So this is a Zack Snyder joint about "young girls who escape the dark reality of their lives through their vivid imagination". I think it'd be funny if they imagined they were all Spartan warriors and this movie was just five minutes of new footage tacked onto a repeat showing of 300.
12:42: Talking about success stories that started here: Iron Man, District 9, and 300 all started in this very room. Says Sucker Punch might be the next one to make it big. Here's Zack Snyder to tell us why. Footage is coming up, but they're going to talk about this being his first original movie that's not an adaptation. Snyder scripted it. Keeps saying how much "fun" it was; shades of the Red panel.
Gonna bring out the cast before the footage: Carla Gugino. I am not going to comment on her breasts, because that would be crude of me. Jamie Chung, Vanessa Hudgens, Jena Malone, and Emily Browning.
12:46 And the footage starts. 2D, it seems. Lots of text to start. "Open your mind." Looks like these girls are going to an insane asylum. Lennox House. All girls, I guess, looks like it might take place in the 50s. So the girls are in the asylum but parts of the movie take place in their imaginations; you just flip between the two worlds. One of them is in a burleque show. Scott Glenn is a Samurai master. No real narrative that I can tell in the trailer. The girls are soldiers in WWI, Ninjas, dancers, astronauts, fighting in mechs that fly. So yeah. Fighting robots. God damn, this looks like it's going to be the best video game movie that's not based on a video game. Huge dragon, poker game. Jon Hamm? Big zeppelin crashing, sci-fi city. So it's like Inception but with a 12-year-old boy making the dreams, I guess. Rad trailer, though.
Emily Browning is saying that the thrust of the narrative is that all of the girls are attempting to escape the asylum, presumably in "real life". Vanessa Hudgens actually knows the names of the guns that she had to fire: SAWs, 50 cals, 30 cals.
12:50: Gugino says she plays a dominatrix, psychologist, madam, and choreographer in the movie. Alice in Wonderland meets One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. Where did the story come from, Zack? "It originated for me in this transition concept; I made a lot of commercials, and there's a visual process of condensing time that created a germ of an idea." Stressful moments let the girls escape to the other world, but their adventures only last a moment in the real world, so yeah: Inception. Says there's a twist in the movie that he hopes is satisfying.
So apparently the dance scenes are representations of the girls' selves, so they each have a different dance that they do. The dance scene is a day in the life of the reality that they've created, so there's singing and dancing. Those scenes did look elaborate, like Moulin Rouge on steroids. So all of the girls are talking about their dances; Jena Malone says that her girl is a "sound therapist", so her dance is borderline burlesque interpretive dance that reflects the struggles that they girl is going through. So that's the gist of the dream sequences: they're internal struggles that the girls work through internally. Neat concept. Said that in contrast to other Snyder movies, there were a lot of peopl watching when the dances were filmed. "Liquid Chaos".
Q: The twins again. How much better is it to work with an all-female cast, as opposed to 300? A: Snyder says that his cast was awesome, predictably enough. "I could say something about a lot of stuff." The actors are amazing and did an amazing job. Q for Jamie: How did you prepare for this film? A: I had to...(asking Zack for permission to talk)...crash course in flying a plane and a chopper, had to work out with all of the girls for the fight scenes; she jumped in a month late, had three months of training, so apparently the other girls had four months of training. Pretty crazy. Q from monotone guy: What's it like to have a place among the ass-kicking women of cinema? A: "It's awesome." The thing I'm learning from Comic-Con is that everything is awesome and amazing.
1:04 PM: Q: The action scenes in The Watchman; same choreographer? A: Yep. We shake it up, but it's the same dude. A genius of mayhem. Q: This is more complex than 300; do you find it more appealing? A: It's exhausting to make a film with a hundred different levels that all have to come together in the end. Long for the simpler days when people didn't need complicated movies, but he's kidding. Q: Finally an Inception question: one of the trickier things in these films, how do you define the line between reality and imagination? A: Spent a lot of time trying to figure that out, and the rules and reality and everything else. Q: Rating? A: Chance to be rated PG-13, but he's waiting to see what they'll say. He's throwing out Lord of the Rings as a comparison; lots of dead fantasy creatures, but it was still PG-13. If you kill an Orc or a Droid, you can get away with it. Zombies or monsters. So apparently the German soldiers in WWI are zombies to try and get the rating down.
Q: What was it like writing strong female characters, which isn't the norm. A: Carla says women are always looking for multiple layers, so it was easy to make the movie, and it helps that women can be multiple things in this film: sexy, ass-kicky, etc. Snyder's a good director, but he also "really likes women".
Zack is talking a bit about writing Xerxes, which Frank Miller is working on right now. Q for Vanessa: What's it like working on this film. Guess what the answer is? "It was amazing." Yep. Probably awesome, too.
1:11: Q: One last question, all the cast members want to go down stairs to watch the footage because they couldn't see it too well from the stage. Question is about doing his own material. A: It's interesting, he rambles on a bit about being told that the comic adaptations were too close to the original source material. Once Sucker Punch was written, it became kind of similar to adapting a source material. And they're going to play the trailer again. But they're going to wait for all of the girls to come down to the front of the stage, they're mixing in with the crowd, which I'm sure is giving some security guards a heart attack right now. Good to see them pumped about their own trailer, though, and it really is an impressive piece of work. "Puish through your fear to reach your own paradise", Carla says in the movie. Tagline is "Next Year, you will be unprepared." Coming out in March 2011. Genuinely cool action movie trailer; hopefully they'll throw it online sometime soon. And that's the end of the panel, which means the race to get to the front of the line for the bathroom begins. Always fun to see people run to pee.
