Hello, everyone. My name's Kenneth Branagh
Everyone calls me Ken,
so please feel free to do so if you choose to talk to me
while this director's commentary is going on.
And I'm here to talk a little bit
about how we came to some of the artistic decisions we made
when we were creating our new film of Thor.
So first off, the marvel of it all.
I was asked to do this back in the summer of 2008.
And one of the first things that we had to decide is,
"What's the basic structure?"
And one of the things that I was keen about was that we should start on Earth.
And so here we are in Puente Antiguo,
"old bridge," for those of you who know your Spanish, in New Mexico.
And the sequence that you're watching now
was one of the very first ones that I worked on
with our first storyboard artist,
a brilliantly talented young man called Federico D'Alessandro.
And it was about coming up with a kind of teaser on contemporary Earth
that allowed us to do a number of things.
First of all, introduce a vast Earth landscape,
something that could be, during the course of the picture, epic.
I'd worked in New Mexico as an actor, I'd shot there,
and I knew it was the land of the big sky.
And the sense of immensity in that landscape
would be, visually, very powerful and might work as a very strong mirror
for some of the epic landscapes
that we would try and convey off Earth, as it were.
We also wanted to take this opportunity to introduce the audience to characters,
contemporary characters.
In this case, Jane Foster, played by Natalie Portman,
Erik Selvig, played by Stellan Skarsgård,
and Kat Dennings, who plays Darcy Lewis here,
at the front of the movie
who are engaged in scientific activity out in the desert watching the skies,
and who are introduced to this extraordinary aurora phenomenon.
I will digress in various ways. Let me tell you a little bit about auroras.
This kind of look, this kind of image
was the sort of image that we were finding all over the world
during the course of the two or three years of my involvement with it.
So, every time somebody saw some amazing thing happening over Moscow
or over the desert in Finland, we would pool these kinds of images,
and we would talk about it with our visual effects team.
And we would work out how closely we could mirror actual phenomena
that were found on Earth.
And that's where the beginnings of that Earth-like aurora phenomenon
meets the demands of the story, which calls for a Rainbow Bridge,
the Bifrost as the comics have it, which is part of the means
by which our characters will travel from world to world.
This first shocking moment of a race through the desert
and then hitting a man who we don't quite see
was always a strong feeling
about literally starting the movie with a bang in a big landscape,
new characters, contemporary characters,
a race, a chase, and then a big question mark,
where did he come from?
And so, here, at this point in the movie, in the original version of the screenplay,
there was the idea of some kind of prologue.
So, you have a teaser to allow the audience,
perhaps, to understand we'll be back on Earth,
a landscape and people that we'll enjoy being with.
But now we go into a version of a prologue
that tries to introduce some of the thematic material,
some of the world of the larger Thor universe.
So here, for instance, this Scandinavian influence, this fjord,
this world of Tonsberg, Norway,
a name, indeed, which those of you interested in the larger Marvel Universe,
may well find features elsewhere.
But as you can see through this very concentrated, condensed,
we hope very impactive storytelling here,
certainly what we were aiming for,
we introduce both the Viking element in Viking Earth
and then the arrival of the Frost Giants.
The Frost Giants are going to be enormously important in our story
and technically, we created them
by actually designing some very impressive make-ups
that real actors wore,
as well as creating some computer-generated versions of them.
The King of the Frost Giants,
who is facing off here with Anthony Hopkins as Odin,
was played by Colm Feore, a marvellous Canadian actor,
and we wanted anybody who had to face off
against the magnificent master of the screen, Anthony Hopkins,
to be also wonderfully charismatic and able to convey a little with a lot,
and Colm Feore, with the role of Laufey, did just that.
We wanted, here, to understand that there had been a battle,
as there were so many in the history of the Norse myths
and the history of the Marvel version of the comics,
that this is a warrior race full of historical examples
of where they fought and lost worlds and gained worlds,
and how their history was forged,
but also how their lives are led, which is to tell tales of yore,
tales of dashing exploits.
And it allowed us also to talk about where Jotunheim was,
and where Asgard is in the universe,
and to introduce it through this rather disguised upside down shot
that may or may not be some kind of power source,
some kind of lighting,
some sense of an almost nuclear reactor
at the bottom of what we now see
revealed through the water, is a fjord-like land.
You have the magic of the buildings on the right floating above their base
and then this vast central tower at the back of an Asgard,
which is very much influenced by Jack Kirby, by empire,
this kind of image that you might expect to see
in the Roman or Grecian empires.
And here, another example of how we evoke Asgard,
which is with a shot like this, that is a sort of cityscape shot,
to absolutely maximise what I'll talk a little bit about later on,
which is 3-D.
But for now, let's find ourselves here, arrived in Asgard,
with young Thor and young Loki.
These are terrific performers. Dakota is Thor and Ted is Loki,
and they were remarkable for their ability
to capture something of the essence of the older actors who play them,
and also to have fun with
and be up to speed with Mr. Hopkins in this scene.
They loved being in this set, this vault set, which we constructed.
Many of the sets, we constructed because there was a concern
that we do as much as we can to make sure
that as exotic and fantastical as some of the worlds in the movie should be,
it should not feel synthetic.
There's a sort of relative reality
we discovered that we wanted to have in a superhero movie, in this case,
which somehow wants you to believe everything, even though it's fantastical.
