Le Montagne della Follia

[Erik]

Mi pare di ricordare che lo shoggoth non lo vede il protagonista ma il suo collega di spedizione che lo accompagna nella capitale degli antichi.

 

In realtà lo vedono entrambi, perché si sentono inseguire e si girano a un certo punto dureante la fuga.

Tant'è che il protagonista lo descrive precisamente (per quanto possibile ).

 

Quello che SOLO il collega vede e che non vuole rivelare, lo vede durante il viaggio di ritorno in aereo, dalle montagne al campo base.

Modificato 28 Settembre, 2010 da Erik

[Joker]

Mi pare di ricordare che lo shoggoth non lo vede il protagonista ma il suo collega di spedizione che lo accompagna nella capitale degli antichi.

 

In realtà lo vedono entrambi, perché si sentono inseguire e si girano a un certo punto dureante la fuga.

Tant'è che il protagonista lo descrive precisamente (per quanto possibile ).

 

Quello che SOLO il collega vede e che non vuole rivelare, lo vede durante il viaggio di ritorno in aereo, dalle montagne al campo base.

 

Dopo che lo vedono segue una fuga a dir poco precipitosa ma non staremo spoilerando troppo?

[Erik]

Per ora non troppo, ma sarebbe meglio fermarsi.

[Dairon]

Non mi risultava fossero novellas (il novel è leggermente differente), ma è possibile che mi sbagli io.

 

Sinceramente non ho mai ben capito dove finiscano le novellas e comincino i novels, però wiki così chiama Dexter Ward. Poi per una volta la nostra lingua mi sembra più efficiente...

Comunque guarda che si chiamava Howard di nome proprio, il nostro Providence-man... La prossima volta lo chiamerò Edoardo, ok?

 

P.S.: il film amatoriale di CoC comunque è interessante perché non aggiunge davvero nulla al racconto, è di una letteralità quasi sconcertante, eppur funziona. I pochi soldi fanno cadere solo su una cosa, anzi, una location...

Vedremo con (quest'anno) Colui che Sussurrava nelle Tenebre, che c'ha pure il parlato!

 

(avete praticamente spoilerato tutta la trama in tre righe, non male )

[kevin8]

Nooo, non state spoilerando troppo.... ormai so già tutto del racconto...

 

 

Erik, mi capiterai tra le mani prima o poi....

[sirtao]

meh, la conoscenza della trama è irrilevante quando si parla di Lovecraft. è l'ambientazione e la narrazione che contano.

[Erik]

Comunque guarda che si chiamava Howard di nome proprio, il nostro Providence-man... La prossima volta lo chiamerò Edoardo, ok?

 

Senti, già tu parlare strano. Io povero uomo bianco fare fatica. Poi se tu parlare con nomi uguali, ora nomi ora cognomi, io perdere filo.

Prossima volta fai disegno.

 

Vedremo con (quest'anno) Colui che Sussurrava nelle Tenebre, che c'ha pure il parlato!

 

Uau, il racconto che probabilmente mi ha fatto più incazzare, vista l'immensa IDIOZIA del protagonista.

Che culo.

 

(avete praticamente spoilerato tutta la trama in tre righe, non male )

 

Colpa tua che non ti fidi.

 

Non fraintendermi. Fai benissimo.

[Taro]

Secondo i disegni dell'epoca gli antichi risultano stranamente kawaii:

 

 

 

 

 

Shoggoth and friends

 

 

Chissà se si conserverà questo concept

[sirtao]

lo Shoggoth sembra molto quello di Demonbane

[Erik]

Si conserverà. Con soluzioni visive molto belle/raccapriccianti.

Modificato 1 Ottobre, 2010 da Erik

[Boyd]

Maledetti Del Toro & Alan Moore, mi hanno fatto venire 'na voglia pazzesca: sto rileggendo Tutto Lovecraft.

[kevin8]

io ci sto dietro (alternandolo a letture più leggere) da quasi un anno...

[sirtao]

io sto' sfruttando il mammuth della Newton(al qual proposito, sono in offerta in massa a 9 euri alla FNAC di Torino, se a qualcuno interessa)

[Boyd]

Piccolissimo update: nulla che già non sapessimo, ma è mejo de gnente!

