Posts Tagged ‘Set Visits’
Prince Caspian Set Visits – Part 5 – Sergio Castellito and Pierfrancesco Favino
Friday, October 19th, 2007Here 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!
Prince Caspian Set Visits – Part 5 – Ben Barnes
Friday, October 19th, 2007Here is a portion of ComingSoon.net’s interview with Ben Barnes.
ComingSoon.net How does this compare to “Stardust”? Can we assume that it’s a much bigger scale?
Ben Barnes: I didn’t really get used to it, because I was only on that for a couple of weeks. But in terms of the scales of the sets and everything it was kind of similar. There was one scene I did in this kind of magic marketplace, and they built it in the courtyard of a castle, a real castle, up in the north of England. I walked in and my jaw dropped, almost as far as it dropped when I walked on to the Miraz castle set that we’ve got in Prague at the moment, which is just… Have you seen it? It just blew me away.
CS: What was the audition process for this like?
Barnes: Actually I came into it really late. I know that they’d been looking for a long time, and I hadn’t really heard about it at all. Somebody came to see a play that I was doing and I went in to meet the casting director in London, just to read like two scenes, and then the next week I met up with Andrew and all the producers and screen tested and then I had the job four days later. It was really fast. It was like three weeks from start to finish. Less. Two and a half weeks from when I heard about it to when I got the job.
CS: What does the character give you as an actor to grab onto?
Barnes: Well I think the reason I like the character is because he’s sort of an everyman. It’s sort of a coming of age story, really. It’s from boy to man and prince to king, kind of story. Obviously, it’s been adapted somewhat from how it is in the book because the kids that were in the first one have grown up so much that it’s very hard to keep them as young children. So it all had to kind of grow up a little bit. Hopefully, he’s a kind of everyman character that you go on the journey with and sort of drags you through the story, and hopefully you kind of emphasize with him and latch on to what he’s feeling. When he’s feeling vulnerable, you feel vulnerable, and when he’s feeling strong, you’re feeling good about what’s happening. Principally, he’s that kind of character, but he’s very honorable and I think those are kind of the principal things, really.
CS: You didn’t have much time to prepare for this, did you?
Barnes: Actually, once I got to New Zealand I had a good few weeks. I literally got off the plane and within 20 minutes of getting off the plane in New Zealand I was on a horse, and they were like, “Okay, go.” And I did it every day for two months, I think. I was riding with these fantastic Spanish horse trainers we’ve got and doing the stunt training with Allan Poppleton, who choreographs all the fights for us. He’s fantastic. So I had a good sort of eight weeks out there, whilst filming little bits and pieces, but I had a good eight weeks of quite hardcore training.
CS: Were you experienced on a horse?
Barnes: No. I might have suggested that I had ridden before, but I, in fact, had not. So yeah, that was an experience. But I love it now. I love it.
CS: Did you read the books or know the part Prince Caspian played in not just this, but future books as well?
Barnes: I actually knew the first three: “The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe”, “Prince Caspian” and “Voyage of the Dawn Treader.”
CS: So you were familiar with the character?
Barnes: Yeah, I remember watching the BBC series where Sam West played him in the “Dawn Treader” part, and I remember sort of being exactly the right age for that to really capture my imagination. As soon as I got the script I remembered the beginning of that with the theme music and how it kind of panned over the map of Narnia and all that. Actually, right when I first heard about the audition, I went and looked on my bookshelves and found my copy of “Prince Caspian,” and it had a copyright date of 1989. So I remember I was eight. So that’s like the perfect age, I think, to have first got into that. And it had a little sticker in the front saying, “I can’t bear to be without my books” and a picture of a bear and below that was written Benjamin Barnes in my little eight-year-old handwriting.
Prince Caspian Set Visits – Part 5 – William Moseley and Skandar Keynes
Friday, October 19th, 2007A whole slew of Narnia and other film site journalists got the chance of a lifetime: to visit the set of Prince Caspian in Prague. It’s cool, I’ve got my passport ready for the next one.
Anyway, here we’ll start with our sister site NarniaWeb, where glumPuddle has interviews with William Moseley and Skandar Keynes.
William Moseley
Q: So, we heard you did some horse stunts?
William: Yeah, we did some horse stunts. Recently, I did the biggest horse stunt I’ve ever done. I had to… Actually it sounds pretty crazy even to me. But I basically had to chase a running horse, I had to grab onto the saddle, I had to kick a guy while the horse was running and I had to jump onto the back of the horse, and carry on going…all in a courtyard at four in the morning and it was raining.
Q: Did you do that yourself?
William: Yeah, I did that myself. It was easy [laughs]. The thing was, like, it’s funny when you do stunts like that, because you know you can do it, and if you’re not quite getting it, then…I don’t know, you want to do it again and again and again, but you don’t really realize how dangerous it is at the time, until you look back and go, “Oh, at take 7, I probably should have taken a break.’
Q: How many takes did you do?
William: Seven. That’s all I was allowed. I wanted to do eight, but seven was all I was allowed. Two were perfect, five I was kind of like, holding on for dear life a couple of times.
Q: Were there any wires involved?
William: No wires, no. It was good, though. It was really fun. They must have a lot of faith in me.
Q: Are you ready for the fight?
William: You know, last week I was really worried about it, because I haven’t really have much chance to train for it. Like I said, I think they have quite a lot of faith in me with these stunts, so they think, ‘Oh, he doesn’t really need the training,’ but it’s an over-one-hundred beat fight, so I’m sort of thinking, ‘I think I might need a bit more training than this,’ and they’re like ‘No, you’ll be fine, you’ll be fine, you’ll be fine.’ We were meant to shoot it last Wednesday, and it’s Monday today, so I was really lucky that the weather hasn’t been so good. Few more days practice.
Q: Do you actually practice with Sergio Castellito (Miraz)?
William: Yep, I fight against him. But mostly, what’s really cool is the stunt coordinator’s going to double Miraz. So, the stunt coordinator and I have a really good connection and a good understanding, like, he’s taught me all of everything I know, so it’s going to be a good one-on-one.
Skandar Keynes
Q: So what’s it like to come back for a second time around?
Skandar: It’s been really cool. It’s been really great to see everyone again and like, reuniting the family, to be very cheesy. Yeah, it’s been great here in the middle of nowhere, it’s beautiful. And what we’re doing is really cool, we’re like walking out [of Aslan's How] and everyone is [cheering]. So I’m having a good time.
Q: So in the movie, Edmund is only a year older. But you’re actually a few years older?
Skandar: Yeah, I was 12 when I started the first film and I’m 15 now. I’ll be 16 at the end of the shoot.
Q: I remember last time they had problems with you growing too much…
Skandar: Yeah, I grew 6 inches in 6 months. I felt growing pains last night actually. (laughter)
Q: The costume department said they have a computer program now to determine the patterns and how to make the costumes fit as you guys grow and keep them consistent.
Skandar: I had the chainmail, and I kept growing. And it’s precise enough that if I grew, it would completely change underneath.
Q: Did you wear chainmail in the last movie too?
Skandar: Yeah, I’m actually wearing a lot less now.
Q: I bet you wish you were wearing it now after getting stabbed in the leg. (laughter)
Skandar: Oh yeah, [Will] totally just stabbed my leg! He draws his sword and then moves it back but as he moved it back it went “bang” on my leg. Just went right on my boot!
Read the rest of this report at NarniaWeb
ComingSoon.net also interviewed each of them, as well. You can read each of the interviews with the actors by clicking on the appropriate link below:
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