Video:Avatar - Stephen Lang Interview, Comic Con
with Rebecca MurrayStephen Lang joined Sigourney Weaver, producer Jon Landau, and writer/director James Cameron in San Diego for the 2009 Comic Con. 20th Century Fox brought the 'Avatar' cast and filmmakers to the annual event and even showed off 20 minutes of footage.
Transcript:Avatar - Stephen Lang Interview, Comic Con
20th Century Fox's Avatar at the 2009 San Diego Comic Con.
Stephen Lang - Avatar
So tell me about working on this, particularly about the story. We hear so much about the technology, but what was it about the story that appealed to you?
Stephen Lang: "The story, it harkens back to classical themes of betrayal, of self-discovery, of renewal. It's quite beautiful. What's so tremendously, deeply appealing about it to me is that it tells the story of saving the soul of a planet and of the indigenous population that live there, and all the animals and the creatures. You really begin to understand the interconnectedness of living things in a very, very specific and literal way. And I play an intruder into that and I don't understand that, and that says something about the state of my character's soul as well. It's a hell of a story."
Can you tell us a little bit more about him?
Stephen Lang: "I play Colonel Quaritch who is the head of security at Hell's Gate, which is the human compound - kind of an outpost on Pandora, which is an extremely lush and beautiful, but very, very harsh and toxic environment for humans. My job is to keep our people alive. I take every loss extremely personally. It's a tough place, and I adopt a very tough line on it. Plus I bring to it a history of some really filthy wars back on earth which I think have also had a pretty profound affect on the state of his...on his point of view."
Do you have to change the way you act when you're acting in a film like this?
Stephen Lang: "I think you're always changing the way you act, and you're changing the way you act on a day-to-day and a moment-to-moment basis. I mean, you're throwing everything but the kitchen sink - and the kitchen sink - at it. You do what needs to be done. But, yes, when you're working in performance capture, absolutely. It's quite different. Your best resource at that point is your imagination. And I suppose that's true almost all the time in acting, but not all the time. If you're doing a Western and you're coming down the street and Val Kilmer is coming down the street at you and you're going to draw on each other - something like that, that's very concrete, very material. On the other hand, if you're on the bridge of your war ship and you're being attacked by these huge monsters which is actually a couple of grips with poles that they're beating on the side, that requires a whole different kind of processing it seems to me."