Ben Walker Talks ABRAHAM LINCOLN: VAMPIRE HUNTER and Stephen Frears’ MUHAMMAD ALI’S GREATEST FIGHT at WonderCon 2012

At this past weekend’s WonderCon, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter director Timur Bekmambetov, star Ben Walker and writer Seth Grahame-Smith showed off a new trailer and an extended section of a big action set piece that featured all the principal cast.  If you missed Dave’s recap of the panel, click here.  You can also watch the new trailer here.

Shortly before the panel, I got to sit down with Walker for an extended interview.  We talked about his reaction to the footage he’s seen, what it was like to work with Bekmambetov, what kind of research he did to play Abraham Lincoln, how the 3D be used, and he talks about a particularly gory reshoot and his favorite action scene in the movie.  In addition, with Walker getting ready to film Stephen Frears’ Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight, he revealed who he plays and how excited he is to work his Christopher Plummer.  Hit the jump to watch.

Benjamin Walker Time Index

0:25 – Benjamin Walker talks about his reaction to his film, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. 0:35 – They’re currently doing ADR (dialogue replacement) and Walker mentions his thoughts on the rough cut he’s seen.0:55 – Walker talks about director Timur Bekmambetov’s vision managing to surpass his initial high hopes for the picture.1:35 – Walker talks about a particularly gory reshoot and his favorite action scene to film in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.2:35 – According to Walker, Homeland Security doesn’t let you take axes on planes.2:55 – Walker talks about the level of research they did to prepare for his role as Abraham Lincoln, especially for the voice of the 16th President of the United States.4:00 – The 3D effects will be used as “a tool, not a gimmick” according to Walker. He talks about how Bekmambetov used the tool to interact with the audience.4:55 – In terms of minimal or repetitive takes for a shot, Walker discusses which method he prefers and which director Bekmambetov resembles.5:55 – Walker talks about an upcoming project with Stephen Frears (High Fidelity) and Christopher Plummer titled Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight.7:05 – As a fan of movies and technology, Walker reveals what he hopes to see at WonderCon.

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Director Ridley Scott, Writer Damon Lindelof and Michael Fassbender Talk PROMETHEUS at WonderCon 2012

Described as an action/horror/sci-fi tale about a team of explorers who discover a clue to the origins of mankind on Earth, leading them on a journey to the darkest corners of the universe where they must fight a terrifying battle to save the future of the human race, Prometheus, from director Ridley Scott and screenwriter Damon Lindelof made an appearance at WonderCon 2012. Following their presentation, those two talented and imaginative men were joined by in-demand actor Michael Fassbender to talk with the press about the mysterious and highly-anticipated film.

During the interview, Ridley Scott and Damon Lindelof, talked about how the technological advancements since Alien have effected Prometheus, how much thought was put into the technology in the film, the importance of focusing on just making a good movie, the score of the film, their approach for what the android would be capable of, and the bigger ideas that could lead to a sequel, while Michael Fassbender talked about what it’s like to play an android. Check out what they had to say after the jump:

Before starting the interview, if you missed the awesome new trailer which premiered during the panel, or the next part of the viral campaign, just click the links.

Question: It’s been awhile since the first Alien film came out, and there have been so many advances in technology. Was that a problem, in terms of writing this, or was that advancement a positive point?

RIDLEY SCOTT: It’s easier to carry it out, but it’s still as difficult to write something. In fact, it’s getting more difficult because there are almost too many movies being made.

DAMON LINDELOF: Yeah, and I think that it would have been really difficult to do a straight-up Alien sequel or Alien prequel because you’re beholden to so many of the things that came before it. To be able to shed that stuff [made it easier]. This was Ridley’s idea. From the screenwriting standpoint, for me, it was really just all about getting a clear sense of what was the movie that he wanted to make. It’s Ridley Scott. The movie is his vision, so I did my best to channel it. We had almost no conversations about any other movies, other then this one, which might have been hubris or it might have been freeing, but it felt good, maybe just because we were drunk.

How much thought was put into the technology that’s in the film, especially with audience expectations being so much greater?

SCOTT: You think about everything, down to the shoe laces. We even had a big argument about the globular helmets. I was certain that I wanted the fully spherical glass helmet. In fact, in my research, I read this biography on Steve Jobs’ life and he talks about how he wanted to make his entire office of this glass, which is called Gorilla Glass, and this guy said, “We don’t make it anymore.” So, Steve Jobs actually then re-opened up the factory and started remaking Gorilla Glass. If I’m in 2083 and I’m going into space, why would I design a helmet that has blind spots. What I want is something where I have 360 [vision]. Glass, by then, will be light and you won’t be able to break it with a bullet.

How did you approach the android and what he would be capable of?

SCOTT: What was important was the story. There’s nothing new about an android. There’s nothing new about a robot. That idea is 800 years old. So then, embrace what it is. By embracing it, he becomes that much more interesting because he’s just part of the ship. In a sense, he’s not just butler, but he’s housekeeper and maintenance man, who legitimately does not need to sleep. From that, then he also becomes extremely useful during the story, as it evolves. There’s a great scene where Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) is actually a bit of a bitch, occasionally, says, “Hey, you, boy!,” to him. I thought that was real cheeky. And then, he says, “Why are you wearing one of those suits? You don’t have to breathe.” It ends up with David (Michael Fassbender) saying, “Not too close, I hope,” referring to being told, “We’re making you guys just like us.” You don’t know who’s insulting who there. That’s when those turn-abouts starts to occur.

What is the mix of genres in this film? How much horror does it offer versus science fiction?

SCOTT: The bottom line is just to make a good movie. Just make a fucking good movie. It’s got nothing to do with horror or whatever. That’s why there’s only a few really, really great ones. Thereafter, there are only evolutions of copycats. There are two great horror movies that I never got over. One was called The Texas Chainsaw Massacre by Tobe Hooper. I knew I didn’t really want to go see that movie, just by seeing the fucking poster. But, eventually I had to, as research for Alien. The other great one, with a single idea, was the first Exorcist. Possession of the body by a demon was marvelous. Since then, there have been 900,000 clones of those ideas.

MICHAEL FASSBENDER: I could never swim in the ocean after seeing Jaws.

SCOTT: We’re trying to come up with a few first notions with Prometheus, and I think we did.

LINDELOF: In this day and age, when you’re trying to market a movie and you say, “It’s a romance. It’s a comedy.” Neither of those are inherent in Prometheus, although there are funny scenes and romantic scenes. I think there’s a lot of action adventure elements to this movie, in terms of looking at it, in comparison to the original Alien. But, the fact that we can’t really put it in that box of, “It’s a this,” is refreshing. I think that there’s a quiet suspense to the movie. It really takes its time. If you have a master filmmaker who’s working with incredibly talented actors, you just have to say, “We’re going to be patient. We do not need to have things exploding, every 10 minutes.” It’s a little bit of an old school approach to filmmaking, in that it trusts the audience to have a little bit of patience. Just as someone who is a fan of these kinds of movies, I’ve been astonished by the patience of the fan base, in terms of how little we’re telling them about the movie. We’re doing this dance together, as filmmakers, where people want to know more about it, but we say to them, “Do you really want to know?,” and they go, “No, no, no, we don’t. We actually just want to go into the theater, not knowing if there’s a bomb under the table or not, or when it’s going to go off.” Ridley has always had a tremendous amount of faith in the audience’s intelligence. He directs and tells stories in a way that you come up to them, as opposed to them talking down to you. I feel like Prometheus is a proud member of that thing he does so well.

Michael, how did you approach playing an android with no emotion?