And building sets was part of seeing real textures,
real interaction with real people, real shadows,
so that when we go to the entirely computer-generated world,
which is the case with a shot like that one,
we can feel the reality of an architectural structure like this,
the great hall for the ceremony that will be about to have Thor king.
And so this vast crown, the great doors behind, the vast throne,
all of it were constructed over many months by Bo Welch,
our production designer's great art direction construction team.
And it did make a great difference,
for instance, here, to Chris Hemsworth, who's our wonderful Thor,
embodying that willful, rather arrogant, young warrior,
who needs to walk through the halls of Asgard
for the purposes of our story, as if he absolutely owns it.
So, if you're in a great space like that...
Although, it's entirely possible for actors to imagine it,
they do it in the theatre all the time,
you have an empty space, you have to imagine some exotic place.
Nevertheless, here, with that costume on,
these golden walls, with this curious mixture of a sort of primitive qualify
to the whole layout with the patterns on the floor,
but also the sense in the finish on the walls of a material
that you believe could be made by a race that travels through space,
so that they are technologically advanced,
much more advanced than us,
but also they have this callback to an ancient culture
that uses ancient weapons,
like that spear, Gungnir, the all-powerful weapon of Odin,
Mjolnir, the hard-to-pronounce mighty hammer of Thor,
an iconic part of the Thor story.
And I, as the director, I love this combination
of the ancient and the modern, the primitive and the sophisticated.
A character like Loki wearing his horned helmet,
but they're inside these kinds of remarkable buildings
which have their own partly Viking-influenced layout,
but also have this kind of super sci-fi qualify.
For me, it was a fascinating combination
to try and bring to bear.
People interested in the larger Marvel Universe, I think,
may be interested to answer the questions of,
what are those additional items in these alcoves, in this vault?
One of the enjoyments of being part of that larger Marvel Universe
was being able to, wherever we could, maybe just offer a little indication
of how other elements of it might play here
that perhaps feature elsewhere.
And so, I encourage anybody who fancies doing it
to maybe have some fun working out what else was in the vault.
It's time, probably, to talk a little bit about
what, I think, is the luxury casting of our film.
That man, Anthony Hopkins, if you're going to cast someone
who looks as though he should run the universe, he's your man.
It's a universe that has to protect itself against this kind of thing,
the vicious violence of the Frost Giants,
these creatures who can terraform worlds
as they do with the vault there,
creating ice that encapsulates the walls, the water,
being able to produce ice weapons from their very hands.
But they are not invulnerable
to something as extraordinary as the Destroyer,
and we get a tiny hint of this creature ruled by, run by Odin,
who will appear later on in the film and who is a sort of killing machine.
This was a very early decision
to choose that particular creature, monster, machine,
whatever you like to call the Destroyer, as a key element in our picture.
This brings me back to the casting,
and how, with some of the things we've spoken about,
the idea that at the centre of this there would be a film that you could refer to
as being about fathers and sons, or, indeed, about who would be king.
Some people have said to me,
"There are Shakespearean connections here."
Where I think connections lie are between what Stan Lee was after,
and what classic, mythic tales look at,
and in this case, it is the story of a fitness for responsibility.
Thor, here, reacts to the same thing that Odin's reacting to.
Odin reacts with what one might call judgment and discretion.
Young Thor, here, is without those qualities,
he simply wants to go and hit out.
He wants to punch, he wants to fight.
And it looks like that may be the way
he's going to run his version of the kingdom.
But as you see in that very effective reading from Anthony Hopkins,
he isn't king yet.
When we did this scene, and Anthony Hopkins came out with that reading,
it was one of the moments which we subsequently learned,
as it started to play, where you could feel for what we hope
would be all the fun of the opening of the film.
This was a moment where the temperature changed a bit,
and suddenly you realise that there was actually a very passionate
and hot familial relationship at the centre of it.
We often talked about it, for all that they're speaking
in a slightly more heightened way, and they're speaking with this passion,
and here they are on an asteroid at the top of the universe,
but we would often say that the sort of emotional feeling here
is entirely contemporary in terms of what a father might relate to his sons
and the frustration that the sons might feel.
And so, that was something in rehearsal
we did many times ahead of the actual shooting.
We tried to encourage. You just wanted to believe these people.
And in this scene, for instance,
you want to believe that these two are brothers,
and that the Warriors Three and the Lady Sif,
who join them here, are their genuine friends.
The sense, however briefly done, but in the feel of how it's done,
in the way they react to each other,
in the kind of intimacy and the knowledge,
in the almost casual way they talk to each other,
that they know each other, that they go back a long way,
that in this case, as we had rehearsed it and built our backstory,
they'd been to the Asgardian Academy, if you like,
that they'd already been through many battles.
So that when Fandral and the others now suggest to Thor
that it's madness to go to Jotunheim,
we believe that they've been on other similar kinds of adventures,
that they're bonded, that they're a group,
in fact, they're a group that we want to be with.
And so, this was very important as a means of understanding
that they were this kind of group, if you like, of young cadets.
And also here, as throughout the rest of the movie,
there's a kind of lightness of tone, a lightness of touch
that's embodied by the warmth between them,
and then a kind of reaction like this from Thor.
So, that kind of back and forth, we wanted to enjoy.
Thor is an epic, and here with this kind of shot,
with the use of the horses against this extraordinary cityscape,
the sense of breadth and the geography itself,
these massive golden gates,
and then this iconic element of the Thor universe,
the Rainbow Bridge, the Bifrost,
which in the comics is a sort of psychedelic, turning, right-angled thing
that leads all the way from Asgard to Earth.
