Continuing our set report on the hit fantasy/thriller IMMORTALS, begun here… 

“I love that expression,” replies art director Michael Manson sarcastically when Fango refers to IMMORTALS as an example of the “sword and sandals” genre. Manson, whose credits include assisting IMMORTALS director Tarsem Singh on THE CELL as well as designing for Ridley Scott and M. Night Shyamalan, shakes his head at this generalization. “We’re doing our best to try and make it above that.”

Fango is on a tour throughout Manson’s extensive art department offices, where teams of artisans are hard at work putting the finishing touches on a series of prop helmets. The walls surrounding the department desks and worktables are papered with examples of Renaissance artwork, as well as pieces by modern artists such as Norwegian painter Odd Nerdrum. Italian baroque painter Caravaggio dominates, as his use of lighting and dramatic poses chiefly inspired the look of IMMORTALS, as Singh will explain. A number of construction blueprints are Scotch-taped to desks, all detailing humongous multistory sets. This leads Fango to ask Manson how much the production intends to rely on computer animation to illustrate their interpretation of ancient Greece.

“It was something that was debated for a long time: How far do we take this, or how much can we do?” Manson says. “Films today can get away with a very minimal amount of real estate for the actors to stand on. Early on in development, we realized that approach was taking away from the emotional availability that actors always complain about missing when stuck in some greenscreen environment. Also, it was a secret wish of the art department to construct our sets a little bit bigger, because for the audience, it’s going to be much better for them to be able to look at something and know it’s real, at least to an extent. Audiences today are sophisticated enough to know what’s CGI and what’s not.” Producer Mark Canton is on hand to continue, “Normally, on a movie like this, you just see green paper, blue paper, you do it all CG… We’ve had 15 sets built, 15 stages.” The revival of practical craft also extends to IMMORTALS’ inspired costuming, as created by BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA Oscar winner Eiko Ishioka. “Every costume we use on this show is handmade, so it’s not like somebody ran to the store and grabbed something off the rack,” says Canton.

The tour next passes through a prop armory stuffed with swords, spears, tridents, etc. Fango makes a point to ask Manson if the art department included any nasty surprises in the film that our readers might appreciate. “We have a scene where the oracles are captured and punished, and eventually put to their deaths by a very ancient Greek device called the Brazen Bull,” he replies. “It was a device made out of metal and shaped like a bull for iconic reasons, and allowed you to put a person or persons inside and light a fire underneath. The fire eventually got the metal quite hot, and if left inside, you would be scalded to death. Depending on how long the fire is allowed to run, you either get the information you want…or you don’t. That was an actual Greek reference that we pulled in and found instrumental to the story.” Manson adds that the design team made sure to reproduce another historical detail of the Brazen Bull. To amuse spectators, the Bulls’ heads were typically outfitted with a series of vuvuzela-like horns, so that the agonized howls of roasting prisoners would be converted into something like the actual bleating of a bull.

Since Fango’s set visit is taking place in late June 2010, both the financial success and negative audience feedback regarding the recent CLASH OF THE TITANS remake loom large over IMMORTALS, since the two movies share a similar basis. “I haven’t seen it,” says Manson, quickly glancing sideways after CLASH is brought up. When pressed, star Henry Cavill (soon to be seen as Superman in MAN OF STEEL) owns up to having paid for a ticket, but is diplomatic in his verdict. “We’re two very different movies. I mainly watched it for entertainment value,” he defers.

Producers Canton and Gianni Nunnari are a little more candid in their opinions. “I have to say that CLASH wasn’t a great movie,” Nunnari says. “But it grossed half a billion dollars, and they’re already pushing for a sequel. So our point of view is that if that movie did so well, and we have here the real clash of the Titans [which feature prominently in IMMORTALS’ storyline], I think the audience is going to want to go see what real fighters and real Titans are about.” Canton adds, “We’re learning from their mistakes, and we’re not rushing. We’re shooting most scenes in 3D, we have a stereographer here on the set and the scenes we can’t shoot in 3D, we have much more time to conform them. When CLASH came out, they rushed to make that release date and decided on the 3D later on. I think that’s where CLASH got caught up; they had problems with the story and tried to mask them with technology. We were already making our movie when CLASH arrived, so we are very conscious about ensuring the heroic BRAVEHEART-like nature of our storytelling remains at the forefront.”

From the outset, the producers wanted to emphasize character and relatable situations, so IMMORTALS foregoes outlandish 80-foot-tall beasts. Visual FX supervisor Raymond Gieringer states that the movie will feature zero CG creatures, other than makeup enhancement or the occasional bird flying in the background of a shot. That’s not to say that the bizarre has no place at all in IMMORTALS; Manson assures those of us who might take our seventh-grade mythology a smidgen too seriously (here your Fango scribe pleads guilty) that yes, Theseus faces off against a Minotaur at one point. Fango is shown production art of a typical human-bull interpretation, only looking as if it had been recruited by HELLRAISER’s Cenobites. The Minotaur’s horned head is entwined with a cowl made of barbed wire, and its body is adorned with strange onyx armor plating. And don’t expect the Minotaur confrontation to be a tame, bloodless affair—Canton points out that the production is shooting with an R rating in mind.

In this sense, they are rejecting CLASH’s PG-13 model and using the explicit 300, which Canton and Nunnari also produced, for IMMORTALS’ compass. Reminded of the 300 prequel that is scheduled to commence filming sometime soon, Fango asks the producers if they have a continuing story in mind if IMMORTALS proves to be a hit. Nunnari confirms that this is already under discussion. “For Mark, everything is a franchise,” Nuranni says. He pauses, then adds, “But for some strange reason, the movies we’ve made together, the heroes all die in the end. I’ve been trying to come up with a sequel to SE7EN for the past 20 years!”

Producers hyping their product is to be expected, but real proof of Singh’s spectacular vision is presented to Fango in a slideshow of production stills, and the images are just as sumptuous as promised. Legions of soldiers wading into one another’s ranks slicing and stabbing, gory impalings, corpses strung from fortress parapets like Christmas-tree ornaments, mysterious robed figures lurking in puddles of shadow—everything is staged in riotous color and with a painterly composition. The feel and texture of Caravaggio has certainly been achieved, as Fango is treated to a series of chiaroscuro nightmares that don’t shy away from the painter’s own fondness for blood spray and decapitations. After the show, Canton swears that the actual footage will make these stills look like “bar mitzvah pictures.”

He goes on to praise the process of collaborating with Singh. “I’m not shy about it: I think Tarsem is the most gifted visual filmmaker in the world, and I know I’m not alone there. I’ve worked with all the masters and I’ve never seen someone so crystal-clear about what every shot, frame and lens should be in a movie. He’s a unique mind, a passionate guy. Together, we have set out over the last two years to raise the bar higher and make an original piece—not from a graphic novel, not from a game, not from any source material. We wanted to create something for a time when we think audiences are demanding originality and great filmmaking.”

Back on set, the war rages on. Severed limbs litter the stony floor. A production assistant yells for more blood, and the makeup supervisors oblige by drenching stunt blades in sticky red syrup. Another break, and Fango asks Singh about working with the suddenly redeemed Mickey Rourke. The actor plays the villainous King Hyperion, whose facial disfigurement and the self-mutilating cult that gathers around him form a large part of IMMORTALS’ overall plot.

“My thing was, if there’s anybody in Hollywood who’s really f**ked up in the face, we’d start from there… [feigns a dawning realization] ‘My God, Mickey Rourke!’ ” Singh jokes. “[The producers] said, ‘You can’t have Mickey Rourke,’ so we looked around for other actors. Suddenly Mickey became the thing to do because THE WRESTLER came out, but I had wanted him all along. Then the problem started, because somebody with that much momentum comes with baggage, which is good baggage for the character. And Mickey was f**king brilliant. He’s a pain in the ass, but he was a good pain in the ass. He took every hammy scene and turned it into something great.”

Finally, as the day winds to an end, Fango brings up a quote Singh made when filming began some months ago, that he was aiming for something resembling “Caravaggio meets FIGHT CLUB.” The director nods and says, “I was looking around and thinking, what’s everybody already done? Zack [Snyder], who was a classmate of mine, had just made 300. The comic-strip thing, everyone’s done it. What I thought nobody had approached was, let’s see a ‘painting-strip’ film. I looked at Caravaggio and thought, ‘That’s the simplest one of the lot, the lighting and all that; let’s see if we can tell a story that way.’

“Now, if this film is successful, I don’t see too many people making, like, Man Ray meets something-or-other,” he laughs. “At the same time, I wanted this to be close to Baz Luhrmann’s ROMEO + JULIET, to be a contemporary-slash-period piece. Everything’s going to be hodgepodge. I started with that in mind, and slowly I would begin to hear shuffling every time I mentioned that there would be electricity [in Theseus’ village] and other things like that. Now, I would have fought for it, but by the time [IMMORTALS] had evolved, it really wasn’t necessary. When we began, I said this thing didn’t have to be period-perfect, because it’s not. On the second day of shooting, one of the producers called me over and asked if the nails above Theseus’ bed were period, and I said, ‘For a month, you can’t talk to me. We were just filming something with a concrete dam half a mile long, so if you’re asking me if a nail is period, you obviously don’t know what you’re talking about.’ But am I interested in a strict period piece? Hell, no. Am I interested in Greek tales? Not really. I’m just interested in mixing things up and seeing what comes out.

“So it started off Caravaggio meets FIGHT CLUB, then it became less FIGHT CLUB, a little bit of OLDBOY came in and we evolved. For that, I’m truly grateful. If this really were for some interfering studio, and they asked questions earlier like, ‘How do you mean to do this and how are you going to do that?’ it wouldn’t have evolved. I just put my team together, and once money is being spent people will come in and do it, and they really have. It has changed as it’s gone along, and I believe in that process big-time. I think it was Alain Resnais who said that the film you think of, the film you shoot and the film you end up with are three different things. It started as Caravaggio meets FIGHT CLUB, but now I don’t know what it is…” He thinks it over for a second and comes to a conclusion: “It’s a good film!”

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