Ladies and gentleman... The Spielberg has landed. Yes, the man who is responsible for so many of the movies that people at Comic-Con cherish, re-watch and quote has never personally appeared here at the event. But today, all that changed when he arrived at Hall H to pimp The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn. Can we sum it up in a word? No. A sound? Woooo!
There was an awful lot of that as Spielberg took the stage to a roaring standing ovation and fever pitch excitement. Clad in his trademark baseball cap and shirt, he was his typically humble in appreciating the waves of geeky love coming his way. Standing to address the crowd, he began well… “I wouldn’t be here without you, the audiences that support the movies and staying kids the rest of your life.” He’s not growing up and doesn’t intend to!
According to the man himself, he should be sitting in the audience with the crowd.
Quizzed by moderator Geoff Boucher, Spielberg began by relating his first experience with Tintin. "Tintin has been embraced all over Europe and Asia. I didn't know anything about him until I read a French review of Raiders in 1981, and it kept comparing my film to Tintin, so I got a book in French. I didn't need to read the words to read the story. I could see the point, too. It felt like a cousin to Raiders. In the world of Herge, Tintin was a reporter, and he kept doing what you're not supposed to do, putting himself into the stories he was reporting, and he would become the story. And for us, with Raiders, Indy was an archaeologist, and he would go after an antiquity, usually a supernatural antiquity of some kind, and he would get caught up in the legend and become the story, so there is a commonality."
Asked about casting the film, he mentioned how he enjoyed the freedom of casting a motion capture performance. “When I was you start the way of a normal movie with the best actor. Don’t identify Daniel Craig, but you’ll see every nuance of his performance.”
But he also had to make sure he made the right choice when it came to the best way to make the movie. “I had to make the decision to shoot it live action with a digital dog or animated. I asked the animators to show me what a digital dog looks like against a human character.” With that, he asked the audience whether we wanted to see that test.
Cue a short video that was decidedly not the test, but Peter Jackson auditioning for the role of Captain Haddock. Auditioning very badly… Oh, and a CG Snowy who proceeded to get drunk and fall off the dock they were both standing on, leading to Peter to jump in the water after him.
As the lights came up, the crowd roared again as Jackson strode on to the stage. “Working with Steven has been amazing. He shows real promise. He could go places if he keeps with this filmmaking thing.”
Asked about his own history with the property, Jackson talked up his story. “Steven got rights to Tintin in 1983, when I was making Bad Taste. I was reading stories about Steven and him making Tintin. I was a huge Tintin fan and was looking forward to Steven’s Tintin movie… For a quarter of a century. You can’t imagine what it was like when he invited me aboard. I thought for, oh, two seconds.”
On his wishes to be faithful to the original stories and their designs, Spielberg was adamant. "We wanted the movie to look like the drawings in all the Herge adventures, and we didn't want people to complain about us getting the characters wrong. You're all here because you love art. We love art so much we wanted to use the animation to bring his characters to life. We didn't want them to look like big movie stars."
That was Jackson’s drive too: "We wanted characters in a 3D world, but we also wanted to make it a hybrid of live-action and animation, and even though they have faces you'd never find in a human being, we wanted pores and sweat and stubble… a level of detail that almost feels like live-action. Neither Steven or I are very good on computers. I can barely send an e-mail. We wanted to create a version of animation and motion-capture that allowed Steven to step inside the virtual world with the characters and the locations and the sets that were built over a two-year period before we shot the movie. This is a hybrid where Steven had a virtual camera where he could step in and film it like a live-action film. The thing that I'm excited about when I watch this come together is that this is a film that Steven shot himself. It's almost like his early 8MM films in that way."
Later on the panel, Spielberg emphasised that element and told us all we hadn’t seen anything yet. “I filmed it like a live-action film. There's a lot of handheld and Steadicam. It's just using new tools to tell my stories the way I know how to tell them. It's the way I'm comfortable with. I wanted to be in The Volume with the actors. The movie is a dense detective story. It's a murder-mystery. It's very funny when it needs to be. You just saw the tip of the iceberg. The earliest iteration of the storytelling. It's gone way beyond this in terms of storytelling and spectacle. You'll see that soon."