The Malaysian Insider :: Showbiz
The Malaysian Insider :: Showbiz |
| ‘Avatar’ director donates dive craft, says 3D movie due in autumn Posted: 27 Mar 2013 12:52 AM PDT
Cameron, who is focused now on pre-production for the sequels to his blockbuster movie "Avatar", said he hoped the donation to the non-profit research facility in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, would bring the technology he developed for the undersea craft into the mainstream. In a telephone interview marking the one-year anniversary of his nearly 11.2-km-deep dive in the western Pacific, the Oscar-winning director said that scientists had identified more than 60 new species, including bacteria, from material he brought back. Cameron expects to release a long-awaited 3D movie of the dive in cinemas in the autumn of this year. Cameron also directed the 1997 movie "Titanic" as well as undertaking and filming several underwater expeditions exploring the wreck of the ship in the North Atlantic. Q: What impact do you hope the Deepsea Challenger's transfer to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) will have on continued research? A: It drives public attention to the need for new technology and funding for deep ocean work, which WHOI is the leader of in this country. It will have a very specific and immediate effect of new vehicles and new vehicle platforms, our cameras, our communications, our syntactic foam and battery systems, they'll incorporate into their future stuff. The way we solved problems is so outside the box, they're eager to bring that into their projects. I could leave the sub in my barn, but that's not going to do anybody any good while I'm off making "Avatar" films for the next few years. I want this technology to be out there and dynamic and adaptive. Q: What are some of the new species and findings that have come from this dive? A: I met with Doug Bartlett out of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography (who was the chief scientist on the dive expedition) and he said there are at least 68 new species coming out of this, and that includes a number of arthropods and invertebrate animals and a lot of new bacteria. Q: What will audiences experience when your 3D movie of this dive is released? A: "The Deepsea Challenge" is coming out this fall. You go on the journey. It's about the team of these young guys and how they tackled the problems and overcame a lot of hurdles and setbacks. They got to see some pretty amazing stuff and got to bring back the footage in 3D. You'll feel like you've been through the whole thing, including actually diving inside the sub. I was jammed into this 42-inch (106cm) sphere with all this equipment and a 3D camera with me at all time. Q: How has filming underwater in 3D with this dive and past Titanic dives helped you as a Hollywood director? A: There's always been a good synergy between the technology that's been developed for these expeditions and the technology that's used for the films. "Avatar" was shot with a second generation of the 3D cameras that were built for my 2001 Titanic expedition. We're constantly building and improving the technology. Some of the things that went into building the Deepsea Challenger cameras, which had to be so tiny, will probably be used in action cameras in the next "Avatar" films. The odds are other filmmakers will use this technology before me because my company, Cameron Pace Group, supplies cameras to most of the big movies that are shooting in 3D. We develop something new, I use it on an expedition, and while I go off and write and design and fool around in pre-production, five other movies have gone out and used the cameras in the meantime. That was the case even when I had made "Avatar", a number of other films had already used those cameras. — Reuters |
| Judi Dench rules on stage despite age taking toll Posted: 26 Mar 2013 07:01 PM PDT LONDON, March 27 — Actress Judi Dench may be battling deteriorating eyesight and a failing memory but the veteran performer showed no sign of faltering when she teamed up with fellow James Bond star Ben Whishaw on a London stage. Dench, 78, one of Britain's most-respected actresses, has tackled a list of stage and film roles over her career, at ease with Shakespeare as in Hollywood, playing M in seven Bond movies before bowing out of 007's life in last year's "Skyfall". It emerged a year ago that Dench was suffering from macular degeneration, the leading cause of severe vision loss in people over 60, and she relied on friends to read scripts to her. This month she said on a television interview that she took fish oil tablets daily to boost her memory and remember her lines, but said she had no intention of slowing down or stopping acting. Dench won nothing but praise yesterday for joining 32-year-old Whishaw, the gadget guy Q in James Bond, on Monday in a new play, "Peter and Alice", by American playwright John Logan who co-wrote "Skyfall". "(Dench) lends to Alice her brilliance at combining a sense of tart, witty combativeness with a reverberant depth of bruised humanity," wrote critic Paul Taylor in the Independent although he was less enamoured with the play, giving it three stars out of five. "Dench is unmatchable," raved the Times critic Libby Purves, giving the play that "breaks your heart open" five stars.
As the two start talking and look back to their respective childhood, the gaps start to emerge between the fantasies of the stories they inspired and the harsh reality they faced as adults, confronting loss, death, illness and alcoholism. The 90-minute play, painfully moving, was described as a tenderly sketched portrait of life's challenges. Tragedy "No one expresses that pain and resilience quite as acutely yet stoically as Judi Dench, and she is ideally partnered by the more depressively hang-dog presence of Ben Whishaw for a beautiful study in contrasts of how they deal with life's blows," wrote critic Mark Shenton in the Stage. The true story of the five Davies brothers, whom Barrie befriended, is tragic. The eldest, George, died in the trenches of World War I, while Michael, the second youngest, committed suicide aged 20, and Peter, the middle child, killed himself by throwing himself in front of a London train in 1960 aged 63. The case of Alice Hargreaves (nee Liddell) is almost as sad. She lost two of her three sons in World War I and ended up broke after her husband's death, selling off the original 1864 "Alice" manuscript to raise cash. She died in 1934. "One of Judi Dench's great strengths, seen in countless Shakespearean heroines such as Viola and Beatrice, is her ability to combine ecstasy and melancholy, witnessed in abundance here," wrote the Guardian's critic Michael Billington, giving the play four stars. "Peter and Alice", running at London's Noel Coward theatre until June 1, is Logan's first new play since "Red", which opened in London in 2009 and went on to win six Tony awards, Broadway's highest honours, in 2010. — Reuters |
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