ACTION TIME FOR
LARA CROFT IN TR SEQUEL
Copyright 2003 www.tombraiderchronicles.com
[ July 22nd 2003 ]
Of all
the challenges Angelina Jolie faced making the
new Lara Croft action movie, the toughest was
one she couldn't see. In Lara Croft Tomb Raider:
The Cradle of Life, opening Friday, the video-game
archeologist with the killer body battles ruthless
villains to find the mythological Pandora's box.
If opened, it could destroy the world.
The movie
is filled with special effects and computer-assisted
moments, but in director Jan de Bont's favorite
scene, Jolie's Croft starts a simple shoot-'em-up
in an underground laboratory lined with glass
walls. The result is relatively old-fashioned,
low-tech and glass-shattering. "It's like a game
of hide-and-seek, with reflecting surfaces and
mirrors everywhere," de Bont says. "They can see
the enemy, but they can't get at them."
Filmed
on the sound stage at Pinewood Studios in England
where many James Bond movies have been shot, the
segment crackles as gunfire smashes the partitions
around Jolie and co-star Gerard Butler. For less
than 10 minutes of screen time, de Bont (Speed,
Twister) spent two weeks choreographing and filming.
To create the scene safely without sacrificing
excitement, de Bont and stunt coordinators increased
the number of explosives embedded in numerous
9-foot-high by 6-foot-wide walls - but used safety
glass to protect Jolie from the shards.
That
created different problems. "It's actually very
hard to break safety glass, since it's not made
to be broken," de Bont says. "It took much more
power to destroy them, so we had to set several
electrical charges in each corner of a panel.
It needed to shatter [all at once], otherwise
it would create large broken pieces that could
be dangerous."
The multiple
blasts created the thousands of tiny shards the
director wanted. The explosives were in the form
of thin, hard-to-see metal rods, which were wired
to the actors' prop handguns. When the guns fired,
a flash came from the muzzle and the panes blew
apart.
Jollie,
who did many of her own stunts, was eager to get
down and dirty when the scene called for Lara
to roll across the glass-covered floor. "Angelina
did get some cuts, unfortunately," says de Bont.
"I didn't want her to [lie down] on the glass,
so when she's rolling on the pieces, it's really
on tiny pieces of prop rubber. "She's tough,"
he says, "but rolling on real glass would have
been too masochistic."
Some
problems were less edgy. "All the windows were
reflective, which makes it tough to move the camera
around because you catch your own image," de Bont
says. "It's also very hard to actually show glass,
since it's basically transparent or photographs
as green or blue. So you have to light it from
specific angles." De Bont added the idea of invisible
walls (similar to the funhouse-mirror scene in
Orson Welles' 1948 film noir The Lady From Shanghai)
to what was a generic action scene in the script.
"A little twist can make a hell of a difference,"
he says. "We wanted to expand on the idea of tombs,"
says "Cradle of Life" producer Lloyd Levin. "We
have plenty of ancient places in the movie, so
we conceived of this giant laboratory as a sort
of high-tech, 21st-century tomb buried in the
basement of a shopping mall."
However,
for the director, it brought back painful memories.
"I walked right through a glass door as a kid,
and I can still remember today how painful it
was," says de Bont. "I had a big scar on my head.
That really hurt!"
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