Total Icon Count: 71

Teasers:

( Icons Here! ) Comment & Credit if taking.

South African-born Charlize Theron has had an incredibly varied career as an actress and model, rising to fame in the late 90s before winning an Oscar for her portrayal of serial killer Aileen Wuornos in MONSTER.

In the late 90s she starred in Woody Allen's CELEBRITY, as well as THE DEVIL'S ADVOCATE, MIGHTY JOE YOUNG and THE CIDER HOUSE RULES. Since winning the Oscar in 2003, Theron has been in much demand, with roles in projects as diverse as NORTH COUNTRY, AEON FLUX and HANCOCK.

She was most recently seen in Jason Reitman's comedy YOUNG ADULT, as Mavis Gary, the thirty-something writer who returns to her hometown to try and restart the relationship with her high-school sweetheart, despite his wife and child.

Theron plays Vickers in Ridley Scott's return to sci-fi, PROMETHEUS. From the film's set at Pinewood Studios, she introduces the film.

How would you introduce the story of PROMETHEUS?

Oh god, you're trying to get me in trouble! I think we can say that this is an independent sci-fi film Ridley is doing with the DNA of ALIEN, but it really is a film that stands on its own. It's the story of all those great questions that we don't really have the answers to: Where do we come from? And is what we believe in safe? Do we still believe it in the face of evidence that proves otherwise?

How much ALIEN DNA do you think survives into PROMETHEUS?

I think it's up for people to make the connection. I think that what's great about it is you don't have to be an ALIEN fan to go and watch this, and I think people who are fans, all those nerds will be like, "Wow, I get it!" [laughs] But I think that it really is a film and a story that stands on its own.

You've worked in sci-fi a bit in the past, do you love the genre?

Well, I've done one film, and that was it! I just did AEON FLUX in my fifteen-year career span. But I do love the genre and I think for me good storytelling surpasses any genre. I believe in good storytelling more than any specific kind of genre. That's what I like about working with Ridley Scott, because he's a filmmaker who's really driven by story and people's motivations and really asking real questions. To me, that's really the core of the story.

Ridley redefined the genre with ALIEN and BLADE RUNNER. Can we expect the same of PROMETHEUS?

Absolutely. He's one of the greats and I think that when he tackled the genre back in the day, he brought a lot of original thinking to it, and he's very comfortable in the genre. I think people are going to be really satisfied by what he's doing with this. The story's great and really lends itself to all of his skills. The characters are really great and they really carry the heart of the story. That as a combination is really what you're looking for. I think the tendency nowadays with big budgets and with sci-fi is to make giant sets and spectacular and there be nothing at the core of it. I think this kind of storytelling has to drive all of that big show-off things that these kind of sci-fi movies have.

Ridley's a precise director, what has been the experience of working with him?

It's incredible. It's why I wanted to do this film, because for me as an actor he was that director that I went through my career going, "If I ever get the chance to work with Ridley Scott I would grab it in a heartbeat." He's really the reason why I wanted to be involved and he's one of very few great, great directors out there where you look and his body of work and you can't help but wonder what the experience would be of working with him. He's done nothing but surpassed what I thought this experience would be. He's very much an actor's director. He loves actors and he's very in-tune with them and how they work. And he has great instincts. He has a great sense of exploration, which is really fantastic. There's no one-way, there are several ways and he wants to explore them all. It's a constant peeling back of layers, which for an actor is really just fantastic.

Who is Vickers?

She works for the Weyland Corporation, which is funding this mission. And so she's kind of given herself this role of corporate suit who shows up and doesn't necessarily care about putting anybody, especially herself, in danger. She's very much driven in the beginning of the story by the power she has because she works for the corporation, and trying to kind of control everybody to have them do what she wants done. She's a bit of an enigma; you don't quite understand what her emotions truly are. In the beginning you really do think it's just corporate need. But it being a Ridley Scott film, there's a lot more there that doesn't really come to the surface until the end of the second and the beginning of the third act. She's revealed towards the end of the film and it's a really nice reveal. It's a nice surprise in the film.

How do the crew treat her?

They certainly take a dislike to her right from the beginning, because they're there to do something that's incredibly difficult and she isn't necessarily making things easy for them. She throws a lot of red tape around and has a bit of a power trip which gets in the way of these very passionate scientists who are really in it to try and discover something that hasn't been discovered before. And also she doesn't really take shit from anybody. [laughs] She's not necessarily there to make friends. She's a very, very isolated character.

How much do you think about the film's themes when you're on set?

I don't think that I can talk about it! That's really kind of giving stuff away. I think all the characters in this story have to come to a realisation once they're faced with reality and the facts of what they actually find and see. They all have to question their belief before of who they are and where they come from, whether there's a religious base to those thoughts or a scientific one. They all have to question them towards the end of the film.

------------------------------------------------------

PROMETHEUS – Art of PROMETHEUS: The Planet
By Joe Utichi -www.joeutichi.com

When the crew of the Prometheus land on the alien planet at the core of their expedition, they find an inhospitable, barren environment and a strange, vast alien structure. It will, assures director Ridley Scott, look like nothing we've seen before in science fiction, and the production went to great lengths to shoot on location in Iceland, at a location so remote that the cast, crew and equipment had to be airlifted in.

