Hitting the big screen in 2010,How to Train Your Dragonquickly became a major hit for DreamWorks.
Well, they can watch the animated movie."
“There’s room to expand it and enrich it.
She’s worked really hard for the attention that she gets.”
“She’s the kid [Stoick] would have loved to have had,“he says.
“Hiccup is never focused on this destiny.
Custom Image by Diana Acuña
His mind goes elsewhere.
He has the benefit of privilege.
He’s the son of the chief, and so he coasts by.”
It’s a better character to watch.
“It’s a better character to watch.”
The performance tells me [everything I need to know].
It’s also an expanded mythology, so not everyone needs to be white in this community.
They are a gathering of warriors from all of these different places, under the same Viking banner.
They’re now generations in, they’ve been mixing it all in.
All that sort of nonsense [surrounding the diverse casting], I just discount it.
They don’t know what they don’t know.
Once you see the movie, the things answer themselves.
The truth is, the Vikings did travel far and wide.
They were on the Silk Road.
They’re in the Far East.
Image via Universal Pictures
They’re in North Africa.
They even had a name for North Africa, which is called Blaland.
They interacted with all of these cultures and traded with all of these cultures.
So it makes sense.
[In this world], there are dragons.
It’s the truth.
Image via Universal Pictures
Then it gives a sense of urgency and purpose to the start of the story in Berk.
In generations, they haven’t even found the nest, never mind actually killing off all the dragons.
They’re being beaten at their own game.
Image via Universal Pictures
It puts Stoick under a lot of pressure, and it makes Hiccup’s screw-ups more consequential.
It ratcheted up the tension.
I took the stance that there are key moments that people see as iconic to the original trilogy.
We deliberately were very close in terms of shot-to-shot at times.
In other places, we expanded.
We take a scene into a place that was never there.
One example would be when Stoick first ventures into the fog looking for the nest.
In this movie, we can indulge in that.
We play into the mystery as we go into the fog with them.
it’s possible for you to hear the dragons surrounding them.
You get to ratchet up the peril and the seriousness of Stoick’s purpose.
It’s not just Hiccup befriending dragons, and telling the audience ‘Oh, they’re just all misunderstood.
They’re just big pets.’
We also remind them they’re dangerous as fuck.
I may be too close to it, to really see what the big surprises were.
The animated movie provided the previous model of what the live action movie is.
I feel like the biggest surprise was just how supportive the set was.
I was keeping up with the pace and being additive instead of holding people back.
My rookie-ness went away pretty quickly, I felt like I became part of the crew.
It just became such a tight-knit family right away.
I was really daunted by it, and it just turned out to be super exciting.
Every day I would wake up and say, I’m ready to go again.
It’s like making a movie with training wheels.
Where would you give more character depth?
Where would you give more [to] the relationships?
Where would you add a little bit of visceral action?”