Here is a literal bridge,
but with, clearly, energies running through it that are very special.
It was something that took us many, many, many months,
really the whole of the design process, to perfect to our satisfaction.
It was tied into this building behind the glorious Idris Elba as Heimdall,
his observatory, as we called it.
We tried every kind of experiment with it,
as you'll see in some of the shots.
The bridge and the light impacts on the bridge as people walk on it
change slightly. The way in which they do that
has been something we've experimented with in very many ways.
The actual nature of the substance of the bridge
we researched in terms of modern plastics,
in terms of the make-up of quartz, et cetera, and crystals.
We tried every kind of version of this fusion
between a light source, a light energy
that would play very importantly into the story at the end,
but that also had the sort of magical feel that we were after.
As I said, it was tied into this idea of this turret, this observatory,
this globe, which in terms of directing people away from Asgard,
was now something directed by Heimdall
who, with this extraordinary inner mechanism,
could direct this gun, this nozzle, this turret, this observatory
into the universe.
And through the way in which the lightning connects
and reflects on the interior,
creates a kind of an astral map,
an astral map reflecting, if you like, the patterns of Yggdrasil, the tree of life.
So, you see an idea of it here,
as if it's some sort of extraordinary underground map,
or some sort of roadmap where he chooses a place inside that nebula,
inside that vast galactic solar system that is Yggdrasil
through which the Nine Realms are spread.
He chooses the destination and he sends you there.
And here they are being drawn into the Bifrost.
And that was me enjoying taking the sound out completely
to try and create the real impact
of passing through this, sort of, time warp, space warp,
so that they have travelled through the Bifrost,
through the trees and the branches of the Bifrost,
until they land here on Jotunheim.
So, the logic of that, sort of, space travel,
Heimdall's position up there as the lonely attendant,
as the guardian of Asgard, the last person you see as you leave,
the first person you see as you return.
I'm very pleased with the way everybody worked on that.
We had a marvellous visual effects supervisor in Wes Sewell,
who was full of brilliant ideas for that,
as was Bo Welch, whose team built so much of the observatory itself.
Beautiful finishes.
Here we come to Jotunheim.
Jotunheim, we'd imagined as this once absolutely splendid city of ice,
also like Asgard, from a civilisation that were very sophisticated
and yet had this primal connection to the source of their power,
water, ice, cold, all concentrated in the blue Casket
that has been stolen from them, in their view, by Odin,
the Casket of Ancient Winters, and it's that almost nuclear device
that would allow them to leave here.
First of all, to restore this to its former glory, then leave here,
travel through the Nine Realms,
and terraform and conquer other worlds with this terrible, icy power.
So, in this opening sequence,
which is a combination of work that we did on some set
and some CGI, realised by Digital Domain
amongst our many VFX vendors and partners that we worked with,
we wanted to create this sense of dread at what Jotunheim,
the now broken-down Jotunheim, the angry planet,
the planet full of emptiness and echoes and pain,
what that would bring to the story.
There you hear for the first time a slight treatment of the voice of Laufey.
And here we see a proper, sort of, first appearance
for this deadly red-eyed King of the Frost Giants.
Colm Feore, unbelievably patient
about the five, six hours it would take him
to get into the full body make-up that we used for him.
Legacy was the company that we worked with,
and they had an incredibly dedicated team of people
who were up in the small hours working with him.
And he's an example of the kind of actor who really can use the make-up.
Not do too much, be very still,
allow the make-up to really inform who he is,
and so the acting comes in from under and it's very, very powerful.
This is an interesting moment for Thor
because, in a way, it's his gamble, it's his risk,
and we see the point to which perhaps he can be pushed,
before he brutally risks war,
by potentially provoking and whether he is capable of listening.
It's a slight sort of shading
on what we may have to understand about him later on.
Just before all of this kicks off, might be worth talking about, briefly here,
we will again, costumes.
Alexandra Byrne did the costumes.
She's an Oscar-winning costume designer.
I've worked with her many times
and started with her back in the theatre nearly 30 years ago.
Her attention to detail in Thor's costume was amazing,
from those discs to the cape,
to the way it sculpted itself around Chris Hemsworth's body,
to the way it was influenced by the comics and by the Norse myths,
and the way in which a confident and cocky Thor can move in it.
So, here you'll see these costumes under great stress and strain.
And the fight you're about to see, the first big, major action sequence,
was one where we wanted to make sure that everybody amongst the Asgardians
had a chance to have some kind of signature move,
particularly, of course, Thor, who is the provocateur here.
And at the same time, we wanted to showcase
the incredible threat of the Frost Giants themselves,
this dormant, pain-filled race, who are now pouring out
from every conceivable part of this mixture.
Is it stone, is it jade, is it ice? Exactly what is this world constructed of?
But it's dangerous, it's lethal,
and potentially has many, many more of its population
than Thor is currently considering.
Meantime, the general philosophy for the fight was, as you can see,
to try and put the audience as close into it as possible.
For my first film, Henry V,
I had the great pleasure of working with a wonderful second unit director
and a great stuntman as well, Vic Armstrong,
whose work you'll know from many Bond films,
from the Raiders films,
from him being an incredibly impressive double for Harrison Ford,
and having been a very effective and brilliant director of many things,
but action being one of them.
I worked with him and his team, Andy Armstrong
and the Armstrong clan, who are a great part of our industry,
and we worked to, first of all, find out what everybody's individual gifts were.
