Here’s the first look at Henry Cavill, Freida Pinto and Mickey Rourke in Tarsem’s upcoming Greek mythology tale “Immortals.”
The film follows the story of warrior prince Theseus (Cavill) as he leads men and gods alike into battle against titans in order to save mankind. Also starring in the picture will be the likes of Stephen Dorff as Stavros, Kellan Lutz as Poseidon, Luke Evans as Zeus, John Hurt as Old Zeus and Isabel Lucas as Athena.
“The Gods are like superheroes [in the film],” Tarsem explains to IAmRogue in a series of video blogs. “So they can kind of do what Batman does — not like Superman — so you can jump from a high thing and not get hurt by landing down but he can’t fly up… it’s can’t have ‘magical-ness’ in it. So I keep thinking the Gods are like flying squirrels.”
Cavill and Pinto obviously look good in these images but it’s Rourke that’s definitely the more interesting and more in line with something you’d expect from the visual magician, Tarsem. There’s also a tease of a Minotaur villain in the film, played by Robert Maillet (the 6’10” giant in “Sherlock Holmes” and “300”), who Tarsem simply describes as a “butcher who just likes to fuck people up.”
The sets seen in the video blogs aren’t exactly the expansive outdoors shots in “The Fall,” but of course, Tarsem is going for a very different canvas, originally touting the project as “Caravaggio meets ‘Fight Club.'” While the influence from the 16th century Italian artist is being retained, the director noted that “it’s turning a bit more into Caravaggio meets ‘Oldboy,'” going on to describe an influence from the famous action hallway scene in Park Chan-wook’s 2005 film.
“Four or five months I just thought it’d be good if it wasn’t so cutty,” Tarsem revealed.” So [action sequences are going to be more] just one piece of action that I wanted to be a bit more choreographed and unfortunately the slow-motion thing has been done to death so it’s kind of violent, fast action.”
It also looks like the production has decided against shooting in 3D with cameras in the vlogs of a more reasonable size as opposed to what we imagine would be much bigger equipment. Of course, the film will probably see a post-production conversion anyway but for now it’s good to see Tarsem isn’t taking chances with his vision.
“Immortals” is filming in Montreal as we speak and is tentatively scheduled for a convenient 11/11/11 release.
