Incredible Hulk comes from an entirely new creative team with a new cast, headlined by Edward Norton as Bruce Banner/The Hulk. The film, which is one of the first features developed by Marvel independent of a major film studio, also brings the story closer to its comic-book roots, with a heavy dose of the beloved 1980s TV series that starred Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno. French-born helmer Louis Leterrier (the Transporter films) steps behind the camera.Leterrier, producer Kevin Feige (who is also president of Marvel Studios) and producer Gale Anne Hurd spoke recently with SCI FI Weekly and a handful of other reporters about The Incredible Hulk during an editing session in Hollywood. The Incredible Hulk opens June 12.
Feige: The film is finished now as of literally this morning [May 21]. ...
Leterrier: Literally, we finished this morning at 8. I'm exhausted. Broke my back. I'm tired. You know, after two years of pushing, then you get the stuff, everything goes [makes cracking sound]. ...
This is definitely not a sequel. This is a reboot. We have to call is a reboot, because people are expecting also to see the same thing that was served to them the first time around, you know, with the big origin story. You know, it takes 40 minutes, and after 49 minutes you see Hulk. ...
Three months ago, we decided, "OK, let's take everything, all the ... backstory-telling, and compress it and make it the coolest credit sequence to explain everything, just to make it very graphic." Which is literally an homage to the TV show, which I love. I actually love the TV show. ...
Feige: [As in] the TV series, [Bruce Banner, played by Norton, is] taking odd jobs, he's going to places, and in our film, we meet him, he's working in a bottling factory [in Brazil] for reasons that become clear relatively soon. He's looking for ingredients that come in from the rain forests for this particular kind of soda that they make in this bottling factory, but he then goes home and experiments with. So having that three-minute jolt in the beginning, we'll actually come in and as we experience his story for the next 10 or 15 minutes.
Hurd: The chair that he's in is an homage to the TV series, but at the same time, what's clear is that we have characters from the comic books that weren't in the TV series, like Betty [Ross, played by Liv Tyler,] and Gen. [Thaddeus "Thunderbolt"] Ross [William Hurt].
What's interesting is the Hulk in the comic books and the Hulk in the TV series have different origins, and they sort of are coming from very different places. In the comic, he becomes the Hulk out of this one act of heroism. In the TV series it's sort of this seeking knowledge thing. How does choosing that origin affect your version of the Hulk?
Leterrier: We sort of combined both in one event, [one] incident, that was shown here and later on down the line explained by Ross. It's hard nowadays to do, like, the old gamma bomb and to talk about that stuff, and I like the sort of like ... the quest for knowledge. The contrast between this very intellectual, very intelligent human and this very brutal--not dumb, but primal--creature. So I really wanted to use these different opposite poles to qualify this hero and antihero.
Feige: The origin's very much the TV series mixed with even a little bit of Banner's origin in the Ultimate comics. The Ultimate universe, which ties in with the supersoldier program, which we talked about at Comic-Con a little bit. So as the movie progresses, you see a little bit of the angle that Ross had for the experiment and the angle that Bruce had for it, which of course were two very different things.
Hurd: There was a military aspect to the experiments that he was conducting, which is different from the TV series.
This film is not a complete origin reboot, but you are rebooting the franchise with this and making it a sequel at the same time. That must be a difficult thing to balance.
Feige: It was, and that was one of the things, when Edward came on board--we were sort of early on considering a "don't ask, don't tell" policy: ... People who want to think it's a sequel can think it's a sequel. People coming in off the street who's never seen the first one can enjoy it as well. And, actually, it was Edward. ... One of the things he did in his polish, his rewrite, was to firmly establish a unique origin, which actually dovetailed perfectly with what we were trying to do at Marvel, which was ... create individual franchises that can live and breathe on their own, but--as you already see in the first three minutes--can interconnect with each other for people who want to see a bigger picture. And going back to a unique origin, this Banner allowed us to start weaving in some of these other elements that may or may not pop up in future Marvel films. Leterrier: There are obviously several moments in the movie when we get to see Hulk fighting various, you know, ... enemies. This one is a big Hulk vs. the Army [one]. The super, typical Hulk-vs.-tanks, and all that was very important to show. ...
