Bob Hoskins
'Mario's Great Challenge: Despite Fearsome Odds And Galling Setbacks, It Appears The Movie Will Actually Come Out'
and
'The Bros. Mario Get Super Large: Take the world's most popular video game, add $40 million, some Koopa Troopa turtles, two rewrite-happy directors and outspoken actors like Dennis Hopper and Bob Hoskins, then mix together in a deserted cement factory...'
"All these rewrites get frustrating so I don't do too much research," says Hoskins grimly, while waiting all morning for the directors to decide the shot. "The trick is: Don't take the job too seriously, turn up and do your day's work. That's all.
"My 7-year-old son is quite depressed about my playing Mario," he says. "He knows I can't even program a VCR, yet alone play the game. How do I prepare for the role? I'm the right shape. I've got a mustache. I worked as a plumber's apprentice for about three weeks and set the plumber's boots on fire with a blowtorch.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
'The Bros. Mario Get Super Large: Take the world's most popular video game, add $40 million, some Koopa Troopa turtles, two rewrite-happy directors and outspoken actors like Dennis Hopper and Bob Hoskins, then mix together in a deserted cement factory...'
Pg. 9
Later, Hoskins sits in his trailer and puts the epic struggles of moviemaking into perspective: "After I did 'Roger Rabbit,' my younger son wouldn't talk to me. It took me about two weeks to figure out that he reckoned that any father who had friends like Bugs Bunny, Yosemite Sam, Daffy Duck, and who didn't bring them home to meet him, well, his father was a total (jerk). The basic premise of all this business is that everybody's totally insane. They are. They are completely insane. And that's wonderful."
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
'The Method? Living it out? Cobblers!'
[He accepts there have been flops, and films he's detested, but that's the nature of the game.] "The worst thing I ever did? Super Mario Brothers. It was a fuckin' nightmare. The whole experience was a nightmare. It had a husband-and-wife team directing, whose arrogance had been mistaken for talent. After so many weeks their own agent told them to get off the set! Fuckin' nightmare. Fuckin' idiots."
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
San Sebastian Film Festival - Bob Hoskins Press Conference
Q: I'd like to go back to one of your more commercial films, perhaps it's not your favourite, but I would like to know what attracted you Mario Bros.? Because it was going to open the doors to others possibly or you just liked the idea of the film itself? I'm sure I've said the name incorrectly but I'm sure you know what film I am referring to.
A: You're talking about Super Mario Brothers. Super Mario Brothers had a husband and wife directing team whose arrogance convinced everybody of their genius, but I'm afraid the genius wasn't there, and we watch this completely lost. It started off a very good script, but the first day they threw the script away, and they said: we'll do this our way. And when they're gone over ten million dollars their own agents threw them off the set, then we said: we've got to finish this film ourselves. The editor came down and said: I don't know what we are gonna do, we haven't one single finished scene. So basically in a week, in two weeks, we had to cobble together the film and what could have been a very, very interesting film went up... rubbish, complete rubbish. My attraction was the money in the first place (little laughter in the room).
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
John Leguizamo
'Mario's Great Challenge: Despite Fearsome Odds And Galling Setbacks, It Appears The Movie Will Actually Come Out'
and
'The Bros. Mario Get Super Large: Take the world's most popular video game, add $40 million, some Koopa Troopa turtles, two rewrite-happy directors and outspoken actors like Dennis Hopper and Bob Hoskins, then mix together in a deserted cement factory...'
"New pages," mutters John Leguizamo, who's been cast as Luigi Mario. "Every day's a new page. It's like waiting for the news. What the hell happened yesterday? And there it is: All new, all live. 24 hours: Ding, ding, ding."
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Dennis Hopper
'Mario's Great Challenge: Despite Fearsome Odds And Galling Setbacks, It Appears The Movie Will Actually Come Out'
and
'The Bros. Mario Get Super Large: Take the world's most popular video game, add $40 million, some Koopa Troopa turtles, two rewrite-happy directors and outspoken actors like Dennis Hopper and Bob Hoskins, then mix together in a deserted cement factory...'
"I suspect it will probably be rewritten," Hopper said. His eyebrows are shaven and his hair sculpted into dinosaur ridges to make him resemble the archenemy of the brothers Mario, the evil King Koopa, a descendant of Tyrannosaurus rex. "The script had probably been rewritten five or six times by the time I arrived here," he added. "I don`t really bother with it anymore. I just go in and do it scene by scene. I figure it's not going to hurt my character."
