ARTICLE
Liam Neeson & Sam Worthington talks about Wrath Of The Titans
By InCinemas / 11 Jul 2012 (Wednesday)
WRATH OF THE TITANS, the sequel to Clash Of The Titans (2010), is now available in Blu-Rays and DVDs! And its Blu-Ray disc contains lots of special features that'll bring you insights to the production and monsters featured in the movie!
Thanks to our friends at Typhoon Creations, we're able to bring you an interesting Q&A with the lead actors in the mythical blockbuster! Read on and find out what Liam Neeson and Sam Worthington likes in the Wrath Of The Titans.
Q: What appealed to you about this project and drew you back to the same world and these same characters?
LIAM: It was worth coming back to. You're talking about gods, demigods, and I think in the first film we semi-explored who they were, introduced them to an audience. This time around we wanted to make them more human, to see what that family dynamic was between a father and a son. Even though they're gods, they're still fathers and sons; and very dysfunctional, very, very dysfunctional. That was worth exploring.
SAM: I've never done a sequel before, so it's a very weird experience because you have all these things that you might have wanted to explore or take on in the first movie. You sometimes think, “Oh, I dropped the ball,” or something. So, to get a second chance, you're extremely lucky, and to me that was exciting. It was exciting to come in armed up with ideas of where I wanted the character to go, where I wanted the characters to be together, and the journey we could take an audience on if you're given carte blanche to have another crack.
I was very excited about just the possibilities of where we could go, and not being beholden to a first film that was in the '80s, or being beholden to any kind of ideal. We had the freedom this time which was exciting.
Q: The characters have developed and are even richer now. How do you see your characters now in this film?
SAM: They are at least ten years on. Perseus, in the first one he was just an absolute wrecking ball. For me, the first one's a revenge film. Perseus was flying through, nothing could taint him, and nothing could stop him. I was a bit over that myself and I wanted a character that was out of his depth, was like a rusty gunslinger, hadn't picked up the sword or a weapon in a long time, and had a different level of responsibility, which in this case happened to be his son.
Then he has the responsibility of the rest of the family that comes into play. So his values of the world have changed a bit. Out of that, I can create a character that I can have more fun with. I can be a bit gentler and calmer and, as I said, a bit more out of his depth which adds its own different dilemmas to an action scene and an action hero. That's how I kind of just looked at him.
Q: Liam, how do you see Zeus in this movie?
LIAM: A dad trying to forge a relationship with his son before it's too late. The father knows the end of the world is nigh because his dad, that was imprisoned in Tartarus thousands of years ago, is going to resurface. As epic as that is, in essence, it's a dad trying to connect with a son. That appealed to me very, very much. Also with my scenes with Ralph who's playing Hades. He's the god of hell; he's the god of the underworld. Yet I've sent him there, and I want to try and make it up to him in some way.
It's really exciting to just portray those human emotions knowing that the director and all these extraordinary special effects people are creating this amazing tapestry of illusion I've never seen in movies before.
Q: The film also offered you the possibility to travel to England, to Wales, in your case also the Canary Islands. Do you enjoy shooting on location?
SAM: Yeah. It's a perk of the job. You get to travel to these amazing places that I would never travel to or have the opportunity to travel to before. I'm somewhere like Tenerife, it's an amazing volcanic island where there's places that you're not really allowed to go to but they let a film crew go. What do they call it? Moviematic immunity.
LIAM: You do get access to places that the public never gets to see.
SAM: So not only are you seeing the brilliance of these islands, but you're getting to play in them, and encouraged by the actual country itself. There's something about the epic nature of Tenerife, I love going there. Then Wales, the last time we were in a slate mine, now we're in another quarry. Wales is hard yakker. It's a lot like the people, the Welsh themselves. But, when you're in that kind of situation, it grounds us and if we can ground the special effect and ground the movie, it's tactile and rough. Wales is always hard. The rain goes UP, for goodness' sake. I've never seen anything like that in my life.
LIAM: You get horizontal rain too.
SAM: It's just in one spot, and then it just chases you.
Q: Do you enjoy all the travel? There's kind of like a gypsy part of the job.
LIAM: I love being a gypsy and as actors you are. I've lived in hotel rooms all over the world, absolutely love it, I really do like it. Knowing my crew are in the same hotel, or my fellow actors are there. It's just a band of brothers, you know?
Q: How comfortable are you both working with the special effects, with green screen, which is also an important part of the shoot?
LIAM: Huge. I've done it quite a few times over the years. Not least, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. But I've learned a lot from Sam. Sam is very, very particular when he works with a director and the special effects. He wants them on set. He says, “Look, okay, we've got falling rocks here. Well, what type of falling rocks? Is there one I can focus on rather than just general acting,” which you sometimes see in those early special effects films. You can tell the actor's glassy-eyed, he doesn't know what he or she is looking at.
Sam was very, very particular when he got to those. I learned a lot about them and you'll see it in the movie. It's like he's interacting with all this stuff that's happening to him, in a very, very specific way. That sells the story even more.
SAM: The more details I find in the special effects scene, the better. Even if they haven't been thought of or pre-visualized, you can help dictate the course of the special effect by working with the special effect guy in detailing the scene and detailing what's around. I always looked at it as, it's just the minutia that makes the special effect come alive. Things in a beanbag, the more beans you add in the beanbag, the more comfortable the seat.
So with special effects, the more beans you add in, the more the special effect doesn't become a special effect, it just becomes part of the scene and part of the dynamics of the scene. So I will ask everything. Then that makes me more comfortable with creating something out of nothing.
Q: Some humor too. Is that important?
LIAM: Oh, very. We could easily get carried away with all this heavy stuff, dysfunctional families and wars and battles and stuff. You've got to have humor in there and I think the film does, in spadefuls! And not just for the sake of being of funny. There are fantastic actors who have taken their characters and twisted them in some wonderful way.
SAM: That was like when Bill Nighy came. When Bill Nighy came and walked on set, no one knew what that character was going to be.
