The Reaping
Making a movie about biblical plagues can be a taxing experience. Besides all the difficulties on set, you're bound to question anything that happens in real life as reflexive of the movie. When Hurricane Katrina slammed through the south during production on The Reaping, it made the movie's CGI locusts pale in comparison.
Idris Elba on The Reaping
"That was a bit weird for us, especially seeing 80% of our crew were from New Orleans or Baton Rouge, in that neighborhood," said Idris Elba. "So it was sort of 80% of the people that were working on us lost their homes or had some family members lose their homes so that was very weird for us as filmmakers making this movie about acts of God if you like, and then going through something that was really honestly something that you've never seen before."
As Hilary Swank shared with us, the crew returned to finish the film, allowing the hurricane victims to keep their jobs. "Of course we suspended for a little while and then came back, but we stayed there. We stayed there and continued to make the film because we committed ourselves to the cause and to that area. We weren't going to abandon the filmmaking process because of that. It did affect us but we kept going."
Elba plays Swank's miracle debunking partner, in the town of Haven to try to explain away the 10 biblical plagues that keep occurring. Though the film may reinforce some stereotypes about Southern religion, Elba kept things in perspective.
"When I saw it for the first time, it occurred to me then because having spent time in Louisiana, in the script it wasn't sort of stereotypical at all and in the film it wasn't but I just remember going, 'Okay, I've been to Louisiana, it's very, very spiritual down there and Haven is there, okay.' But it didn't really hit me at first at all."
And then those locusts came. While major shots were completed with CGI, there were scenes in which Elba had to interact with real bugs. "There is a certain amount of movie magic of course but a lot of it we played for real. No green screens, really. A lot of it was real locations and then the locust scene of course, we had real locusts there, I mean, loads. And I hate bugs, I'll tell you right now. And I had to do the scene where there's a huge glass container of all these bugs and the camera was on the outside filming down. You'll see there's a scene where the whole screen fills up with bugs and then I have to put my hand in them and get dug out. I'm like, dude, honestly, I was like okay, when are we doing that scene? I had to mark it down so I could be mentally prepared for that because these things were like this big."
They didn't bite or sting, but that was little comfort to Elba. "They flew. I was like, 'Just crawl, that's cool. Flying around my ears is not the look.' But yeah, that was pretty harrowing."
The Reaping is out in theatres now.
For the posters, trailer, stills, review and more movie info, go to The
Reaping Movie Page.
Stay tuned for updates.
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