wo brothers find a unique mechanical tin board game and play it, making their house blast off into space, fly past Saturn and head to the planet Zathura. Zathura is based on the children's book by author Chris Van Allsburg, who also wrote Jumanji, which was made into a film starring Robin Williams, and The Polar Express, which starred Tom Hanks and Josh Hutcherson, who stars as Walter, the older brother in Zathura.
Walter, 10, and 6-year-old Danny (Jonah Bobo) play a board game that spins numbers, moves mini-rocketships and spits out a card that creates havoc. The cards bring out a destructive robot, freeze their sister (Kristen Stewart) and make a lost astronaut (Dax Shepard) appear outside their house. The SF children's story is brought to the big screen by Jon Favreau, who acted in Deep Impact and Daredevil and has two children of his own. Favreau bounced elements off his children to see whether they were scary and funny enough, especially the giant lizard-like Zorgons, designed by monster creator Stan Winston. Tim Robbins also stars as the dad in the film, which opens nationwide on Nov. 11.
Favreau and the cast spoke to Science Fiction Weekly at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills, Calif.
Josh Hutcherson and Jonah Bobo, you play brothers so well in this, how did you get to have such a good connection?
Hutcherson: I have a 9-year-old brother, so I do identify a lot with the problems of having a little brother. One time I was showing my brother a wrestling move, and he ran away and called our mom from the bathroom and said I was trying to kill him. But it was hard to yell at Jonah because he is a nice guy.
Bobo: He wasn't too bad, he was good to me.
What did you guys learn during the making of this that you want to tell other kids out there?
Bobo: That goats on other planets have four eyes, and if you find green goo in a spaceship, don't eat it, it's not candy, it's alien goat poop.
Hutcherson: Be careful, you could get launched to Candyland or run across big, fat, stupid alligators.
Do you like board games or video games?
Hutcherson: I would much prefer playing board games, moving pieces around. I don't really relate to the video games.
Bobo: I much prefer video games. I think they're more exciting, that's all.
Dax Shepard, what was it like working with the boys?
Shepard: It was great. I just got to come to work and play all day like I was 9 again. Josh, the older one, is a really, really good actor, and Jonah, the 7-year-old, is a certifiable genius. He is best on improv. I would do a million moves with those two, they're so much fun. I was not expecting to improv, but Favreau would say, "Let's try something else, let's see if we can make this funnier," even though David Koepp's script was good. There wasn't much to prepare for the role; it wasn't like they had to put me in the space program. I think the biggest preparation I had to do was to put on the space suit.
This is the second film in a row you're doing where time travel is involved, right?
Shepard: That's true, I'm taken through the "time sphincter" in this one, and next year there's Idiocracy with Luke Wilson. America has dumbed down, which is probably happening right now, and [Wilson] is the smartest man in the world, and I'm arguably the dumbest man in the world. To get [into the role] I decorated my trailer with monster truck posters, which was the extent of my research for that movie, and I gained 35 pounds, which is something I wouldn't do again.
How was it working with Favreau?
Shepard: It was great. Jon asked me if I wanted to make $9 million someday and become a big action star, or if I want to just make $100 and play a quirky weird guy for the rest of my career. So I grit my teeth when I fly through the hole and do my heroic moment, rather than just look like the geek.
Kristen Stewart, how was it having a life-sized frozen mold of yourself made by Stan Winston?
Stewart: Yes, there's a life-sized Kristen Stewart standing in a warehouse next to the Terminator, and it's an incredible experience standing next to something like that, something that no human being has ever experienced unless they have a twin. Of course, her lips are all blue, and her hair is frosted, she's not that good-looking at all. I did have to stand really still; it was an arduous process when modeling for the cast. They did a digital scan of my body, but I did have to breathe through a tube when they did my head. It was kind of scary. Then I had to sit there while they were painting her. I stood next to the mannequin the whole time and watched. Every freckle in my arm is on that body.
You're doing a movie with Asian directors Oxide and Danny Pang, called The Messengers, about a family that gets haunted at a sunflower farm in North Dakota. Can you tell us more?