FASSBENDER: You want to play with as many of those human traits as possible. You’re essentially trying to build a computer that has a physicality to it, that can respond and understand human behavior. It’s programmed to be able to incorporate itself within a human environment. You’re going into space, so you’ve got to get certain personalities that will get on in space. He has to be very flexible. So, what happens when you program that and the program then starts making its own connections and joins up to its own electrical linking to other areas and forming its own ego, insecurities, jealousy and envy? I don’t really think too much about things. I just try to explore what’s happening within the scene, moment to moment. What I thought was very interesting was that you have this guy who was on his own for two and a half years while everyone else was in cryostasis, so what did he do to amuse himself? The idea that there is something of a little boy there, and that he has to rely on his imagination to keep himself occupied, imagination is a very human trait. The fact that he’s curious, how far will that curiosity go? The way that Damon [Lindelof] wrote it, people treat him as a robot and there’s a bit of contempt towards him because he has all the answers. He’s hyper-intelligent. His physicality is more advanced than human beings. So, people don’t really embrace him. He’s sort of used and abused. How does that make him feel, if robots can feel? I didn’t want to make a direct, definite choice. I played with the ambiguity. Is this robot starting to develop human personality?

LINDELOF: I remember a conversation that Ridley and I had, fairly early on, about David. There was this idea that David is mass-produced. There are 20,000 other David units out there, who look exactly like Michael Fassbender. What a wonderful world that would be, wouldn’t it? It’s the idea that we all have our iPhones, yet we put different cases on them and different apps on them. This David, once you take him out of the wrapping, would begin to customize himself. He could change his hairstyle. He could change the way that he speaks. He could have different applications, based on what this unit is designed to do. That’s where I felt like, as soon as we cast Michael, that’s the killer app, right there. It’s pretty cool.

Alien had such a ground-breaking score from Jerry Goldsmith, that influenced a lot of films after it. Can you talk about the score for Prometheus?

SCOTT: Jerry Goldsmith has been around for awhile. I still think that was probably one of his best scores. The score is always a challenge. Every element you put into it, you always try to find something else. Before it’s done, it’s not written. Everything is abstract. It doesn’t really matter how good or bad the words in the screenplay are. Once you’ve got that hundred and some pages, you’ve got something to talk about. It’s the same with the music. You can get a lot of pretty good demos now, where you get the physical keyboard demonstration. It’s not a real choir or a real cello, but it’s digitalized. You don’t really know what you’re going to get until you’re actually in Abbey Road. That’s where I did all the music, in The Beatles’ place. You start to hear it then, and then you start putting it onto the film. Everything is trial and error. You’re always looking to find something more. That’s what’s interesting about filming, certainly for me. It’s always about, “Yes, but . . .” But, you have to always try to keep reins on it and keep yourself within the parameters that you create, early on. A three act play is a drama box. Create your ground rules and stay within that, and the chances are that you’ve got a good play. As soon as anything goes, it doesn’t work. It’s bullshit. Some writers work on the script with a board with every scene laid out, so they’re literally moving things around like chess pieces. Some people just start at the beginning and go through to the end, and then read it and go, “Christ, that does work,” or “That does work,” or “I have to do that and that.” Everything is always on the move.

Since you’re leaving this film open with these bigger ideas that could lead to another film, would you take that film closer to the Alien franchise, or would it be its own different storyline?

LINDELOF: I think that’s actually a really insightful question. This word “prequel” was on the table. It was the elephant in the room and had to be discussed. When I had first heard that Ridley was going to direct an Alien prequel, and then six months later my phone rang and the voice on the other end said, “Are you available to talk to Ridley Scott?,” and then I crashed into a telephone pole, I answered the call and Ridley was like, “Hey, man, I’m going to send you a script tonight.” And, he doesn’t know he’s Ridley Scott. So, I read this thing and we had a meeting, and he was already very clearly saying, “I want to come back to this genre. I want to do sci-fi again. I feel like this movie is just a little bit too close to Alien. I’ve done this stuff before. But, there are big ideas in it that are unique, in and of themselves. Is there a way to do that?” I said, “I think that that’s what we have to do.” If there were a sequel to this movie, it would not be Alien. Normally, that’s the definition of a prequel. It precedes the other movies. The Star Wars prequels are going to end with Darth Vader going, “Noooo!,” unfortunately. There’s an inevitability, in watching a prequel, where you’re like, “Okay, if the ending of this movie is just going to be the room that John Hurt walks into, that’s full of eggs, there’s nothing interesting in that because we know where it’s going to end. With really good stories, you don’t know where it’s going to end. So, this movie, hopefully, will contextualize the original Alien, so that when you watch it again, maybe you know a little bit more. But, you don’t fuck around with that movie. It has to stand on its own. It’s a classic. If we’re fortunate enough to do a sequel to Prometheus, it will tangentialize even further away from the original Alien. When you go to the concert that is this movie, you want the Stones to play “Satisfaction.” There is this sense of us saying, “We want you to do something new, Ridley, but just give us a little bit of space jockey. Just play it! Even in the encore.” And, I think Ridley has given us the movie that I think we all want to see.

Damon, going from working on a very large canvas where you could explore your ideas, on Lost, what was it like to pare it down to something more streamlined?

LINDELOF: A huge relief. Obviously, with Lost, it was six years of my life. Between Carlton [Cuse] and I, we were at the wheel of the car. The idea of telling a story over 121 hours of time just felt so unwieldy. I went away for a month after Lost ended, and then the first project that I committed the next year of my life to, exclusively, was Prometheus. So, the idea of saying, “Yes, it’s just going to fit within the confines of 120 pages,” was a relief. That’s the story, but you keep going over that same story again. And then, there was also the huge relief of whatever story is out there about me saying, “This is what you should do, Ridley,” it’s, in fact, the opposite. It’s Ridley. I came in and he had a very clear sense of the movie he wanted to make. We had a number of conversations, he was enormously patient with me, and then I wrote that movie. It was nice to be sitting in the passenger seat and being like, “Maybe we should just make a left up here,” as opposed to having to drive the car constantly. If you’re going to let somebody drive, I highly recommend Ridley Scott. Although, Michael [Fassbender] said he’s a bad driver. I think it’s exciting, if you might go off the road, occasionally.

Click here for all our WonderCon 2012 coverage which includes panel recaps, interviews, and plenty of images.

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Cosplay Invades WonderCon Part 2: Almost 100 New Cosplay Images

Like I said Friday night when I posted our first Cosplay recap, every year at Comic-Con/WonderCon, half the fun is seeing all the people that Cosplay.  It’s actually one of the reasons the conventions are so much fun, as you can dress up like any superhero, anime character, or comic book icon and get huge props from attendees.  While the percentage of people doing Cosplay at WonderCon is lower than Comic-Con in San Diego, I’m always impressed with the costumes and attention to detail.

Anyway, over the past two days I took almost 100 new pictures of people doing Cosplay.  So if you thought what I posted Friday night was cool, you definitely want to check out these new pics.  That’s because I found Bane, the Penguin, Green Lantern, Cobra Commander, Batman, Robin, Wolverine, Superman, Wonder Woman, and many other superheroes walking the convention floor.  I even found some Jedi’s fighting Star Trek: TOS officers, and an Ape holding a human prisoner.  Hit the jump for the images.