Banner has been, you know, ... hiding around the world, [and he] has been found. His quest for the cure has had to stop, and his race forward to where he thinks the cure is, that brings him back to his old stomping ground, the university he used to work at. It's called the university, like in the TV show. At the same time Emil Blonsky--who's played by Tim Roth in the movie--was a soldier, kind of at the end of the road physically. ... He's older than your young soldier, commando, but he's never accepted to be put behind a desk, [to] get a bigger rank, bigger salary. ...
What was the guiding principle in coming up with stuff that looks new but is Hulk-like?
Leterrier: I really love Ang's movie. When they called me, I thought it as to do the sequel to Ang's movie, and I said, "Oh, well, I don't know if I really can do a sequel to Ang's movie." So I tried to make it very different. You still have to make it Hulk vs. the Army, because that's one of the iconic things in the comic book, so we had to think about different ways. ...
Feige: I think the movie style and his kinetic camera, which is always moving and a lot of it was handheld, the camera's always floating, trying to grab Hulk, which I think helped integrate Hulk into his environment instead of shots which are very static. They're very flowing.
Leterrier: I was making sure I would shoot Hulk the way I would shoot Jet Li, for example, [in Danny the Dog, released in the UK as Unleashed]. Like, trying to be, as a camera operator, trying to find the guy, you know? Jet is really fast, but can you imagine Hulk that fast, and how big he is? ...
In your previous films, you've had lots of action scenes and fight scenes, but they've almost always had people hitting each other, and this is so different, because all the action scenes, it's not going to be real people. How do you approach that?
Leterrier: Well just the same way. Actually, it's a little better, a little easier this way, because whenever I approach an action scene I imagine it first and I storyboard it, and I'm like, "OK, do it." And you've got the human limits when you come to set. And you have to adjust to it. So when Jet or [The Transporter's] Jason [Statham] do their stuff, then I have to [adjust]. ...
Here, I just did the same work, same approach, storyboard, pre-visualization, off you go. But you have no limits. But you have to tell your cameraman, "Yeah, you, cameraman, you have to have your limit. You have to be surprised by [the Hulk]." ... In many CG movies, I don't like it because it's too perfect. ...
Can you talk about finding the emotional entry point for the story and then balancing it with this level of action?
Leterrier: My emotional entry point for The Incredible Hulk was the TV show, and that's why it's so ... heavily based, in the beginning, at least, on the TV show. Because growing up in France, the comic book, the Hulk comic book, was not as widely distributed as here, so my first ... hard-core full exposure to Hulk was on TV. ... When I was 7, probably, it was the biggest show in France, so a lot of how emotional both Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno were, you know, acting, their performance was in this TV show. So that was my emotional entry point. ...
That goes also with the stylistic approach. When I met these guys, they told me about Hulk, I said, "Oh, it's been a long time since I ... read Hulk comic books." So I went to several of these little comic-book stores, and the only one they had was the Jeph Loeb-Tim Sale Hulk: Gray, which is, like, super-stylistic but [a] very simplistic approach, like, [a] basic approach to the Hulk and, like, super-emotional. That thing is beautiful. It's poetry. It's like comic-book poetry. And I read it, devoured it, and I said, "This, guys, Kevin, this is amazing. This is what I want to do." And there's actual visual scenes in our movie that are homages, you know, panel after panel kind of homages, to this comic book, because I love it. Just because it's very emotional. It's Beauty and the Beast, Frankenstein, King Kong. It's got all of these. We love these monsters because they're scary, but deep inside they're like a heart of gold, they're, like, so pure and simple. That's what I wanted to do. That was the emotional journey I wanted the audience to experience, because it's been mine forever now.
Feige: It's good. The movie really is the merging of the pathos of Banner from the television series, the spectacle and smash of Hulk from the best of the comics, and Hulk: Gray, the Loeb/Sale [miniseries], really is the link between them. And even in the scenes that you're talking about, panel for panel, is the centerpiece of the film. It sort of links the two stories.
