Land of the Lost: Exclusive Red Carpet Interviews!
Written by David Michael Brown Thursday, 11 June 2009 12:29
Interview
We speak exclusively to Land of the Lost star Will Ferrell and director Brad Silberling at the Sydney premiere
At the end of May, Hollywood hit Sydney for the world premiere of Land of the Lost, a remake of the cult '70’s Sid and Marty Krofft television show. The film’s star Will Ferrell joined director Brad Silberling on the red carpet and was obviously delighted that the first showing of his new comedy was in Australia. The pair still found time to speak exclusively to Roll Credits' man Down Under, David Michael Brown. "It's pretty exciting to have the first premiere overseas, I've never had that done before," grinned Ferrell obviously relishing the attention of the screaming fans.
The actor, who plays Dr Rick Marshall, a scientist who has invented a machine that allows him to travel to an alternate universe, is joined on his amazing journey by redneck Will Stanton, played by Danny McBride, and fellow scientist Holly, played by Anna Friel. They encounter a T-Rex called Grumpy, slow moving extraterrestrials called Sleestacks and a cavemen called Chaka in a surreal land that fuses the past, the present and the future in a new world that can only 
be created using the latest in make up and CGI FX, an avenue of filmmaking that is alien to Ferrell. “It was actually great, not nearly as bad as I was expecting. You hear some painful experiences sometimes about working on green screen and you don’t get to relate to the things that are added later on the movie but Brad the director did a great job of making sure we had real environments to work in so everything planned out, it was a lot of fun.”
Silberling, however, is no stranger to the world of big budget special FX fuelled movies with Casper and Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events already under his belt. “The interesting thing was the original show,” he explains,” was that it was shown on Saturday morning television so they could only get so dangerous. At that point it was state of the art, it was still Harryhausen style animation but because it was the Kroffts they never thought twice about cutting away from stop motion animation to puppets. That was the strangest thing, as a kid you couldn’t put your finger on it, it was weird, but that’s what they did,” he continues, “For me it’s double edged, I know the minutiae involved in filming a truck load of computer generated graphics. I took a deep breath, here we go, and I’ve done it before two other times. By the end you just want to shoot actors in a room. There is a pleasure in it too, you have an army of 250 incredible artists and you get to direct as well, just in a different way.”
Land of the Lost is the second time that Silberling has worked with a comedic genius acting out of his normal comfort zone. How does he manage to rein in such unpredictable live wires like Jim Carrey and Will Ferrell in a film that is so FX heavy and must surely rely on the actors constantly hitting their mark? “On Lemony Snicket Jim was always wildly improvising yet he was always incredibly rehearsed. So the bulk of Jim’s improvisational material was what we discovered in preparing the film whereas Will is a performer who is more in the moment, I didn’t see this as a problem, my job as director is to create a playground effectively in which they never have to feel constrained by the FX requirements,” he laughs, “they can just worry about being funny.”
