On The Set Articles
Super Hero Flix and Sci Fi Wire posted two articles about their set visit for Dragonball Evolution. They are pretty long so I have taken a brief couple paragraphs from each article.
“What we saw on the Mexico set of Dragonball Evolution”
In the scene, Goku and Master Roshi (Chow Yun-Fat) are squaring off against Lord Piccolo: Marsters unrecognizably covered neck to toe in black armor and wearing full-head makeup that turns him into a greenish pointy-eared alien.
“It’s a four-hour makeup job,” Marsters, encased in layers of prosthetics, says between takes, sitting in a chair to keep cool so that he doesn’t sweat the makeup right off.
The set is lit: amber spots, smoke, bits of flame in the background. Master Roshi is on the ground, Goku on all fours. Piccolo strides up to them to finish them off. But Goko rises to punch Piccolo in the face. Piccolo parries the blow. Cut!
Part of the challenge has been to adapt and translate for an American audience a 20-year-old franchise that comprises by one count a manga series, three anime series, 17 animated feature films, a card game, several electronic games and a series of collectible action figures.
“I looked at all the mangas, the Dragon Ball 18 books that they provided me,” writer/director Wong says during a break in filming. He adds: “I didn’t really know too much about it, and Dragon Ball Z [a later animated series] is so different than Dragon Ball that, you know, when I heard about it, I thought, ‘Wow, I don’t know … what to do with this thing.’ Because it’s so crazy, with all the aliens and stuff like that. So I looked at the mangas, and it gave me a whole different perspective on what this movie can be.”
“We battle the cast of Dragonball Evolution in Durango, Mexico!”
Dragon Ball is especially important to the fans. They are the ones that will be most interested in seeing this property achieve glory on the big screen. Wong, of course, took that into consideration when crafting the look of the film, “There is an incredible amount of story that can’t be put into just one movie. The biggest change we had to make was with Goku. We wanted to age-up the character. In the mangas, he is twelve and fourteen. It’s not until the end that he becomes a teenager. We wanted to start with him on his eighteenth birthday. That changes a lot of things. The most important thing to capture in the movie is the tone. Its important to capture the fun that Dragonball offers. We had to take out the parts we couldn’t do. The mangas are just so fantastic. There are so many places we could go. We had to figure out this journey for Goku. How he comes to realize his destiny.”
More than anything, it was important for Wong to take a realistic approach to this world and its iconic characters. He had to ease the more fantastical elements in with great finesse, “In the manga, you are thrust into this magical world that is overrun with pterodactyls and dinosaurs, and a bunch of other crazy things. Those are in the book right from the get-go. Our approach was to make that world more relatable to those audience members who aren’t familiar with Dragon Ball. We slowly turned it into a more fantastical type of world as the story progresses. As Goku goes on his adventure, the things that he visits, and the creatures that he runs into become much more bizarre and crazy. My hope is that people will want to go back and check out the comics after seeing the movie. Then they will be even more excited about it. Hopefully, they will get caught up in it like I did with the mangas.”
Wong proved to be a very busy man on set, as he was bounced from one location to the next. While setting up the fight sequence in the Temple with Emmy and Joon, he was also hustling to set up shots inside a giant foam volcano. There, Justin Chatwin’s Goku and James Marsters’ Lord Piccolo would be throwing down in one of the greatest climactic battles ever put to screen. We started to follow Wong out to the volcano when he got sidetracked by a second unit team filming Chow Yun-Fat in the back of an Airstream trailer against a green screen. As the trailer was jostled by a couple of off-screen prop-masters, a giant fan blew Chow’s hair back. He was wearing Roshi’s signature Hawaiian shirt, and a pervert’s grin. Wong’s eyes lit up. He liked what he was seeing, “You guys are going to like this scene. He’s taking a joy ride. I think you will also like the fighting in this movie. One of the things Fox asked before we started shooting was, “What is this going to look like? Why is it so special? How are you going to make Dragonball different in feel from the other martial arts movies we have seen?” I started thinking about that a lot. Two different approaches came to me. We wanted to make these fight sequences really different. So we chose the Iconic camera, which is really tiny. You can hook them onto an actor. You can have a fist-cam. You can follow their punches. We also liked the idea of a super-slow motion camera. We thought that would bring an interesting look. We thought, ‘How can we employ new technology into the film to make it look unique and special?’ One of the first things we did was think about Goku. We wanted to show some of the magic moments that the Phantom camera can capture. So that’s how we decided to do the fighting scenes. After you read the mangas, you can’t help but want to make something special out of them. This is a really exciting project, and I am excited to be doing it.”
