With two very different movies coming out next week, director Steven Spielberg is back in the public consciousness in a very big way – not that we haven’t seen dozens of movies that reference, pay homage or were greatly influenced by his work in the time since his last movie, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. While his animated The Adventures of Tintin and the sweeping WWI epic War Horse don’t have much else in common, they’re both clearly Spielberg, tapping into some of the things we’ve seen from him before as well as entering new territory.
The Adventures of Tintin teams him with Peter Jackson to revive Herge’s popular character who has been the star of 24 graphic adventures, using performance capture and 3D animation. Jamie Bell plays Tintin, the intrepid reporter who comes across a mystery when he buys a model of an old warship called the Unicorn, a model that everyone wants to get their hands on. Helping Tintin solve the mystery is the alcoholic Captain Haddock, descendant of the original captain of the Unicorn, played by Andy Serkis, whose masterful performance capture work has graced Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy and King Kong, as well as this year’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Simon Pegg and Nick Frost play the bumbling identical twin investigators, Thompson and Thompson.
Co-written by current “Dr. Who” mastermind Stephen Moffat with fan faves Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish, Spielberg has created something that taps into the large-scale adventure of the Indiana Jones movies tempered by all sorts of other influences including Laurel and Hardy, crime noir, high seas adventure and more.
Paramount Pictures hooked ComingSoon.net up with a chance to talk directly to Spielberg about his work on The Adventures of Tintin, and though we didn’t get a ton of time with him, in the brief video interview below, we discussed:
* What he took away from Hergé’s comics when he first read them
* Deciding on doing the movie with performance capture and WETA
* Snowy, Tintin’s faithful dog (who steals the movie)
* Using an FX house like Weta to do the animation
* The movie’s mini-“Hot Fuzz” reunion
* We ask about Jurassic Park 4, which you may have already read here.