Finally, before getting to the pics, a big thank you to everyone who let me take their picture.  For more coverage from WonderCon 2012, click here.  And make sure to say which Cosplay was your favorite in the comments below.

click on any image for high-res

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WonderCon 2012: RESIDENT EVIL: RETRIBUTION Panel Recap; Milla Jovovich and Writer/Director Paul W.S. Anderson Host a Preview and a Q&A

Today at WonderCon 2012, Sony Screen Gems presented footage from their big fall release, Resident Evil: Retribution. Good move on their part as there was a huge burst of crowd support when the panel was announced. The fifth film in the series by director Paul W. S. Anderson and star Milla Jovovich features Alice’s return to the fight against the Umbrella Corporation. Also returning are some fan-favorites from Resident Evils past. Anderson and Jovovich were on hand to screen the trailer and an action sequence from the film, which promises to be the biggest yet as Resident Evil goes global. You can get caught up on all of our previous coverage of Resident Evil: Retribution here.

Resident Evil: Retribution, also starring Sienna Guillory, Michelle Rodriguez, Oded Fehr, Boris Kodjoe, Johann Urb, Kevin Durand and Bingbing Li opens on September 14th. Hit the jump to see our coverage from the event.

I’ll be honest up front, I was a huge fan of the first Resident Evil film but the movie franchise quickly lost favor with me with the atrocious handling of the Nemesis character in the sequel, Resident Evil: Apocalypse. That being said, it’s still impressive what the filmmakers have been able to do with the property, making Jovovich the first female action hero to star in give installments of the same franchise and maintaining (even growing) a huge fan base over the years. But I digress.

Anderson was on hand first to introduce the film and his lovely wife, Jovovich. Per Anderson, Retribution is a direct continuation of Resident Evil: Afterlife, in which an epic battle was promised from aboard the ship, Arcadia. Soon after, the film goes in an unusual and unexpected direction as audiences are taken back in time to see the world before the T-virus outbreak and get to revisit some favorite characters. Anderson also stressed the global scale of the fifth film, as they shot in Tokyo, Moscow, New York, Washington, D.C. and even the Arctic Circle. With that introduction finished, Jovovich took the stage to great enthusiasm from the masses. Soon after she took the stage, the duo debuted an action sequence from the movie as follows.

Without context, the clip played out as a simple demonstration of Alice’s (Jovovich) zombie-killing skills. She was donned from head to toe in tight black leather with an Umbrella Corporation symbol clearly evident. It looked like a training sequence from a Resident Evil videogame, as Alice runs down a brightly lit hallway that is almost completely white, contrasting against her all-black outfit and the colorful attire of a hoard of individually attacking zombies. Armed with a chain whip, a handgun and her kick-ass boots, Alice takes out all comers in a variety of ways in order to highlight her martial arts skills and Anderson’s 3D shooting. The 3D gimmicks are obvious and are to be expected.

After the clip, Anderson and Jovovich led into a panel discussion. Their comments follow below:

Anderson commented on the number of returning cast members (Rodriguez, Fehr, Guillory) and was especially happy to be bringing Rodriguez back. In hindsight, he regrets killing her off in the first film as he would have liked to keep her and her character around for the series.Jovovich remarked on the difficulty in filming fighting scenes in 3D, as the margin for error is much smaller and the point of contact must be much closer or the believability will be lost.Anderson talked about the symbiotic relationship between the Resident Evil video games and movies, saying they “feed off one another.” He also says that that this movie will set up a spectacular finale with “lots of blood and death.” When asked which video game franchise he’d like to direct next, Anderson joked “Donkey Kong,” with Jovovich throwing the barrels. Jovovich suggested Zelda and Halo, both of which got a good crowd response.Jovovich commented on tearing up while watching a trailer that pieced together scenes from past films; she got caught up in the nostalgia of the moment, especially due to working with Rodriguez again.Anderson believes that their crew is best at shooting a movie in 3D as they’ve done it for three movies now. Because of it, they’re able to concentrate on pushing the boundaries of 3D rather than getting caught up in the the difficulties of it. His director of photography built a custom rig to allow Anderson more freedom in 3D shooting. Anderson guarantees that Retribution will be above and beyond any other 3D film this summer.Jovovich talked about the freedom of making the Resident Evil movies organically rather than on a studio’s forced schedule.Anderson quipped that the most difficult part of the shoot was pulling Rodriguez away from her “Call of Duty” game.

As I said above, I’m a huge fan of the games but have more of a luke-warm attraction to the films. However, for fans of the rest of the series, Retribution is a must see.

Follow along with our continuing WonderCon coverage here.

Here’s the official synopsis for Resident Evil: Retribution:

The wildly successful film franchise adaptation that has grossed nearly $700 million worldwide to the popular video game series, “Resident Evil,” returns in its highly anticipated fifth installment, “Re5ident Evil: Retribution” in state-of-the art 3D.

The Umbrella Corporation’s deadly T-virus continues to ravage the Earth, transforming the global population into legions of the flesh eating Undead. The human race’s last and only hope, Alice (Milla Jovovich), awakens in the heart of Umbrella’s most clandestine operations facility and unveils more of her mysterious past as she delves further into the complex. Without a safe haven, Alice continues to hunt those responsible for the outbreak; a chase that takes her from Tokyo to New York, Washington, D.C. and Moscow, culminating in a mind-blowing revelation that will force her to rethink everything that she once thought to be true. Aided by newfound allies and familiar friends, Alice must fight to survive long enough to escape a hostile world on the brink of oblivion. The countdown has begun.

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WonderCon 2012: LOCKOUT Panel Recap; Maggie Grace Screens First Footage

Featuring producer Luc Besson (the writer behind Taken) and Maggie Grace (the daughter who was Taken), the high-octane outer space thriller Lockout made an appearance at WonderCon 2012 today. This time, the man with a particular set of skills is no longer Liam Neeson, but Guy Pearce (Memento), playing Snow, a man wrongly accused of conspiracy to commit espionage. His one chance at a pardon comes when he is tasked with rescuing the president’s daughter from a maximum security outer space prison facility when the inmates take control. Lockout also stars Peter Stormare (Constantine) and is the feature directorial debut of James Mather and Stephen St. Leger. The film opens April 13th. Hit the jump to check out our WonderCon panel recap.

The Lockout panel started off with the trailer that was previously released by Open Road and Film District. It doesn’t highlight Snow’s (Pearce) charisma and sarcasm as much as other trailers, which I find to be a strong selling point to the movie. The addition of Besson lends some gravity (pardon the pun) to the project and his influence is readily apparent. The panel also screened five minutes of footage from Lockout which focused on Snow’s entry into the facility, a nice anti-gravity fight between Snow and a random prisoner and his daring rescue of Emilie Warnock (Grace). It also touched on a bit of the madness and personality of the prisoners involved as they force a prison engineer to open a locked door standing between them and the president’s daughter. While Pearce’s wise-cracks were welcome, some of the plotting was simply inane, as in [SPOILER] Emilie’s bodyguard blowing his own brains out to preserve the remaining oxygen in the room or Snow jabbing a “self-directing” needle into Emilie’s eye in order to jump-start her brain functions.

Grace was present for an intimate Q&A after screening the footage. I’ve posted her comments below:

Flying into town, Grace hadn’t quite cleaned all of the blood off the back of her neck from the shoot, having just wrapped on Taken 2. She quipped about the prudence of Homeland Security and their ability to spot it.Grace commented on the sequence in Lockout where she has to cut her hair, dye it (with “horrible things from the men’s bathroom and grease) and appear to be a young male prisoner in an attempt to escape.Grace said that Lockout “doesn’t take itself too seriously,” calling it a fun and funny action movie.For fans of Maggie Grace, you might be interested to know that she is a closet Jane Austen fan who even had period costumes growing up.On seeing the rough cut of Lockout, her mom and little sister were a bit shocked at the fellatio joke between her and Pearce as seen in the trailer and footage.