 

Il Vangelo secondo Ron Perlman (che per mia somma gioia ha già sfanculato The Hobbit):

 

On At The Mountains Of Madness…

 

I’ve actually read the script and it’s magnificent. [Writer/director Guillermo del Toro] wrote a role for me which is phenomenal. I’m just hoping that logistically it all works. It’s gonna be a little bit of a conflict with some other things I’ve got on the board, but I’ve gotta be there for this one.

 

On Guillermo del Toro…

 

He’s the coolest guy I know, without equivocation. He’s in a class by himself as a filmmaker. He also runs one of the most fun sets I’ve ever been on because he’s just got this amazingly wonderful wit and great enthusiasm for the filmmaking process, which translates itself into pure joy. It’s a state of grace being on a film set with Guillermo.

 

(On The Hobbit Role That Never Was…

 

I was gonna do it when he was gonna do it, but that’s all changed so I’m no longer involved. I think he had written [the character of] Beorn, the bear-man, for me. But I think it’s going to somebody else now. It’s all right.)

[Boyd]

Ci siamo quasi, eh?

 

Guillermo del Toro and James Cameron begin to climb the mountains of madness

 

And lest you think producer James Cameron is simply putting his name on it while he's off working on "Avatar 2", think again: The "Terminator" director was present for the summit meeting and has been offering Del Toro some notes.

 

"In his subtle style he said to me, 'I have a few notes, but I have one fatal flaw [that I see in the script],'" Del Toro recalled. "He pointed out one thing that was big. I've been thinking about this for 35 years, and he pointed out something I'd never seen."

 

Mitico!

[Erik]

E' sempre bello quando due persone messe a lavorare insieme fanno più della somma delle due parti. :biggrin:

[Boyd]

Piccolo aggiornamento di Cameron su Le Montagne della Follia:

 

"We're very, very actively pre-producing the film right now with Universal. The design work is phenomenal, both the three-dimensional and two-dimensional design work, the physical maquettes, the CG test scenes; the artwork is phenomenal. The fans certainly won't want for a visual feast with this film. But there's [still] a bunch of number-crunching and "How you gonna do it?" and "How you gonna make it?"; "Where you gonna do it?" All that stuff."

 

Non ho ancora capito se il film ha ottenuto ufficialmente il greenlight. Mi sa di no. Comunque speriamo che a giugno parta.

Modificato 6 Gennaio, 2011 da ilpirlaconleragnatele

[Erik]

Nemmeno a me risulta che sia stato "greenlit" ufficialmente, ma il fatto che la pre-production sia così spedita è certamente un buon segno ... senza contare che con Cameron alle spalle è normale lavorare a spron battuto, fottendosene degli studios fino a quando sono sono strettamente necessari! :lol:

[Boyd]

Sul New Yorker è apparso uno splendido e piuttosto articolato profilo su Guillermo Del Toro:

 

Show The Monster

 

Riporto solo la porzione fapperrima che riguarda Le Montagne della Follia:

 

 

But he was thinking of taking an even bigger risk, and pursuing the adaptation of Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness”—his “Sisyphean project.” He had begun sketching images for an adaptation in 1993 and had completed a script in 1998. But the project had seemed too daunting; digital effects weren’t yet good enough to render creatures that changed shape far more radically than Transformers. Then, while del Toro was in Wellington, “Avatar” was released, and its landmark effects made “Madness” seem plausible. Crucially, James Cameron, a friend, had agreed to be a producer for “Madness,” sharing his expertise in designing strange worlds. And del Toro was now less wary of making digital monsters. At Weta, he had experimented with a “virtual camera,” which allows a director to maintain a sense of physicality when filming a C.G.I. creature. “They lay out the animation, you grab a camera, and you can change the angles within that virtual environment,” he said. “One day, I ended up dripping sweat from handling the virtual camera on the motion-capture stage. This camera would be very handy on ‘Madness.’

