By Fred Topel | Image property of New Line Cinema.
The Golden Compass
The Writer's Strike may have the most dramatic impact on the success of The Golden Compass. The fantasy story prominently featuring polar bears would have incurred the wrath of Stephen Colbert, but the strike has him off the air and unable to give the film free publicity for his rage.
Chris Weitz Directs The Golden Compass
"I was thinking about that," said director Chris Weitz. "I was thinking that it was a great opportunity to have Iorik as a Wag of the Finger or something like that. It's an opportunity missed, yeah."
Philip Pullman's trilogy of fantasy books attracted Weitz in 2000. It took him many years to work up the courage to make a big visual effects spectacle. Visits to Weta studios only intimidated him more, but once he started, he got used to imagining the possibilities.
"Every time I was shooting a scene I'd have to worry about what the G*d damn daemon was going to be up to. I knew that the next time I filmed just two human beings sitting in a room I'm going to start thinking about what that person's ferret is going to be up to. It's going to be really annoying."
The Golden Compass begins the story of Lyra (Dakota Blue Richards), a girl in a world where people have animal spirits attached to them. Lord Asriel (Daniel Craig) and Mrs. Coulter (Nicole Kidman) enter her journey briefly, for now.
"I think that obviously it helps us a lot to have these major stars because our lead is a complete unknown, but frankly it was because we could get them. The reason that we can get them is because of the books and because of Phillip Pullman's achievement. Daniel Craig just loved the books and wanted to be in the film. We're not going to turn that down and Nicole Kidman is just the perfect person to play that character. But also knowing that I'm trying to set the table for the second and third films in which the characters do become more and more important and in this world the characters are very grand figures who will have a huge effect on shaping sort of cosmic history and so having big stars is not an inimical to the whole idea. I think the great thing about Nicole is that although she is a big star she never acted as though she was slumming in a fantasy movie. She really took the character very seriously and as someone who believes that what she's doing is right even when she's acting opposite kind of a green Nerf football representing her daemon. I thought that was incredible."
Predicated on the success of the first film, Weitz hopes to move right into completing the trilogy. "I think it'd be good to start preproduction in the next few months and they should be shot at the same time because then the element of financial gamble which this first movie represented becomes a better bet if the film does well enough to merit undertaking films two and three. Right now time is working in our favor because there's a love story for Lyra that develops over the second and third books and it's appropriate that she grow a bit older, but obviously you wouldn't want to wait. Fortunately we have a kind of continuity there and a lot of the really difficult things to tackle have been handled like what daemons look like and whether polar bears can be done digitally and all that kind of stuff. Some of those things then are already in our pockets."
The Golden Compass opens to theaters on December 7th.
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