Overall, the film does look fun and funny with a little bit of crazy thrown it. It seemed like a combination of a lot of Escape from New York, with some The Fifth Element and Die Hard for good measure. If any or all of those films appeal to you, do yourself a favor and check out Lockout on April 13th.

For all of our continuing coverage on WonderCon click here.

Here’s the synopsis for Lockout:

Starring Guy Pearce and Maggie Grace and set in the near future, LOCKOUT follows a falsely convicted ex- government agent (Pearce), whose one chance at obtaining freedom lies in the dangerous mission of rescuing the President’s daughter (Grace) from rioting convicts at an outer space maximum security prison.

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WonderCon 2012: LOOPER Panel Recap; Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Writer/Director Rian Johnson Premiere the First Trailer

With all the massive movies coming out this year (The Amazing Spider-Man, The Hunger Games, The Avengers, Prometheus, Resident Evil: Retribution, etc), you might have lost track of Rian Johnson’s (Brick) Looper in the mix. That’s about to change. As part of Sony’s presentation at WonderCon 2012, the first trailer from the time-traveling sci-fi flick was shown. While you can get a look at some still images from the film here (including Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s awesome make-up), the trailer hasn’t released just yet. You’ll just have to trust me when I say that this is definitely a film to keep an eye on, even if coverage of other movies attempt to drown it out. The question you have to ask yourself is this: if faced with the order to assassinate your future self, could you pull the trigger?

Looper, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis and Emily Blunt, opens on September 28th. Hit the jump to check out our recap.

Let’s start off with a walk-through of the trailer for Looper. It opens with a narration by Gordon-Levitt explaining to us what it’s like to live the life of a Looper, assassins hired by the mob to execute criminals sent 30 years in the past. While Gordon-Levitt talks about how rewarding the profession is, the image on the screen shows him standing in the dirt next to a corn field with a white sheet laid out on the ground about twenty feet in front of him. Out of thin air, a man appears on his knees with his hands bound behind his back and a hood drawn over his face. Gordon-Levitt’s character wastes no time in blowing the target away with a modified “Looper gun.” Back at whatever time-jumping station he works out of, Gordon-Levitt drop the gun off in a conveniently labeled bin that reads “Looper Guns Here.”

The trailer goes on to show a group of young Loopers alternately living the high life and executing their marks; all in a day’s work. Things go swimmingly until Gordon-Levitt’s future self (Willis) shows up on the edge of a corn field on his knees with his hands bound. Gordon-Levitt hesitates and that’s all Willis needs. He spins around and Gordon-Levitt fires his gun, hitting nothing but a make-shift vest of gold bars strapped to Willis’ back. Willis hefts a gold brick in Gordon-Levitt’s direction, distracting the younger assassin long enough to escape. Then, the chase is on! Gordon-Levitt attempts to track down and assassinate his future self before his fellow Loopers can put them both out of commission for good.

While the trailer moved too quickly to get a good look at Gordon-Levitt’s make-up, the still images do a fantastic job of letting us see what the Younger Willis will look like. Then, director Rian Johnson and Gordon-Levitt himself took the stage to talk about the film. Their comments follow below:

Johnson spoke about the long-germinating project, one he’s wanted to write for a while. He had Gordon-Levitt in mind when he wrote the part.As for the huge cast (Looper also stars Paul Dano, Piper Perabo, Garret Dillahunt and Jeff Daniels), Johnson praised the lot of them and specifically called out Blunt who “really kicks ass.”When asked how he liked working with Willis in the film, Gordon-Levitt replied, “He’s Bruce-fuckin’ Willis! That’s all I have to say!”Gordon-Levitt had to sit through three hours of make-up to be transformed into the younger version of Willis.Gordon-Levitt was thrilled to take on this role, especially because he was able to transform into someone he really wanted to match. He stripped audio from Willis’ films (specifically Sin City) and listened to them on his iPod.The film shot in New Orleans and in China.The aforementioned Daniels had a great line in the trailer, something akin to, “This time travel stuff will fry your brain.”For Johnson, the biggest challenge on the shoot was reigning in the time travel aspect of it, calling it the “secret ingredient from Iron Chef.”Hard to believe, but Gordon-Levitt has been acting for 25 years now. He considers himself privileged to work with people he loves (and whose work he loves) on meaningful projects. He said, “maximizing box office potential doesn’t necessarily lead to a good movie; in fact, it rarely does.”Gordon-Levitt compared Johnson to a young Christopher Nolan and Steven Spielberg. Johnson spoke to the influence of a lot of different elements in the film, saying “part of the fun is the way it surprises you.”As Johnson and Gordon-Levitt worked together in Brick, Johnson says he feels like he learned a lot on that film and knew more of what he was doing on Looper. Gordon-Levitt said that he was being humble and that Johnson knew exactly what he was doing on Brick. He compares their working relationship to the early years of high school vs your senior year, where things are similar but you know each other better.Johnson reveals that Looper will deal with all sorts of moral quandaries involved with time travel, especially the basic questions around finding yourself standing across the way from your future self.For fans of Breaking Bad, Johnson will be directing another episode.Gordon-Levitt expressed interest in doing a musical if a good enough project came along.Johnson expressed a desire to be lucky enough to work with Gordon-Levitt for the rest of his career.As a big fan of sci-fi, Gordon-Levitt is most excited for fans to see Looper, even though he has The Dark Knight Rises, Premium Rush, Lincoln and Django Unchained opening this year!Johnson brought in Shane Carruth, the writer/director/star of time-travel flick, Primer, as a consultant on time-traveling.Gordon-Levitt’s make-up was so convincing that his own mother and best friend were freaked out because he acted like himself but appeared completely different.

While we have the entire summer to get through before we can see Looper, which opens September 28th. Luckily for the film, the heavy hitters will have come and gone by then (even Resident Evil: Retribution opens a full two weeks beforehand). With the excellent caliber of filmmakers both in front of and behind the cameras coupled with the always-entertaining mash-up of mob movie and time traveling, Looper is already on my list for most anticipated films of the year.

Get caught up with all of our WonderCon coverage here and check out the synopsis for Looper below:

In the futuristic action thriller Looper, time travel will be invented – but it will be illegal and only available on the black market.  When the mob wants to get rid of someone, they will send their target 30 years into the past, where a “looper” – a hired gun, like Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) – is waiting to mop up.  Joe is getting rich and life is good… until the day the mob decides to “close the loop,” sending back Joe’s future self (Bruce Willis) for assassination.  The film is written and directed by Rian Johnson and also stars Emily Blunt, Paul Dano, and Jeff Daniels.  Ram Bergman and James D. Stern produce.

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Director Rupert Sanders Talks SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN at WonderCon 2012

After showing some new footage of Universal’s upcoming dark and action-packed tale Snow White and the Huntsman at WonderCon 2012 (read our recap here), director Rupert Sanders met with press to talk about his take on the familiar story. In this re-imagining, the Huntsman (Chris Hemsworth) is ordered to take Snow White (Kristen Stewart) into the woods to be killed, but instead becomes her protector and mentor in a quest to vanquish the Evil Queen (Charlize Theron).

During the interview, Rupert Sanders talked about his decision to tackle such a huge film for his feature directorial debut, the discoveries he made about Kristen Stewart as an actress, developing the right accent for her character, her fearlessness in the horse riding and sword fighting, what Charlize Theron brings to the role of the Evil Queen, the decision to have eight dwarves instead of seven, his perspective on Tarsem’s take on Snow White with Mirror, Mirror, and the aspects of the fairy tale that resonated with him the most. Check out what he had to say after the jump:

Question: What made you decide to tackle such a huge film, right out of the box?

