MTV recently announced the possible nominees for their 2009 Movie Awards, which includes not only an award for Best Fight, but also for Breakthrough Performance: Male.
But they need your help.
Animated Views has an article about the final portion of the battle at the end of Prince Caspian. They interviewed Prince Caspian’s Art Director, Frank Walsh, who provided many pictures and explanations for how things worked.
Animated Views: So, tell me, Frank. What will your last story on Prince Caspian be about?
Frank Walsh: Towards the end of Prince Caspian there is a climactic scene where the Telmarine Army, lead by King Miraz, march against the Narnians. Andrew Adamson, the director wanted to precede the final battle by setting Miraz the challenging task of having to ford a monstrous river to reach his enemy. In much the same way Julius Caesar, in 56BC, had taken his army against the Germanic tribes by a building bridge across the Rhine, so Andrew set us the task of achieving the same for his film. Caesar accomplished this task allegedly in 10 days; we had 40, accompanied by the predictable ‘flood’.
There are three very cool posters that have just started floating around. The King Miraz one that we posted, without logos, has been released WITH logos. These posters are international posters, as evidenced by the logos found on them. The first features the Pevensie children. The second, Prince Caspian. The third is the one we saw yesterday, with King Miraz.
Prince Caspian Poster 4
Prince Caspian Poster 5
Prince Caspian Poster 6
Weta Holics has posted all new design illustrations from the Weta design files for the upcoming film in the Narnia series, Prince Caspian!
Weta Designer Nick Keller, created this artwork, for the Prince Caspian design and production team, as an example of the final look of Miraz in costume.
Here we’ll start with our sister site NarniaWeb, where glumPuddle and the rest of the journalists interviewed Sergio Castellito and Pierfrancesco Favino.
Q: We saw just now all the costumes and gear that you have to put on. We get to feel the weight of it. Does it help your performance to get into costume and feel the weight of it?
Sergio: Oh yes, absolutely. It’s totally different from my experience – I’ve had a completely different cinematography. So for me, it’s an absolutely new experience. And it will be very interesting because acting is both athletic and psychological too. And I have a lot of admiration for Andrew Adamson because he’s very careful about psychological relationships between the characters. It’s totally different than I could imagine about a movie like this. But at the same time, it’s really interesting to act out a stereotype. This is the first time in my life I have played a villain. It’s really interesting, because after a lot of movies, this is the first time I have played a villain. And so, I have to fight myself with the stereotype I had in mind. Really interesting.
Q: Where you familiar with the books at all before you got the role?
Sergio: No, not so well. But I have two kids. They knew the first Narnia very well. When I told them that I could act in the second Narnia, they had a lot of admiration for me.
Pierfrancesco: For us in Italy, it’s not the same like in the U.S. or in England. We don’t have that saga as you have. For us, Pinocchio is our one. Nothing comparable to this.
Q: They have fleshed out your role a lot [in the movie]. So were you surprised how much they fleshed out your role, and gave him a little more for the movie?
Pierfrancesco: (translating)
Sergio: Oh, I think it’s a good idea.
Q: How did Andrew talk to you about the character? Did he give you very specific things he wanted to see or did he just let you play it broadly?
Sergio: We speak about the character in a psychological way. This is the very interesting side of this work. Because I thought that everything was just an imaginary stereotype. But at the same time, we spoke about the character like a human being. There is a very interesting side of my character that is the fight between youngness and oldness. So the good and evil is like youngness and oldness. It’s very interesting.
Q: Did you have to do a lot of sword practice?
Pierfrancesco: (nods) Especially him. A lot of horse-riding.
Sergio: A lot of practice. We have an extraordinary trainer, Alan. Very good. This is my first… {shows a cut on his knuckle}
Q: Is this your first English language film?
Sergio: No, I shot “The Big Blue,” and the TV movie directed by Jim McBride starring Peter Falk, some years ago. We acted together, in English, an Italian movie about the life of Enzo Ferrari.
Q: Do you have the script translated into Italian so you can learn the lines?
Sergio: Yes. That was very important to me in the beginning to understand the meaning and psychological meaning. But we also study accents. I think Andrew wanted a Mediterranean accent. Spanish, Italian, Greek, North-African, French…a Telmarine’s accent. It’s quite easy for me to do a good accent.