We did a kind of boot camp and we made sure everybody was flexible,
that Fandral could be flashy with his sword,
that Tom Hiddleston here, as Loki,
could use the daggers in an interesting way that are part of his character.
And that we could, with long lens photography,
sometimes do what we did in Henry V,
which is to try and put people inside the battle, closer,
in this sense of a hectic, frenzied moment
where things like that can happen.
You turn around and suddenly, the taking your eye off what's going on
for even a second is lethal and dangerous.
So, we wanted there to be this sense of hurry and of frenzy.
It was less about huge, wide shots
showing hundreds and thousands of people fighting each other at this point,
but more a dirty scrum that leads to this kind of revelation
that once again, Thor, cocky Thor,
has underestimated what this angry, hurt race have in store.
And here, what appeared to be a statue or a plinth
that was commemorating some great beast of the past,
that was announcing the entranceway to this part of the city,
turns out to be, in fact, a sleeping giant,
this beast that now is headed towards the rest of the Asgardians
who are leaving with the hurt Fandral.
The inclusion of the beast happened about halfway through post-production,
where the original beat in the story had thousands,
hundreds of thousands of Frost Giants emerging from under the earth,
and by this stage of the battle, we felt we'd done it,
so we needed an additional element, and I was very, very pleased
that we came up with and then enjoyed the idea of this ice monster
doing this kind of chasing,
while the damage that Thor has done,
which is essentially breaking the very floor of the planet up,
is at work in the same way.
These kinds of shots, this massive shot with Jotunheim falling,
with the creature upside down is a great idea of Federico D'Alessandro.
Part of the process, where for me,
as a relative newcomer to the world of big visual effects shots,
happens very late in the day,
so many of these shots, which I was thrilled by,
were always planned and I knew what was coming.
But it was really quite late in the day when they arrived,
so the experience in a visual effects picture,
where you've worked on it for maybe two, three years
of the full understanding that that's gonna happen,
doesn't quite get to you until the last minute.
So, it's a little harum-scarum.
The visual effects shots are cooking away,
and eventually they arrive,
and when they do, you get a lot of magic right at the end.
Meantime, of course, you're mixing sound,
and you're mixing and creating other visual effects,
like the additional snow here, or like these additional Frost Giants.
And you need to be very, very confident in all of your fellows.
We had a great head of visual effects in Victoria Alonso
and a great VFX producer in Diana Giorgiutti.
And they worked all hours that God sent
with their team to make sure
that if you needed an eight-legged horse in time,
then Sleipnir would arrive.
Sleipnir, the eight-legged horse, I absolutely love.
For those of you familiar with the Norse myths,
you'll know that Sleipnir has many adventures of his own across the myths,
and in fact, one of the challenges for us when we came to this material,
was just what to select, what to include.
There are Nine Realms, there are dwarves, there are elves,
there are Norns, there are characters,
hugely important characters like Balder, like Princess Karnilla.
There were so many opportunities to create so many different kinds of story,
but our real sense, both for the devotees, for the aficionados
and I hope for people new to the story,
was that we would try and tell a genuine origins story
full of this kind of excitement, this kind of warring worlds,
but that actually, at the centre of it, the backbone of it,
apart from the antagonism of someone like Laufey
and his very disappointed, revengeful race there,
at the centre of it was a story of, as I've mentioned before, fathers and sons.
Now, here we come to a scene which encapsulates this struggle
between an Odin who is absolutely serious
about how difficult and how necessary and how precarious a job it is
to protect the safety of the Nine Realms, the whole of the known universe,
and a son who seems to be working on instinct,
an instinct that doesn't seem to be serving him very well.
He may have set off some kind of nuclear war.
And here you have a chance for a kind of passion
between these characters that I think is unusual,
because the stakes are so high, the universe is at stake,
it can take this level of feeling.
So here, when Anthony Hopkins receives this blow, this dismissal,
a line that Prince Hal might have said to Falstaff
in the Henry IV plays in Shakespeare,
you see him take the hurt.
You still see the lion roaring in relation to Tom Hiddleston as Loki,
but you have this great capacity for feeling conveyed through simplicity,
but he's not afraid of the fire of it.
So, you feel the incredible passion at the centre of the picture,
and so you know when they're playing with this kind of intensify,
that we hopefully will be able to come back here
and want to know how this story is resolved.
Who will be king? What will happen to Asgard?
Is Odin's heart broken? Is it more than that?
But we're feeling the beginning of a very marked moment in Thor's journey,
a journey which will literally see us see him change from that arrogant youth,
who paraded and cheered his way down that ceremonial room,
to someone who is going to have to think seriously about
whether he belongs here.
I love this cashiering moment.
There he goes. There's a biblical line and it's a biblical action.
The fall of man.
Thor falls from the Garden of Eden, if you'd like, from Asgard,
and he's stripped, court martial-like,
an image that I pulled from The Dreyfus Affair
Paul Muni and The Dreyfus Affair,
ancient film about an extraordinary scandal in the French government
in the late 19th century.
And they pull the epaulets off the uniform,
and I wanted to do it in that scene.
And then to bring that extraordinary leap through space,
for our hero to return to the place
from where he first began at the beginning of the movie.
And as we come to this scene,
one of the things we noticed when we started to screen the movie
or just spoilers, et cetera, for a work in progress.
Because they don't become public ones,
because of the dread, fear and terror
that negative things might be written on the Internet
or just spoilers, et cetera, for a work in progress.
