Steven Spielberg brings 'The BFG' to Hollywood

26 June 2016 - 02:00 By NADIA NEOPHYTOU
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Nadia Neophytou gets the inside story from the maker of Roald Dahl’s The BFG

Mark Rylance as the 8m giant, with Ruby Barnill (Sophie) on his shoulder.
Mark Rylance as the 8m giant, with Ruby Barnill (Sophie) on his shoulder.
Image: REUTERS

You don't have to ask Steven Spielberg which movie he felt the most overwhelmed about making in his 40-odd years in the film business. He offers up Jaws - how it was $4.5-million over budget and 104 days off production schedule, among other issues - with very little prodding.

And just when you think he's done reminiscing about the 1975 blockbuster, he'll offer anecdotes about a more recent time in his career when he felt the same way. As recent as just last year, when making The BFG.

Taking on a film version of the 1982 Roald Dahl book loved by so many generations - more than 200million copies sold worldwide - and published in 41 languages, with an 8m central character, proved to be a challenge even for Spielberg.

It was also his first film for Disney, so the three-time Oscar-winning director was apprehensive even before filming got under way.

"When I first walked onto the sound stages and I saw the different levels of complexity and the technology that was required to realise even a single shot, I was, for the first time since Jaws, completely overwhelmed," he says, sitting in the Sir Sean Connery suite of the Carlton Hotel in the south of France, ahead of the film's international release.

"I wasn't sure exactly how to pull it off."

It seems unlikely that someone who's built his name over four decades on the ability to take a story from the pages of a book to the big screen would still be fearful of a new project. But Spielberg's willingness to admit it makes him rather a lot like the big friendly giant at the centre of his latest movie.

He may be a giant of show business, but when you get up close it turns out, endearingly, that he's probably just as scared of you as you are of him.

Dahl's big friendly giant is a character Spielberg can easily relate to.

"It took me right back," he says. "I was able to relate to the book when I read it to my own children because BFG is the loneliest giant in history - until he meets Sophie - and I felt like I was the loneliest kid in the world, growing up.

"Not because I didn't come from a loving family, but because socially I was isolated and I was never included in anything. For a long time. In elementary school, in junior high - it was not a good time for me. I know what that feels like."

The video camera became Spielberg's Sophie, and this "friendship" took him from being an imposter running around on the Universal Studios lot as a shy teenager to becoming a TV director and then a fully fledged filmmaker. His debut as a feature director came with The Sugarland Express in 1974, followed by Jaws.

But the personal attachment Spielberg felt to Dahl's story was one of the reasons for his trepidation in taking on the film. Like Spielberg, the millions of people who have read The BFG have all found their own meaning within the rummytot ("nonsense") of the book's gobblefunk language. The need to respect this was not lost on Spielberg, nor on his lead actor, Mark Rylance, who plays the giant.

Rylance's close friendship with Spielberg, who says he doesn't readily make new friends on film sets, helped ease the stress of the production. "Mark was also in the same place as me growing up; too shy to express himself and make friends. Just like me. He also knows what it's like to be one of the invisible millions," says Spielberg.

Rylance, who won an Oscar this year for best supporting actor in Spielberg's Bridge of Spies and has two more films lined up with the director, had already distinguished himself in the theatre, including in Shakespeare roles, before working with Spielberg.

So what was the biggest challenge in his latest project?

Can you forget everything but the movie itself? That's all I want. For people to forget everything except what they're experiencing

"Getting the audience to forget that any special effects went into the making of The BFG," he says.

Spielberg has never been one to shy away from new technology - from choosing to use CGI over claymation in Jurassic Park to using performance-capture techniques in The Adventures of Tintin. But his priority is to make the smoke and mirrors invisible to the audience.

"To get the audience so involved and so consumed by the characters, and in their relationship, that once they were used to what BFG looked like, they would forget how BFG was created and just go with the story - that's what I wanted," he says.

And that was the speech he gave at the beginning of the film's four-month shoot at Weta Digital, the visual effects company in New Zealand co-founded by Peter Jackson. The production required a new hybrid style of filmmaking using a blend of live action and performance-capture techniques to bring the story's fantastical characters to life, all on real sets that were built specifically for the film.

"The most important thing about movie-making is, can you forget who made the movie?" Spielberg says.

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"Can you forget everything but the movie itself? That's all I want. For people to forget everything except what they're experiencing."

When he gets it right, even Spielberg himself gets lost in the moment, as he says he did many times while watching Rylance and his co-star Ruby Barnill, 11, who plays Sophie, work together.

"It's those moments where I forget to say 'cut', because there is such truth in the scene.

"On The BFG, I remember it happened specifically in a white room, without a set, where Mark had on just his wet suit and the dots on his face, and he's explaining to Sophie what her dream means. Every time I filmed it, I got lost in it."

But those moments had to be earned. As did the approval of the Dahl family for the finished production.

"That was the one phone call I was waiting for," he says. "They are absolutely head over heels in love with the film, and that's what matters to me most."

Spielberg and the late screenwriter Melissa Mathison, who also wrote ET, had to tweak the original story when adapting it for the screen.

Spielberg says he will take on more books soon, like Ready Player One, Ernest Cline's novel about a dystopian future, and his company Amblin Entertainment has also bought the rights to The Apartment, a book by South Africans Sarah Lotz and Louis Greenberg writing as SL Grey.

So the director, nearing 70 now, is not done taking books from print to film. But he does find himself looking to new sources of inspiration.

Lately, he's been binge-watching TV shows like The Night Manager and The Girlfriend Experience. He believes TV has some of the best storytelling right now, and so, busy as he is, he makes time to watch, much to the chagrin of his handlers.

"Great writing - great stories - inspire all of us. We're better if we have more inspiration," he says. "If the stories aren't good, then we're not good. There has to be a kind of renaissance that gets people excited about telling better stories."

Whether it's on TV or in a book, you know Spielberg will be taking it all in, ready for his next challenge.

The BFG will be in cinemas on July 1

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