 

The movie would not be an easy sell, though. Del Toro envisaged “Madness” as a “hard R” epic, shot in 3-D, with a blockbuster budget. Creating dozens of morphing creatures would be expensive, and much of the film needed to be shot somewhere that approximated Antarctica; one of the most disquieting aspects of Lovecraft’s novella is that the explorers are being pursued by monsters in a vast frozen void, and del Toro wanted to make the first horror movie on the scale of a David Lean production. But a “tent-pole horror film,” as del Toro put it, hadn’t been made in years. High-budget productions such as “Alien” and “The Shining” had been followed by decades of cheaper thrills. “The natural flaw of horror as a genre is that, ninety-nine per cent of the time, it’s a clandestine genre,” he said. “It lives and breathes—‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre,’ the first ‘Saw,’ ‘The Blair Witch Project’—in dark little corners that come out and haunt you. Rarely is there a beautiful orchid that blooms.” He mentioned Hitchcock’s “The Birds”: “It was a major filmmaker using cutting-edge optical technology and special effects. It was a big-budget movie. It had Edith Head designing costumes, it had all the luxuries. And it was appealing because it had all the polished aspects of a studio film.”

 

Del Toro thought that nearly all his previous movies had conveyed “sympathy for the monsters.” With “Madness,” he said, he would terrify the audience with their malignancy. First, though, he needed to make Universal executives feel that, in allowing del Toro to design a creature-filled world, they weren’t being reckless—rather, they were commissioning a variation on “Avatar,” the most successful film in history. “Studios look backward,” del Toro said. “Filmmakers look forward.”

 

To anybody who owns thousands of comic books, “At the Mountains of Madness” is as central to the American canon as “Moby-Dick.” H. P. Lovecraft, who was born in 1890 and died in 1937, wrote densely interlinked stories that convey “cosmic horror.” More than one tale features a giant tentacled alien named Cthulhu. Lovecraft refers to Cthulhu several times in “Madness,” and del Toro, in writing his script, had devised a way to integrate the iconic beast into the climax. (“Its membranous wings extend, filling the horizon, its abominable head silhouetted by lightning in the clouds!”) Del Toro could create a totemic god.

 

Del Toro loves the story, in part because Lovecraft combines terror—the panicked effort to escape the creatures—with metaphysical horror: “The book essentially says how scary it is to realize that we are a cosmic joke.”

 

This past summer, Universal gave del Toro seed money, allowing him to create an “art room” for “Madness.” Once again, del Toro was designing creatures without a green light. By the end of the year, he would present his vision to the studio. If Universal executives said yes, he would start filming by June; if not, he would have provided more support for the parental claim that monsters don’t really exist.

 

I met with del Toro in Los Angeles on the first day of preproduction. He had hired five artists to engage in ten weeks of “design promiscuity” at Lightstorm, James Cameron’s production company, which is in Santa Monica. Parts of “Avatar” had been designed in the same suite of offices.

 

For the first few days, del Toro wanted his “Madness” artists to draw without precepts. These men had been sketching Shoggoths since junior high school. What had Lovecraft made them see? “Lovecraft is actually really stringent about describing the Old Ones,” he noted. “And his design is really hard to solve, because they are essentially winged cucumbers.”

 

He wanted the creatures in “Madness” to be fascinating, not disgusting. He said, “Normally, creatures are designed in the same way that gargoyles were carved in churches—for maximum shock value.” He cited Ray Harryhausen, a master of stop-motion animation, who designed the effects for the 1981 “Clash of the Titans”: “He used to say, ‘Whenever you think of a creature, think of a lion—how a lion can be absolutely malignant or benign, majestic, depending on what it’s doing. If your creature cannot be in repose, then it’s a bad design.’ When you see our creatures, you’re not going to say, ‘Oh, what a great movie monster.’ You’re going to say, ‘What aquarium, what specimen jar did that thing come from?’ They need to look entirely possible in their impossibility.” He’d been watching nature documentaries. “The worst thing that you can do is be inspired solely by movie monsters. You need to be inspired by National Geographic, by biological treatises, by literature, by fine painters, by bad painters.”

