Deppheads

I could listen to Johnny's voice all day to be honest.

I also got the Fear and Loathing reference.

I was so excited over the trailer I showed my mother and my close friend from Sydney.

Lol, soo funny! I love the animation too, it looks soo real.



And Johnny, you never looked soo good! I think that green skin paired with the Hawaiian Shirt really brings out your eyes.

Another cool article.

Gore Verbinski Talks About 'Rango'
Behind the Scenes of the Animated Movie 'Rango'

By Rebecca Murray, About.com Guide

June 29, 2010 - The animated feature film Rango is the story of a chameleon with an identity crisis, according to Paramount Pictures and director Gore Verbinski (the man behind all the Pirates of the Caribbean films except the upcoming On Stranger Tides). And if that snappy little teaser description isn't enough to catch your attention, the fact the lead character in this animated film's voiced by Johnny Depp ought to be enough to increase your interest.

Verbinski's hard at work putting together the project, with the studio aiming to release the family-friendly Rango on March 4, 2011. But despite being super busy, Verbinski took some time off on June 28th to show off character sketches, the trailer, and a behind the scenes featurette which showed the actors voicing their characters while acting out the scenes. Verbinski also answered questions about the film, a project far different than anything he's done before.

Gore Verbinski Rango Q&A
On the Character Rango:
"He kind of fancies himself a hero and he's thrust into a crazy set of circumstances where he becomes one and he has to ultimately come to terms with the difference between pretending and what's real. People start believing in him. Our world is sort of Western. He's a contemporary character thrust into kind of a backwards Western genre, if you will."

Who is Rango Really?
"He's like a thespian in search of an audience. He's in his terrarium and he's made friends with the inanimate objects in his terrarium. He calls them all by name and actually when we meet him, he's in the process of putting on a play with various objects in his terrarium. Things get out of hand and the production goes down, literally. He's enlightened by his need for conflict, basically, and our story begins. We also have this Mexican Greek chorus of mariachis. They intro the tale and they follow him around singing of his whole demise. They break the fourth wall from time to time and keep us apprised as to the emotional state."

On His Voice Cast:
"We have a great cast. We have Abigail Breslin who plays Priscilla, Alfred Molina who plays Road Kill, this armadillo who's run over. It's part of the origin of Rango's demise, when his terrarium is thrust from his car and he ends up in the desert. Isla Fischer plays Beans. We have Bill Nighy who plays Rattlesnake Jake. Ned Beatty is the mayor. Harry Dean Stanton as Pappy."

Verbinski said Rango starts out in the present day but winds up in the West in the 1800s. "It's kind of a crazy mixed bag, contemporary and sort of throwback. He's the fish out of water."

On Designing the Characters of Rango:
"It really started with this concept of first just creating a sort of Western genre based on creatures of the desert. From there, I sat down with four of my favorite illustrators and just said, 'Let's conjure. Let's go.' That's the only rule. So snakes and tortoises and lizards and everything, so out of that we started to build iconography and first just very simple silhouettes and shapes. At the same time, we were working on the screenplay with John Logan and both things influenced each other. It was very much an open format process building a the narrative where art and scenes, Jim and I did all the voices, scratch voices and cut the whole thing on a Macintosh as an animatic. So it was just a bunch of these pencil sketches."

"After finishing a run of two Pirate movies, but even from The Ring to Pirates to Weather Man to two more Pirates movies, it was really an opportunity to take a pause and to sit back and go, 'Okay, let's get small,' basically. This is a project that I've been banging around since 2005, working with a children's book author named David Shannon and the producer John Carlos who produced Where the Wild Things Are. We've been sort of feeling out the idea of the project for a while. That was basically all we had. Rango came working with Jim, identity crisis, outsider coming into this world and we just sort of built it from scratch. Our intention was to create something that we liked. We hope there's enough people out there that like it too."

On Western Influences:
"We definitely have the classic John Ford, but there's a lot of spaghetti in there too, which I think has a little more irreverence. It's not as wholesome, if you will. It's kind of more of a postmodern Western. Wild Bunch I'm a fan of, the tail end of the genre more so than the kind of origins because it gets a little hokey when you go back to the 'bum ba dee da bum ba dee da.' So definitely Peckinpah and Leone."