RUPERT SANDERS: I came straight from the Mattel factory into the director’s chair. Yeah, it is a big film. I couldn’t get a small film, ironically. It’s much harder to get a small film off the ground than it is to get a big film off the ground. But, the high stakes gamble on the roulette table is that, if it doesn’t fall on your color, you’re in a small prison in Burbank, for the rest of your movie-making days. Hopefully, that would happen.

Because you do such big-scale commercials, don’t you feel like that helped prepare you?

SANDERS: Yeah, if you think of the money we spend on a minute, I’m actually making a fairly low-budget film. I’ve definitely loved doing commercials. I’ve had so much fun. I’ve traveled the world and I’ve gotten to really take on a lot of challenging projects. It’s not exactly the same, but it’s not dissimilar. It’s like riding a bike. Once you’ve learned how to ride a bike, then you can get on a motorbike. It gives you confidence, knowing that you can work with a thousand extras or a massive fight sequence with 600 horses on a beach or whatever it is. I wouldn’t have done it, if I’d been wetting myself every morning, going in there scared. But, life is about taking those risks. It was a high-stakes risk, for myself and for the studio, who very kindly wrote a large check to me to get it done. And they weren’t there, whipping me into line, which was great. I was really expecting to be shuttered in, but they were great. They trusted what we were doing and they let us go, which is all you can really ask for, in a partnership with a studio.

As you got to know her and work with her, what were the discoveries you made about Kristen Stewart, as an actress, especially with how people perceive her from the Twilight Saga movies?

SANDERS: I think what I realized is that she’s such a good actor that everyone thinks she’s Bella Swan. They believe that that’s her. Obviously, an actor is playing a role. She is nothing like Bella. And, I got on really well with Kristen. It was great. As I was writing stuff, she was there. We had a lot of conversations, seeing through her eyes. We really hard on developing that character together. I was just amazed at her talent, really. She’s incredibly good at her craft. She’s incredibly instinctive. She’s incredibly intuitive. She will overcome fear, like no one I’ve met, when it comes to it. She didn’t really want to ride a horse. She had a bad horse-riding accident, as a kid. When you’re riding fast on a horse, with 200 others soldiers on horses riding behind you, through surf on a beach, that’s terrifying. She really went there. She crafted the accent, and it’s flawless. She’s a stunning actor. I saw her first in Panic Room. Then, I saw her again in Into the Wild. I loved her in The Runaways. I loved her in Welcome to the Rileys. I think she’s going to be incredible in On the Road. She’s a great actor, and people just go, “Twilight girl,” which is a testament to her. She’s kept this pipeline of interesting projects going on the side, so she’s not just going to be that girl, forever more. She’s a great actor and she’s made incredibly shrewd decisions for someone who’s half my age.

Considering that, what were the challenges in ensuring that your film didn’t get distracted by the fact that this is the girl that so many people see as Bella Swan?

SANDERS: I’ve never seen the Twilight movies, so I didn’t really care that much. I met her, I really got on with her, she’s a great actor, and she was right for the character. That’s it. It was as simple as that, for me.

People haven’t gotten to see too much of her Snow White in the trailer footage thus far. Is that indicative of the movie, or are you just being really selective about how much you show?

SANDERS: No, she’s the lead. I’m not a marketing expert, but the way it’s positioned, I think we’re starting to bring her in, more and more. We don’t want to give too much away. We just want to say, “Here’s the bad person, and here’s someone who’s trying to get to her.” We’ve only done teaser trailers. The more stuff people see, the more they’ll see of her and the more they’ll be pretty blown away by what she did.

Charlie Theron is known as being a great actress. What did she bring to the role of the Evil Queen, which could have ended up being camp, in the wrong hands?

SANDERS: When you’re playing an Evil Queen, you can go into pantomime very quickly. What she did and what’s indicative of the film we tried to make is that she grounded that in reality. She found a way of playing this character in a very modern, realistic and gritty way. She’s not, “Off with her head!” She’s not the Alice in Wonderland kind of queen. It’s not that kind of film. She’s playing it pretty straight, as a very disturbed character who’s desperately got to find this heart because she needs to live forever. It’s as simple as that. She’s someone who’s dead on the inside, but she’s determined that she will avenge her family and the tribe that she was with, that was constantly brutalized by kings and by other kingdoms. She’s determined that the world will feel the suffering that she felt, and she will stop at nothing to do that. She’s totally dead. She doesn’t feel anything of life, but she has to get that heart and she has to live forever and she has to avenge her people. She’s very driven by some very dark machinations. She’s also incredibly wounded and incredibly fragile underneath. It’s an incredible performance.

Will there be backstories for all of the other characters?

SANDERS: Yeah, all of them have very rich backstories. They’ve all suffered a great deal of loss. This queen took over a kingdom. She’s someone who’s suffered a lot of loss. She lost her family, she lost a tribe, and she found her way into this kingdom. Like a Trojan horse, she moves from kingdom to kingdom, hollowing them out from the inside. She’s like a siren who attracts these people to her beauty. The dwarves lost everything. They were down in the mines. They’re noble goldminers who see light in the darkness. When they came up from the mines, the world was blackened and they lost all the other people in their race. The Huntsman lost a wife. Snow White lost a kingdom, both her parents, and the love of the people. Everyone’s dealing with loss, in very different ways.

Fairy tale re-imaginings have been a staple in literature, for some time, but now they’re also hot in Hollywood. Why is this the right time for that?

SANDERS: These things are cyclical, and they come and go. There’s been a lot of superheroes and this big scale of movie. They’re always looking for something that they know something about, whether it’s a comic book or a fairy tale. It just happens to be that this is the time for fairy tales. Also, it’s a financial thing. Once one makes a lot of money, then everyone gets on the bandwagon. The same producer that did this, did Alice in Wonderland previously. He started this up again.

How do you feel the tone of this differs from Alice in Wonderland?

SANDERS: That was very hallucinogenic and it was very CG based and very otherworldly. Ours is a very realistic film. It’s really a big swash-buckling, knights in shining armor movie with lots of castles on hilltops and horse battles and shattering black armies. It’s a medieval fairy tale, the kind of scale of those films that people love, like Gladiator or Lawrence of Arabia. It’s got those big, sweeping vistas, and it’s a big, imaginative world.

How much are you aware of Tarsem’s Mirror, Mirror and what is your perspective on his vision for Snow White?

SANDERS: We used to be represented at the same company, so I know of Tarsem. It’s definitely a big veering from what he normally does. It’s comedy, which is something that Tarsem is not known for. We’re probably both getting a lot more publicity because both films are out there, but they’re very different. I think there’s room for both of them. I hope we both succeed, and I hope that people want to see two versions. People love to go, “Oh, Hollywood is making two movies about the same thing. They’re so dumb.” So, everyone talks about it and I think it helps the awareness of the projects.

Do you plan on seeing his film?

SANDERS: I don’t know. If you see a hooded man in the back of the theater, [it will be me].

Fairy tales have themes that speak to people, throughout generations, even though there are different spins on them. How do you think your film is going to speak, eternally and specifically to what’s happening right now?

SANDERS: It’s a film that was made by a lot of people who are in their prime. You can’t really hope to make a film for any other reason then it turns you on. I say, “This is what I want to do, and this is how I want to tell it.” You can’t sit down with a flow chart and go, “Well, 90% of the people want to see a raven, and 10% want to see this.” I’ll leave the focus groups to the marketing department. We just got on and made the film that we wanted to make. It was as simple as that.

Initially, fair tales functioned as parables, in a broader sense. What is the particular message you’re telling with this?

