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Issue Date: May 6, 2007
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Villains An exclusive Q&A with the meanest of the season.
2007 Summer movie preview
Things you didn't know about this summer's biggest and best releases.
By Jamie Malanowski
There are plenty of good answers to the problem of global warming. But while you're weighing the merits of hybrid cars, carbon credits and wind power, don't overlook the positive effects of going to the movies. Sitting in air conditioning with a 36-ounce Icee never fails to make our world a little cooler. Here are some fun facts and anecdotes about the films we'll be looking to catch.
WAITRESS (May 2) More than 200 pies were made and shot during the course of this film about a woman who discovers that she's pregnant just as she's about to leave her jealous, controlling husband. Although a "pie consultant" was retained, a lot of the pies were thrown together. "We just kept adding stuff until it fit what we were looking for aesthetically," says producer Michael Roiff. Not all of them turned out as good as they looked. Says Roiff, "Our spaghetti pie was so bad, poor Jeremy Sisto could barely swallow it to complete the scene."
SPIDER-MAN 3 (May 4) As Tobey Maguire can tell you, playing Spider-Man is no day at the spa, and neither is playing a Spidey villain. In the course of performing his stunts, Thomas Haden Church, who plays Sandman, was yanked 5 feet in the air before being face-planted in mud, chased (and caught) by dogs, dangled in midair, dropped onto train tracks and smashed face-first into a pane of plexiglass.
SHREK THE THIRD (May 18) Of all the performers in the film, CNN talk-show host Larry King stood out by being most prompt. Says co-director Chris Miller: "If Larry's start time for a recording session was 11:30 a.m., he would show up at 11 and be out of there by 11:10. The news waits for no one."
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD'S END (May 25) The price of continuity can be high. The sash Jack Sparrow wore in the first two "Pirates" movies was woven by a tribe in mountainous Turkey. When more of the material was needed for this installment of the film, costume designer Penny Rose had to dispatch an assistant to Turkey to get the tribe to weave another 100 yards.
KNOCKED UP (June 1) Mark this down as one of the challenges they don't prepare you for in acting school: In a bathtub scene in this movie about a one-night stand that results in a pregnancy, the latex mold that Katherine Heigl wore to look pregnant kept filling with water and sloshing around as though it had a mind of its own.
SURF'S UP (June 8) Because this CGI-animated mockumentary about the Penguin World Surfing Championship includes flashbacks to an earlier period, the filmmakers wanted those parts of the film to have a retro archival feel. In order to get that, the producers had to track down one of the Sony DXC-M3A shoulder-mounted cameras used back in the day. Where did they find one? EBay, of course.
OCEAN'S THIRTEEN (June 8) Producer Jerry Weintraub built a beautiful bar on the set and dubbed it "The Ocean's Club," where the cast could hang out and play cards between takes. There is considerable disagreement over which actor was the best card player, but everyone agrees that "the cooler" -- the person with such bad luck that he spreads it to the nearest gambler -- was George Clooney.
NANCY DREW (June 15) Although girl detective Nancy Drew has enough pluck and gumption to shimmy down a drainpipe or crawl through a tunnel, she also is always an elegant young lady. To help actress Emma Roberts convey that quality with ease, the production hired an etiquette coach who met with her and director Andrew Fleming and instructed them on posture, the proper way a lady crosses her legs (at the ankles) and how to shake hands.
FANTASTIC FOUR: THE RISE OF THE SILVER SURFER (June 15) As he does in most movies based on Marvel Comics characters, Stan Lee, who helped create the "Fantastic Four," makes a cameo appearance. In the original, Lee appeared as a mailman. In this sequel, in an homage to the final frame of "Fantastic Four Annual #3" from 1965, Lee appears as himself, trying to get into the wedding of Reed Richards and Sue Storm.
A MIGHTY HEART (June 22) In this film about the murdered "Wall Street Journal" reporter Daniel Pearl and his wife, Mariane (played by Angelina Jolie), the filmmakers took some calculated risks to shoot at the actual locations in Pakistan where Pearl went. Locations included the Village Restaurant, where he was to meet his contact, the office of the organization that seeks to rescue kidnap victims and the hotel where he met "Bashir" (who was later revealed to be one of Pearl's accused murderers).
EVAN ALMIGHTY (June 22) We've heard about on-set feuds, but this is ridiculous. In this picture about a modern-day Noah, filmmakers not only had to acquire lions, tigers, pelicans, leopards, giraffes, elephants, reindeer, baboons, zebras, camels, raccoons, porcupines, Kodiak bears, buffalos, snakes and many other species, but they also had to watch which animals filmed on which days because so many were natural enemies that could attack one another. Not even Bette Davis and Joan Crawford did that.
LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD (June 27) If it seems like director Len Wiseman, 34, has been preparing for this assignment his whole life -- well, he nearly has been. He made his own short film version of "Die Hard" in high school with a 16mm camera. In addition to directing, he played John McClane.