Stewart: It's a great movie. I'm catatonically terrified most of the time. There's a lot of screaming. ... The movie is about a family going through a rough time in their lives. Financially, they are not stable, and there is animosity between the daughter and the parents for a few pretty good reasons. They move out to a farm, escape the hectic city life and enter a pretty spooky house. The only person who sees what's going on is my character, but because of her history no one believes anything she says. It's a pretty claustrophobic movie set in the middle of nowhere, and you feel very closed in, and she's a very vulnerable character who is determined to get to the bottom of what's going on. It's not like their previous movies, no, and it's not like typical Asian horror films [adapted for American audiences]. It's through different eyes. In fact, when we were on the set at the end of the movie they gave us shirts that read "Pang Vision" instead of "Panavision."
What did you do to get along with the boys?
Stewart: We went to the pier a couple of times, hung out, played games. They're just like normal guys, they have great families. Jon made it a lot of fun on the set.
Jon Favreau, are you a big science fiction fan?
Favreau: I'm a total sci-fi fan. And, I'll be the first to admit that time travel is a flawed notion. You can disprove there is time travel by definition, because you can keep going back until you hit a reality when time travel was never discovered and then get locked into that time and never change anymore. Science fiction accepts the fact that there probably isn't time travel, but this is a kiddie movie.
What made you want to use models more than computer graphics for the special effects in the film?
Favreau: The biggest thing that we did, as opposed to how it would normally be done, is to shoot the spaceship scenes like they would have done with the old Star Wars, not the new ones. Rather than pouring money into CG, we built miniature models and did stop-motion control and shot it on miniature sets and cobbled it together. That's the way they used to do it. It's fun, and you have something to hang up in your house. You look at Forbidden Planet and it looks like a person hiding inside it, and Alien was scary, but when you finally saw the alien you could see the creature was just a guy in a suit. We built the robot puppet first and made it so that the legs and arms were too small for a person. There was a guy inside the costume with his arms folded across his chest, and we put his feet on with CG and connected it to the torso. You can't see how a person could be in there, but there was, so it was a perfect mix of the two.
You have two kids now, 2 and 4. Did you use their feedback for the film at all? Did you bounce anything off of them?
Favreau: Kids like getting scared, and unfortunately PG movies are not made for what kids want; it's for what parents think their kids want. My son is 4, and he wants to see Spider-Man, and I'm not comfortable with him seeing all of it. He wants to see Fantastic Four, and I had to turn off Van Helsing, that was too much. He wants to see Lord of the Rings, and that's R. We wanted to make something that was PG and not make anything inappropriate for kids, nothing graphic, but have something that is a little frightening to kids. ... I played them a trailer, and they wanted to watch it over and over and over again, and that's when I noticed that I may have tapped into something that kids will like. The first time my son saw a few of the things, he jumped and hid his eyes. But then he knows that they will be safe and he wants to see it again.
We heard that you used an air horn to scare the boys every once in a while?
Favreau: Kids are terrible liars. To tell them there's a monster on a green screen and getting them to react, you'll get a terrible performance. But to get a child's eyes to light up for the first time, to get a 7-year-old to see something for the first time, that is priceless. So if the set can shake, they can experience that jump and roll, and they'll flinch better than they can do consciously. The air horn worked well when they didn't know it was coming, but then they caught on and just got really upset.
Your next project is John Carter's Mars. How are you preparing for that?
Favreau: That has been around a long time, I heard it was competing with Snow White as far as an animated movie idea. It only has one human in it and Tharks, these 15-foot-tall green aliens with four arms. It has expansive scenes and cities and big war scenes. I wonder if we have finally reached the tipping point where we can do it. I don't know if all the problems have been solved. The problem with the story is that it only has one human, and I don't want to have just CG characters, I want a mix of them. We don't have a John Carter yet. We don't even have a script yet.
You didn't show the house blasting off into space. Is there a reason for that?
Favreau: It would have been great to show the house blasting off. It would have been like the little kid opening up the door in Close Encounters with the light under the door. But we wanted the discovery to be the same as it was in the book. It would have been a real cool shot, but the whole idea of the house is like the parable of The Wizard of Oz —it is a parable for a dream, and every movie should be seen as if it could be a dream.
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