Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. One of the benefits of most of these advance screenings Harry sets up for Austin is that I can usually snag the people brought in for one on one interviews. In the case of THE INCREDIBLE HULK I got a pair of one on two interviews. First up are producers Gale Anne Hurd (yeah, of ALIENS, THE TERMINATOR, THE ABYSS and TREMORS fame) and Marvel Studios’ own Kevin Feige. Keep in mind this was last week, before all the Favreau stuff hit… and everything I understand about that situation has Feige out of it, which is good because the impression I get from him is he’s a true geek and understands the power of the properties he’s working with. We talk a lot about Ang Lee’s Hulk, what Ed Norton brings to the role, the TV series and we touch upon the upcoming Marvel Slate towards the end. Enjoy!
Quint: I was out of town, but my understanding is you should have been at the IRON MAN show at the Alamo.
Kevin Feige: I know, I couldn’t go. Was it at the same theater that we are going to see it at tonight?
Quint: [To Kraken] Was IRON MAN at South Lamar?
Kraken: [Points to his wife] She went.
Gale Anne Hurd: How was it? Fun?
Andromeda: It was fantastic. The audience here is the best.
Gale Anne Hurd: That is why we are so excited to be here.
Quint: And just on the Ain’t It Cool side, we have been getting lots of reviews from screenings now…
Gale Anne Hurd: Really? I only saw one.
Quint: There have been a couple that have come in in the last few days. I don’t know if they have been posted yet, but they are saying “this is what a comic book movie should be.”
Gale Anne Hurd: See, we weren’t lying. We didn’t need that truth serum.
Quint: Not yet!
Gale Anne Hurd: We weren’t lying way back when, when we said “This is it and it should make the fans happy.”
Quint: I know there was a lot of head scratching when this was announced, people going “We just had the HULK…” Since you have this huge catalog of Marvel characters, there was a feeling of “Why reboot this franchise?” I guess Hulk is still is a giant staple of the company…
Kevin Feige: Well that’s why. The real question is… IRON MAN came out a month ago and people are going “Where’s the next IRON MAN?” The real question is the movie that the majority of people didn’t seem to… weren’t clamoring for another experience similar to that one, let’s put it that way, from the Ang Lee HULK… Five years is as long as it’s ever been between movies, for us, so it was actually quite a while. Clearly the reason we took that kind of time was because we wanted to clear the slate and do it again.
Quint: What are your thoughts on the last one? I know you (Gale) produced it. What are your thoughts on the final version of it? I actually really like THE HULK. It’s a bizarre movie, but I think that’s what I like about it.
Gale Anne Hurd: Also, it was an origin story. Ang Lee had a story that he very much wanted to tell that fit in line with the origin story in the comic, in terms of the psychological backstory and well, we didn’t have to do that this time.
Kevin Feige: I think the intention behind Ang Lee’s movie was noble and I don’t think there will ever be another movie like that and to that extent I think it was cool to have been a part of that. I’ll tell you what I didn’t enjoy, I didn’t enjoy the majority of the audience’s reaction to it and for every person that you find that says “No, I kind of liked it” I sat in theater after theater after theater of people who had waited to see the movie and it just didn’t do it for them.
Quint: I think honestly, everything would have been fine if it was not for the kind of more internal battle at the end instead of the external. I think people were wanting more visceral thrills, but at the same time because Nick Nolte is so batshit insane in the movie, the presence he has on screen… I can’t help but really dig that…
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Kevin Feige: You know the more we’ve talked about it over the last couple of years of making this one, the more I like to look back at Ang Lee’s HULK as a one shot. If you go back through the comics and go through the bins and you will find one shots, and I can’t think of any examples exactly, but from a writing team or an artist who hadn’t played with the character before, sort of their interpretation of…
Quint: Like the Origins Line. I think that is kind of unique in the comic books, that you are able to do that and that’s why I think BATMAN BEGINS allowed people to easily forget the Schumacher and even Burton versions of it and restart.
Gale Anne Hurd: There’s a tradition in the comic books. It’s not like “oh the movie this time is different.” Comic books start over again with new interpretations and you’ve got Grey Hulk and the intellectual almost Hulk… There are already so many different takes on the Incredible Hulk.
Quint: So, when you decided you wanted to reboot this one, was it more for the image of getting a new Hulk film or did Norton come up immediately? What was the driving force?
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Kevin Feige: We wanted to do another one. We wanted to do another Hulk film. When we got the rights back, we gathered our financing which allowed us to make the current slate of Marvel Studios films, it kind of never was that difficult of a discussion that Hulk would be one of the first two that we attacked, because it’s the Hulk and it’s so big. Certainly in terms of the other areas, Hulk has been selling very well for years and it had picked up since the 2003 film.
Quint: And you guys just had the World War Hulk, which was really big.
Kevin Feige: And the comics and the toys and the videogames… Really Hulk was very popular, so we absolutely wanted to do it again and we wanted to explore as I have been saying to people “the other 99% of the Hulk mythology” that had not been explored in the first film. Gale used the term a lot on the first film and it didn’t necessarily come across in the film, but “wish fulfillment” which something we definitely want to get into this one.
Gale Anne Hurd: And also to give a nod to the TV series as well.
Quint: Yeah, I think that’s in a lot of the reviews that we have been getting, people are saying that the first act is almost an episode of the show and how people are really digging on that. At the IRON MAN premiere, I was talking to Peter David, I’m a big fan of what he is doing right now with THE DARK TOWER series, and so we were talking and he got on to talking about the Hulk and he was like “I don’t understand it. When the Hulk came out everybody was saying ‘Why isn’t it more like the fucking TV show or more like the fucking comic books’ and then this one comes up and people are saying ‘Why isn’t it more like fucking Ang Lee’s Hulk?”