We realised that this return to Earth
was something that people were really enjoying.
They felt pleased to be back amongst these characters.
Of course, now you're looking at Thor in a completely different way.
You're bringing to this the sense of all of that drama and grandeur
that went on up in Asgard,
but it's backing up against a modern sensibility,
which inevitably results in it being quite funny.
Absurd and surreal in some ways, but funny.
And back to what we started talking about at the beginning of this,
contemporary Earth and humour were two ways
in which I felt we had to go in order to blend
and make successfully stay in the same film,
all of these many combinations of the fantastical elements,
the space elements, the Jotunheim elements,
the drama up there and the investigation and the science down here,
all of it had to include a sense of humour, basically,
a sense of humour that you've seen Chris Hemsworth embody
in his performance
and that we definitely see here in the reactions of Selvig, and of Jane Foster
and of Kat Dennings as Darcy.
Once again, the beginnings now of the classic tale,
the classic tension, if you like, of a god amongst men
starts to play out comically.
Let's talk a little bit, as we see Thor on Earth,
about the casting of Chris Hemsworth.
About 6'3 ", 6'4", a young Australian actor,
I met him at the beginning of the three- or four-month casting process,
and we didn't know much about what our Thor was going to be like.
He had a cold, I don't think anyone had given him any pages,
maybe we didn't have any pages of the script.
It was a little unsuccessful, I suppose, our meeting.
And then, about three months later,
when we had met people from all over the world
and tested some people,
we knew much more about what our character should be like,
as we see the crater here made by the falling Mjolnir.
When we understood that we needed this character to change,
there would be an acting range required,
that he couldn't just be muscle, he couldn't just be brute strength,
we were then lucky enough and smart enough, in some way,
one of us was, not me, to understand we should get Chris back in
if he was prepared to do so. And come in.
And we did meet, and we talked and we workshopped and we tested,
and he told Thor war stories, and he was involved in passionate scenes,
and he had romantic scenes, and he did some physical work
and he absolutely owned it.
He walked in and took the part by the scruff of the neck,
and one realised that we'd be luckier than a lucky thing to have him.
So, Chris Hemsworth, additionally to all of that,
showed himself to be a natural screen actor.
He knows how to hold the screen,
he knows how to be in front of the camera, not just to do.
And so, I feel very, very lucky that this movie has him at its heart
because he carries it off.
And he's able to carry the movie, no mean feat.
Here are two people who have carried movies before,
the beautiful, wondrous, intelligent, funny, sharp, true Ms. Natalie Portman,
and the brilliant Mr. Stellan Skarsgård you've seen in a thousand films.
He's a ubiquitous actor, always striking, always brilliant.
And there you've seen already lines that have amused and thrilled us,
Kat Dennings, who is a brilliant comedian, excellent actress.
The three of them got on very, very well,
and they lend this scientific credibility to the story of this,
the man who fell to Earth.
Here, an image from inside that funnel cloud.
I enjoy, in this shot, the red shoes,
the red Crocs on the right side of frame.
And the colour palette throughout,
we try and be as subtle and intelligent with as we can.
The blues and the reds there that echo Thor's costume.
And that's something that we discussed, obviously, with Bo Welch,
who gave me a nice, clean room there,
with Alex Byrne, who gave me the simple costumes.
And of course, crucially with Haris Zambarloukos,
our director of photography
who was involved with this project from the very earliest days.
And he and I, with models of the sets
and an entire mini lighting rig-up,
would play, as if with a kind of doll's house,
on the interior of something like this.
Then we'd go out to a real interior, and way ahead of time,
we would practise what we wanted from the lighting.
His contribution was crucial, as are moments like this.
It made me laugh the first time we did it, it's made me laugh every time since.
I think it's funny when people, cruel as it is,
get hit in moments like that.
Obviously, it's a bit of a running gag for Thor.
This scene, fans of the comics will know,
has appeared in varying versions of the comics,
and I love it for the fun and for the colour that it introduces,
but I just also enjoy the fact that this is Stan Lee,
who you may see coming up in a moment.
And the Marvelistas raiding the Norse myths,
but also popping in their own Arthurian moment with Excalibur.
And there's Stan Lee asking, "Did it work?"
No, Excalibur or Mjolnir, in this case, is still in the stone
or in the rock, in this case.
I had lunch with Stan Lee before we started shooting.
He's the most extraordinary mixture of energy
and intelligence and kindness.
His insights into the character and his generosity about his invitation to us
to do with him what we would were incredible.
He was really a joy to work with.
This work, evidenced in Chris Hemsworth's torso,
was the product of his six, nine months of very intensive work in the gym,
and I thought that I might risk saying
that I'd had his head pasted onto my body here for this sequence,
but I fear that you wouldn't believe me,
so I guess I'm just going to have to tell you that it was him.
And I remember a few days before we shot this
saying rather embarrassedly, "Hey, Chris, I want to do this shot,
"it seems important to me that we reveal Thor in this way.
"Do you mind taking your shirt off?" To which he replied, "Do I mind?
"I've been doing this for nine months, mate.
"Of course I'm gonna get my shirt off."
I'm glad he did, because it's produced gasps in early screenings,
and we needed Thor to look like a god, Chris Hemsworth does.
Here is the home of the gods, Asgard,
where from that beautiful evocation of the city,
we pan into another one of Bo Welch's great sets.