"The directors won't give interviews?" Hopper asked, after being told of Morton and Jankel's decision not to talk to the press about their work.
"That's the smartest thing I've heard from them. That's the only intelligent thing I've heard that they've really actually done."
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Dennis Hopper Talks Super Mario Bros. the Movie
I made a picture called Super Mario Bros., and my six-year-old son at the time -- he's now 18 -- he said, 'Dad, I think you're probably a pretty good actor, but why did you play that terrible guy King Koopa in Super Mario Bros.?' and I said, 'Well Henry, I did that so you could have shoes,' and he said, 'Dad, I don't need shoes that badly.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Random Roles: Dennis Hopper
Super Mario Bros. (1993)—"King Koopa"
Dennis Hopper: Wow, you really did a jump there. [Laughs.] My son, who's now 18 years old, was 6 or 7 when I did that movie, and he came up to me after he saw it and he said, "Daddy, I think you're probably a really good actor, but why did you play King Koopa?" And I said, "Why?" And he said, "Well he's such a bad guy, why did you want to play him?" And I said, "Well, so you can have shoes." And he said, "I don't need shoes." [Laughs.] So that was my 7-year-old's impression. It was a nightmare, very honestly, that movie. It was a husband-and-wife directing team who were both control freaks and wouldn't talk before they made decisions. Anyway, I was supposed to go down there for five weeks, and I was there for 17. It was so over budget. But I bought a couple buildings down there in Wilmington, NC, and I started painting. I made an art studio out of one.
AVC: You had a real run there in the '90s of playing villains in big movies like Super Mario Bros., Speed, and Waterworld. Was that fun for you?
Dennis Hopper: Speed and Waterworld… I like both of those films, actually. I did not like Super Mario Bros. I thought Waterworld got a bad name for itself in the United States, but it did really well in Europe and Asia. I think the studio sort of shot themselves in the foot by announcing it was so over budget, blah blah blah, it's going to be a failure… All this came out before we released it in the States. But I enjoyed it. And Speed, I really loved; I thought it was a terrific movie. Jan De Bont's first directorial job, coming from being a cinematographer. He did a terrific job. That was fun.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Fiona Shaw
'The Bros. Mario Get Super Large: Take the world's most popular video game, add $40 million, some Koopa Troopa turtles, two rewrite-happy directors and outspoken actors like Dennis Hopper and Bob Hoskins, then mix together in a deserted cement factory...'
But a recent solution chosen by the directors is to put Hopper and Fiona Shaw, who plays Koopa's queen, into a mud bath with $3,000 worth of worms.
"The first script I got was witty," sighs Shaw, whose previous credits include the doctor in "My Left Foot." "That was maybe 10 scripts ago. Now they're talking about taking a bath with worms."
But Shaw's courage inspired the directors to add the tub of worms. During a scene in the Boom Boom bar, they had instructed Shaw to sip from a shot glass containing a worm. Assuming the worm was fake, she'd done as directed--only to find it wiggling from her lips. Shaw had maintained her professional composure until after the take. The directors loved it so much they'd asked her to do it again. She had reluctantly done so... and did it again... and again....
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Harold Ramis
Harold Ramis Glad He Turned Down Mario Movie
(Video mentioning the statement)
Harold Ramis: (Producer) Roland Joffe wanted me to direct the Super Mario Bros. movie. I took the meeting because I loved the game,†Ramis told the Associated Press. The AP notes that this may have been the veteran comedy actor/director’s "smartest career decision,...
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Shigeru Miyamoto
MIYAMOTO: THE INTERVIEW
Edge: What are your thoughts on the Disney Super Mario Bros. movie?
Shigeru Miyamoto: Well, when we first initiated talks about a Super Mario Bros, movie, I tried to emphasize the point that the Mario Bros. games are fun as videogames and if we were going to make a Mario Bros. movie, that movie should be entertaining as a movie, and not a translation of the videogame. I think that they tried very hard and in the end it was a very fun project that they put a lot of effort into. The one thing that I still have some regrets about is that the movie may have tried to get a little too close to what the Mario Bros. videogames were. And in that sense, it became a movie that was about a videogame, rather than being an entertaining movie in and of its self.
Edge: Are there any particular movies or TV shows that influence your game making?
