whoa!
Set Report: "The New World"
Posted: Tuesday October 5th, 2004 4:54pm (Au-EST)
Author: Arctic Blue
Location: James River, Virginia
Terence Malik, the man behind the acclaimed "The Thin Red Line", is back in the director's chair again with a new interpretation of the famous Pocahantas/John Smith story. Today one of our roving spies checked out the Virginian set of the film which stars the likes of Colin Farrell, Christian Bale and Christopher Plummer:
"Those who appreciate the excellent but unprolific work of Terrence Malick will have something to look forward to next fall. "The New World" looks to be a beautiful and subtle movie, punctuated with violence. Three scenes and at least one insert were shot in the oldest house in America, a 16th century English manor taken apart timber by timber, and reassembled in Virginia on the north bank of the James River. For the film, the house doubled for an English interior location. On site were Christopher Plummer (Christopher Newport), Christian Bale (John Rolfe), Q'Orianka Kilcher (Pocahontas), and Roger Rees (?).
In what was obviously the most important scene, John Rolfe paces from room to room mulling over his crumbling marriage with Pocahontas. Newport advises him not to let her play with his emotions. As Rolfe comes to stand in front of a window, he tells Newport that he feels he shouldn't hold her in a marriage she entered into in "mischief." He doesn't want her to be manacled to him like a prisoner.
The actors spoke very very low, the mikes being on their persons, and this only added the particular intensity of Bale's performance as Rolfe. They ran this scene over ten times with various tracking and following shots with a steadycam to cover both Bale's and Plummer's faces. In a final go at it, Malick himself set a camera on his shoulder and shot the conversation-by-the-window-portion. It's important to mention here that the fellow everyone kept calling "Chavo" or something was actually the DP. This could give some kind of hint as to how this film's going to look, since he did Y Tu Mama Tambien and the new Lemony Snicket movie.
read more at http://www.darkhorizons.com/news04/041005f.php