Above you see what is a ram's head, inverted,
which becomes the canopy to this real fire.
Beautiful shot, I think, that one of Jaimie Alexander as Sif.
Let me talk a little bit about these excellent actors, starting with this man.
Tom Hiddleston, I worked with in the theatre and on television in England,
and he brings to Loki an intellectual complexity.
He has a real swiftness of thought.
Tom has a fine sense of humour, so you can get Loki, the mischief maker.
He, like all the others, did an enormous amount of work by way of preparation,
by way of research into the comics.
And he is someone, as an actor, who from take to take is very free, very able,
very imaginative, and is really quite a brilliant, young talent.
He got on very well with both Chris Hemsworth directly
and was part of a very, very happy,
kind of, chemical combination of folk in this group.
Jaimie Alexander as Sif,
an absolute comic geek, she knows more about the comics
than most of the people involved with the project.
I think she's from a family of many brothers,
and she has also that tomboyish qualify
that makes her unafraid to be involved in the physical stuff.
So, she did a great job of conveying the warrior princess,
but she also, as you can see, is quite stunningly beautiful,
and brings to Sif's inner life, as we go through the movie,
really quite a complex qualify,
particularly in relation to what she feels about Thor.
It was a very fine, very subtle piece of acting.
Here we see Tom Hiddleston as Loki
returning to the Casket of Ancient Winters
to try and understand what happened on Jotunheim
when his skin appeared to turn blue.
And, in a moment, there was a very good suggestion of Craig Kyle,
one of our co-producers who was intimately involved.
We reveal
that Loki is at least part Frost Giant.
Once again in this scene,
it felt as though the film was trying to be ambitious,
to bring to this family dynamic
this, if you like, relatable, universal issue,
not experienced by many but understood by all,
of what happens when your life appears to have been exposed
as having been a lie.
Loki is not, in fact, Odin's son.
Although the act of saving him may, in Odin's view,
have been the beginnings of loving and adoring
and caring for him as his own son,
the reality to Loki of this lie,
and the evidence that his father is, in fact, Laufey,
is obviously a cataclysmic discovery for him.
In a scene like this, it seems to me that, again, the stakes are so high,
the passions involved are so extraordinary
that the kind of acting moments touched on by these two
are pleasing and unusual in a film like this, I think.
They give it some ballast.
They are the kind of weight
against which the comedy, the fun of so much of the rest of it sits,
and is offset, and it's a necessary balance.
When you put these two together to do something like this,
I think you are blessed.
Tony Hopkins, this was his first day on set, his first scene.
And I decided that I would experiment
with something I'd been experimenting with as an actor myself,
which was to start the day in a scene like this by shooting the close-ups.
Normally, you'd start in a wide shot, like the one we've just seen,
and you'd move slowly in and you might get to close-ups after lunch
or in the middle of the afternoon.
At whatever time we got him on set, maybe 9:30, 10:00 in the morning,
Tony Hopkins was doing the close-ups for this scene,
and I thought he did a magnificent job.
And he was incredibly generous to young Tom,
who was incredibly patient and did his close-ups
much later in the day or even the next day.
It was an example of great camaraderie and cooperation between two actors.
The town of Puente Antiguo, we built in New Mexico
just outside Santa Fe.
It's this wonderful western town that was featured in movies
from as far back as Silverado and as recently as Ed Harris' Appaloosa.
We took the basic shape and we remodelled the frontages,
and instead of the dust track down the middle, we tarmacked
and we created what I wanted to be, with Bo Welch,
a sort of heightened version of a kind of Americana
that I had enjoyed seeing in the comics.
I wanted it to sit in the vast sea of the desert,
just like Asgard sits in the vast sea of space.
And I wanted to be able to have the colours of the seats, like the red here,
have a sort of ambience that evoked the world of Edward Hopper,
a kind of heightened, very familiar, very intensely flavoured,
intensely coloured version of small-town America
that comes out of the comics,
and that is immensely fascinating and attractive, I think,
to anyone who is not from America and I hope, obviously,
if you're from America, it's equally interesting.
But it was to do with trying to have Thor land
in a coherent environment, community,
where, when eventually it is threatened,
we have some sense that it deserves not to be threatened,
it deserves to be saved.
And there are kind people there, and people like you and me.
And so, the building of this town,
the creation of this town inside the desert
with that kind of backdrop right at the back
with the mountains and the fun of a sign like,
"Welcome to the home of the Vikings" on the water tower there,
was a wonderful part of creating an Earth part
of a translation of the comics, which I loved doing.
From a movie point of view,
building something where we could have control over it,
we did lots of scouting down in New Mexico,
there were lots of candidates as real towns,
and that issue of level of reality was one we discussed much.
But here, I knew that we would be staging, later on, a big battle in it,
and I just wanted to be able to stop and start
and have complete and utter control over what we were doing
and the camera style, and not be stopping traffic
and not be dealing with everything that's to do
with closing down a real town.
Also, I wanted to have the time to, again, have some of the fun of,
at the beginning of this scene, Thor walking down the street ignoring,
either walking on the left- or right-hand side,
walking like a god walks.
I mean, people should get out of his way.
The other part of his god-like qualify was this sort of gallantry,
the idea of kissing hands and generally being a sort of knight
gallant to someone like Jane Foster.
And here you see that in the very brief time
in which you may be able to establish
some kind of romantic feeling between them,
she is absolutely thrown for a loop by his old-fashioned gentlemanliness
wrapped up in this kind of gargantuan, massive, sort of, caveman body.
