Venom

Before ‘Venom’ ended production, the studio arranged a visit to their set for outlets to score some amazing footage and interviews with various cast and crew members, which they are now releasing since we are so close to the premiere date of the film. You can check out the two videos below the jump, titled ‘How And Why The Symbiotes Came To Earth’ and ‘How Tom Hardy Is Bringing Venom to Life,’ and you should as they are pretty cool and give a lot of insight into what the filmmakers had in mind on the new film.

It seems one of the biggest challenges was explaining the origins of the Venom symbiote, and tying that all into the main plot of the film. When speaking on the motivations of the symbiotes in the film, VFX Supervisor Paul Franklin explained:

“We see, at the beginning of the film, the moment when the symbiotes are collected up by a Life Foundation space probe, which finds them on a comet drifting through space, approaching Earth. And the space probe is out there looking for signs of life, and they can’t believe their luck. There’s life signals everywhere, all across this asteroid…The symbiotes seem to actively want to be collected. Because it’s all part of their plan to come to Earth. They’re looking for planets where they can find hosts to inhabit. They’ve never really found a place where they can exist in harmony with the life forms of whatever planet they find themselves on.”

Franklin goes on to talk about the number of and variation between the many symbiotes in the film:

“We see several different symbiotes. We’ve got different colored symbiotes. We understand that Venom isn’t just a one-off organism. This is a completely new thing for the symbiotes. The Venom symbiote finds Eddie Brock, finds he can live in equilibrium with him. That there’s a balance that can be found there.”

When speaking about the villainous”Life Foundation” in the film, production designer Oliver Scholl stated:

“The fun thing about the Life Foundation is that it’s a cover. Character-wise, it’s a cover. The company itself is supposed to be this beautiful, perfect scientific endeavor for all mankind, while actually, it’s just the dark cover-up for doing scientific experiments that are going a bit too far, and using people for things that are non-ethical. And besides that, being treasonous, teaming up with aliens to take over Earth. So, that’s not really healthy.”

In the second featurette, Franklin speaks about the performance of Eddie Brock/ Venom by Tom Hardy, and how much the man brought to the film with his choices alone:

“Tom voices the character at all times, and that vocal performance is so rich and so characterful that we have plenty to start working with straightaway. So we’re capturing Tom’s physical performance, and that, in turn, is also informing what’s going on with the digital character…He’s trying out different versions of what he could be saying, thinking, how the interaction would be…Interaction is the wrong word, because he’s interacting with himself. [It’s] Tom finding Venom, or trying to find him inside him, like, bringing him out and playing this schizophrenic personality, and I think it’s a very different tone.”

Of course, to be able to capture Hardy’s performance and maintain the stature of a very tall Venom, they had to do some special movie magic to get the effect just right. As Franklin states:

“Our grips built a fantastic rig using a regular camera dollie with a flat platform on the end of the arm, and the pneumatic lift can then lift Tom off the ground, so he rises up to become the full height of Venom. We’ve done lots of amazing, physical special effects. Lots of fantastic stunts have been filmed for the movie, as well. That grounds it in terms of bringing a sense of realism to the project.”

All in all, these featurettes served to get me pretty excited about ‘Venom,’ which was much needed after the disappointing news about the film getting that PG-13 rating. Hopefully, there is still enough grim violence and terror to satisfy Venom fans, as it is clear Tom Hardy and the film’s crew worked very hard on the project and strove to make a ‘Venom’ film fans would enjoy and do justice to the character. I guess we’ll find out how they did when the film premieres in a few weeks.


Source: IGN, IGN