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PARIS PHOTOCALL [07/09/10]

MADRID PHOTOCALL [07/13/10]

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Part 1:

DAN KAUFMAN: So how familiar with the cartoon were you when you auditioned?

AASIF MANDVI: I didn’t know anything about it. I’d never watched the cartoon before I got the audition. What happened was there was a period of time where they said, “Night is very interested in you for this role,” but he hadn’t actually made an offer yet. And so, in that period of time, between when they said, “Night is interested in you,” and when Night actually made the offer, I watched the first season of the cartoon. To understand a little bit more of my character, you know?

DAN: Were you excited to maybe be working with Night?

AASIF: It was weird, because I was actually—you know, I’d met M. Night Shyamalan briefly at the after-party for Lady in the Water, and I’d met him outside a Broadway show once. But I had never really spent any time talking to him or anything. After the audition they called me and said, “M. Night is gonna call you.” And I didn’t know if he was calling me to say, “Hey, you know, that was a terrible audition. Don’t ever audition for me again,” or if he was calling me to offer me a role. Maybe it’s, you know, a slow day, and he’s like, “Hey, I’ll call Aasif Mandvi and see what he’s up to. How’s life at The Daily Show?” I thought, “Maybe he’s just calling to chitchat, ’cause that’s what he does.”

DAN: Of course, he’s got nothing else going on.

AASIF: (laughs) Right. But then it turned out that he was calling to be like, “Hey, I loved your audition.” And we talked about it. I was in an airport, actually, on my way to shoot a piece for The Daily Show. So I was in the departure lounge at the airport and I get this call on my cell phone from Night, and he’s basically talking to me about this movie. And I’m boarding this flight, you know?

DAN: (laughs)

AASIF: By the end of it I was like, “Night, I gotta go! We’re taking off and they’re asking us to shut our cell phones off.” (laughs) And then he was just like, “Let’s do it. You wanna do it?” And I’m like, “Yeah, let’s do it!”

DAN: Awesome! So, the offer might have crashed the plane?

AASIF: It might have. It might have. (laughs) If I was like, “Listen! This is a really big deal for me! I can’t turn off my cell phone right now!” everyone on the plane would’ve been mad at me.

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Part 2:

DAN KAUFMAN: In our interview with Night he said that he’s kind of a control freak. Did that manifest on set at all?

AASIF MANDVI: I can only say it if he says it. (laughs)

DAN: He did. But it sounds like it comes from a place of true affection for the material, and he just wanted everything to be right.

AASIF: Yeah. I would say he’s a control freak. But the truth is, many directors are control freaks. You become a director because you wanna tell everybody what to do and how to do it, you know? But at the end of the day, Night is an auteur. He’s somebody who creates a world that’s distinctly got his tone to it, in the same way that painters and writers do. He creates a feel and tone to his work that is very specifically him. So, in order to get that, he has to ask for exactly what he wants. And he does.

DAN: How was your experience with him different from other directors you’ve worked with?

AASIF: Well, some directors are very loose. Like with comedies, it’s much more about playing and improvising and riffing. In this, Night was more specific about things that he wanted. He’s like a musical conductor. He knows exactly what the musicality of the scene is supposed to be—he’s mapped it out in his head already. And the good thing about that is he doesn’t waste a lot of time, because he knows where he wants to go and how he wants to get there.

DAN: Yeah, he was saying his first table reads take so long because he would frequently be jumping up and describing scenes in great detail, acting out camera moves and such.

AASIF: Well, and this is an indication how technology is working today in making films, Night had many of his shots already animated onto his iPod.

DAN: Oh, cool!

AASIF: Yeah, he had them in an animated format so that he could see where he wanted the camera to go, and how he wanted to do it. So he was recreating things that had already been plotted out very specifically. It wasn’t like working with a director who’s figuring out where the shot is and how to do it [on the fly]. Because when you’re working on a huge production like this—this is not some indie film, you know what I mean?

DAN: Yeah, seriously. This is kind of a big deal.

AASIF: You can’t spend the whole afternoon figuring out how to set up this shot. I mean, you can’t do that on an indie film, either. But the thing is that he didn’t have that luxury, because there was a lot to do. There were a lot of things, CGI-wise and special effects-wise. So it’s quite a mammoth task. The good thing was that he had it all planned out — how he wanted the shot to ultimately look and how he wanted the camera to move. I’m sure that he varied from it to some degree, but for the most part, it was all kind of set up. He could tell you, “This is where I’m going with the camera.”

DAN: He also mentioned he doesn’t do a lot of coverage.

