We still have a bunch of things to share from this past weekend’s New York Comic Con, and we had a particularly busy day on Saturday with tons of interviews, lots of movie presentations and very little time (or WIFI) to get it all up right away.
One of the odder movies to show up at this year’s con was Warner Bros.’ Beautiful Creatures, an adaptation of the young adult fantasy novel written by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl and produced by Alcon Entertainment. The movie’s written and directed by Richard LaGravenese, whose last two films Freedom Writers and P.S. I Love You would not make one think he’d ever have a movie presented at Comic Con. In fact, LaGravenese also wrote Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King and Alfonso Cuarón’s A Little Princess, two pivotal films that blended reality and fantasy so well.
Set in rural South Carolina, Beautiful Creatures tells the story of two young lovers as a local boy named Ethan, played by Alden Ehrenreich), meets and falls in love with the mysterious Lena (Alice Englert, soon to be seen in Sally Potter’s Ginger and Rosa), a young girl with dark secrets tied to the past of both their families and the town in which they live. The stellar cast around the two relatively new actors includes Viola Davis, Jeremy Irons, Emma Thompson and Emmy Rossum
Unfortunately, we missed most of the panel including the footage shown, so we can’t say too much more about that. Hopefully whatever Warner Bros. showed will appear online soon enough, but here’s our earlier interview with LaGravenese, in which we talked about:
* Why he decided to go after the novel “Beautiful Creatures” as his next movie
* Shooting in New Orleans for South Carolina
* How romance is a running throughline of his movies
* Casting the two young unknown actors as Lena and Ethan
* Getting the amazing cast he put together around them
* Why the movie shouldn’t be deemed “the next Twilight”
* How he got the band Thenewno2, featuring second generation musicians Dhani Harrison and Paul Hicks, to do their very first score for the film
* How the visual FX for the film are coming along
* Getting cinematographer Philippe Rousselot to shoot the movie
And More!
