On Saturday, May 18, 2013, after watching the “green” carpet premiere of Epic at the Ziegfeld Theater in New York City I was fortunate to interview the film’s director, Chris Wedge, and several stars from the film – Amanda Seyfried, Colin Farrel, Chris O’Dowd and Aziz Ansari.
The interviews were broken up into two groups. Chris Wedge, Amanda Seyfried and Colin Farrell were in one group and Chris O’Dowd and Aziz Ansari were in another group.
I’ll break the interviews up into two posts to make it easier. This first post will feature the interview with Director Chris Wedge, Amanda Seyfried and Colin Farrell. If you want to read the interview with Chris O’Dowd and Aziz Ansari you can find it here.
Chris Wedge, the Director of Epic, has directed other family favorites – Ice Age and Robots. He’s been the Executive Producer on other Ice Age films and has even lent his voice to the character of Scrat who appears in all of the Ice Age films.
Chris came across as a quiet man but he was more than happy to chat about his incredible new film, Epic.
Amanda Seyfried is best known for her roles in such films as Les Miserables, Mamma Mia, In Time and Dear John. She also stared as Sarah Henrickson in the HBO series Big Love.
I knew Amanda was a petite young lady, but I didn’t realize just as tiny she was until you see her in person. She also comes across as VERY shy, which is not something you would expect from an actress. She’s very soft spoken and quiet.
Amanda is the voice of MK.
Colin Farrell was once seen as a “Hollywood Bad Boy”. He has stared in such films as Total Recall, Horrible Bosses, In Bruges and one of my personal favorites, Phone Booth. In 2009 he filled in as the character of Dr. Parnassus in the film The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus after the untimely death of Heath Ledger. He filmed the role along with Johnny Depp and Jude Law. Colin donated his salary from the film to Heath’s daughter Matilda.
I was expecting a bit of a cocky attitude from someone once seen as a Hollywood hell raiser, but that was not the case at all. Colin was very friendly, personable and funny. He also was very well spoken and clearly adores his two young sons. I was pleasantly surprised by him. He’s also a lot smaller in person then he comes off as on the big screen.
Colin is the voice of Ronin.
We interviewed this group after interviewing Chris O’d Dowd and Aziz Ansari. Chris and Aziz had our group laughing hard the entire time. When this group walked in Amanda wanted to know why we were laughing so loud. We told them that Chris and Aziz were just really funny. Colin, not to be outdone by his cast mates, started off the interview with “So, an Englishman, Irishman and Scotsman walk into a bar” to which Chris chimed in “A priest and a Rabbi are walking down the road…”. We asked them to finish but due to time we needed to get on to the interview.
Q: Did the environmental message in this movie have an impact on whether or not you wanted to take a part in it? Was that something that you said, wow, this is a great way to really get this message out there to the kids? I mean, obviously, it’s a good thing, but was it something in your thought process? And for you, Chris, was that a huge part of this for you?
Chris Wedge: It seemed like a fun magical place to go. I do what I can to live as small as I can. It’s kind of hard when you’re working on one of these movies because you’re on airplanes all the time.
Colin Farrell: Yes.
Chris Wedge: But, the idea behind the movie was that we would go to a place that seems familiar to us, but we would see the magic inside of it. And when I wanted always to get in touch with that from an emotional perspective, I thought about the times that I just walk into the forest, whenever I’m by myself, and just stop and listen and just feel it, because you can feel the presence of some kind of nature power going on all the time.
There’s a little movie going on with the squirrels that are chasing around and the things are growing out of trees, and it’s always happening, and you can feel the presence of that.
And, look, we’ve done a very stylized version of a magical forest here, but if it generates some more kind of respect for that in kids, if they think, wow, maybe if I walk out there, I’ll see this, because I am taking perspectives and showing you that, sometimes, it looks just like it does to us, right, you’ll see evidence that this is happening.
So, my hope was that a kid would go out and see like, wow, those birds making all that noise, that’s not just a sparrow chasing a crow away from its nest, it’s Leafman and Boggins that are fighting, that would be it for me. There’s magic out there that we just don’t pay attention to.
Colin Farrell: This is me on the environmental warpath, absolutely. There’s no doubt that there’s a message that’s inherent in the script just by the representation of the beauty of nature and the minutia of nature and the simultaneous fragility and strength of nature. So, that’s all inherent in the script.
So, to respond to the script, I think you’re responding to those ideals. But, no, it’s just a case of meeting Chris and his team and really seeing the visuals and just loving the story and loving the world.