The Icelandic location, it transpires, wasn't the first choice. "We were planning to shoot in Morocco," reveals production designer Arthur Max. "But with all the geopolitical turmoil in North Africa, we weren't able to do so. We'd scouted it several times with everybody and had worked out all our locations, and we've had to rethink."

The change means a very different aesthetic to the look of the planet – Morocco's deserts have been replaced by the cold, icy rock of the Iceland location. "When we first scouted Iceland it was winter, and 20 below, and you couldn't see anything," remembers Max. "But thank God we'd pre-scouted it. When we went back we nailed the locations and got Ridley over there and he liked them."

In addition to shooting on location in Iceland, the production took over the 007-Stage at Pinewood Studios, just outside London. At 374ft long, it is the largest soundstage in Europe and boasts more than 59,000 sq ft of usable space. For PROMETHEUS, it wasn't big enough by half.

The production started on the backlot behind the stage, constructing the Prometheus's cargo bay and a small replica of the planet surface. This spilled onto an extension built to house more of an alien pyramid mound interior set, before finally connecting, and filling, the main space inside 007-Stage.

"It's never big enough," sighs Scott. "I worked on it once, years ago, for a film called LEGEND, and I burnt it down. Even then I was thinking, 'Damn, it's not long enough.'"

In the end, the production added 150ft to the stage's length. "I knew, looking from end to end, it was never going to be big enough for this set," says Scott. "I hate working with green screen. I like the actors to have their proscenium and see what they're doing; see the arena they're in. It's partly that. To do that blue screen thing and say, 'the monster's coming down the corridor!' It's really boring."

"The scale meant we could do a nice, big exploration scene in there," explains Max. "We've got a 250ft network of tunnelling in there, 150ft of chambers and 25ft high doors."

For Michael Fassbender, Scott's attention to detail in the set design of the planet surface was second to none. "Have you gone into 007-Stage yet?" he exclaims with disbelief. "You have to see the space colon, as I call it!"

The practicality of the set makes his job easier as an actor, he explains. "What's great is Ridley will do something on a piece of fishing line if it works, and stick a bit of green screen up in the corner. He knows technology but what's great about him is he's very primal. Even the technology in the film, you're like, 'That's totally feasible.'"

To be able to look around at the set in 360 degrees is essential, he argues. "To have these things all around you helps, without a doubt. It's like putting on the costume. Or if you do a period piece, to be surrounded by the objects that they would have used at that time; all of that helps you get that extra layer on the character. If it's not there then you have to work on it but it just takes that little section out that you have to work on."

Arthur Max says he and Ridley Scott have learnt, over many years of working together on films like GLADIATOR, KINGDOM OF HEAVEN, and BLACK HAWK DOWN, that sometimes it's better to achieve something practically than with CGI. "I think balance is the key in how much you build," he says. "You have to get a convincing base, and when you speak to the visual effects department, they'll tell you that they want enough reference material to work from. It's especially tough on this, because almost every shot has a visual component and everything has to be constructed from scratch. You can't go to a backlot and you can't go to a prop house."

The centrepiece of the alien set at Pinewood was a 32ft tall monolithic head, which can be glimpsed in posters for the film. This was built practically by Arthur Max's team. "The idea there is that it's part of the culture of the Engineers," says Max of the race of aliens at the heart of the story. "This race of interplanetary visitors who have given us upgrades – mentally and physically – over the millennium."

Constructing the "pyramid mound" - its shape was described as a pyramid in the script, explains Max, but the final conception is a little different, hence the contradictory descriptor – took 16 weeks to complete with more than two hundred technicians working on it.

In attempting to understand PROMETHEUS's connection to ALIEN, for which H.R. Giger designed the reptilian, skeletal and iconic look of the Xenomorph alien, Max says he had a clear direction from Scott. "Ridley said, 'I don't want it to be too Giger-y, but I don't want to give it all up either."

The art department looked at design work Giger had achieved for the first ALIEN film, in the form of archival files retrieved from the Motion Picture Academy Library and from the personal collections of those who'd worked on the first film. Ridley also screened some of the genre's most definitive works. "He had accumulated a lot of research based on the original movie and the whole series," remembers Max. "We watched all those movies. Ridley had us screen ALIEN and BLADE RUNNER, and a lot of movies with 'STAR' in the title. There's three of them. I'll let you figure out which ones!"

Watching the reference material was as much about discovering what not to do. "We didn't want to be like any one of those," Max explains. "We wanted to be new and fresh because, I hate to admit it, otherwise it really dates us. We decided to make it less biological, in terms of the styling of the alien planet, and more mechanical."

Max summarises the key challenge of envisioning the alien environment: "The people who inhabit this planet, called the Engineers, and their technology, is beyond anything we're able to know or understand, but it has to be visually interesting. That's, I think, the hardest challenge, too, because we have to compete with the most iconic science fiction creature ever. Trying to come up with something that's going to rival that is the real trick."