How to train your dragon: "I did not want the series to lose its integrity"



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After more than 10 years of corruption in three films and an eight-week television show, the beloved DreamWorks Dragons franchise is coming to an end with the trilogy on the big screen The Hidden Kingdom . As you might expect, ending the saga that he started with that of 2010 How to Train His Dragon was a bittersweet experience for screenwriter / director Dean DeBlois.

"It's both liberating and sad," says DeBlois Den of Geek when we join him in London. "The team that shot this film is largely composed of all three of us, so we separate as a family as the characters disbadociate themselves in the story."

However, as the main guardian of the franchise, accomplishment finally say goodbye to Hiccup, Toothless and the magnificent world of Berk.

"For me personally, I am very happy to have had the opportunity to make a trilogy," says DeBlois. "I am really a child of Star Wars .This first trilogy inspired me to embark on this venture, so I am very happy to have completed the story." did not want to let her down, continue doing sequences until people get tired of it and can not stand it anymore, I'd rather have a definitive end and let people want more than just letting people go slowly losing interest and the [series] losing its integrity along the "

Getting The Hidden World on the big screen was not without challenges, though: not only was the third movie was- he was more ambitious technically than his predecessors, but there was also the small problem taken over by a company (after the purchase of Dreamworks Animation by Universal in 2016).

Here, DeBlois talks with Den of Geek about film making, about fans' expectations and about the problem of remakes of live animation films …

The history of Hiccup and Toothless takes place on a large scale, covering three films.

When Chris Sanders [thefirst-timedirector of Dragon ] and I were working on the first film, we were simply trying to finish it at the end. line, so there was no thought of a bigger scenario. But as a result of his success, there was talk of a sequel. I am allergic to the aftermath: if they do not feel that they have a real purpose in advancing the story, I often check.

So, to avoid this, I proposed the idea of ​​a trilogy that would map that of Hiccup. as an adult, since the first film we met up to the wise and selfless leader who was destined to be – and treat these three films as three acts of a story. The studio bought that. He gave the second and third installments; I knew that in the end, the goal was to go back to the story as we know it and close the chapter on that time when dragons roamed the Earth.

You are finishing a series gathering a huge and very loyal fan base – have you felt the pressure to make sure that they have a goodbye?

Yeah. The fans of Dragon bring a lot of support, voice and enthusiasm. It has been very interesting and fun to watch him grow up over the three films and television series that separate them. People really feel that they own these characters. And we – the 400 people who made this film – felt pressure to live up to these expectations.

The biggest challenge for me was to avoid shitting the bed. So often, the third installment is a disappointment. I wanted to reach a satisfactory conclusion that would separate Hiccup and Toothless from all the Vikings and their dragons so that the public does not hate us. It was tricky, especially since Hiccup preached the coexistence of two films and that he essentially had to embrace the idea of ​​separation.

How did the change of direction after the agreement with Universal affect the film?

We had about three years to make the second film; he took over four. This was partly because DreamWorks and Universal became our new bosses. It was not just the acquisition; it took them time to evaluate all the pre-production and production films at DreamWorks. It was a stand for us, but it was not a stand that was derailed. We had nothing to reconcile, which was great.

How long have you pushed technology on this one compared to, say, Dragon 2?

Making this movie was very liberating. All the promise of the tools we had on the second film was fully realized on the third. The new final rendering process provided very realistic lighting and very fast results, which allowed us to face thousands of dragons in one shot, in an environment lit by all kinds of complex light sources.

The world itself is really an example of what we have achieved technologically, because we could not have done it in the first film and it was very difficult to do in the second. We have finally arrived at a stage of computer animation where it is possible to imagine an image and to create it without any limitation. Nobody on the sidelines says, "Oh, that's fine, but you'll have to make a smaller version because we can not make it on time." It's pretty amazing.

About putting your imagination on the screen, there is a lot of dragons in this movie. How did you imagine all the different models?

I mean that's certainly the most fun part of the process: designing dragons and defining their specific abilities and animal references. In reality, we can never afford to build about four or five new dragons per film because they are very complex, time consuming and therefore expensive. But we have developed a modular system on the second film that we have continued to tweak, where we can badociate different heads with different bodies, different stories and different points and create an infinite variety of background dragons to populate the world. place. 19659002] But the centrally located dragons are worked for months and months, not only in terms of design, but also in terms of pattern and articulation, building all the bones, muscles and fat of way to really be able to hold up a close up.

Some scenes in the movie are quite dark, especially when the Deathgrippers are on the screen. Until where can you push these elements in a movie like this?

We have an interesting phenomenon in which the audience grew up with these characters. And in some ways, as with Harry Potter's films the tone might darken a bit and take on much more mature themes. We just had to keep in mind that we were not leaving the younger audience behind us.

It was always important to me that we never have gratuitous violence, but I wanted this world to feel that it had consequences and perils. If you fell a great height on the back of a dragon, you would not bounce and everything would be fine. If you were on the way to a dragon fire, you would burn – and as a result, Hiccup loses his leg, a parent dies … So it's a world that, hopefully, presents a balance of humor and intensity.

One of the film's flagship characters scenes is the court between Toothless and the Light Fury. What are your references for this sequence?

This is largely inspired by the idea of ​​Cyrano de Bergerac – the friend who whispers in the bushes while the lover tries to seduce his lover interest. In this case, because Toothless has spent a lot of time with humans, he is compromised. The Light Fury is pretty pure – it comes from a world of dragons and it has had very little human influence. We started to look at many mating behaviors of birds because they tend to be the most ridiculous. We have channeled many of these into the behavior of Toothless.

Some prominent animation directors, such as Brad Bird and Travis Knight, have recently come into action. Is this something you would like to do?

Yes. I wanted to add a live action to the toolbox for a long time. Between Lilo & Stitch [DeBlois co-wrote and directed that film with Sanders] and How to Train Your Dragon I took about seven years to mount action projects to write and achieve. And each type of hitting the rocks. But he has somehow left this open ambition to try again. I do not know if that's the next project I'll do – I've actually made no decision as to what to do next. But I hope that there will be an opportunity in the future to do something real that pleases my sensitivity and where I could apply the skills that I have developed in the world. ;animation.

There is also a recent trend. to turn clbadic animated films into real action movies – even Lilo & Stitch was evoked for remake processing. What do you think about this?

I find it shocking, to be honest. In a sense, I think it's easy because all the hard work to find the story and sharpen it has been done – so now you have to take a movie that has been successful and do it on a different medium. But more than that, I feel that live action adaptations deny animates in a certain way; as if to say that they are better than the original. You know, "let's improve your imperfect medium". So, as a person who loves animation, I think that she loses her charm.

This may please a wider audience – and they certainly do very well. So, I'm probably in the minority. But especially for a film like Lilo & Stitch that was such a singular and offbeat vision – we were essentially a group of people trying to bring Chris Sanders' idea to life for a storybook. And it's so personal; it is not a secular fairy tale or a known legend. It's a story so specific. So, to do it again, especially with a new group of people who were not part of this original team … Yeah, that seems strange to me.

How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World has just been published.

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