And as Chris said, if anyone can come out of this with a moment’s more pause for thought than they would have had before it or if kids want to go out and pick up a rock and see what lies underneath it and put the iPad down for five minutes, happy days, you know?
Q: When you’re creating the characters and you have the actors in there, how does that work as far as they don’t look like them, but you can tell that their facial expressions, there are things that you can say, oh, that looks like them!
Chris Wedge: The animated characters are collaborations. They come from a lot of different places. So, we write them, and we design them, and we have animators. But, we get voices from human beings that can create a performance for us.
Every time we record, there’s a little camera watching these guys, watching their faces as reference for our animators. But, often, the animators don’t ever look at it because so much of the performance comes through in what they hear.
So, this part is just what you hear, really. But, it inspires a lot of what you see. I mean, we didn’t make these guys jump onto anything and ride it around or do anything crazy.
Colin Farrell: I just rolled around in the forest before I went into work just to get in the mood.
Chris Wedge: It’s weird. His fingers were always dirty when he came in. But, you get all of it from performance.
Q: My blog is called Latina on a Mission, and a lot of my readers are single moms. So, MK and General Ronin both felt a loss. So, if you were to channel your character, what kind of advice would you give kids who have loss, whether it’s that their parents separated or something else?
So, I’m wondering, what advice would you give to kids? What did you get from that character, both of you?
Colin Farrell: I’m a single father, and both my kids have mothers who are single mothers, single parents, and as wee as it sounds, how a parent treats their child I think is less of a reflection on their child than it is on the parent.
And I think if that can imparted, if somebody treats their child with kindness and with grace and with love, well then, maybe the parents wants to say because they’re proud of their child and they love their child, it’s to do with my child. I think it’s more to do with a parent in the same way that if a parent abuses their child, treats them with harshness or cruelty, it’s nothing to do with the child. It’s to do with the parent.
And loss can represent a sense of abandonment, of course, a sense of being unwanted. Even if that loss is as the result of a passing of a life, as the result of death even, it’s the way human beings are and as sensitive as we are, but certainly, if it’s a father who’s not turning up.
So, I think, love is the most important thing. And then, if there’s a feeling as an absence of love, as much as it can be explained to the child that that is through no fault of their own, I think that’s a really important thing.
Amanda Seyfried: Well said.
Chris Wedge: I have to say, I’ve been worried about that because I thought about it. I mean, obviously, when you’re writing something, you’re trying to create motivations for characters and situations that they have to work through and relationships that can build and be emotionally satisfying.
But, I’ve been watching those scenes in front of audiences and going, hmm, really, hmm, do we really have to wallow in this thing, does she really have to have lost her mom to make this story work.
Amanda Seyfried: It’s big. Yes, it’s the worst thing that can happen, I think. But, it just shows that there’s a future. I mean, I couldn’t imagine a future without my mother, but there is one if that happened. And, nobody wants to think about that, but life does go on. Does it?
Chris Wedge: The point’s about connections in the movie. And both Ronin and Nod feel as though they’re isolated at the beginning of the movie, and Nod with Ronin realizes that he’s a father surrogate, and MK realizes she never lost her father, she just thought she had. It was her attitude more than his that had created the visions.
Q: What was your favorite movie when you were a kid?
Colin Farrell: Star Wars for me. I had all the figures and collected all the figures and loved those films, yes, very much so.
Amanda Seyfried: Sonic the Hedgehog. And I was Sonic, so I got to fight evil myself, which is exciting.
Q: I have a question for Collin. I’m a mom of two boys, so I’m assuming, when you’re out and off on set for a couple of months maybe at a time, do you bring your kids with you?
Colin Farrell: They visit me, yes, every time I go to work. It’s much harder to leave home than ever. I mean, to be honest, I love what I do, and I consider myself very lucky to be able to do what I do and make a living doing it. But, I would love to do one film every year maybe and be at home.
Over the last few years, I’ve had periods where I’ve been off for six months and then periods where I’m off for four weeks between jobs. It gets harder but the lads visit.
And they seem, as much as I can detect, really well adjusted to how everything is. And they have two mothers that really adore them, and they have a dad that adores both of them.
And so, a mortal fear of mine is the idea that they will ever feel unwanted or something because of the amount I’m away. Look, my dad was around every day when I was growing up, and I didn’t feel wanted by that man, and he was there every day.
