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ROB BOWMAN::
"Taking a medieval, mystical, mythical creature and putting him into what I felt was really a World War II scenario [excited me]."
MATTHEW McCONAUGHEY::
"The dragon fights are spectacular, sure, but you also give a damn about the people on the ground. If the movie had a cartoon style instead of a style based in reality, I think that might get lost."
CHRISTIAN BALE::
“I had a lot of reservations about making a movie like this.
Any movie is a leap of faith, especially so when you’re not going to meet the star of it – and the dragon is the star of this movie. I had no idea what on earth it was going to look like or how they were going to present it. All I wanted to know was that what Rob told me was going to happen was going to be exactly how (he describe it), that suddenly in editing there wasn’t going to be CGI where they decided that the dragon was going to kind of like my character, or was suddenly going to have a hat on its head, or big eyelashes. These things can happen, and I wanted to be make sure that it wasn’t that kind of project.”
ROB BOWMAN::
“Basically I just made up the dragons. I had to decide how I wanted it to fly, did I want him to flap a lot or glide? Was it balletic in the air or was he a lumbering T-Rex? I decided I wanted him to be supreme, to look like a perfectly designed predator, and more agile than a jet. And his sound, his breathing, is a king cobra. I find the king cobra is the creepiest animal in the wild.”
IZABELLA SCORUPCO::
“I never thought of it as a dragon. I thought of it like a biological weapon, or an attacking plane and this is a time of war, this is the end of the world.”
CHRISTIAN BALE on having to imagine the dragons::
“It’s as silly as you can imagine it to be really, but every part of the job is. Any movie is incredibly silly. The most earnest character driven movie is still very silly if you look at it with clear eyes. It think it’s always a good idea to have that in mind, and not take yourself too seriously. But it was a new thing having to stare at midair. I got an awful lot of the artists’ renderings of the dragons, so I knew exactly what it was going to look like, and the thing that made it easier was that we didn’t use blue screen at all, it was all done on location. That enabled the performances to still have a momentum to them and a reality, instead of the hygiene of a very cold atmosphere of a studio with a blue screen.”
MATTHEW McCONAUGHEY::
“It’s not that the dragons are evil, they’re more Machiavellian. They’re just doing what they have to do to survive, even if that means getting rid of Mankind along the way.”
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THE CONCEPT:
