Producer Peter Jackson has admitted he has to reign himself in during post-production on director Steven Spielberg's Tintin, so he doesn't get carried away doing ever more ambitious shots.

"You can go back to get angles you didn't think of on the day," Jackson told Superhero Hype while discussing the freedom allowed by a totally CGI shoot. However, he described that option as both "a good thing and a bad thing".

"You try to treat it as a real movie, to keep from going crazy with difficult shots, but sometimes you can't help yourself," he added. "You have to know when to stop."

He was also happy to chat about the financial pros and cons of a shoot that takes place on a motion capture sound stage.

"On a live-action set you have hundreds of people working and if it clouds over or rains, which it does from time to time in New Zealand, they're just sitting there waiting for it to stop and it's costing hundreds of thousands of dollars," Jackson said. In comparison, Spielberg shot Tintin in just 32 days using a crew of around 50 people.

"But it's not cheaper than live action. Not at all," Jackson shared, citing the extensive time needed for both pre- and post-production.

The Adventures Of Tintin is released in UK cinemas on 26 October 2011. Source: www.totalfilm.com

Tintin movie scribe talks [1st March 2011 00:11:19]

Tintin, the bequiffed young dog-loving explorer, will be hitting cinema screens later this year in his first CGI movie, The Adventures Of Tintin: The Secret Of The Unicorn.

With tantalising images all circling the net with increasing rapidity, Total Film sat down with co-writer Joe Cornish to discuss his involvement in the project.

"My involvement compared to the number of amazing, enormous brains involved in that production is fractional," he tells us.
"Edgar Wright and I did a few passes on the script, and then I did a few passes on my own, but it really is a huge collaboration."

On the film's tone, the writer calms fears that the term 'CGI update' equals 'Yogi Bear-like mess', stating: "It's not tongue in cheek, it's a proper adventure, it's like the Herg� books were proper adventures.

"Tintin will honour and stay very close to the spirit of the books, everyone involved is an enormous and very reverent Herg� fanatic. The intention is to honour the books, not modernise."

With the first Tintin film being steered by master filmmaker Steven Spielberg, Cornish of course had to meet the big man himself; something that the writer admits was "daunting".

"Edgar and I sat round a table with Mr Spielberg and Mr [Peter] Jackson a little while ago," he says. "The first thing you say to them is certainly quite scary. But it gets easy very quickly because they're very down to Earth.

"At the end of the day it's about the work, so you just focus on the work. Though every now and then you have a little flash of the history of the people you're working with and it can make your mind go blank with astonishment."

The Adventures Of Tintin: The Secret Of The Unicorn opens 26 October. Source: www.totalfilm.com