When I’m not working, if I’m home for six weeks, they’re sick of looking at me. I’m there all day. Do you know what I mean? I don’t have a nine to five. So, I have these really intense periods of being home.
Q: (Directed to Colin) Have your children seen the movie yet?
Colin Farrell: No, neither of them have, no.
Blogger: Are you going to let them see a movie?
Colin Farrell: I can’t get my hands on that pirate copy I’ve been trying to find.
Amanda Seyfried: You could just videotape it when you go to the theater.
Colin Farrell: That would be genius.
Amanda Seyfried: I’m sure they have some kind of screening. Do they go to movies?
Colin Farrell: Yes, what have we seen recently? Sitting down for an hour and a half, James kind of gets bored. But, Henry made it through Hotel Transylvania.
Q: How old is MK, the character?
Chris Wedge: I wanted to make her a little older. But, I wanted her to be right on the cusp. I wanted her to be 17, 18, just old enough to be on her own, just old enough to be about done with high school, just old enough to do it on her own if she had to.
Amanda Seyfried: To make her own decisions.
Chris Wedge: Yes, but she goes in this thing with a purpose.
Q: Amanda, MK seemed like a really strong character. So, I’m wondering, how did you feel about that?
Amanda Seyfried: I’m attracted to those kinds of gals. Yes, I like to find characters that I can relate to in some way.
When I’m looking for a challenge, a character that I can’t relate to at all is always great. But, this girl is somebody I can relate to because she’s very headstrong and honest and wants to know what it is she’s about. And, I’m struggling with that every day.
And that’s real for anybody that age… But, also, she’s really, really brave, and I’m not. I aspire to be that way. So, I like playing characters that would react to things in a completely different way.
Colin Farrell: You may be more brave, I don’t know, than you give yourself credit for.
Amanda Seyfried: Maybe, yes. But, if I were shrunken into some other kind of world or even transported–like say I woke up and I was in the middle of the Congo, I would be so paralyzed with fear.
Colin Farrell: You may shock yourself, you really may.
Amanda Seyfried: Yes.
Colin Farrell: I’d say I’m the same. I’d would say, is this a Michael Crichton book, The Jungle? You may surprise yourself. I don’t know. Human beings are strange creatures.
Amanda Seyfried: That’s true, actually.
Colin Farrell: And they’re capable of massive amounts of resilience.
Q: How did you get the images to look like that? I haven’t seen 3D like that. You could tell from the very first scene it was going to be something different.
Chris Wedge: Well, thank you.
Blogger: The color was so saturated and it was just so beautiful. Is there something different that you did?
Chris Wedge: Well, a difference is in the technology that we use. We’ve been working on this stuff for 25 years, and so there are physicists at Blue Sky that work on the physics of light.
And a lot of it, I have to say, it comes from the art direction. The idea for this movie, I wanted to make a very romantic fantasy film. And so, I went back to the illustrations and paintings of NC Wyeth was the main one. He painted one single beautiful image for Treasure Island or Robin Hood or Sea Hawk, and that incredibly nuanced textured artwork is what I wanted it to look like a storybook.
I’m sure that we could have asked more questions but they were very busy and had more interviews to do throughout the day. I even rode in the elevator with Amanda when she headed back to her hotel room.
I hope this interview gives you are little more insight into the movie, Epic, which opens in theaters on Friday, May 24, 2013.
For more information about the film, it’s cast and charters plus photos and activities, visit the official website www.EpictheMovie.com. You can also check it out on all it’s social media sites.
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To find other Epic related posts please use the search box located on the top right side. Simply enter in the word Epic.
Kimberly
*I was not compensated for this post. I am posting this for the enjoyment of my site readers. The opinions expressed are my own and not influenced in any way.
mikemost says
another great interview, three even! well written and thanks for the insight. I was curious to see how Colin came across and I read it (even looking at the photo of him) that he started out a little cold but eventually seemed to warm up. Here’s a guy that would probably be suited better in a bad boy type film -granted they never should have re-made Fright Night or Total Recall but he did great as Crocket in Miami Vice and enjoyed him in the Recruit. While I’m sidetracked, they better never re-make Lost Boys.
Ok… so it was nice to hear him speaking about his kids and how Chris Wedge was concerned whether they needed to have the mother absent in the film. Too many of these “kids” films bring in death and bad problems that aren’t required to make a good family film.
Your writing put me right there as a part of the interview, thanks!
Kate F. says
Great interview! This sounds like a cool movie.
Dayna says
great interview!!! i’m going to see that movie this week!