 

(CUT) each Shoggoth had at least “eight permutations.” He said, “Let’s say that creature A turns into creature A-B, then turns into creature B, then turns into creature B-C. And by the time it lands on a guy it’s creature E.” He discussed one grisly Shoggoth transformation: “It’s like when you grab a sock and you pull it inside out. From his mouth, he extrudes himself.”

 

Del Toro then visited his art team.(CUT) Barlowe had been sketching Cthulhu and many appendages emanated from a central vertical column; it had the majesty of a redwood tree. When del Toro looked at it, he said, “I love the idea of the floating things!” Cthulhu was surrounded by satellite parasites, just as some sharks are haloed by schools of fish. Barlowe said that he was going for a “regal look,” and pointed at the creature’s neck. “It’s like an Elizabethan collar!” del Toro said, smiling. “Great.”

 

Though del Toro was enthusiastic about Williams’s work, he admonished him for incorporating too many signs of “infection or disease.” “These creatures are like Ferraris,” del Toro said. He sliced the air with his hands, suggesting aerodynamic contours. “The Old Ones didn’t create shitty machines.”

 

Peter Konig, who also designs characters for video games, sat in a pitch-dark room, before a glowing screen. His work was sharply etched, like Egyptian hieroglyphs. He had been playing around with symmetry, and showed a Shoggoth that appeared to be perched on spindly legs. With a click, he flipped the image upside down, and the legs became long arms, like those on a monkey.

 

“The silhouette works both ways,” del Toro said.

 

Even though del Toro’s team had three months to experiment, the challenge was immense. The frozen city, for example, could emerge only after the artists had settled how the Old Ones moved, ate, and slept. “If you spend enough time strolling in the street—seeing a cathedral, seeing a door opening and closing in a building or a car—you understand the ergonomics of human beings,” he said. With a few key shots, del Toro needed to conjure, wordlessly, the lives of the aliens.

 

“I wanted the whole city to be like an abandoned coral reef,” he said. He showed me an image of a cavernous interior space. Everything was tubular and encrusted with skeletal remains—abandoned tools. “A coral reef is a shitload of skeletons fused together, right? All the technology those creatures have, all their technology is organic. You and I use metals, plastics. These creatures don’t have weapons or chisels. They create other creatures as tools.”

 

The architecture of the Old Ones was based on “curves and cylinders,” he said. “There are no steps, no ramparts. And the edifices are not at all human. There’s no balconies or doorways.” The city resembled a labyrinth of pneumatic tubes.

 

As del Toro had promised, the city’s form intimated the silhouette of the Old Ones. “They are essentially suppositories,” he said. “They sort of torpedo through the tubes.” But didn’t Lovecraft write that they had wings? Del Toro smiled: wings and tentacles had been hidden inside the ovoid silhouette. An Old One opened up “like a Swiss Army knife.”

 

“We designed the creatures in such a way that they can go forward or backward, or hang, or be vertical, and they still make sense,” he said. Beckoning me into the Rain Room, he opened his laptop and showed me a rough digital rendering of an Old One. As Peter Konig had done at Lightstorm, he flipped the image upside down; then he flipped it on its side—in all formations, locomotion was plausible. “It has no forward and no backward,” he explained. “If this moves forward or backward in a way that I can recognize, it’s boring. Have you seen a Spanish dancer move in the water? They go like this”—his hand made an undulating motion. “It’s muscular and creepy.”

 

The Shoggoths had a racecar sheen. “They are pristine,” he said. “They are functional. They are not asymmetric. Symmetry is efficiency. And these guys need to be efficient.” He wasn’t sure yet if the Shoggoth palette should be “pearlescent” or “circulatory”—reds and blues. Since the Shoggoths could mutate into anything, there was no fixed silhouette, but many would feature a “protoplasmic bowl,” an abdomen-like area from which new forms could sprout. One maquette was a disorienting twist on classic Lovecraftian form. It looked like a giant octopus head with tentacles jutting from the top and the bottom—a fearful symmetry. “That’s my belly in the middle,” del Toro joked.

