Monday 13 June 2011

Elle Fanning talks about first loves and 'Super 8'

Elle Fanning has had a busy year and starring in J.J. Abrams' new film, "Super 8" was like starring in two films simultaneously since there is a movie within the movie.

The movie takes place in a small town in Ohio in 1979. A group of youngsters witness a train crash while making a zombie movie on their Super 8 camera. Following the crash, disappearances and other strange events begin to take place in town.

The 13-year-old actress got to experience first love and experiment in filmmaking while on the set of the Steven Spielberg-produced film. The young stars actually wrote and starred in their own zombie movie, which will be aired during the credits.

"We filmed it with the Super 8 camera and whenever we had any breaks between the real movie, we would write the scripts for 'The Case,' as it's called and we would take out our pencils and write all the lines and stage directions and hand them to J.J. [Abrams]," Fanning told OnTheRedCarpet.com. "We were so proud. It was fun to have that be part of the movie, so you'll have to stay for the credits to see it!"

The movie-within-a-movie was written by the young stars
Hopefully you stayed through the credits to see "The Case" in its entirety, because the six young stars of "Super 8" wrote and directed it themselves.

"We actually wrote 'The Case,' " Fanning said. "J.J. [Abrams told us] it had to be a zombie movie and that was the only thing we had, so during breaks, we would sit down and collaborate and make up the lines and everything," she explained. "And then we actually shot it with a Super 8 camera."

There is a lot going on visually in "Super 8," but it's hard not to notice the sweeping, magical tinkling of the film's score. So what instruments are you hearing? We asked Oscar-winning composer Michael Giacchino to explain which instruments make up the distinct effect.

"[There is] a celesta, which is kind of a bell piano, a very short piano with bells," Giacchino revealed at the film's premiere last week. "You play it like you would a piano, but with bells. A Hammond organ was a big part of the score as well, which is interesting because you normally only hear those in church or in blues songs," he added. "We used it with the [103-piece] orchestra, which was really fun. There was guitar actually, but done in a very ethereal way, you would never know it was a guitar."

About that alien
The biggest secret of them all: There's an alien in the movie — one that the kids didn't see until after they'd already been running away from it while filming green-screen sequences.

"Whenever we were on set and acting with it, we were imagining what it could look like," Ryan Lee said. "When we actually saw it, it was 10 times more scary than what I had imagined."

"The artist for 'Avatar' actually made the alien," Gabriel Basso revealed. "It was really cool, because I was talking to him and he showed it to me on his laptop. I was like, 'That's what we're running from?' 

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