SANDERS: The messages aren’t dissimilar. No one sat down and wrote the parables. They were word-of-mouth that were transcribed later, over generations. These were stories that were told around the campfires, for God knows how many years before the Grimms wrote them. They are parables. They’re Biblical tales. The themes in ours are quite similar to the themes in the original. We’re dealing with a lesson in how to deal with some of those things that are difficult about the human condition, like loss and death. I hope that we haven’t been preachy and said, “Our parable is this.” I hope there’s enough in there that people take their own lessons from it. What we really wanted to do was make a film that touched people and stayed with them. I didn’t want to just create wallpaper that looked pretty and dazzling, and then it was forgotten as you walked out into the street and got a taxi. I hope that it’s something that stays with people, and I hope that people get something from it. We did a test screening for a couple hundred people and there were a lot of young people there, and a lot of the response was very positive. People said, “I really want my kids to see this kind of film because it’s not telling them to shoot people and drive fast cars.” It has moral messages, but it’s not like we’re saying, “Here’s your moral message: You mustn’t wear make-up. You mustn’t have plastic surgery. Beauty is within.” All those things are obviously part of it, but it’s not like, “Here’s our big message.”

Before this, you were well known for your video game commercials, particularly for Halo. Was there ever any talk about you attempting to resurrect the Halo film?

SANDERS: No, no one called me. The industry is always looking for the next big thing. They’re always trying to take people from commercials and music videos and film school, and find that. It’s hard to find a project. I didn’t want to just make a film. I waited five years, until I found a project that I really wanted to do. I was close on a couple of other things, and they didn’t work out. You put a lot of work into something, and then it just goes by the wayside. It’s a tough business and you have to stay strong, but you should never do something that isn’t within you. When I first read this story and started to work on it, I found that it was within me and it was a story I felt I could tell, rather than just going to do some comic book that no one was doing. It’s dangerous when you make a first film. You put so much of your life into it. I’ve done nothing but Snow White for over a year. It’s all-absorbing, and you have to do that, so you better make sure that you’re in love with it. It’s a marriage.

How appropriate is Snow White and The Huntsman for kids?

SANDERS: Well, it’s not for six year olds, but it’s for eight to 80. I think there’s a message in it for everyone. It’s certainly not for the kids who wear Snow White diapers.

What was your first exposure to the story of Snow White, and when did you learn about the darker elements of the Grimm fairy tales?

SANDERS: I read that before I saw the Disney one. The Disney one is still pretty dark, even for Disney. It’s got, “Bring me the heart, the lungs and the liver.” It’s a brutal story. In the original, she eats the heart, the lungs and the liver, and then finds out that it’s a deer. And then, at the end, to really rub in her jealousy, Snow White invites her to the wedding and makes her dance a death in molten steel shoes. It’s a dark story. I don’t think we’ve shied away from the darkness, and Disney actually didn’t either. They just took a very different approach than we did, but the heart of the story is the same.

There are iconic elements to the Snow White story, like the apple and the mirror. How do you incorporate those elements, while also keeping the film grounded in reality?

SANDERS: You take the root of that idea. What is the mirror doing to the character of the Queen? Why is she asking it these things? What is it telling her? What does the apple symbolize? Going back to the parable, there are so many Biblical images in the story. All of those things are so laden, if you read a lot of Jung or Freud. With the mirror, the apple, the snake in the tree and the dark forest, it’s a very rich world. We’re still scared of dark forests, for some bizarre reason. There’s nothing scary about trees or birds, but if you put someone in a dark forest, they get scared.

What does it add to the mythology to make this version of Snow White a warrior princess?

SANDERS: Warrior princess is something that’s external, rather than being internal to the character. She wears a suit of armor, but she’s not suddenly Bruce Lee’s adopted sister. She is wearing armor for protection, and she has to kill a queen. She’s not beheading people. She doesn’t suddenly acquire these skills. It’s very instinctual and defensive. She knows she has to kill someone, and that is abhorrent to her. That sword lies very uneasy in her hand.

How did Kristen Stewart take to the sword work?

SANDERS: I put that sword in her hand, as I would put it in any of your hands. If I told you someone was going to come through that door who had done something terrible to you and you had to kill them, I’m sure you’d fucking give them a good run for their money. That’s really how she fights. She’s no ninja or samurai. It’s purely reactive.

What was it about this story that resonated the most, for you?

SANDERS: For me, it was about loss, and being pulled away from somewhere you were safe and you were exposed to something terrifying. You have to find that within you, in order to tell a story properly. A lot of my process, going into it, was to find those things that really connected to me, and that was a recurring theme. You’ll see a lot of people being pulled away from each other. Those things really resonated with me, and that’s what I put into the story.

Why did you decide to have eight dwarves instead of seven?

SANDERS: I don’t know, really. It’s just weird, how those things happen. It wasn’t like, “We’ve gotta have eight dwarves!” It was like, “Fuck it, let’s have eight dwarves.” The Snow White story, or Snow Drop story, just had dwarves. We weren’t trying to beat Disney. We just wanted one more.

What role do they play in the film?

SANDERS: Mythologically, dwarves are latent sexuality. They are half-men, so they’re about sexual awakening. There are no dwarf gang-bangs. It’s really about another group of people who have lost everything, and they are touched by Snow White, and they decide that they will fight for their pride again, alongside her. They’re very instigative, in taking her kingdom back with her.

Are they still the comic relief, at all?

SANDERS: They are funny, but it’s not slapstick humor. They’re funny because they’re funny guys. Ray Winstone delivers this beautiful, allegoric speech about what’s happened to them, as a tribe of people, and it’s really heartfelt. And then, he goes off and is really funny. We just let them go. They’re a hysterical bunch.

How did you go about finding Kristen Stewart’s British accent for the role?

SANDERS: If you’re amongst the forest and there’s knights in armor, all looking chivalrous behind you, and then Snow White says, “Is that, like, my castle?” So, it was important that she wasn’t Californian. To fit into the world, all of the characters have accents from that part of the world. Chris Hemsworth’s accent is Scottish, and Kristen’s accent is very royal English. She was really great at it, and she did the work. It’s easy to do an accent for a few minutes, but to be able to do it without thinking about it, so you can concentrate on the performance, is very hard. She worked with one of the best British dialect coaches. It’s hours of work, and she did the work so that she was flawless. She didn’t need to worry about it, and could get on with the performance.

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WonderCon 2012: BATTLESHIP Panel Recap; Alexander Skarsgard, Brooklyn Decker and Peter Berg Debut Two New Clips and Host a Q&A

Here at Wonder-Con 2011, Universal Pictures was kind enough to stop by with some new footage from their upcoming action film, Battleship. The recently released new trailer was just the tip of the iceberg as director Peter Berg came loaded with two new clips highlighting drastically different tones of the film. We got to see another side of Taylor Kitsch’s character as well as a good look at the alien menace in Battleship known as the Regents. We also got a very fine look at Brooklyn Decker and man how I’ve been waiting for that (she’s a supermodel, for God’s sake. Use her in your marketing!) Alexander Skarsgard also told a funny story about being shot in the face with a 25-foot-long air cannon. Just another day at WonderCon.

Director Peter Berg’s Battleship, starring Taylor Kitsch, Liam Neeson, Alexander Skarsgard, Brooklyn Decker and Rihanna opens May 18th. Hit the jump for more.

Let’s start off with the clips as they gave a pretty good indication of the level of action and humor we can except to see in this summer’s Battleship. The first one, surprisingly, highlighted the relationship between the Hopper brothers, Alex (Kitsch) and Stone (Skarsgard). They’re out at a local bar for Alex’s birthday with big brother Stone buying drinks and doling out unwanted life advice. Alex is apparently on hard times and is unemployed, while Stone is in the Navy, following in their late father’s footsteps (which is why Stone feels the need to look out for Alex).

