15 years later How to train your dragon made its debut, the Live adaptation Atterri in Los Angeles on Saturday, as Gerard Butler and director Dean Deblois continued their roles at the head of the franchise.
Butler, who played the Viking Stoick Le vast chief through the three animated films, comes back to the role For the live project, joking when he heard for the first time it happened, “I said to myself:” Are you crazy? It’s going to be terrible. “”
But he had “questions”, and Deblois told him to come “spend a day in Belfast and see what we are building, what we are preparing, what the dragons look like, what the world will look like, and when I saw that I was like” OK, I understand everything “. I mean I have it anyway, I just wanted to play a little hard to get, “he joked The Hollywood Reporter at the first.
And as for playing the same character in essentially the same story, Butler noted: “When I look at myself, there are moments when I go”, it’s very like the way I did it before, “so there are moments when you are just different. What I wanted to do was fresh, I was not doing when I was doing the voice.
The return of the star almost did not occur, revealed Deblois, noting that Butler was initially not available and reserved in consecutive projects in the window that the film planned to shoot. The news that he should launch someone else in the role was “a little painful for me,” said the filmmaker, but the actors’ strike occurred and changed production hours in a way that allowed him to make the film. “When Gerry arrived, I felt a great feeling of confidence and comfort like:” Oh, it will work now “,” said Deblois.
Adaptation is first of all Deblois live movieAfter writing and managing the three anime How to train your dragon projects. He noted that he had “publicly said that I did not like this trend, and it is true – as an animator, I do not like freely the idea that live films present themselves and replace the fierce work years that we have put there, which made it a first studio.
He continued: “For better or for worse, he has this continuity, but I promised (the studio) even if I had not made a live film before, I would do everything I can to deliver the wonder and the emotion of these original stories on the screen.” Deblois added that there were a few key scenes where they went to shoot with the original – in particular the rotation around the Mason Thames hiccup and its beloved dragon, but they could also be “a little more experimental in other parts of the film”.
One of these big changes was to fill the character of Astrid, with Deblois commenting that he had always felt “she was a little wrong in this first animated film”. Nico Parker plays the role, which America Ferrera expressed in animated films – the two actresses did not speak of adaptation, but Parker stressed: “She is so wonderful and I hope she sees and she loves her.”
Recalling his reaction to learning a live action film, Parker said: “I never say to my friends when I audition for things because there is this clumsy thing when you do not understand and you see it on a bus and they think it’s funny to be like,` Oh my God, you auditioned for that ” and it is always a pain affection. Deal I said to myself: “Guess what I have an audition?” Because I knew that even if I did not understand it, I would see it the day of the opening. »»
She added: “The fact that we are here and in fact I am in it is so surreal.”
How to train your dragon arrives in theaters on Friday.