Spielberg, Jackson direct Tintin
directors team up to direct, produce 3 movies about Hergé's cartoon
May 15, 2007
(Source: www.variety.com)
Über-directors Stephen Spielberg (Jaws, A.I.) and Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings) have teamed up to direct and produce 3 movies, based on Hergé's classic cartoon series The Adventures of Tintin. The movies will be rendered in full digital 3-D using motion-capture technology.
Each director will helm at least one of the movies, and will produce them all with the help of Spielberg's longtime producer Kathleen Kennedy. No one is saying who will direct the third flick, or which of Tintin's 24 adventures would be adapted for the silver screen. The two directors are also deciding whether or not to release the movies through DreamWorks Animation.
Spielberg, along with music mogul David Geffen and movie producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, helped found DreamWorks back in 1994.
The Great Beard of the Universe has been after the rights to Tintin for over 25 years now. When he finally acquired them last year, Spielberg hooked up with Jackson and DreamWorks to develop the project.
"Hergé's characters have been reborn as living beings," Spielberg said, "expressing emotion and a soul which goes far beyond anything we've seen to date with computer animated characters."
Jackson's New Zealand special effects house WETA, which rendered all the CGI work for his acclaimed Lord of the Rings trilogy, has developed a 20-minute test reel to show how Hergé's (real name Georges Rémi) Belgian reporter Tintin, his dog Milou, Capt. Haddock and many other characters would look in CGI.
"We want Tintin's adventures to have the reality of a live-action film, and yet Peter and I felt that shooting them in a traditional live-action format would simply not honor the distinctive look of the characters and world that Hergé created," Spielberg said, explaining why he and Jackson decided to render the movies in mocap.
"We're making them look photorealistic; the fibers of their clothing, the pores of their skin and each individual hair," said Jackson. "They look exactly like real people – but real Hergé people!"
Both directors have their own projects to work on before they start in on Tintin. The Beard is putting together the long-awaited fourth installment in his blockbuster Indiana Jones franchise, while Jackson is directing a live-action film for DreamWorks, a feature adaptation of Alice Sebold's bestselling novel Lovely Bones. Both films will be wrapped by the end of the year.
Fun Fact: Hergé was heavily criticized for his first book, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, for making the Bolsheviks the villains of the piece, motivated only by personal greed. Hergé admitted that his research sources were highly prejudicial: much of the background was based on Moscow Unveiled, a highly critical book written by former Belgian ambassador Joseph Douillet. It was given to him by the Abbé Wallez.
Hergé later called the book "a transgression of my youth" and said, "I was fed the prejudices of the bourgeois society that surrounded me."
However, future events exonerated his vision of Soviet-era Russia. "In retrospect . . . the land of hunger and tyranny painted by Hergé was uncannily accurate," declared The Economist magazine in 1999.
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