The chemistry is pretty good here and you can tell a portion of it is improvised (Berg commented on actors’ performances on Friday Night Lights being half improvisation.) Then we get the glory shot of Samantha (Decker) walking into the bar, at which point Alex does his best to impress her. Without ruining a pretty funny scene (it resembled an outtake from The Hangover), let’s just say that Alex goes to great lengths to get the lady a microwaveable chicken burrito.

Cut to five years later: Stone is high-up in the Naval command, Alex is a trouble-maker in the Navy and is preparing to propose to Samantha, who just so happens to be the Admiral’s (Neeson) daughter. Putting the kibosh on his marriage plan is an alien race, who have dispatched five ships that were sent to Earth to answer our interstellar radio signal. The scene opens with one of the aliens laid out in the hold of the ship with the crew standing around it. Alex, now a Captain, removes the helmet from the alien, revealing a humanoid creature with sharp, bristly hairs on his chin. Then, in a scene reminiscent of the Area 51 autopsy from Independence Day, the alien springs to life. A mind-meld of sorts occurs between Alex and the alien with images of extraterrestrial warfare, just before the alien is rescued by his cohorts. Chaos ensues, as is usually the case, and Alex and the other officers scour the ship in search of an alien that remains on board.

There are some cool highlights to the alien here, which Berg calls “Thug.” They seem to have a Swiss Army knife-like appendage on their suits that can flip and rotate into a variety of tools including guns, knives and a weird scanner-type apparatus (from the footage, it looked like “Thug” was scanning one of the ship’s engines or weapons; it was difficult to tell out of context). More fighting breaks out with the alien clearly winning the upper-hand until…[SPOILER] Alex leads him up onto the deck where Raikes (Rihanna) shoots the thing point blank with a 5-inch deck gun. The build-up to that money-shot was well worth the execution. What was disappointing was Kitsch’s terrible one-liners (he actually said, “I have a bad feeling about this.”)

In between the clips, Berg, Skarsgard and Decker participated in a panel discussion. I’ve outlined their responses below:

Berg’s father was a Marine and a Naval war historian. He used to take Berg and his sister on tours of military bases were he would interrupt the tour guide and correct them on their historical inaccuracies.Originally, Berg wanted to make a movie about the Essex, a whaling ship that sank in 1820 and stranded its crew on an island; the crew resorted to cannibalism to survive. Berg quipped that “cannibalism was not popular with the studio.” (This was the same whaling ship that inspired Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick.”When asked, “Why Battleship?” Berg was candid with the fact that “it didn’t initially lend itself to the most logical interpretation to film,” but he found inspiration in the fact that once you’ve scored a hit in Battleship, you “try to kill your opponent as brutally as possible.”Berg commented that, although Battleship has an attractive cast, they’re “smart, complicated actors.” He especially raved about Decker and Rihanna.Skarsgard commented on the physicality required for the action scenes in the film. He told a story about a scene in which Berg wanted to film Skarsgard’s reaction to being hit by an incoming soundwave, which resulted in Skarsgard taking a blast to the face from a 25-foot-long air cannon.Decker also talked about her action scenes saying, “I got to shoot guns. I was a happy camper.” She said that Berg makes everything feel very real, mentioning a time when the director hid in a nearby bush with a machine-gun during a shot in which she stumbles onto a terrifying scene of carnage.The aliens, known as Regents, come from what is known as a Goldilocks planet (neither too hot, nor too cold and having similar conditions to Earth); they were designed by ILM.Berg says that Battleship may not be the biggest movie of the summer, but they have the biggest guns.

After viewing the footage, there looks to be a lot more humor and heart invested in the characters than I would have guessed at first blush. While the setup scene came off a bit goofy, it did round out the characters a bit more. Battleship still looks like, as Berg called it, “a fun, kick-ass, intense, emotional-at-times, summer popcorn madness” movie. With this summer being as over-loaded with action movies as it is, Battleship might end up sinking below the rest.

Here’s the synopsis for Battleship:

Peter Berg (Hancock) produces and directs Battleship, an epic-scaled action-adventure that unfolds across the seas, in the skies and over land as our planet fights for survival against a superior force. Inspired by Hasbro’s classic naval combat game, Battleship stars Taylor Kitsch as Lt. Alex Hopper, a Naval officer assigned to the USS John Paul Jones; Brooklyn Decker as Sam Shane, a physical therapist and Hopper’s fiancée; Alexander Skarsgård as Hopper’s older brother, Stone, Commanding Officer of the USS Sampson; Rihanna as Petty Officer Raikes, Hopper’s crewmate and a weapons specialist on the USS John Paul Jones; and international superstar Liam Neeson as Hopper and Stone’s superior (and Sam’s father), Admiral Shane.

Berg directs this epic action-adventure also produced by Scott Stuber (Couples Retreat), Sarah Aubrey (The Kingdom), Brian Goldner and Bennett Schneir of Hasbro (the Transformers franchise), along with Duncan Henderson (Master and Commander) and Jeffrey Silver (300). The film is written by Jon Hoeber & Erich Hoeber (Red).

The battle for Earth begins at sea.

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WonderCon 2012: SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN Panel Recap; Rupert Sanders Screens New Footage, Hosts Q&A with Charlize Theron and Kristen Stewart

As part of Universal’s promotion at this year’s WonderCon, they showed off some new footage of their upcoming spin on an old fairy tale, Snow White and the Huntsman. Some of it you can see in a series of featurettes we’ve posted here and here. Some of it will undoubtedly only be shown when the movie hits theaters early this summer. The picture may sound like a simple fairy tale, but after seeing this new footage there is no question in my mind that Snow White and the Huntsman is an action-packed, visual marvel that is positively brimming with emotion. While Chris Hemsworth’s Huntsman and Sam Claflin’s Prince William may be the requisite brawn of the movie, Snow White and the Huntsman is all about the showdown between Charlize Theron’s frigid Queen Ravenna and Kristen Stewart’s defiant Snow White. Forget Return of the King, this is “Return of the Queen.” 

Rupert Sanders’ Snow White and the Huntsman, starring Kristen Stewart, Chris Hemsworth, Nick Frost, Bob Hoskins, Ray Winstone, Toby Jones, Eddie Marsan, Ian McShane, and Charlize Theron opens June 1st. Hit the jump for more.

In an exclusively cut sequence for WonderCon, director Rupert Sanders presented us with a five-minute compilation from Snow White and the Huntsman. It began with a cavalry charge, the daring knights of King Magnus’ (Noah Huntley) forces literally smashing through the Queen’s Shadow Army. Next, we see Snow White (Stewart) making a daring escape from the Queen’s dungeons. It’s out of the frying pan and into the Dark Forest for Snow White, who encounters the evil and nightmarish creatures in the woodland’s depths. Enter The Huntsman, in a familiar scene in which the Queen demands his assistance in returning the fair Snow White.

In a bit of new footage, we’re introduced to the dwarves when they capture The Huntsman and Snow White and string them up. Frost, Hoskins, Winstone, Jones, Marsan, McShane, Brendan Gleeson, and Johnny Harris all look remarkable as digitally-shrunken warriors. In a nice twist of storytelling, they bend their knees in allegiance to Snow White once they learn that she is the daughter of King Magnus. In another bit of new footage, the group leaves the dying wasteland of the Dark Forest for a verdant place of life and color known as the Sanctuary. This was a fantastic scene in which the fantasy of the story is allowed to come out and play, lending an overall expert balance to the action, fantasy and character development of, at least, the small section of footage shown.

