and make the technique of something seem as unapparent as possible. So, it's really no different in essence."
Inkheart movie page coming soon.
More Inkheart set reports coming soon on CanMag.Com.
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