On Johnny Depp's Involvement:
"We brought it up to Johnny during Pirates 2 because that's when we had the basic outline. We always just felt like he's very lizard-like, referred to quite a lot of his lizard run, lizard on ice, some of his physicalities are very lizard like, so he was really into it. A year and a half later we showed him a story reel and he loved it."

On Tackling an Animated Film:
"I never had a career plan so it's really kind of much more of a shoot from the hip, if there's an interesting story and you want to tell it, you figure out a way to tell it. [...]I've been blessed and lucky, but I didn't really set out to do an animated movie. I think it scares me. It's something I don't know how to do so I tend to be drawn to that, I guess. Ultimately, it just was a story. It seemed right. it was the right time. A lot of those techniques are the techniques we use in live action: storyboarding, letting visuals influence script, developing narrative based on visual as much as based on literary references. I can't say that it was part of a global plan."

On the Target Audience:
"I think if you're nine years old, you hit somebody on the head with a frying pan - it's funny. If you're 60-years-old, then you'll get a little bit of Jean Paul Sartre reference in there. It's just about keeping those things hopscotching so it plays for both worlds."

Thanks QGR for posting the article -it was a fascinating read. I didnt think i would be inetersted in Rango but i think Ill watch it now when it comes out
On Johnny Depp's Involvement:
"We brought it up to Johnny during Pirates 2 because that's when we had the basic outline. We always just felt like he's very lizard-like, referred to quite a lot of his lizard run, lizard on ice, some of his physicalities are very lizard like, so he was really into it. A year and a half later we showed him a story reel and he loved it."
I have always thought of Johnny as a chameleon in the way he can change his looks and accents to suit a character and i know he did the lizard run in pirates but "some of his physicalities are lizard like"????????????????????

Yeah, I found it pretty ironic that Johnny, a professional chameleon, is going to be playing a literal one.

I think Gore's referring to Johnny's shy personality, his quick mannerisms, that sort of thing.

Thanks for explaining that to me -that makes sense now

LOVE IT!!!! I really wasn't looking forward to this,but now i can't til next March!!!

I also see Fear and Loathing reference !!!

Empire

Rango: A Walk-Through With Gore Verbinski

Posted on Monday July 5, 2010, 07:50 by Sam Toy in Off The Wire

This time last month, Rango was a project we, like most almost everyone else, had only the most rudimentary knowledge of: an animated film being directed by Gore Verbinski, with Johnny Depp providing key vocal talent. Then, a few weeks back, the teaser trailer landed. Which was, to be honest, unhelpful. You know the one: that shot of a desert road, with a wind up fish (out of water, and in mid-air) slowly making its way from one side of frame to the other, which didn’t really elicit much more of a response from anyone, beyond “Okaaaaaay.”

Thank your chosen deity then that Paramount chose last week to launch the far more exciting first proper trailer. Now we talkin’. Why? Because just twenty four hours earlier, we’d been at the film’s production offices, being shown all manner of eye-popping artwork, as well as several bits of unfinished-but-still-breathtaking bits of animation, complete with commentary from Verbinski himself; we’ve now got at least some evidence to support why Rango has rocketed from largely-below-the-radar curio to one of our most anticipated films of 2011. Here are a few reasons why:

Firstly, plot. The trailer goes only a small way to introducing the story, letting you know pretty much solely that Rango (a Hawaiian shirt-wearing chameleon, no less) is a stranger to the desert. How does he get there? Well according to Verbinski, he’s a domesticated lizard, whose entire terrarium goes out a car window when the vehicle hits a bump on a highway through the Mojave. “He’s basically a thespian in search of an audience,” explained the director, in his production offices at Universal Studios. “In his terrarium, he’s made friends with inanimate objects. Actually, when we meet him, he’s in the process of putting on a play with those objects, when the production goes down.” He somehow survives a walk through the desert – as would seemingly be depicted by the trailer, before he stumbles into the town of Dirt.

With the look of a town of the old west, Dirt’s townsfolk – all desert animals - are in need of a sheriff, as they’re at the mercy of Rattlesnake Jake (briefly seen in the trailer, and voiced by Bill Nighy). As Verbinski put it “this town is really in need of a hero, and they get the great pretender.” What they trailer doesn’t show you is Rango leading a rag-tag posse of locals on a quest to defend their community from the malicious, malevolent forces that threaten them. “I’m not going to explain much more than that,” said Verbinski, “it all gets highly involved, and hopefully, entertaining.”

