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http://www.canmag.com/nw/6613-thom-gray-tmnt-remake
February 1, 2007
The previews for the new CGI Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles look awesome, but still, why remake it? Those animatronic movies were awesome, at least the first one. I even liked Secret of the Ooze with Vanilla Ice.
TMNT Remake
CG is the easy answer, said producer Thom Gray. If you go back and look at where we were going with the first three, we did $132 million, $84 million and $42 million. The budgets were going the other way. 11, 16, 21. They were going in the wrong direction. After the third picture, we got together with New Line. The next one would be $30 million and maybe it would make $25 million. So it was going in the wrong direction. We let the rights expire and that was with Golden Harvest. I left that company in 98. A lot of people trying to put it together with I think John Woo at one point mentioned. It was a Korean company who tried to put it together on a tax deal that never got going. When I joined this animation company [Imagi] in 2004, the question became what about turtles in CG? Knowing how inexpensive it would be to do it verses live action, because live action would be a hundred and some odd million dollars today. So CG became something that was economically to do, plus we could do a lot more interesting things in CG that we couldnt do in live action for budgetary restrictions. We didnt have the money to make a $140 million picture. I guess thats the real motivation to do it and we felt that there was enough interest out there that we could come back and keep it going.
Ah, it always comes down to money. At least now we can see turtles do more elaborate ninja moves on their foes. Director Kevin Munroe also promises to make it look more like the original comic books.
Both in the design and in the rendering of the animation, I think theres a lot that happens in between panels in the comic book that you fill in in your mind of how this pose got from here to there, or what happened from there, said Munroe. The idea and the hope that this movie would feel like its everything that happens in between those panels. That sounds so stupid and cerebral, but after you get it in motion, hopefully as they are moving, you can freeze frame the movie and create a great comic book if you went through it, just the way its posed and framed. As far as the lighting of it, I think I said this at Comic-con, we lit the whole movie in black and white before we added a stitch of color to it, which was really fun just going after that Frank Miller kind of very black and white comic vibe to it just in term of the lighting. In the re-design of the Turtles, I didnt think wed get away with Pete [Laird], but it was just one of those things where just making them feel like teenagers, just a family of teenagers sitting on the sofa arguing.
There is a current TMNT animated series on TV, but thats not what Munroe wanted for the movie. Whats in the TV series now works for the TV series, and its really great that 2D aspect. But its really weird that theyre just so big and buff, they dont feel like teenagers to me; so when we approached Pete with it, he was all for it, and he was really great. So we just tried to work and make each of them different to match their characteristics and stuff, just really going after the graphic novel. It isnt real, so theres no reason to go after and replicate reality; but I just wanted to create a believable alternate reality. I think we did in the lighting and effects and the colors.
The turtles look great, thats established. But they have to do great things too. Luckily, Munroe was thinking as much about the story as he was about the new approach. I think it was pretty much at the same time, but at the beginning, there were just a couple of us going over the story with Peter; and then we were just doodling in sketch books as we were talking about story. So I think from the beginning, that was sort of the first thing to bring to Peter, sheepishly present your sketch book, and say were thinking about this, and expect the big red X across. And so yeah, it was that and the story at the same time; they started intertwining quite a bit as we were going on.
Find out more about the new TMNT film in our continuing preview coverage.
TMNT opens to theatres on March 23rd, 2007.
February 1, 2007
The previews for the new CGI Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles look awesome, but still, why remake it? Those animatronic movies were awesome, at least the first one. I even liked Secret of the Ooze with Vanilla Ice.
TMNT Remake
CG is the easy answer, said producer Thom Gray. If you go back and look at where we were going with the first three, we did $132 million, $84 million and $42 million. The budgets were going the other way. 11, 16, 21. They were going in the wrong direction. After the third picture, we got together with New Line. The next one would be $30 million and maybe it would make $25 million. So it was going in the wrong direction. We let the rights expire and that was with Golden Harvest. I left that company in 98. A lot of people trying to put it together with I think John Woo at one point mentioned. It was a Korean company who tried to put it together on a tax deal that never got going. When I joined this animation company [Imagi] in 2004, the question became what about turtles in CG? Knowing how inexpensive it would be to do it verses live action, because live action would be a hundred and some odd million dollars today. So CG became something that was economically to do, plus we could do a lot more interesting things in CG that we couldnt do in live action for budgetary restrictions. We didnt have the money to make a $140 million picture. I guess thats the real motivation to do it and we felt that there was enough interest out there that we could come back and keep it going.
Ah, it always comes down to money. At least now we can see turtles do more elaborate ninja moves on their foes. Director Kevin Munroe also promises to make it look more like the original comic books.
Both in the design and in the rendering of the animation, I think theres a lot that happens in between panels in the comic book that you fill in in your mind of how this pose got from here to there, or what happened from there, said Munroe. The idea and the hope that this movie would feel like its everything that happens in between those panels. That sounds so stupid and cerebral, but after you get it in motion, hopefully as they are moving, you can freeze frame the movie and create a great comic book if you went through it, just the way its posed and framed. As far as the lighting of it, I think I said this at Comic-con, we lit the whole movie in black and white before we added a stitch of color to it, which was really fun just going after that Frank Miller kind of very black and white comic vibe to it just in term of the lighting. In the re-design of the Turtles, I didnt think wed get away with Pete [Laird], but it was just one of those things where just making them feel like teenagers, just a family of teenagers sitting on the sofa arguing.
There is a current TMNT animated series on TV, but thats not what Munroe wanted for the movie. Whats in the TV series now works for the TV series, and its really great that 2D aspect. But its really weird that theyre just so big and buff, they dont feel like teenagers to me; so when we approached Pete with it, he was all for it, and he was really great. So we just tried to work and make each of them different to match their characteristics and stuff, just really going after the graphic novel. It isnt real, so theres no reason to go after and replicate reality; but I just wanted to create a believable alternate reality. I think we did in the lighting and effects and the colors.
The turtles look great, thats established. But they have to do great things too. Luckily, Munroe was thinking as much about the story as he was about the new approach. I think it was pretty much at the same time, but at the beginning, there were just a couple of us going over the story with Peter; and then we were just doodling in sketch books as we were talking about story. So I think from the beginning, that was sort of the first thing to bring to Peter, sheepishly present your sketch book, and say were thinking about this, and expect the big red X across. And so yeah, it was that and the story at the same time; they started intertwining quite a bit as we were going on.
Find out more about the new TMNT film in our continuing preview coverage.
TMNT opens to theatres on March 23rd, 2007.
Why a TMNT Remake? Is the title of the Interview that I copied over from the website.