One can see that he makes an impression, and swiftly.
However, we also know that life won't be made easy
and into the movie, as hinted at earlier on
when Clark Gregg showed up at the crater site,
there's now a much stronger presence
of the mysterious government agency, S.H.I.E.L.D.,
in the form of Mr. Clark Gregg, who you'll know from Iron Man
and who I was really thrilled to be working with in this.
He has a great sensitivity for the character,
a great deadpan qualify, very dry and funny man in his own right.
But he does the difficult thing in a part like this,
especially one that's now become a very successful part,
of continuing to keep it honest, play it straight,
and he brings that side of the story,
this concern on the part of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Nick Fury
and those who work with him,
at the potential danger, the potential knowledge to be learnt
from what's happening out here in the New Mexican desert,
and from what's happening
in Jane Foster's brilliant, maverick, scientific journey.
The shots that follow, I love having been in New Mexico.
It gets away from the synthetic and there we are, the real set, the real desert.
And for me, tilted angles, Dutched angles as we call them,
because that's the way I remember comic book frames.
It was something controversial at the time,
I remember there was some concern about whether I was overdoing it.
I hope you don't feel I did.
They were there because that's how I received the dynamism
of the composition in the frames.
Wide-angle lenses with lots of depth
and it's why I chose it as a style for this.
And while we're talking about depth and here, live in the New Mexican desert
on the top of Smith's Motors,
this spaceship, '50s retro designed look
that tries to evoke a little outer space even on Earth,
let's talk a little bit about 3-D.
3-D was a discussion early on in the process.
I didn't want to shoot in 3-D. I needed more time to work with the actors.
I wasn't confident about how swiftly I could work with the two 3-D cameras.
And so, I investigated, instead, what would happen if we converted,
and as we, indeed, did render,
the vast majority of our 1,309 visual effects shots in post-production.
I was very, very happy with the results.
I had the initial discussion saying,
"Look, if this is just an attempt to make some more money,
"people will see through it.
"I need to go through a journey where I can understand
"how much more value it can add for me."
So I did, and when we prepared our five-minute piece
for the great convention of Comic-Con in San Diego,
we worked out how 3-D could enhance a more and differently immersive
version of the film for sequences like this,
where you have an iconic image of Tom Hiddleston as Loki on the throne.
And where here, you can have a sense of the grandeur, vastness,
and layer out the depth between the Warriors Four
and him between them and the background
in a way that, I think, often subtly
and sometimes more directly puts you in the picture,
gives you a stronger, more immersive sense of being in Asgard.
We worked particularly on the depth script,
that is to say through being able to have control shot to shot
on how the compression or release of the space inside the frame worked,
we could avoid, we hoped, that headache-inducing,
eye-hurting kind of qualify that is sometimes the product
of either rushed 3-D, or 3-D where shot for shot, when shot,
has depth judged perfectly,
but when put together can be problematic.
We wanted a smooth and subtly enhancing,
but not wildly disturbing version of 3-D.
I was delighted with the results in both the spectacular scenes,
but also in some of the subtler scenes
where just a different sense of being there
and a different relationship to some of the characters, the textures
and the compositional elements was something
that I was very happy to experiment with.
It took a long time, but I was pleased and proud
with the company we worked with, Stereo D,
they did a fantastic job.
There's the Rainbow Bridge for you, and Odin on it.
That shows you how far we came.
And then something that I wanted to have in the movie from day one,
which is just the simple explanation that "Thursday" comes from "Thor."
It is "Thor's day."
As, indeed, "Friday" comes from "Frigga"
and the two other days from the western character
that are also influenced by the Norse myths.
I wish I could tell you I'd given Chris Hemsworth
a great reading of that line "I want a horse,"
which makes me laugh almost every time.
I didn't, he did.
He came at the part with such a natural sense of humour
that it was great to see him get value out of that fish-out-of-water moment,
and a very good reaction from the pet shop keeper.
This is an area where 3-D, I like very much
in terms of how it makes me feel the vastness of the desert.
And if you're not watching in 3-D, of course,
it's a very nice series of shots.
But it was one
where it was about giving an in-depth experience
that wasn't necessarily to do with hammers throwing themselves at you.
This is an experience, by the by,
where Natalie Portman, who had just been working on Black Swan,
was talking about the moments when people said to her,
"Are you frustrated you get to work on an independent film
"and you have all that marvellous creative satisfaction,
"and then you do something like Thor and it's all a big sort of machine?"
She said, on this one, for this scene, we had all day to do this scene.
We spent all day driving around the desert,
many, many takes to try and get this right.
She said on an independent film, you never have any time.
You've got to do four scenes in a morning and move on,
and you're often left frustrated because you didn't get a chance to practise.
So, for Natalie, the kind of time that we were able to take
just for a scene like that, to try and get it right with lightness of touch
but depth at the same time, was a real enjoyment in the process.
The talented and beautiful Rene Russo plays Frigga,
and she and Odin had some more scenes in the film
that in the end didn't make it into the final cut
simply because we just didn't have the room
to do everything else the story was doing,
but I admire her so much.
She was such a beautiful actress inside and out
and gave a wonderful, wonderful sense of depth
in this warrior queen.
She was a pleasure to work with.
God, she's a great-looking gal,
and she got on very well with these two kids.
This idea for the restorative Odinsleep effect
was a very good one from Ms. Victoria Alonso,
and I think it tells the story of Odin's need to regenerate.