EVENING (June 29) Producer Jeff Sharp recalls that when the cast members were in Rhode Island rehearsing this film based on a Susan Minot novel about an ailing mother and her two daughters, they spent one evening sitting by their hotel's fire pit. When the subject turned to favorite songs, a brave member of the cast performed. Claire Danes, who plays the mother, impressed everyone by singing "I See the Moon," a song her mother had sung to her as a child. A week later, the producers needed a song for a poignant scene between the mother and her daughters. "We knew immediately what song we should select," Sharp says.
RATATOUILLE (June 29) In this Pixar film about a rat who wishes to become a chef, Peter O'Toole voices the part of powerful food critic Anton Ego. To underscore Ego's ability to kill a restaurant, the filmmakers gave him an office that is shaped like a coffin.
TRANSFORMERS (July 4) For this film inspired by the popular toy line, screenwriters Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci found themselves immersed in the fantasy world they had created. "You know you're in deep when you find yourself pondering the foreign policy ideas of an evil alien," Orci says. One result of this was that a key scene, in which the aliens meet and discuss the future of humanity, was rewritten no less than 300 times!
HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX (July 13) The new student at Hogwarts, the "odd" witch Luna Lovegood, is described in the novel as wearing radish earrings. The costume department on the film hired several jewelry designers to make the earrings, but Evanna Lynch, the young actress who plays Luna, was so into the character that she made her own. "And they were better!" says costume director Jany Temime. "More artsy-craftsy, more like what a creative young girl would do. The stuff we had was too professional. So we used hers."
TALK TO ME (July 13) In filming a James Brown concert sequence from this picture about a Washington, D.C., black radio DJ in the 1960s, droves of students from the nearby University of Toronto came out of their dorms and mixed with the 500 extras in the crowd. This was fine until six months later, when the movie was shown on a large screen at a preview and the filmmakers noticed kids taking photos with their cellphone cameras. Suddenly, there was extra work for the visual effects guys, who had to remove them.
HAIRSPRAY (July 20) Turning John Travolta into Edna Turnblad took more than the customary fat suit. Because he had to move easily in order to dance, the 40-pound suit had to be subdivided into more than 15 pieces to accentuate his fluidity.
NO RESERVATIONS (July 27) We've heard of actresses waiting tables, but not usually after they've won an Oscar. And yet, to prepare for her role in this comedy, Catherine Zeta-Jones went undercover as a server one evening at New York's famed Fiamma Osteria, reciting specialties on the menu and serving orders. Several customers even commented on their server's remarkable resemblance to the actress Catherine Zeta-Jones, to which she would reply, "I hear that all the time."
BECOMING JANE (Aug. 3) Anne Hathaway was reluctant to accept the role of Jane Austen in this film -- she was "too nervous" -- until she ran into actress Emma Thompson on a talk show. Thompson, who won an Oscar for adapting Austen's "Sense and Sensibility," asked Hathaway what projects she had coming up. Hathaway felt too intimidated by the confident British actress to admit her trepidations and suddenly just blurted out that she had decided to take the part. And that was that.
THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM (Aug. 3) One way to measure the lengths to which the makers of this movie went to shoot the film is to say that they went to nine cities in seven countries on three continents. Another way is to say that they used just under 3,000 train tickets. Says producer Pat Crowley, "Moving around as much as we did, we hired so many people that if only the crew came to see the film, we'd have a great opening weekend."
UNDERDOG (Aug. 3) If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a kennel to make a dog movie. Eighteen trained dogs were used to portray all of the dogs in the film, including three Cavalier King Charles Spaniels who played Polly and four lemon beagles who played Underdog. Although four were used, one -- Leo, from Orange County, Calif. -- was the so-called "face dog" who got most of the close-ups (and who will presumably sign most of the autographs).
RUSH HOUR 3 (Aug. 10) When the script calls for the appearance of a gigantic Asian man, how do you find one? Easy -- the same way anybody finds anything these days. The casting director simply Googled "giant Asian men." The result: Sun Ming Ming, who, at 7-foot-8, is reputed to be the second-tallest man in China.
SUPERBAD (Aug. 17) For the opening credits sequence of this comedy about dysfunctional teenagers, the producers asked actor Michael Cera to do a 45-minute take of him dancing. Co-star Jonah Hill did the same dancing, but for just eight minutes. The director used one minute of each. According to a studio spokesperson, the filmmakers knew that they would only use a bit of the dancing, but they just wanted to make Cera uncomfortable for their own entertainment!
THE COMEBACKS (Aug. 24) This film about a bad football coach and his team of rejects involved a cast full of famous sports figures (Lawrence Taylor and Dennis Rodman, to name two), but the Tom Brady affiliated with the film was not the famous quarterback, but the director. No one was confused until a 77-year-old limo driver who was a lifelong New England Patriots fan arrived at the airport to pick up Brady, certain that he was chauffeuring the Super Bowl MVP. The director's long hair, beard and several extra years did nothing to dissuade the driver, who was ecstatic upon realizing his lifelong dream. "It would have broken his heart to argue with him," Brady recalls, "so I simply hopped in the car and gave this sweet old guy the play-by-play from 'my most recent game.' "
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