Shawn Levy is perhaps best known for directing cinema filling family favourites but his next release, Real Steel, is a rather tougher outing. Georgine Waller asked him about the change in direction...
Director Shawn Levy’s latest film marks an unlikely addition to his CV. The man who made his name in family friendly fare such as Night at the Museum, Date Night and Cheaper by the Dozen is now focussing on a Rocky-like action film starring giant robots kicking seven shades of paintwork out of each other. Here’s what he had to say about Real Steel…
Real Steel marks a change from your previous movies. Was that change in direction part of the appeal of doing this film?
I’ve always aspired to have a career that is eclectic, like the ones I admire – Ron Howard, Robert Zemeckis, Steven Spielberg. They all work in a variety of genres, but are always entertaining, always populist, always humanist. So when Steven Spielberg offered me Real Steel I jumped at the opportunity.
With the Night at the Museum trilogy and now Real Steel, we can see that you’re a fan of CGI…
Do you know what’s funny? I’m not. I’ve been working with Jim Cameron over the last six or seven months, and some directors like Jim love the technical, they really get into it. I view the technical and CGI stuff as a tool that I need to master in order to tell my story. So I don’t enjoy it as its own process, I enjoy the result of it. Which is why, I would say, 30 per cent of Real Steel uses real robots, not CGI. I built real robots; they’re remote controlled. And so the reason so many scenes look and feel realistic is it’s completely 100 per cent real robots.
So, you’ve got your own robot...
Yeah, I’m not allowed to keep it in my house though. The real robots have been under lock and key in the factory where they were made and now I think they are doing some crazy promotional tour around the world.
Were they fully functioning robots?
Yes – eight feet tall. They moved only from the torso up, so any scene where a robot is walking or boxing is CGI, but every other scene is a real robot. That’s why those scenes between the boy and the robot feel almost magical and it seems like the boy really loves that robot. That’s not acting, that was a real ten-year-old boy doing scenes with a real robot. And I know it worked on me as a 42-year-old director. When you’re in the presence of a robot that is moving and shadowing your movements, it’s pretty awesome.
What can you tell us about the themes of the movie, because Real Steel definitely isn’t just about robots beating each other up...
I felt that to do another robot movie without differentiating it would be lame. So I wanted the spectacle to be fantastic but more importantly I wanted the movie to have a real human narrative and to be essentially about the redemption of relationships and how we view ourselves. Charlie (Hugh Jackman) is a character who has given up on his relationship with his son and has pretty much given up his faith in himself, and over the course of the movie, through this weird junkyard robot, he comes back to life. So I’ve always referred to the theme of the movie as a trinity of redemption – father, son, machine. They are all similar in that they’ve all been cast away, forgotten, discarded, and because they find each other, the three of them have a chance at a return to grace. And that’s the movie.
Did you look to other robots from previous films for inspiration?
The truth is I looked to other robots less for inspiration than for differentiation. I didn’t want our robots to look the same because frankly there have been many successful other robot movies – and I envy their success – but I knew that we needed to do our own thing. So we spent six months designing our robots, because unlike Transformers, for instance, there was no pre-existent anything – no toy, no game, no graphic novel, no comic book, nothing. So we created this world and these robots from the ground up.
Have you decided what name you’d give to your own robot?
It’s funny because I have four daughters and they got surprisingly into robots as a result of this movie, and one of my daughters wanted to build a robot. So we built it out of wood – I’m a terrible craftsman so it looked ridiculous – and we named it Woodchip, and we still have him in our garage. But one of the fun things is, we’ve been asked to start thinking about a sequel to Real Steel just in case we have success, and I have to say naming the robots is really fun. Just coming up with kick-ass, sharp, evocative names is cool.
Did Hugh Jackman have to do a lot of boxing training or did he already have all of those moves down?
No he didn't. He already had a pretty decent physique, but he not only did a boxing workout for months leading up to the movie but he also worked with Sugar Ray Leonard. He showed Hugh how a fighter throws combinations, how a fighter moves, how an ex-fighter thinks, so he was very influential in not only getting Hugh into fighting shape but also impacted on the way Hugh portrayed his character.
Reel Steel is released on October 14
Want more?
- Check out the official Real Steel website
- Six of the Best Training Montages
- Exclusive interview with Soul Surfer star Bethany Hamilton
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