AASIF: He doesn’t do a lot of coverage and he doesn’t like to cut, which sometimes makes it hard for the actor, because you gotta get it, you know? It makes it difficult because normally, you can cut away, you can cut back. There was one scene that I did where we had to get it in one take, and it was a big, long scene! So the camera, the actor, everything had to work together as one. But then, when it works, it looks amazing. You’re like, “He got that all in one take?!” And that’s part of his style. I think that’s why the special effects and everything are gonna look so cool in this movie, because he doesn’t do a lot of cutting. The special effects, the waterbending and the firebending and all that stuff, it’s all being done in these long takes. I don’t think we’ve seen that before. I don’t think we’ve seen Night’s style in a special effects movie like this before.

DAN: I don’t think we have, either.

AASIF: It’s not gonna be like a lot of action movies, where you’re just like cut, cut, cut, cut, and half the time you don’t actually know what you’re watching. You’re just seeing a lot of close-ups. You know you ended up at the end of a battle, but you don’t quite know what happened. I think that’s what’s gonna be so cool about it; these long takes. That’s gonna be what makes it unique. So, on one hand it looks awesome. On the other hand sometimes it’s hard for the actors and for the special effects people and everybody involved. (laughs) And for Night himself, you know?

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Also, there was a NEW Last Airbender trailer that aired during Glee. Be sure to check it out as it features a few new scenes with Ozai, Zhao, and Iroh speaking!

Caps for both videos coming soon.

Also, a NEW photo of the Last Airbender cast during a Cast Screening was added to the GALLERY. Be sure to check it out!

JULINA TATLOCK: The Last Airbender has major elements in it that a lot of your other films don’t have: huge action fighting sequences and the big use of special effects. Was there anything about specifically the fighting and the action or the CGI that you were either concerned or particularly excited about?

M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN: Well, the fighting part of it was something I was really excited about, because I’ve been studying martial arts on and off for eight or nine years and probably, if somebody broke into my house or something, I would run like a schoolgirl, but I theoretically have been training for that moment for quite a while.

JULINA: [laughs] I study taekwondo, and the more I practice it the more I think my only winning fighting strategy would be: “Hit really hard and run as fast as I can.”

NIGHT: [laughs] Exactly. I’d like to believe that my mind would stay clear and all the training would just flow, but I’m not sure that would be the case. [laughs] But yeah, out of the applications you mentioned [fighting sequences and CGI], all of that is an understanding of the physics of fighting, and being able to apply that for the first time, really, in an acute way, was really exciting for me. I got to work with the choreographers in a real specific way, you know? If I was a dancer and I was choreographing a musical with the choreographer, it would be a similar relationship. I could say: “I’m not buying the stands on that punch; I’m not buying why you would do such a roundhouse at that moment.” All of those things, and the language, and I would talk to the two fight choreographers before, in the first days, and say: This [fighting] is dialogue, and the dialogue can’t be: “I hate you, you hate me. I hate you, you hate me,” you know? That’s not dialogue. [laughs] It’s got to be: “I don’t wanna fight you, please don’t make me fight you, please stop, I don’t wanna do this to you, OK, you’ve given me no choice.” That needs to be in one fight — that “conversation” that you’ve added to the fighting — and we would work through each fight sequence with, What’s the dialogue? What are they both saying to each other [through their body language]? Where there’s a change, who’s affecting who? And then we had the added one-of-a-kind choreography that this movie is forms against other forms … For people that aren’t familiar with martial arts, the form is where you learn particular techniques or you learn each belt. Or in Kempo, which I studied, there are different forms you learn for each belt and they teach you different movements and different stances and different katas [forms] for different purposes. It’s like tai chi — one of the four nations [in Airbender] is based off of tai chi, so there’s a lot of tai chi in the movie. There’s a lot of poetry in the martial arts. Let’s say, hypothetically, there’s a movie that my wife might not be into, but one that I would love — this [movie, Airbender,] is something that would speak to her because she would understand the emotion and the physics behind it, because we really spent time on that. It speaks to the beauty of what it’s like to control your body.

But the CGI part of it definitely scared me to death. It was something I had to learn, and really I felt like to be a “big boy” I had to learn this as part of my storytelling. [laughs] I felt like Mr. Spielberg, Mr. Lucas, Mr. Jackson and all these people were just naturals at it, and this was my training ground — just like if you want to play professional basketball you gotta learn to do [certain] types of moves. I definitely, probably, put everyone through the wringer as I was learning on the job, but I feel much more confident now where if I were given the opportunity to make parts two and three of this franchise I would love to continue the education.

JULINA: It was baptism by earth, air, fire and water!

NIGHT: [laughs] Yeah, exactly right.
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For those who haven’t yet, check this interview out of Nicola Peltz that we posted in our YOUTUBE CHANNEL a couple of days ago. Screencaps coming soon due to some website-related problems.

Also, here are some NEW promotional images! Be sure to check them out in our GALLERY!

Lastly, the OFFICIAL LAST AIRBENDER SITE has a new look! Be sure to check it out as it has NEW downloads, photos, etc…