 

In another maquette, the Shoggoth had sprouted two heads, each extending from brontosaurus-like necks. Their skulls could be smashed together to destroy victims. “The idea is to create craniums that function as jaws,” he said. The Shoggoths would often create ghastly parodies of human forms; as they pursued the humans, they would imitate them, imperfectly.

 

But del Toro promised that the film was “not gory.” Victims would be “absorbed” by the aliens in ways that were “eerie and scary.” He explained, “When you watch a documentary of a praying mantis eating the head of its mate, because of the complexity of the mouth mechanism, you’re fascinated. It’s a horrible act, but you’re fascinated.” Though he wouldn’t be spattering blood, he said that he needed to fight Universal for an R rating, “to have the freedom to make it really, really uncomfortable and nasty.”

 

Modificato 1 Febbraio, 2011 da teloappoggiomanonspingo

[Erik]

Boyd, metti in spoiler. C'è TANTA roba che io, non avessi letto la sceneggiatura, non vorrei sapere.

[Boyd]

Boyd, metti in spoiler. C'è TANTA roba che io, non avessi letto la sceneggiatura, non vorrei sapere.

 

Fatto anche se è francamente superfluo: a parte te, chi vuoi che si sciroppi un malloppo del genere in inglese? Inoltre si discuteva solo dei possibili concept-art per i mostri, nulla di trascendentale per me. :uff:

Modificato 1 Febbraio, 2011 da teloappoggiomanonspingo

[Dairon]

Ci inventiamo la tecnologia degli Antichi?

[Erik]

Fatto anche se è francamente superfluo: a parte te, chi vuoi che si sciroppi un malloppo del genere in inglese? Inoltre si discuteva solo dei possibili concept-art per i mostri, nulla di trascendentale per me. :uff:

 

Non lo so, ma c'è soprattutto un nome importante che NON deve essere rivelato ... almeno non fino a tempo debito.

 

Ci inventiamo la tecnologia degli Antichi?

 

Tutto nuovo e migliorato. Per la tua gioia.

 

Sherzi a parte, non c'è nulla di "inventato". E' tutto mutuato da Lovecraft, ma dove il Solitario è fumoso e scazzone, qui si punta ad una maggior precisione e folle sensatezza, per meglio servire la sospensione dell'incredulità.

Non posso essere più preciso, ma tanto ce lo ridiremo.

[Boyd]

E' tutto mutuato da Lovecraft, ma dove il Solitario è fumoso e scazzone, qui si punta ad una maggior precisione e folle sensatezza, per meglio servire la sospensione dell'incredulità.

 

Esatto: è proprio inutile dibattere con chi notoriamente non capisce un cazzo, ignora le più elementari regole dello storytelling (visivo) ed è un bastian contrario a prescindere.

Modificato 1 Febbraio, 2011 da teloappoggiomanonspingo

[Dairon]

L'architettura degli Antichi è esplicitamente non biotecnologica, usavano gli shoggoth per trasportare la pietra etc. Come sempre qui, altro che scazzone, è pignolo fino alla noia: questa è una modifica della mitologia in questione.

 

E no, non sono contro le "aggiunte". Chtulhu è fuori dal testo ma ci può stare (nel romanzo specifico lo si cita solo come mitologia pregressa, al massimo si parla della sua progenie), e per quel che è ci potrebbe stare, che ne so, un accenno ad un'altra divinità originale; però se anche sarebbe pure un concetto carino il popolo alieno che è così alieno che sputazza mattoni, stiamo adattando HPL, mica inventadocelo, no? Piuttosto, cerchiamo di rendere la parte documentaristica del tutto (che sarà difficile, per questo bisogna pensarci bene; se non si opererà in tal senso, idioti a pensare di girare), che il materiale è già tantissimo e poco cinematografico.

 

Mi preoccupa un po' anche la questione delle teste degli shoggoth (?), invece mi sembra si faccia il giusto con la versatilità degli Antichi.

 

Non capisco per altro perché altri debbano abbassarsi gratuitamente a livelli da asilo nido quando si fanno notare le verità più banali. A meno di non sapere di che si parla (testo originale).

Modificato 1 Febbraio, 2011 da Dairon