The Adventures of Tintin
Short description
The Adventures of Tintin follows a young reporter and his dog Snowy, who buy a model sailing ship at a market and find it hides a secret tied to a centuries-old mystery. A sinister collector, Ivan Ivanovitch Sakharine, believes the reporter has stolen a treasure connected to the vessel, and when the model is taken, its owner sets out to recover it. His search draws in a bad-tempered sea captain, Captain Haddock, whose ancestor once commanded the original ship, along with two bumbling detectives, Thomson and Thompson. The trail leads across several continents and toward a sunken vessel that may hold a fortune.
Steven Spielberg directed the film, the thirty-second of his forty features in chronological order, arriving between War Horse and Lincoln. Edgar Wright, Steven Moffat and Joe Cornish wrote the screenplay, and Spielberg produced with Kathleen Kennedy and Peter Jackson. The voice cast includes Jamie Bell as Tintin, Andy Serkis as Captain Haddock and his ancestor Sir Francis Haddock, and Daniel Craig as Sakharine and Red Rackham, with Nick Frost and Simon Pegg as the detectives and Daniel Mays as Allan. Twenty-two cast members and 142 crew are credited.
The production, backed by Columbia Pictures, Amblin Entertainment, Paramount and DreamWorks Pictures, cost about 140 million US dollars and took roughly 374 million dollars worldwide. On IMDb it holds 7.3 out of 10 from around 254,000 votes, while on TMDB it rates 6.9 out of 10 from about 6,000 votes. A critics' rating of 7 out of 10 from 233 reviews sits between the two audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- Filming was scheduled to begin in October 2008, with a release expected in 2010. However, the release was postponed until 2011 after Universal withdrew from collaborating with Paramount, which had provided $30 million for pre-production. The delays led to actor Thomas Sangster, who had initially been cast as Tintin, leaving the project.
- The film's plot is based on stories described in the comic books 'The Secret of the Unicorn' (issue No. 11, published in 1942-1943), 'The Crab with the Golden Claws' (issue No. 9, published in 1940-1941), and 'Red Rackham's Treasure' (issue No. 12, published in 1943-1944).
- One of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost's mentors was choreographer and Cirque du Soleil star Terry Notary. He helped the actors synchronize their duet so that the blunders of the Duponts would look even funnier.
- When Tintin on the boat sees the seaplane, he checks the number of cartridges in the Browning pistol he brought from the ship as follows: he removes the magazine, sees one cartridge in it, and tells the captain: "We only have one cartridge." This is not true – a second cartridge was in the chamber, consistent with the pistol's mechanism.
- The comic books sometimes featured images of vehicles, such as a 1937 Ford and a seaplane. The drawings were so detailed that animators were even able to identify the model and year of manufacture.
- This is Spielberg's first film in digital format.
- Spielberg received Hergé's "blessing" for the comic book adaptation during a phone call.
- Hergé believed that only Steven Spielberg could bring Tintin to life on the big screen. Unfortunately, the artist passed away shortly before his scheduled meeting with the director.
- When Spielberg filmed the first Indiana Jones movie, “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” fans of Tintin accused the filmmakers of plagiarism. Spielberg was not troubled by the accusations themselves, but by the unfamiliar word “Tintin.” With great difficulty, he found out what it was about and ordered several volumes of the comics from France without translation. He flipped through them, became interested. He found English editions. He read them in one sitting. He realized who he had been copying, unknowingly. Decades before Indiana Jones, Tintin combined detective work with archaeology – he uncovered conspiracies, exposed greedy capitalists, and found mysterious artifacts in the dust of time.
- Filming took place in a pavilion equipped with a performance capture Volume system. Approximately one hundred cameras were mounted around the perimeter of the ceiling, capturing everything in a 360-degree range and recording information in accordance with the position of each object and actor in space. Actors working in the Volume pavilion wore special suits with numerous mirrored markers, which were picked up by the cameras. This information was translated into a three-dimensional image. Props and sets used in the scenes were also equipped with similar markers. In addition, eight HD cameras filmed scenes as is, that is, directly the actors themselves. This material was subsequently used by animators to ensure that no grimace, smile, twitch, or other emotion and facial nuance went unnoticed. In addition to performance capture technology, facial capture technology was also used, recording emotions based on the distortion of facial lines. The actor wore a helmet that resembled a football helmet and to which a miniature video camera was attached, pointed at the person's face. It recorded the slightest movements of the eyes, lips, and key facial muscles.
- Spielberg first acquired the rights to adapt 'Tintin' after Hergé's death in 1983, and again in 2002.
- Animators from Peter Jackson’s Weta Digital performed test animation of Snowy. To demonstrate the possibilities, Jackson sent Spielberg a video in which the “Lord of the Rings” director himself played the role of Captain Haddock, while a drawn Snowy spun around his feet.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
