Are you ready for an adventure? Starring Dwayne Johnson, Michael Caine, Josh Hutcherson, Luis Guzmán, Vanessa Hudgens and Kristin Davis, JOURNEY 2: THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND promises adventure on the grandest scale when it hits theatres in 3D this Friday. We caught up with director (and fellow Canadian!) Brad Peyton during his recent visit to Toronto, and he had this to say about:
The balance between funny and scary moments in JOURNEY 2:
A movie like this is a rollercoaster ride. It’s fun. It’s an adventure film…. When you look at adventure films, [the balance is] probably the most interesting aspect of them…. Real life tension creates comedy.
Rebooting the franchise:
I looked at the movie as an opportunity to not just do a sequel, but kind of “reboot” a franchise. So, you go back and you look at JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH, and you go, “Okay, what did it do well?” It was great in 3D. It was fun. It had a great tone, but I want to do a movie that would inspire me the same way I was inspired when I saw INDIANA JONES, and might inspire people now. So that’s like, “Get off the sound stage, go to Hawaii so you can shoot in Hawaii as long as possible… put the actors in the dirt, make it as real as possible. Give the island a character, and also just give the scope and scale that you can’t get on a sound stage.”
JOURNEY 2 as a classic adventure movie:
As I was making the movie, I kept saying to myself, “They don’t really make these movies anymore!” For me, since the ‘80s, they don’t make these kinds of fun adventure films as much. PIRATES is probably the closest thing, [but it’s] four times as large as our movie…. So, I was like, I’m pretty ambitious. Let’s see if we can do a movie like this that harkens back to a classic adventure film.
Working with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson:
You meet him, and you realize right away that he’s Superman…. Dwayne is incredibly passionate, incredibly driven. When he does something, he commits to doing it one hundred percent. So when Dwayne came on the movie, he sat down and said, “Brad, I want you to picture this 3D idea.” And then he describes the pep talk about love [scene with Josh Hutcherson]. He’s just sitting there waiting to see how I react and I’m like, “Oh my god, that’s amazing! That’s like the take-away scene of the movie for a lot of people; you just never see that!” And the ukulele scene… is the same thing: Dwayne saying, “I love playing guitar. I love ukulele. I wonder if we could do that.” I was looking for a scene where you could bond the characters, so I thought that was great.
Working with the rest of the cast:
For me, working with a cast like this ultimately comes down to collaboration because they’ve done it so many times. The only way I can figure out how to excel as a director is to work with the people who’ve done it more, are much better and have more experience. I made rules early on, for example, with Luis [Guzmán, who plays Gabato]. The first conversation I had with him, I explained we would do one for fun, as in, six takes with him, and just one for fun.
Making the movie as realistic as possible:
Even with [the bee chase] sequence, trying to make a movie that has a reality to it when there’s nothing real on the screen is a tough challenge. We’ve all seen movies where you just don’t buy it…. So, I had them design the box in a way that, in order to turn the bee, they had to turn it. So, Dwayne and Luis were weighed, and then an equal amount of weight but a little under was hung from below the buck. So, when Dwayne pushes, it swings the weight…. If he needs to go left, he really has to go left…. It was about finding a way to even make the most unreal situations and unreal elements in the movie feel real.
Thank you Brad Peyton! Catch JOURNEY 2: THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND in theatres this Friday, February 10.
(Images courtesy of Warner Bros.)