We’ll continue the interview with ComingSoon.net
CS: You two know each other well from making movies together. In the book, at one point, Glozelle has to betray the king, so have you shot that yet?
Favino: We haven’t shot it yet, but that isn’t a problem. (laughter) I’m joking. This is the third movie that we did together, and I’ve always admired Sergio as one of the best Italian actors we have, at least to me. So we have the chance to work together, but when you’re working apart for different things, I don’t really feel I have to hate him when I betray him. At the same time, he has to slap me and stab me in the back. We’ve made three movies together, and in all of them, he’s been slapping me. (laughter)
Castellitto: Not yet, but we have time.
CS: So, I guess one of the biggest moments in the movie is the castle raid?
Castellitto: Spettacolare! Yes, incredible. We show a lot of people who jump. You know, half of this movie, we don’t know what it is, because everyday on the set, we see a blue screen, so we must imagine that something happened, but we don’t know what.
Favino: It will be a surprise even for us.
Castellitto: Yesterday, we shot a scene and they told us that an army was behind us.
Favino: Thousands of soldiers and cavalry. Actually, this morning, we’ve been rehearsing with horses and there were at least one hundred, so there’s a very good mixture of real things and CGI.
Castellitto: Even though the machine is so big, there’s something that he feels which is artistic. He’s been surprised to find this huge machine going on, and at the same time, people working with their hands. This was something that surprised me and was extraordinary.
CS: Is Miraz the kind of king who gets into the fighting?
Castellitto: He is not a coward, he’s a soldier. He’s a murderer; he killed his brother. He is not a coward. The first idea I had of him is of Prince Claudius in Hamlet. That is the first reference, I think, but he’s also a usurper. He had a son, he wanted the kingdom for his son, he loves his son. At the end, he accepts the fight and he tries to win.
CS: What about the actual battle scenes? Are you going to be involved in those?
Favino: I don’t know how much we can say about that.
CS: Do you have a lot of scenes with Ben Barnes, who plays Prince Caspian? There weren’t a lot of scenes with them together in the book.
Castellitto: The most important scene between us is when he comes to my bedroom and he wants to know the truth about the death of his father. This is the first fight. At the end of the fight when William says…
Favino: Don’t tell everything
Castellitto: Ah, okay, read the book.
Sergio Castellito and Pierfrancesco Favino are King Miraz and General Glozelle, The Bad Guys!
Sergio Castellitto has been cast as King Miraz in Prince Caspian. He recently lent his voice to Arthur and the Invisibles.
[View our Sergio Castellitto page, here on NarniaFans.com!]
Welcome to Narnia, Sergio!
Bio from Film Society of Lincoln Center: With four films slated for release within the first half of 2005, Sergio Castellitto seems well on his way to becoming one of the most popular Italian actors for international audiences since the heady days of Mastroianni and Gassman. Born in Rome in 1953, Castellitto became active in the theater while in his twenties, working with some of Italy’s finest stage directors. In the 80s he began appearing regularly in films, and by the 90s had graduated to leading roles for directors such as Marco Ferreri (La Carne), Francesca Archibugi (THE GREAT PUMPKIN), and Giuseppe Tornatore (THE STAR MAKER). But it was with a French film, Jacques Rivette’s Va savoir, that Castellitto really attracted international acclaim. Playing Ugo, the artistic director of an Italian theater troupe visiting Paris, Castellitto brilliantly captured a certain kind of contemporary artist/intellectual, a man simultaneously completely self-centered and painfully aware of just how self-centered he is. Indeed, it’s his very “contemporary” quality that makes Castellitto such an appealing figure. There’s a wonderful sense of irony, a kind of world-weariness belonging to someone who thought he had seen everything. One can see this in his growing bafflement in My Mother’s Smile, as he gets caught up in a plot he no longer thought was possible; or in his reaction to discovering the chummy relations between talk show superstars of the political Left and Right in CATERINA IN THE BIG CITY. Castellitto isn’t an “everyman,” but there’s something that assures us that we know someone just like him. Besides acting, Sergio Castellitto has also tried his hand at directing, and his second film, DON’T MOVE, co-starring Penelope Cruz, was one of the great critical and commercial successes in Italy last year. – Richard Peña
Loading ...
