In
The Name Of The King
A Dungeon Siege Tale
Leelee Sobieski Interview
I
had the chance to speak to this talented actress about her role in In
The Name Of The King, A Dungeon Siege Tale.
"It would have been nice to have seen a little bit more magic on her
end. In Deep Impact, there were special effects but it was like a wave.
As far as anything else goes, I haven't worked with much special effects.
" On her special wizard entrance "I had no idea what that was going
to look like. We started off screen then kind of showed up. I think
that's something people always dream of doing. You always dream that
you can kind of walk through a wall. And if you close your eyes really
hard you will be transported across somehow and recollect."
"In
the same way in which a young girl or a young boy can dream about being
a princess too, like a young girl can dream about being a soldier with
a sword. I got to play a princess with magic powers in this invented land.
That was exciting for me with this strange Krugs and this ensemble cast.
It was fun."
"I got to wear armor for the second time in my life. When I did Joan Of Arc, I was wearing sixty pounds of armor. This was like twenty or thirty pounds. I hardly even noticed it. When I got the Joan armor, it was really incredible. I went to Rome and got fitted. And that was a full suit of armor. I had it all over my legs and everything was covered. And this it was really just fine. I had leather pants underneath. There wasn't chain mail. It really weighs you down underneath. Sometimes we had fake chain mail on Joan but sometimes quite heavy. I had this chainmail headress that was really quite heavy.Armor is really so cool. When I did Joan, we went to Rome. We worked with these Italian men who had been making armor in their family, time and time again. It was the father passing it on from son to son. That was kind of magical. On the armor in this one, I was shown different designs. I wanted the armor draping off the shoulders a bit more almost like a bird. So we kind of pushed that in that direction."
"Joan didn't use her sword as much. I did a little bit of sword training. No too much. I wish I had more fight scenes then I could have learned a whole bunch of different things. But it was really exciting. My little brother took fencing when I was doing my sword training. He kept saying to me, "Do you know this, Do you know that ?" I would say, "No No No." He remained superior to me in his sword skills.
"It was beautiful. We went to these incredible locations some of which
we took a helicopter to. It can only be accessed by helicopter or by
hiking all day by foot. We had these red helicopters. They looked like
dragon flies. They would take all the technical equipment up on top
of the mountain. You would seem them land like dinosauers. It was so
green with these red helicopters. It was green everywhere. It was so
beautiful."
"Uwe Boll had imput. There were drawings done. They were put on a board. There were fabric swatches chosen and he would come in and make his choices. We draped mannequins to get as close to what the finished product would be. That was the process. For Ray Liotta's character of Gallian, was chosen for what would be the most attractive on the actor. He looked great in blue so we chose that. "
"What
was nice about it in terms of being fantasy, sci-fi, is that you can
make things up. You're not locked into a historically correct design.
To me that's the most fun is making it up. You take elements from here
and there and incorporate into your own design. You want the flavor
of the era for sure. "
"The
Armor was quite a feat because they wanted it out of leather. The production
designer Jim Steuart had a design and we tried to execute that design
as close as possible with in the parameters of what it's doing to move
and work on the actor. There were several incarnations based on the
hinges for each square of leather that was formed and molded. Attaching
those together so that they were malable and would actually swivel.
So that you go your maximum movement out of them."
"For Burt
Reynolds' armor as the king where his was different was the shoulder
pieces and the metal around the neck. There was another department that
built that. So it had to marry with what we had done. As far as the
leather part of the armor was concerned. It was exactly the same as
the others."
"From
my end of it, I had done no research on armor. What was nice about
it in terms of being fantasy, sci-fi, is that you can make things
up. You're not locked into a historically correct design. To me that's
the most fun is making it up. You take elements from here and there
and incorporate into your own design. You want the flavor of the era
for sure. But people are not going to point to it and say that it
is not historically correct because it's never meant to be. It's a
fantasy."
"The
Village costumes, we wanted it to have an oriental flavor because the
neck styles, the sleeve styles lent themselves to the whole flavor of
the movie that Uwe was looking for. "
"The ninja costumes were ninja-ish. It was based on the Ninjas. It's
all black and it's hard to see the detail. The style was taken from
samurai and many different styles. Things were quilted. There was a
lot of detail in most of the costumes which may never get seen just
but I like to know it's there."
"The three of them, it was Farmer, Norick and Bastian who sort of travel together. They kind of had a simplified look. Jason Stratham wanted a very simplified look. He wanted to be a simple man, a simple farming man. That's where we went with him."
“Jason
Stratham wanted a very simplified look. He wanted to be a simple man
, a simple farming man."
Podcasts
Uwe Boll - BloodRayne
& Dungeon Siege
Interview with this German born director of such films as Alone In The
Dark and House Of The Dead. We discuss his new projects, BloodRayne and
Dungeon Siege. Taped at Gatecon 2005. Mr Boll will be a guest in 2006
at Timeless Destinations Convention in Vancover, BC.
Download >>
Toni
Rutter
Toni Rutter discusses her costume design challenges for the film, Dungeon
Siege: In The Name Of The King. Her background includes designing for
the pilot of Tru Calling and several seasons for Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda.
Special thanks to Bill Wanstrom of Wanstrom And Associates. Music is by
Victor Stellar.
Download >>
Leelee
Sobieski
Born
in New York City, this talented actress is now playing Muriella, a young
wizard learning from her father played by John Rhys-Davies In The Name
Of The King, A Dungeon Siege Tale. She has appeared in Eyes Wide Shut
for the legendary director, Stanley Kubrick, and played Joan Of Arc in
the acclaimed television mini-series. She will appear in the film, Night
Train with Danny Glover.
Download
>>
Video
Clips - Dunegon Siege
Long
Fall
Up
In The Trees
Ready
For Battle
,
"We
had a great crew in our cutting room for sure. The amazon rope woman design
was a culmination of sitting down with the person creating the fabrics
used. What I told them was that I wanted it to be very organic, very camoflague
like. It had to be sexy being a fantasy. The rope people had to manuever
themselves very easily. How we ended up doing that was that Kristin Bond
who sewed the fabrics for constructing the garments has this process of
layering things and cutting away things so it's all very frayed and layered.
It made it leaf like and incredible. We sewed laced pieces and organic
pieces together. We also had a rack of all these different textured things
like arm bands..etc. etc. So when Kristanna Loken came in for her fitting,
We tried several options for this piece until we created the costume that
we wanted her to wear."
“The
amazon rope woman design was a culmination of sitting down with the person
creating the fabrics used. What I told them was that I wanted it to be
very organic, very camoflague like. It had to be sexy being a fantasy."
“The
three are not like the villagers. The villagers were more peasant like.
Jason had like leather pants, things like that to distinguish him from
the villagers."
"When you do large groups like the villagers, and you're not doing
fittings. You have to have sizes for combinations for everybody. So you
have to overbuild and have more clothing available if you fitted everybody.
You have to pull from a rack shirts that are all mediums for example and
pull different things to build a costume. So you have to have massive
amounts of wardrobe to fit everybody because of the many combinations
of sizes that are there. Not always the same extras showed up. So you
had to fit them. It's a huge process but it works."
All
Photos courtesy of Wanstrom And Associates
Interviews © 2008 Sci-Fi Talk All Rights Reserved May Not Be Used
Without Permission
