SIMON WEST TALKS
TOMB RAIDER
Copyright 2001 www.tombraiderchronicles.com Source:
www.boxoffice.com
[ May 16th 2001 ]
Simon
West, the man charged by Paramount Pictures to
helm it's £100m action adventure movie Tomb Raider
from the computer game of the same name, talks
about directing one of this summers most anticipated
motion pictures:
Simon
West was skeptical when first approached to direct
the big-screen adaptation of the popular video
game "Tomb Raider," starring Angelina Jolie as
butt-kicking, pistol-packing, yet well-mannered
Lara Croft. Having most recently helmed blockbuster
"The General's Daughter" for Paramount, the studio
was keen on attaching him to its latest acquisition.
But, he says, "like most people, I was a real
snob about films made out of video games. I thought,
'That's a ridiculous idea,' and I hadn't seen
any good ones in the past, so I supposed I was
as prejudiced as anybody against it." It didn't
help that the scripts in circulation for the project
perpetuated the posh cliches about his home country
of Great Britain. "[They were] all about red buses
and tea with the Queen and bobbies with funny
police hats on," West says. "[That England] doesn't
exist, really, and I wanted to show that you could
have an English character that was very cool and
hip and exciting.
"So no
one in the film drinks tea," he continues. "Everyone
drinks coffee because the English all drink Starbucks
as much as the Americans now." West finally agreed
to take on the project if he could start the story
over from scratch. "I basically said, 'I'll do
it if you let me change everything in the script
except her name and the title of the film,'" he
says. That he wasn't much of a gamer didn't deter
West from bringing to life one of the most beloved
characters in geek culture. "Funny enough, the
only [video] game I had played was 'Tomb Raider,'"
he says, "because so many people were addicted
to it that you go over to a friend's house and
they say, 'You've got to play this game.' It was
one of the few ones I actually had had a go on.
"And of course I knew the Lara Croft character
because even if you've never played the game,
she seems to be omnipresent," he continues. "Newsweek
or one of those magazines did a survey on the
most recognized women in the world -- or even
if it was just people in the world -- and she
was in the top 10 with Madonna, Mother Teresa
and the Pope, and she's not even a real person.
I couldn't escape knowing who Lara Croft was."
Even
so, while Lara Croft is a universally recognized
figure (pun intended), in reality, not much is
actually known about her. "I figured that when
you bring a character to life like that, everyone
wants to know everything about her because they've
frustratedly been staring at her back or whatever
it is they stare at when she's running around
in these tombs," West says. "They want to know
what the inside of her house looks like and what
her bedroom looks like and what her bathroom looks
like and what car she has in the garage and what
she does for fun when she's not tombraiding, how
does she relax, who works with her, what are her
friends like. Inventing all those things is fun."
West was likewise creative with the pic's settings,
attempting to remove the project as much as possible
from the Indiana Jones-type action-adventures
that had preceded it and have inspired video games
like "Tomb Raider." "I definitely wanted to go
somewhere that didn't have any sand or pyramids
or anything like that because that's what I always
think of when I think of these films, that you
touch the magic stone in the wall and the big,
Styrofoam block moves out of the way and all the
spiders and cockroaches run out and everyone runs
away," West says.
Instead,
the silver screen adaptation of "Tomb Raider"
is set in diverse locales such as Iceland and
the remote jungles of Cambodia, "where these 900-year-old
temples, which were deserted about 400 years ago,
have these fantastic trees of a prehistoric scale
growing up through their roofs," he says. "You
get this great mixture of nature and ancient architecture
mixed together, which fitted in with my vibe for
the film. I wanted to make it sort of New Age
mysticism rather than campy mummies coming out
of walls and things like that." The locations
weren't without their hazards, however. "Iceland
was probably the most hazardous place we were
at," West estimates. "We were 1,000 feet up on
this glacier with [these amphibious landing craft
from the 1940s], which are barely designed to
go on roads. Of course, I insisted that these
things were taken up to the top of the glacier
because they looked so cool driving across the
tundra. "When we scouted the location, it was
all beautiful, pristine, soft snow and easy to
cross. Three months later when we shot it, all
the snow had melted, and it was down to permafrost,
the ice, which had these huge cracks every 20
feet in it that went down [so far] you couldn't
even see the bottom of it. I think it was two
kilometers thick, this glacier, and so these [cracks]
went right down to the heart of it.
"Driving
these vehicles, we got one stuck in one of them,
and it started slipping down one of the crevasses.
Of course, the first thing everyone does is jump
off, which is the worst thing you can do because
the locals say that they reckon that the vehicles
were so big that they would never fall very far
-- they would get wedged. But a person would fall
down two kilometers, and you would never be able
to get them out again. That was the scariest part,
when we got stuck in a crevasse. It was like a
classic movie moment where the thing's just sinking
slowly." West ignored his filmmaking instincts
during the ordeal, however, and didn't capture
it on film. "At that point, we go, 'You know what?
It's only a film. Forget the cameras. We just
want to get out of here alive.' We're not real
action heroes." "Tomb Raider." Starring Angelina
Jolie. Directed by Simon West. Written by Patrick
Massett, John Zinman and Simon West. Produced
by Lawrence Gordon, Lloyd Levin and Colin Wilson.
A Paramount release. Not yet rated. Opens June
15th.
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