I’ll admit, I was sold once I saw the footage, but there were more surprises in store as both Theron and Stewart came on stage for a panel discussion with Sanders. I’ve outlined their comments below:

Sanders commented on staying true to the original Grimm Brothers fairy tale in making the film resemble the source material more so than a fantasy story.Stewart mentioned that Snow White is a character that she’s the most proud of and was especially thankful for Sanders’ efforts, saying that “everything she wanted her character to be is there.”Theron confessed to having fun with the Evil Queen. In regards to the character being previously portrayed as a wicked stepmother or witch, Theron said there was “something nice about fucking with that idea.”In regards to Hemsworth, Sanders spoke to the actor’s “great intuitive emotional sense [who is] emotionally grounded [and gave a] great performance, not just physically.” Sanders said that most people wouldn’t be expecting to cry upon watching Snow White and the Huntsman, but they might be surprised and find that Hemsworth’s character evokes it.Stewart talked about what drew her to the project, specifically the physicality of it, the fact that the material delves in the gray areas (not black and white absolutes) and the fact that it’s a badass role for her to play. Sanders mentioned that Stewart gets to knock more men out in the film than the other way around. (It was obvious that Stewart was anxious to put her Twilight persona behind her, but was careful not to outright say it with the final film, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2 coming out later this year.)When asked why he didn’t cast little people in the role of the dwarves, Sanders commented that he had always wanted to work with British actors famous for their gangster roles and, although initially he had them in mind for another movie of his, they all happened to be available for Snow White and the Huntsman.

The footage shown at the panel was more than enough to convince me to check this movie out this summer. If you’re a fan of Lord of the Rings, I think you’ll find the aesthetics and the themes to be to your liking. This just so happens to be a tale told with a defiant female protagonist (which I’m sure is a nice change for Stewart) and an equally imposing female villain in Theron’s Queen Ravenna.

Here’s the official synopsis for Snow White and the Huntsman:

In the epic action-adventure Snow White and the Huntsman, Kristen Stewart plays the only person in the land fairer than the evil queen (Charlize Theron) who is out to destroy her. But what the wicked ruler never imagined is that the young woman threatening her reign has been training in the art of war with a huntsman (Chris Hemsworth) who was dispatched to kill her. Sam Claflin joins the cast as the prince long enchanted by Snow White’s beauty and power.

The breathtaking new vision of the legendary tale is from Joe Roth, the producer of Alice in Wonderland, producer Sam Mercer and acclaimed commercial director and state-of-the-art visualist Rupert Sanders.

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WonderCon 2012: ABRAHAM LINCOLN: VAMPIRE HUNTER Panel Recap; Timur Bekmambetov and Benjamin Walker Screen Special Footage

In addition to showing off their footage (and a new trailer!) for Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, 20th Century Fox also premiered some new footage for producer Tim Burton and director Timur Bekmambetov’s (Wanted) Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Part of the new footage was this recently released trailer (Mr. Lincoln, you had me at “gun-axe”). But they also showed an extended section of a big action set piece that featured all the principal cast, Bekmambetov’s signature action style and a helluva good fight. Unfortunately, Burton could not be present because he was gravely ill, but did check-in via satellite in a delightfully Burtonesque clip. Details after the jump.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, starring Benjamin Walker, Rufus Sewell, and Anthony Mackie opens in 3D on June 22nd. Hit the jump for more from the presentation.

The panel kicked off with a very bizarre clip featuring a dessicated (and obviously fake) corpse speaking from a hospital bed. Apparently, this was meant to be a very ill Tim Burton, who was presided over by two attractive nurses and a doctor who preached holistic medicine. After a very strange sequence of events which tried to revive Mr. Burton (and failed), we got on with the show. Author/screenwriter Seth Grahame-Smith moderated the panel which included Bekmambetov and Walker. While the previous trailers hadn’t entirely convinced me to see the film, the following action sequence definitely did, but skip the next paragraph if you’d like to avoid spoilers.

The big action sequence in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter follows our titular hero (Walker) and Will Johnson (Mackie) as they’re defending a speeding train from attacking vampires. Any fan of Bekmambetov’s Night Watch and/or Wanted will instantly recognize the director’s signature style as there is a lot of it on display in this sequence. There is also a lot of axe-play (yes, axe-play) in this scene as not only Lincoln uses it to dispatch the undead, but Johnson does as well. The duo works together to put down vamp after vamp until the big bad shows up: Adam (Sewell), Chief of the Vampires. As the train is steaming towards a bridge set ablaze, Adam appears to be too much for our heroes, who jump from the falling train.

Yeah, that definitely made me want to go see this flick, which is promising to be heavy on action and axe-play. Walker looks completely badass when he’s swinging the two-hander around, lopping off undead heads left and right. It makes me want to see a revisionist write-up of American history with this Lincoln in place of the historically accurate one. Although, as the lights come back up and the panel discussion begins, Walker and Grahame-Smith do comment on the surprising accuracy of the film. I’ve outlined their responses below:

When asked about how Grahame-Smith, who wrote the source novel, came up with the idea of combining Abraham Lincoln and vampire hunting, he commented that he just gets really drunk by himself and throws darts at a wall until he hits two words that are completely unrelated. In actuality, he said that the idea came from a book tour he was on for his novel, “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.” Since it was during Lincoln’s 200th birthday, book stores had Lincoln biographies on display…right next to displays of the Twilight novels. This led him to research Lincoln and discovered the man’s actual “superheroic” origins.Walker commented on the Gothic tone of the film, which was strangely historically accurate (mentioning the unexplained death of Lincoln’s mother), calling it a “period Lincoln movie that just happens to have vampires in it.” In a great quote from Walker regarding playing Lincoln, he called it “badass; it’s an honor as an American. I want to know that my leaders are strong and can make tough decisions…and cut some heads off.”Bekmambetov, Grahame-Smith and Walker all talked about Burton’s support in wanting to take an aggressive, all-out approach on the film. Bekmambetov also said that while they changed some things from the book, the tone of the novel and the structure around Lincoln’s life is still present.Grahame-Smith did extensive research into Lincoln’s life and a lot of his book is in the movie. Some things they added were Adam, the Chief of all Vampires (Sewell); William Johnson (Mackie), who was an actual aide of Lincoln’s who traveled with him to Washington, D.C.; and the kick-ass train sequence mentioned above.On vampire comparisons, Grahame-Smith said the following: “I’m not a Twilight-hater, but I’ll say this…our vampires don’t sparkle.” He also guaranteed that Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter will be the only movie this summer to feature a president killing vampires.Bekmambetov also joked that it’s important to note they’re releasing this movie on the shortest night of the year. They worked hard to ground the vampires in reality, noting that the vampires could be seen outside since sunscreen was invented in the 19th century.When asked if President Obama would make a good vampire slayer, Grahame-Smith responded coyly that “he’s tall, he’s athletic” and could be okay. Walker had the best answer when asked what Obama’s weapon of choice against vampires would be: “Diplomacy. Maybe email.”

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter looks like an awesome action movie with a Gothic horror slant and a touch of history thrown in. Walker looks absolutely imposing as our 16th president and is entirely believable in the fight sequences. While it’s important not to take this movie too seriously (obviously), it could easily be the biggest surprise of the summer. I’ll say it again: gun-axe.

Here’s the official synopsis for Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter:

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter explores the secret life of our greatest President, and the untold story that shaped our nation. Visionary filmmakers Tim Burton and Timur Bekmambetov (director of Wanted) bring a fresh and visceral voice to the blood-thirsty lore of the vampire, imagining Lincoln as history’s greatest hunter of the undead.

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