SM: I do watch a lot of movies and I’m fan of TV shows. It’s really hard for me to pinpoint one particular film or TV show that’s really influenced my work. I would say that probably on a whole, I’ve been influenced by what’s going on in film and television. I think in particular, the comedy drama and the tools that they use have been particularly influential in the work that I have done.
Edge: There’s been so much talk about the convergence of Hollywood and videogames. Where do you see the future of interactive entertainment?
SM: I think that there are a lot of commonalities between the videogame industry and Hollywood in terms of the resources they have to create the work that they are doing. In particular, when it comes to graphics, it can be a very intensive process to create videogame graphics. Similarly, the special effects and computer graphics that Hollywood is using in movies today can be a very intensive process. So I think that there is going to be a lot of opportunity for Hollywood and videogames in the creation of these intensive assets to share the resources. I think there will be more shared assets between movies and games, whether it’s a game that’s appearing as a movie or a movie that’s appearing as a game. It’s still important to understand that the composition of a videogame is very different from the composition and the structure of a movie. So being able to share those resources between two very talented directors in each of those realms is possible, but they must also work in the game world and film world so the projects can stand independently and are two entertainment pieces.
Iwata Asks: New Super Mario Bros. Wii
That's why when discussion started about making it into a movie, I got really nervous. I thought: "How are they going to film blocks suspended in mid-air?" When we made the game, it would start off with a large number of blocks and Mario would go along smashing those until there was just a single block floating there. We decided that ending up with just one block floating there didn't seem to feel unnatural, and we made the game with that in mind.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Other - Production
Rocky Morton
'The Bros. Mario Get Super Large: Take the world's most popular video game, add $40 million, some Koopa Troopa turtles, two rewrite-happy directors and outspoken actors like Dennis Hopper and Bob Hoskins, then mix together in a deserted cement factory...'
(Reached after the production had wrapped, co-director Rocky Morton said he didn't want to comment on the frustrated comments of the cast and crew. "It was a tough schedule. It was a big project. It was just very, very difficult." He found nothing unusual about the various rewrites. "Doesn't that always happen?")
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Roland Joffe
'Mario's Great Challenge: Despite Fearsome Odds And Galling Setbacks, It Appears The Movie Will Actually Come Out'
and
'The Bros. Mario Get Super Large: Take the world's most popular video game, add $40 million, some Koopa Troopa turtles, two rewrite-happy directors and outspoken actors like Dennis Hopper and Bob Hoskins, then mix together in a deserted cement factory...'
"Rocky and Annabel invented this idea that (an) old king had gotten devolved into a kind of primal organism, and a few of the cells escaped and... began growing into fungus, but fungus with a conscious mind," Joffe explained. Eventually the fungus became a character. Made of fishing-lure base and hot glue by prop designer Murton, it evolved to heroic, plot-point stature, destined to be the savior of Mario and Luigi.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Joffe, determined to maintain the integrity of his first purely producing effort, resists the savior role. "I hope to be the kind of producer I'd want as a director," he says. "As a producer I don't intrude. I suggest and guide by asking questions. Sometimes I find my voice in this very technological film is one that's asking, 'Yes, but what about the character? What does the audience feel?' And it's a learning process for me, to ask them."
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
"We fought very hard to get the project," remembers Joffe of the bidding war for the movie rights in 1990. "There were a lot of contenders." But none had what Nintendo considered a viable solution to the absence of a plot.
"I went with a storyboard and story outline," Joffe says of his initial pitch meeting to Nintendo President Hiroshi Wayauchi. "I said, 'This won't be the story, but it'll be a story that contains some of these elements.' I was improvising."
Joffe knew that he wanted to make Mario Mario and Luigi Mario real people, not computer generated or animated cartoon figures. His concept won their infant production company Lightmotive the movie rights to "Super Mario Bros." Joffe believes Nintendo trusted him to actually get the film made, that it would not become just "another studio project" left on a development shelf.
It also didn't hurt that Eberts and Joffe offered "a creative partnership" allowing Nintendo to retain merchandising rights.
So in 1990 Lightmotive paid $2 million for a three-word plot: "Super Mario Bros." Now what? "We needed to find a way into this story to bring the game to life, that gave everything a kind of reality and created a myth of its own," Joffe decided. "The game is made up of an odd mixture of Japanese fairy tales and bits of modern America."