Rango has a look and feel like no other fully CG animated movie to date. That’s because it’s the debut animated feature of Industrial Light & Magic. It’s hard to believe that no-one had thought of it before, but this is the first time the effects powerhouse – who still don’t officially have an animation arm to their studio – have opted to do a project of this kind. Head illustrator and production designer on the film is Crash McCreery, who we were lucky enough to meet very briefly, and as his unbelievably heavy workload was revealed to us, we were just trying to not to too obviously geek out at the various sketches and maquette of Edward Scissorhands adorning his office walls (he was employed by Stan Winston for many years, and among many other towering achievements, is the designer of Davey Jones in Pirates 2 & 3).

Another interest-peaking element to Rango is its almost unique shooting style. Verbinski explained that it was basically a big experiment – neither he nor ILM had made an animated movie before, and they were all feeling their way in the hope of creating something fresh and different. “Just because it’s an animated movie, I didn’t want to give up the techniques that were developed in shooting live-action.” Similar to and expanding upon Wes Anderson’s recording techniques on Fantastic Mr Fox, the filmmakers made sure to get all of the cast together for ‘principal recording’, if you like. “Once we had Johnny’s days locked, I scheduled a recording of twenty days, and basically if you weren’t available on those twenty days, you weren’t in the film,” differing of course from the now standard procedure of actors coming into a studio in small groups, pairs, or even on their own, and recording pieces of dialogue over a period of months, or even years. “We got some video cameras just to have reference, so if I’m talking to an animator, I can say ‘no, look at this’.”

What Verbinski showed us then, we pray will end up as a Blu-ray extra – the entire cast: Depp, Isla Fisher, Stephen Root, Abigail Breslin, et al., running around a studio, crew and an abundance of microphones in shot - sometimes dressed partly in costume, sometimes not – appearing to have the time of their lives as they deliver their lines, acting out the action to give the vocal performance a true physicality – hilarious to behold.

The thing that really hooked us though, was the last of the clips we were shown. No spoilers here, suffice to say that you can see just a tiny slice of this astonishing scene in the trailer (where Rango walks across the busy highway at night, with headlights rushing past him in both directions). We were told that this clip wasn’t quite finished, and had temp score on it, but it was good. Really, really good. Like, opening montage of Up good, and similarly utterly moving. This especially well chosen sequence really demonstrates what Verbinski had been mentioning to us all morning, and what a damn fine filmmaker he is; the painstaking attention given to the eyes of each character, and the tiniest of head movements or facial tics - none of them remotely accidental, all of them forged by his guidance through actors and animators alike - writ large on the big screen in crystal clear digital (and by the way, that shot of the posse riding across the setting sun looks exquisite).

You get the feeling that ‘getting small’, as he describes it, is something that Verbinski is naturally adept at, yet also - even after three years on Rango – something he could continue getting used to. Mark our words: this is gonna be a mighty fine slice o' entertainment.

Incredible information; thanks for posting Roxanna!
Now I'm even more excited to see this movie.

Thank you for posting all of the articles!

I was looking forward to seeing this when I saw the trailer and after reading all the information it looks like it could be a fun fillm! Can't wait!!

I think this is pretty darn awesome.

I want a fish.

Me too! The thought of getting a plastic fish at Comic Con was actually more exciting than the thought of meeting Danny Elfman there. I really wish I could go.

You: "Hey, Danny! Fish are more exciting than you!"

Danny: ...?



My uncle is going and I'm jealous. *sigh*

Ordindary fish aren't. Just the ones that wind up.

Aww, I'm so jealous, too. I've never been to Comic Con, just WonderCon. I know, I know "just" WonderCon, but Comic Con is like WonderCon times a billion. Last year, I almost bust a gut when I learned Tim was going. I just knew Johnny was going to be there, and lo and behold, he was. Grrr.

Wind up fish are amazing. Simple as that.

Yeah, I'm jealous of every living soul that was there last year.

me to

Oh my god! that's awesome!

Awww how cute are they?! I want one <33

I like that fish