First Picture Of Hugh Jackman In "Real Steel"
Now I for one would not want to face this guy in the ring. The iron-jawed fighter is from the upcoming film Real Steel, the film stars Hugh Jackman and he will not be throwing any punches.
The movie, directed by Shawn Levy (Date Night), imagines a world in which human boxing is non-existent, replaced by leagues of mechanized pugilists. It's expected to arrive in theaters in November 2011.
"The moment of walking in and seeing these robots, my jaw was on the floor," Jackman said Monday. That's because the robot in this image is a real device, not a digital visual effect.
Motion-capture animation is used in the film when the machines are brawling (with boxing legend Sugar Ray Leonard working as an adviser on those), but 19 real-life animatronic giants were created for scenes with the human actors.
Levy says that blend was encouraged by Steven Spielberg, an executive producer. (This is a DreamWorks film being released by Disney's Touchstone Pictures.)
"There are some things only visual effects can pull off," Levy says. "But when you give an actor a real thing, in this case a real 8-foot-tall machine, to interact with and do dialogue opposite, you get a more grounded reality to the performance."
The story, set in 2020, features Jackman as an out-of-work fighter who bonds with his estranged son when they go to work rescuing a junkyard find named Atom, and grooming it as a potential champion in the World Robot Boxing league.
"The heart of the story is this father and son relationship and in comes this junkyard robot called Atom that the kid's in love with," Jackman says. "I abandoned the kid pretty much at birth. But we come together because the boy's mother has died. We have a lot of distance to make up. It's through this mutual interest in robot boxing that they find a way to come together and form a bond."
Unlike Transformers or I, Robot, these machines aren't sentient and are controlled by their "corner men," like Jackman and the boy (10-year-old Dakota Goyo) — though Atom seems to have flashes of intelligence and understanding beyond his metallic brethren.
"Like Hugh and his son, he is a forgotten, abandoned being," Levy says.
While the story is based around sci-fi (inspired by a short story by I Am Legend author Richard Matheson), Levy says he also wanted it to seem more "old fashioned," and roots the movie in state fairs and more nostalgic, Americana settings rather than a cold, futuristic dystopia.
That warmer tone fits better with the father-son aspect of the story, he says: "Long before they can talk to each other, they work alongside each other on Atom."
In the real world, Levy says such characters might have bonded over a train set, or maybe under the hood of a car.
"Guys bond through activities. Men, and fathers and sons, find connections through doing projects," the director says. "The train set paradigm is interesting way of putting it. But … like the coolest train set or erector set you could ever get."
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Source-USAToday
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