Joffe visited Nintendo headquarters in Kyoto, the ancient imperial capital of Japan. There he met the game's creator, Shigeru Miyamoto, who explained that Mario had initially been inspired by the company's office landlord in New York. Miyamoto further explained that the Koopa Kids were modeled after the team that designed Game 3. Joffe learned that the precise translation of "Super Mario Bros. 2" into English is "Doki Doki Panic."
But during the nights in Kyoto, Joffe slept on tatami mats, "just as the Japanese have been sleeping for 3,000 years." During the days, he visited the "completely sanitized" Nintendo Headquarters where "rooms are so airtight to keep out the dust and everyone wears white coveralls." Afterward, he'd visit ancient temples and discuss mythology.
Joffe returned to Los Angeles with at least a feel for "these conjunctions of images." He wanted to capture on screen whatever elusive archetypal qualities made the video game so compelling to an entire generation of children--including his own son, who loved playing the game that his father couldn't master. "How do we catch this wonderful mixture of images and inputs and strangeness?" Joffe wondered.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
"We made some mistakes," acknowledges Joffe. "We tried some various avenues that didn't work, that came up too medieval or somehow wasn't the right thing. I felt the project was taking a wrong turn. And that's when I began thinking of 'Max Headroom.' " Joffe admired the television program about a computer generated talk-show host who became a British cult hero in 1985. He went to Rome to meet with two of Headroom's creators, Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel.
Joffe remembers their immediate description of their immediate version of the Super Mario story: "65 million years ago, when the meteor hit the Earth where Brooklyn is today, it pushed a small group of dinosaurs into a sub-dimension, and they evolved into something like us--humans descended from reptiles."
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Dinoyork was born: an alternative reality, a kind of reverse version of contemporary America but "basically a reptilian society and therefore infinitely more brutal than our mammalian society," says Joffe. "So it's a wonderful parody of New York and heavy industry. We call it the New Brutalism."
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
"I wanted the concentrated energy of a studio and the obsessive focus of being on location," Joffe realized. "And you couldn't get anything more New Brutalist than a deserted cement factory."
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Fred Caruso
'Mario's Great Challenge: Despite Fearsome Odds And Galling Setbacks, It Appears The Movie Will Actually Come Out'
and
'The Bros. Mario Get Super Large: Take the world's most popular video game, add $40 million, some Koopa Troopa turtles, two rewrite-happy directors and outspoken actors like Dennis Hopper and Bob Hoskins, then mix together in a deserted cement factory...'
"It's not unusual to go through many script changes," says co-producer Fred Caruso, whose distinguished career includes "The Godfather" and "The Bonfire of the Vanities," "and especially with this particular film because this comes from a video game that has no story. Everything we're doing is made up and it comes from the flow of what we're shooting. All the games have are the characters."
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Dean Semler
'The Bros. Mario Get Super Large: Take the world's most popular video game, add $40 million, some Koopa Troopa turtles, two rewrite-happy directors and outspoken actors like Dennis Hopper and Bob Hoskins, then mix together in a deserted cement factory...'
Pg. 2
During one production meeting, the two directors had insulted director of photography Dean Semmler by giving him their list of camera setups for the week's shoot, plus specific lenses and light readings. "Why'd you hire me?" shouted the Oscar-winning cinematographer of "Dances With Wolves."
Parker Bennett
'The Bros. Mario Get Super Large: Take the world's most popular video game, add $40 million, some Koopa Troopa turtles, two rewrite-happy directors and outspoken actors like Dennis Hopper and Bob Hoskins, then mix together in a deserted cement factory...'
"It's the best kind of work there is," said an elated Bennett of his unexpected fortune, "the last minute. All the actors know their characters. They come to us. They're looking for solutions rather than options, so it's high energy."
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Other - Crew
Patrick Tatopoulos
Patrick Tatopoulos: The Man Behind The Monster
The inevitable followed as Tatopoulos separated from MEL when he was contacted to design the main street sets and characters for SUPER MARIO BROS. "I was the conceptual designer, but the producers additionally asked me to create the characters. I called upon MEL and people who I met there, including Mark Maitre, Dave Nelson, and Rob Burman." Of this time, Burman noted that Tatopoulos' versatility was shining through. "Patrick had pretty much designed everything and we worked from his drawings. Also, he sculpted several really dynamic pieces. He's an incredible artist, just amazing."
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Mike Elizalde
Interview with Mike Elizalde of Spectral Motion
EM: Did you sculpt them as well?
