Gservo
30th June 2002, 04:16 AM
Rob Bowman, director of the upcoming SF movie Reign of Fire, told SCI FI Wire that it was a challenge coming up with a dragon that audiences would respond to instinctively, while avoiding the clichés of previous movies. "The last good dragon movie was Dragonslayer," Bowman said in an interview while promoting the post-apocalyptic movie. He added, "If you invent a creature—even though I didn't invent dragons—if you put in your movie a creature, and it's so absurd that there's no built-in or innate reaction to its attitude or behaviors, the audience has too far to go to worry about it. [But] if it sounds like a cobra, and the scales are kind of like an alligator, and the crawl is kind of like a leopard, the audience has innate reactions to those things. Because ... they've either been to the zoo, they've been to Africa or they've seen National Geographic. And they know that that looks sort of organic."
In the film, a small band of humans battles the winged fire-breathing creatures that have ravaged a future Earth. Bowman said that he wanted the creature's size to reflect its movements and abilities. "I made the dragons as small as I possibly could, so that it could still be intimidating. I did not ever want to make Godzilla, because they made it, good or bad. ... Big just seemed old-fashioned to me. But at some point, they start to become too small. And what I found was that, based on the way I wanted them to fly, which was gliding, that they had to have huge wingspans. Three hundred feet for the big one at the end, which I thought was huge. Well, if I make them any smaller, they'll fall out of the sky. You got to flap a lot, like an albatross. Or like in Dragonheart, it's a big, giant torso and small wings, so he's got to flap all the time, almost like a hummingbird. So I went with more of a serpent torso or fuselage or whatever you want to call it, with a very supple spine, so he could fly very agilely."
Bowman added, "Coloration, we went through every imaginable blend of colors, and came up with black. Black's the only one that left an impression on you. And I was trying not to go with black, but every other variation I saw just didn't have any impact. They have yellow stripes down their bellies, but that's mostly because cobras do. Or the lighter belly, like an alligator has. And you know what, one drop of purple, and he becomes Barney. Not a lot of purple. Just a little bit." Reign of Fire opens July 12.
In the film, a small band of humans battles the winged fire-breathing creatures that have ravaged a future Earth. Bowman said that he wanted the creature's size to reflect its movements and abilities. "I made the dragons as small as I possibly could, so that it could still be intimidating. I did not ever want to make Godzilla, because they made it, good or bad. ... Big just seemed old-fashioned to me. But at some point, they start to become too small. And what I found was that, based on the way I wanted them to fly, which was gliding, that they had to have huge wingspans. Three hundred feet for the big one at the end, which I thought was huge. Well, if I make them any smaller, they'll fall out of the sky. You got to flap a lot, like an albatross. Or like in Dragonheart, it's a big, giant torso and small wings, so he's got to flap all the time, almost like a hummingbird. So I went with more of a serpent torso or fuselage or whatever you want to call it, with a very supple spine, so he could fly very agilely."
Bowman added, "Coloration, we went through every imaginable blend of colors, and came up with black. Black's the only one that left an impression on you. And I was trying not to go with black, but every other variation I saw just didn't have any impact. They have yellow stripes down their bellies, but that's mostly because cobras do. Or the lighter belly, like an alligator has. And you know what, one drop of purple, and he becomes Barney. Not a lot of purple. Just a little bit." Reign of Fire opens July 12.