Director J.A. Bayona is n’t yet a household name , but do n’t await that to last much longer . He was the first soul to cast Tom Holland , our new Spider - Man , in a lead role . His next film is the sequel to Jurassic World . And his unexampled film , A Monster Calls , opens wide on Friday .
Based on the novel of the same name by Patrick Ness , A Monster Calls is about a young boy named Conor ( Lewis MacDougall ) whose female parent ( Rogue One ’s Felicity Jones ) is break down . To help him conduct with the grief , he ’s visited by a elephantine colossus ( Liam Neeson ) who teaches him the power of story . lineament played by Sigourney Weaver and Toby Kebbell also factor in .
“ It ’s a pic about how we need to recover a trueness and utter a truth , ” Bayona told io9 . “ And how we need fancy to read realness . ”
To make that commixture of fantasy and reality , Bayona did n’t just use computer graphics , the diligence standard . rather , A Monster song also uses all type of vitality to portray the various story the monster tells Conor . It not only helps distinguish the scene in the moving picture , but also gives the film a very distinct look .
“ It ’s a movie with so many dissimilar subject , ” Bayona said . “ Stories inside the story that have different levels of reality and fantasy seen through the eyes of a minor who does n’t have the whole story . I thought that put real actors and story inside another narrative would be distract . So , from the very first moment , I lie with I did n’t want to see actors . And then it came to my mind that it had to be through life . ”
Meanwhile , information processing system computer graphic were used to convey the titular monster — a monolithic tree shaped fiber — to life . But that had its own problems , as Bayona realized during pre - production .
“ We did 200 designs [ of the Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree monster ] , ” Bayona said . “ And you get to the determination that if you want a man who calculate like a Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree , you will have the Ents . And if you do a tree that looks like a man , we have Groot . ”
Bayona had a full - sized fashion model of the demon on set , for MacDougall to interact with , but they could n’t get it to move believably . To do that he hire Neeson for his voice and to do performance seizure . And that was where the answer to the Treebeard / Groot trouble was . The director found , the more human you made the face , the more unique and particular the monster character could be . “ If you go too far forth from a human fount , then there ’s a moment where you may not keep the carrying out , ” he said . “ So , we had that inhalation . ”
The theater director found lots of inspiration in his own childhood as well , especially in stories he was pull in to grow up . story that changed his perspective on life , much like the single the monstrosity tells Conor .
“ I remember a tidy sum of movies told through the eyes of kids , ” Bayona said . “ Movies that , sometimes , were not for kid , but , the fact that they were told through the eyes of kids made them feel very close . And I have it away those movies . Even though most of the time I did n’t understand what these films were about . ” He quote The Tin Drum , Fanny & Alexander and Spirit of the Beehive as exemplar .
And yes , A Monster Calls is a tearjerker . All that invigoration and technology is in divine service of a story about the very human reality of death . Because of that , more than decide on animation or nailing the look of the monster , build the film ’s emotion in just the right way of life was the most hard thing about make the film .
“ We drop more clip trying to find the right computer architecture than the tone for the overall moving picture , ” Bayona said . “ It was very challenging , passing from one scene with a mother and a kid that ’s very diplomatic , then to make animations with fairy story characters . The whole pic is such a rich and varied parcel . ”
But it works . And because of A Monster Calls , J.A. Bayona is another stone’s throw nearer to becoming a menage name .
A Monster Calls opens Friday everywhere .
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