ME: No, I didn't sculpt them. The cosmetic work was done by ADl's staff of sculptors and character designers. But just before that I was working with Dave Nelson in Agoura Hills at his company called Animated Engineering. That was a great experience working directly with Dave Nelson as one of the mechanical designers. Again, he's one of those people who demands the best.
EM: I'm not that familiar with Dave Nelson's career. Can you tell us some of the films that he's done?
ME: He did a film called Fluke, and he did the Yoshi dinosaur puppet for Super Mario Brothers the Movie, and a fake head of Christopher Lloyd for an episode of Amazing Stories while in Stan Winston's employ. He was also a chief mechanical designer for Chucky under Kevin Yagher, so he's done quite a bit of work.
Yoshi from Super Mario Brothers.
Animatronic design by Dave Nelson
of Animated Engineering.
Yoshi with skin. Designed by
Mark Maitre.
EM: So you worked for him on Super Mario Brothers?
ME: Yes, we worked together on Super Mario Brothers. We were really proud of the Yoshi puppet. Dave designed most of that and let us design parts of it. It turned out wonderfully. That's when Dave recommended me to ADI.[...]
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
David L. Snyder
'The Bros. Mario Get Super Large: Take the world's most popular video game, add $40 million, some Koopa Troopa turtles, two rewrite-happy directors and outspoken actors like Dennis Hopper and Bob Hoskins, then mix together in a deserted cement factory...'
Pg. 5
"As each script developed," remembers designer David L. Snyder, "the fungus was sort of a metaphor for the mushroom element in a Nintendo game. In a Nintendo game, the mushrooms are the opponents for the allies, depending on what side of the game you're playing. Mushrooms and fungus are in the same family. The metaphor for the mushrooms is the fungus, and as time went on it became a character. All of a sudden, it's like a gigantic character and it became this deposed king of this world that Koopa has taken over. So it developed and we had a company go in and do a survey, and they did a report and came up with five stages of growth of this fungus."
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
'The Bros. Mario Get Super Large: Take the world's most popular video game, add $40 million, some Koopa Troopa turtles, two rewrite-happy directors and outspoken actors like Dennis Hopper and Bob Hoskins, then mix together in a deserted cement factory...'
Pg. 8
Designer Snyder and his craftsmen had found a unique opportunity: "In this building, with all the existing concrete structure, we could hang the scenery from the structure, and not have to build scaffolding, and could integrate the concrete structure into the film's design."
The factory's remaining machinery--such as two 400-foot-long rotating kilns that once melted gravel at 2,800 degrees--quickly became fodder for Snyder. He constructed an exterior street--Dinoyork's Koopa Square--inside the mill.
'In 'Blade Runner,' the street was one level," says Snyder. "Here I have a street level, a pedestrian walkway and above that Koopa's Room, plus six or seven stories in height. I have more flexibility in layering of levels. It's a major, major opportunity. You'd never be able to do this on a sound stage. There isn't a sound stage big enough."
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Simon Murton
'Mario's Great Challenge: Despite Fearsome Odds And Galling Setbacks, It Appears The Movie Will Actually Come Out'
and
'The Bros. Mario Get Super Large: Take the world's most popular video game, add $40 million, some Koopa Troopa turtles, two rewrite-happy directors and outspoken actors like Dennis Hopper and Bob Hoskins, then mix together in a deserted cement factory...'
"It can get confusing and somewhat crazy," confesses prop designer Simon Murton, "but two directors give you two points of view. They have very, very fertile minds but they're constantly changing into newer, better ideas. So I rush things to completion before they change again."
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Beth Rubino
'Super Mario Brothers' will go from TV screen to the big screen at Christmas
Along with Beth Rubino, the set decorator, and Walter Martishius, the art director, Mr. Snyder spent months trying to conjure a seedy, claustrophobic, hostile but oddly invigorating New York City -- one for reptiles and dinosaurs as well as plumbers, of course -- filled with vendors that sell blood tonics, knife salesmen, soapbox preachers and eternally broken cash machines.
"We took the city and stretched it into an odd carnivorous exaggeration of itself," said Ms. Rubino, who lives in New York and hopes the movie conveys the design team's deep affection for the city. "The subway, the street peddlers, the newsstands are all there -- just different. On a good summer evening, you can stroll into the heart of the city and everything on earth is for sale there. So we did that, too. But we made sure to put a little edge on it."