[Everyone Laughs]
Quint: You get people that have that nostalgia, either for now the first movie, or the TV series or whatever.
Kevin Feige: The TV show… That’s exactly what the first act is and by the ending, hopefully, is one of the best comic book battles you have ever seen, so very much we wanted to blend the two of them, which we hadn’t done on the first one. The first one… I don’t know… it felt like we weren’t even allowed to talk about the TV show and I don’t know why that was, but it just wasn’t a part of the discussions.
Quint: Well the TV show, I guess because of the restrictions of television and the restrictions of budget, it really did force it to be more character driven and more emotional.
Kevin Feige: Absolutely.
Gale Anne Hurd: You had “lonely man on the run,” which is very much the case in this film, but at the same time you didn’t have Betty, you didn’t have General Ross in pursuit, so that’s why this is very much a synthesis.
Quint: So when you were looking for your Banner, the pivotal role and I know when Bana was announced with the last one, everyone was like “He’s a great actor, but he’s not Bruce Banner. He might be more of the Hulk…” but people were like “Steve Buscemi would have been the perfect Bruce Banner” as the skinny awkward guy and now you go with Norton, who is not rail thin and awkward… He’s skinny, but he is definitely much more of a smaller person.
Gale Anne Hurd: You look at his past work and you think Bruce Banner, especially once he’s about to Hulk out, is a character that embodies this duality, so he’s a scientist and an intellectual, yet inside of him he has the Hulk. I don’t think you could find another actor today that captures that better than Edward Norton.
Quint: Yeah, PRIMAL FEAR and…
Gale Anne Hurd: FIGHT CLUB…
Quint: And he’s also a fantastic actor and I think it turned a lot of heads when you guys cast him, because he doesn’t really go for the huge paychecks and I’m sure he got paid a lot of money, but he doesn’t go taking movies for money. He seems to be very artistically driven.
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Kevin Feige: We wanted to try and we will never really be able to, but we wanted to try to fill Bill Bixby’s shoes. That was the model that we were looking at. You always felt for him, the lonely road at the end of each episode for that plight that he was in and that was something that Edward absolutely could do and did for us. Also, you see someone like Bill Bixby taking the odd jobs and working as a janitor or whatever he did from episode to episode and you knew that he didn’t fit in there, because he wasn’t supposed to. He was supposed to be in a laboratory working. That’s the same thing with Edward as you will see, he’s got this odd job at a bottling factory finishing bottles up and it’s just not right. You know that man is not supposed to be doing that and therefore instantly you feel for him that he has been put into this situation.
Quint: Can we get a little update on the Marvel slate? I know that you just recently talked to IESB and discussed CAPTAIN AMERICA.
Kevin Feige: Yeah, that was when we brought them in to show them some clips, around the time Moriarty came by and saw some of the stuff.
Quint: I really love the fact that you are committing Captain America to appear in a period film.
Kevin Feige: I sort of let the cat out of the bag on that one by accident.
Quint: Yeah, a little bit, but I think if you were going to, that’s the best thing you could say, because one, it automatically gives the film a different identity than all of the other super hero movies and it’s just perfect for the character and you get to play with Nazis and you get to have that kind of villain.
Kevin Feige: I don’t want to talk too much about it, because it’s so far off and we are just putting everything together over the summer, but you look at the four films that we had announced and they are four very different movies and that’s why I’m excited about them. None of them can be pigeonholed into any particular category, but you’ve got the sequel to IRON MAN, which we all what that is now, you’ve got a fantasy epic with THOR, you’ve got a period adventure with Cap… then you’ve got the biggest crossover that has ever been and I don’t even know what to call it, but I like how different they all are. That’s one of the reasons we are going in that way and CAP is not going to be an authentic… no one is going to mistake it for a WWII movie, let’s put it that way, but it very much will be as close to that as we have ever done which is really cool.
Quint: You mentioned crossovers though, but there’s one thing that I am probably the most excited about with you guys having the Studios and having Stark in this movie and just having it all intersect, do you think that there is going to be a time when you will have the franchises you have already given to other studios be folded back in? Like with SPIDER-MAN or X-MEN or…
Kevin Feige: I think that’s probably a long way off, but that’d be great some day, but who knows? The ways that these deals are set up is that as long as those studios want to continue to make movies, they can with those characters.
Quint: Do you think there’s any possibility of going to them and getting an exception or something?
Kevin Feige: Anything is possible. You never know and really we are looking at the next three or four years for all of the ones that we control right now and putting them together and bringing them to the screen, but someday… who knows? It’d be great. It’s all about them coming home, which I like a lot, being under one roof now.
Quint: And having one continuous universe… I can’t believe there are two FANTASTIC FOUR movies without Spider-Man in it since they are so intertwined… Well, I think that’s about it.
Kevin Feige: We will see you over there, right?
Quint: Definitely and I can’t wait for you guys to experience the Alamo. It was good to meet you.
When I was conducting the interview I was a little thrown by his comments about not mistaking Captain America’s movie with a WW2 film… Does that mean it’s not set during WW2? I sure hope that’s not the case. It has to be WW2. Then going through it now before posting, I think what he means is that it’s not going to be a SAVING PRIVATE RYAN gritty and grim WW2 movie, that there will be a fantastic element to it, a comic book element to it, obviously. I hope you guys enjoyed the chat. Also look out for my chat with director Louis Leterrier and Tim Roth! -Quint quint@aintitcool.com
