Superman: Returns Pictures From The Set
Kent farm and crash site duplicate Donner’s 1978 film
March 16th 2005 03:30am | Posted by: Robert Falconer HNR Senior Editor
You know it’s a big deal when Reuters begins to tread within
the traditional purview of entertainment news sites and fan sites and report on the making of a genre film by employing helicopters to sneak photos.
Yet that’s precisely what’s happened with the new Superman feature, currently lensing in Breeza, Australia. The news organization hired a helicopter to gather some revealing aerial shots from the new Bryan Singer film, and what they reveal is the director’s strict adherence to the history and production design of Richard Donner’s classic 1978 film, Superman: The Movie. Not a bad thing we think, since the ‘78 film was lavishly executed by some of filmdom's most masterful artisans, i.e. cinematography by the late master, Geoffrey Unsworth (also cinematographer for 2001: A Space Odyssey).
The pics show the rural location more or less duplicating the Kent family farm from Superman: The Movie. The most revealing shots, however, show "a life-sized replica spaceship buried at the end of a ditch," and that setup too, is taken directly from the 1978 Donner film, which used a star shaped, crystalline ship to transport the infant Kal-El from the doomed planet Krypton in a distant galaxy to his adopted home on Earth.
Singer is also reported to be employing John Williams original Superman music score – another brilliant move, as it represents one of the richest orchestral scores ever composed for film and immediately calls to mind the character (we can hear it playing in our heads right now!).
We’ve got to hand it to Bryan Singer for sticking to his guns and honoring Donner’s original vision, though replacing Christopher Reeve with Brandon Routh will be the tough part.
Bryan Singer is taking a page from Peter Jackson's playbook and doing on-set video updates from the Superman set for Blue Tights. The first edition of his video blog is now available online, and shows many paintings and storyboards, again, from Donner’s original film (including shots of Gene Hackman as the original Lex Luthor)…doubtless being used for inspiration and continuity.
You can check out the Reuters photos below.
Superman: Returns opens June 30, 2006.
Source: Reuters
In: Movie News
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