Video:Whiteout-Tom Skerritt, Joel Silver, Susan Downey Interviews

Transcript:Whiteout-Tom Skerritt, Joel Silver, Susan Downey Interviews

Rebecca Murray from About.com Hollywood Movies at the Los Angeles premiere of Warner Bros Pictures' Whiteout.

Tom Skerritt – 'Dr John Fury' in Whiteout

Tom Skerritt: "Well I don't know about what it is to be alone in that cold – I haven't been alone in that cold, but you can imagine being locked into a dark room by yourself. And pretty much there's six months of whiteout and there's six months of summer. One comes and the other just goes overnight. And when winter comes to the Antarctic, in that particular place there's I think like 100 mile winds that come in and get you. You're nailed. You can't go anywhere. Guys like Shackleton – I don't know how he ever made it through. I mean you know he was there like two years, Shackleton, and everybody came out alive and that's 1914."

Before everything that we have to protect ourselves. What was the appeal of doing a movie like this?

Tom Skerritt: "Well, certainly it was working with Kate [Beckinsale]. You know, after a while it gets to be pretty much the same. Every film you just… The distinction is this happened to be a very nice group of people. Some films don't have that uniformity about them, and for me it's really the place and the people you spend your time with."

Whiteout Producers Susan Downey and Joel Silver

This was filmed a while back. What took so long to get it out?

Joel Silver: "There was an enormous amount of visual effects in the movie, far more than we realized. I mean we were trying to create a look and a feel for the movie, and we didn't realize how complicated that would be. But in really virtually every shot in the movie is a visual effect. There's a lot of CGI because we had to create this environment that was this harsh. And a situation of a whiteout, we probably couldn't really shoot in a real whiteout but we made it look like it was – and you could see everybody."

Did that mean that the budget then escalated as you had to do more and more shots or no?

Joel Silver: "We had planned to do a degree of visual effects, but we just had to do more than we thought. And once you're into that phase it was just a question of getting it right, and it just took longer than we hoped and that we thought."

And putting these actors out there…how important was that?

Susan Downey: "Well I think to get the exteriors we shot in Manitoba and I think it was for the visual look of it it was more important than for their performance because they're great and they can do it anywhere. But we had to get these vast landscapes to look like Antarctica and we managed to find them there. So they were utterly miserable and really, really cold, but it looks great."

Would you go up there?

Susan Downey: "We did. We went up there and we… Yeah, it's not pleasant."

Not something you'd do voluntarily, it has to be part of a movie.

Susan Downey: "I'm not a fan of the cold."

Did this new deal with DC and what's happening at Warner Bros with the restructuring, did that affect you at all? Does it affect Wonder Woman maybe?

Joel Silver: "Maybe. It might. But DC is now going to structure everything differently. We're still making The Losers right now, which is a DC title. And then we're going to make Lobo, which is a DC title. And, you know, I still have Sgt, Rock. But they're going to bring it all together and I don't know what's going to happen to Wonder Woman. It's going to be in the mix there so we'll see what happens."

We're ready for Wonder Woman.

Joel Silver: "When the studio figures out what they want to do, we'll be happy to do it for them."

Okay, then I've got a Moonlight question: can you ever bring it back because now's the time?

Joel Silver: "I know, but it had its life."

It was the writers' strike that killed it though.

Joel Silver: "I know, but it had its life and it's now moved on. But we'll have something else one day."

More on Whiteout:

Behind the Scenes of Whiteout

Whiteout Photos

Whiteout Poster, Interviews, Credits, and Trailer