Any time you revisit a property that's existed for four decades, you're bound to have massive expectations of what that property could and should be stacked against you. That's why David Lowery, the director of Disney's new Pete's Dragon film, wants you to know he's not trying to tell the same story all over again.
"I really wanted to try to avoid the winks and the nods, not because the original's not great, but because I wanted this to really exist in its own realm," he said during a recent presentation of footage from the movie. "We talked about it, and we thought about having references. ... That always takes me out of the movie."
Lowery set Pete's Dragon in an era-ambiguous (sometime in the '70s and '80s), location-ambiguous (Pacific Northwest but shot in New Zealand) backdrop that will heighten the fairytale he is telling. The four scenes shown to press drip with whimsy, from Robert Redford's Mr. Chameleon telling neighborhood kids about the dragon that lives in the woods to Pete and Elliot's dramatic escape from Karl Urban's villainous Gavin.
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"I really wanted to try to avoid the winks and the nods, not because the original's not great, but because I wanted this to really exist in its own realm," he said during a recent presentation of footage from the movie. "We talked about it, and we thought about having references. ... That always takes me out of the movie."
Lowery set Pete's Dragon in an era-ambiguous (sometime in the '70s and '80s), location-ambiguous (Pacific Northwest but shot in New Zealand) backdrop that will heighten the fairytale he is telling. The four scenes shown to press drip with whimsy, from Robert Redford's Mr. Chameleon telling neighborhood kids about the dragon that lives in the woods to Pete and Elliot's dramatic escape from Karl Urban's villainous Gavin.
Continue reading…
Continue reading...