WonderCon 2012: Live-Blogging the Prometheus Panel
First, we brought you the new trailer for Ridley Scott’s Prometheus. If the film is anywhere near as wonderful as the bits and pieces we’ve seen so far, it will have been well worth the decades-long wait since Scott’s last foray into the Alien universe.
Scott and company continue their Prometheus marketing at this weekend’s WonderCon, where Scott, writer Damon Lindelof, and a couple of the film’s stars are on hand to show some footage and chat about the film.
Read along as we liveblog the Prometheus footage and panel!
1:54: Damon Lindelof greets the audience to discuss his childhood love of (and traumatization by) Alien before bringing out Sir Ridley Scott to chat about Prometheus.
1:55: Scott hasn’t done much with science fiction recently because he hasn’t encountered anything terribly interesting in the genre. He teases the idea that there could be a follow-up to Prometheus, as it leaves a lot of big questions open.
1:56: A new trailer! Even newer than the one released earlier today — and one that Damon promises explains even more about the film than any trailer before it.
2:00: I haven’t seen the trailer released earlier today, so I can’t compare it to the two-and-a-half-minute 3D one they just showed. I can say that it gave me chills from the first few bars of the score.
There are a few Space Jockey images & a suggestion of facehuggers, but still nothing concrete on the film’s relationship to Alien.
The premise seems to be that a number of different ancient alien civilizations with no contact and vastly different evolutionary timelines all used the same pictograph at a similar time. Being curious and hubristic humans, we decide that this is an invitation for us to come and find them. This, of course, is not necessarily the case.
2:04: Charlize Theron told her friends and family that she was working on a romantic comedy while filming Prometheus since they weren’t allowed to talk about Prometheus at all.
2:07: Damon reveals to us that Fassbender’s character is a “robot pretending to be a human.” This may seem like a spoiler, but Fassbender assures us that this is all revealed fairly early in the film. Greg Louganis provided a lot of inspiration (fluidity of movement, etc.) for Fassbender in creating the character.
2:09: Everyone on the Prometheus panel is having the most marvelous time, which is always lovely to see. It also yields amusing exchanges, such as the following:
Lindelof: “Do robots piss?”
Fassbender: “They do, but only to make humans feel more comfortable around them.”
2:12: Scott promises to do another science fiction film as soon as possible, as he found it “refreshing.”
2:13: Taking questions from Twitter can produce interesting discussions on what it’s like for a veteran filmmaker like Scott to return to a genre that has changed so much technologically, or it can lead to questions like what Fassbender smells like. (According to Theron, it’s musk, crushed chilies, and, sometimes, a hint of mint.)
2:15: Another look at the trailer to end on. The difference in quality between the 3D trailers for Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and Prometheus really demonstrates the difference it makes to shoot in 3D rather than convert after the fact. There is such beautiful depth and feel to the Prometheus footage.
