SAM RAIMI, who was on the shortlist of directors for the big-screen remake of The Hobbit, says Guillermo del Toro was a brilliant choice to make the film. thehobbit1.jpgSpider-Man director Raimi told Empire magazine: “I thought that The Hobbit was just a fantastic icon of fantasy literature. I love that book and I’m a giant fan of the Lord of the Rings movies. “It would have been an excellent job but Peter Jackson is the producer and he chose who he thinks would be the best filmmaker, which is Guillermo del Toro, who I love. Del Toro was right choice for The Hobbit, says Raimi
Month: March 2009
Sir Ian McKellen hasn’t spent his entire acting career aching to play Shakespeare’s King Lear. “I thought it was beyond me,” the veteran English actor said, surprisingly. “It was never a part I wanted to play. I knew, from having seen other people play it up close, that it takes an awful lot out of you. “You can’t throw off a King Lear. You have to delve into it.” McKellen never too old to be young
A cast of a Hobbit skeleton will be publicly displayed for the first time ever at Stony Brook University’s 7th Human Evolution Symposium on April 21, thanks to the National Research and Development Centre for Archaeology in Jakarta, Indonesia. As the debate rages on about whether Homo floresiensis – the so called Hobbit – fossils discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003, represent a separate human species, the symposium will bring together the researchers currently in the process of describing and analyzing the remains. ‘Hobbit’ Skeleton to be unveiled on April 21
Sir Ian McKellen received rave reviews for his performance in the title role of “King Lear,” but he’s quick to give credit where credit is due.
The playwright.
“Lear — it’s all there. It’s all pretty obvious what’s going on,” he said. “Although a psychiatrist reviewed the production and praised me for having clearly done my research into the particularity of Lear’s mental problem. I’ve done nothing of the sort. I’ve done no research whatsoever. I just played the part as it seemed to me the words wanted me to. And the brilliance was not mine, but Shakespeare’s. Read McKellen as ‘King Lear’ to the masses
How do Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson, the two titans of pop culture, collaborate on the new 3-D motion-capture version of “Tintin”? With lots of high-tech wizardry.
Spielberg, who’s directing the first installment, “The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn,” recently wrapped 32 days of performance-capture shooting in Los Angeles. Producer Jackson traveled from his New Zealand home base to L.A. for rehearsals and the first week of shooting, and then appeared via an elaborate video-conferencing setup for the rest of the shoot, using a specially designed iChat-type system in which the Kiwi filmmaker can see everything on the set in real time and simultaneously talk with Spielberg. The film is scheduled to hit theaters in 2011. ‘Tintin’ project brings moguls together
In a trailer on the edge of a film set beneath an underpass in downtown Cape Town, Ian McKellen, 69, is musing about fame and death, and what the papers will say when he goes. “ ’GANDALF DIES,’ I expect,” he says. The thought tickles him. Not the dying part. The part about being a classical actor and having billions of fans, most of whom are 12. “When you spend as long as I have doing beautiful work which is only seen by a few thousand people, to be involved in popular entertainment without lessening one’s standards … that’s fairly appealing,” he says. “You become part of the culture.” It’s not that McKellen ever shied away from fame. On the contrary, he sought it out “to publicise myself to people who might employ me.” You might say he overachieved. “Now it’s … well, it’s gone well beyond that.” Ian McKellen: The Player