Now, we do one of these switches from Asgard to Earth.
That was one of the real challenges, story-wise,
about how we could make it work,
and throughout draft after draft, this rhythm, finding this rhythm,
and in post-production was really crucial.
Kevin Feige, our producer, always had very good instincts
about when we could or shouldn't go to Earth or Asgard, back and forth.
What were the ways to exploit that rhythm
and not confuse the audience?
We knew, probably, there would be people who preferred being on Earth,
there would be some people who preferred being in Asgard.
We wanted both because we felt as though the story had to interweave.
It was an exciting sequence like this that allowed us a sense of
how, with music, we could come back
and really make a great advantage of this, as she says, "city"
thrown up by S.H.I.E.L.D.
with all of this paraphernalia to analyse this hammer.
It's worth talking, perhaps, a little bit about this set,
which was put together by Bo Welch,
and I thought was a sort of brilliant graphic response,
a sort of comic visual language response
in all of these tubes and cubes to the marriage between,
again, the fantastical up on Asgard and in space,
and down here, earthbound, but still excitingly graphic and dynamic.
Lots of shapes, lots of texture.
I think that both the way he designed it and the starkness
with which Haris Zambarloukos could light it was very exciting.
It felt like a really different kind of texture, it felt surprising,
a different kind of dynamic to this part of the movie.
It's also worth talking about music.
The composer of the score for the film was Patrick Doyle.
Patrick, I've worked with since his first film and mine, Henry V
He was a student of composition and piano
at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music.
He then worked as an actor. He has a very wide-ranging experience of story,
and his gifts as a composer are a wonderful ear for melody,
but a great sense of the dramatic.
He always gets involved very early on,
and we knew that he needed to have
the kind of drive in the music
that would keep the sort of ticking clock of Thor's time on Earth
really vibrantly motoring through, for instance, a sequence like this.
Patrick is particularly good at being able to craft,
once he sees a sequence like this, the ups and the downs of the music,
leaves space for the sound effects, leaves space for the visual effects,
be able to give and paint in a musical introduction
to as important a character as we're about to see, this man.
And so, his sculpting of the score is really exemplary,
and his ability to write a great tune is, I think, unmatched.
He's had a fantastic
and continues to have a fantastic career as a composer,
and he made an enormous contribution to this.
This is Barton, Hawkeye,
a character familiar to readers of the comics beyond Thor.
They'll know that he is one of the Avengers,
and an extra pleasure in being in the Marvel Universe
was to get a chance on this picture to work with this young man,
Jeremy Renner,
who came in much further down the line to shoot his part of this sequence,
but was a joy to watch and to work with.
And to see someone latch onto a character immediately,
and to do so in the style and with the talent of the best
by a beautiful choice of relative minimalism
in the look and speech of the character.
And it was very, very nice to have that kind of a talent
come into a movie like this in, in this case, a small part.
All of this work in the mud was done very late in the night,
maybe 4:00 in the morning, during a couple of weeks of night shoots,
which are always a challenge on a movie.
Mr. Hemsworth, uncomplaining,
as were the rest of the brilliant stunt team.
All the boys who are used to this, who nevertheless have to
sometimes put up with fairly trying conditions, were great.
The, sort of, mud fight helped us understand
this primal qualify to both Thor and to this point in the story,
because now he's going home, isn't he?
He's gonna get his hammer, and he's gonna go home
and that arrogant Thor is gonna prove that might is right.
If you could only smash your way out of a hospital or out of a van
or recruit people like Jane Foster to help you, you'll get it.
And here in the music, we try and set up this sense of impending triumph,
the great strongman of the universe will claim his right,
Excalibur will be lifted from the stone,
Thor will be returned to his full powers and will be able to go home.
Except, of course, that he can't.
"Only he who is worthy," that's what Odin said.
And we have not seen sufficient evidence in this story of the flawed hero
who must lose in order to find.
We haven't seen the evidence there.
This is not something he's gonna take easily, however,
and once again, that primal part of the character kicks in.
Like a great bear yelling
or like a crazed child hysterically screaming,
some part of him is broken
by the certain knowledge that he ain't going back,
that's it, it's over.
No home, no friends, no family, no powers.
This becomes, for Thor, a pivotal moment
in his journey through the picture.
And one of the things I love about Chris Hemsworth's performance
is just the look coming up.
The sense, as he sees the symbol of home,
of that hurt and of that youthfulness in his look,
that great oak tree of a man
is now almost a, sort of, bottom-lip-quivering kid.
He's had to really understand that he's not going home.
It's very touching, I think,
and I asked Pat to reflect that in the music.
It's the moment in which, perhaps they may have admired,
they may have been amused by him, they may have a sneaking admiration
for his cheeky, grinning, winking cockiness,
but now, perhaps the audience have genuine sympathy for this man,
because now he's down on our level.
He loses stuff, he doesn't get his way all the time,
and maybe it's the point at which the audience fully sympathise with him.
I like this scene very much for a number of reasons.
The 3-D or just the composition generally in this lab, I love,
because they were at the back of the lab in the wide shot,
and you have all those layers of structure.
You have the real genuine outside of a real town at night
through the glass, seeing all the neon.
You have this passionate debate,
which, in a way, states the kind of parameters
of the issue of reality in our film.
She quotes Arthur C. Clarke, "Magic's just science we don't understand yet."
"It was science fiction," says he. "Which is a precursor to science fact."
And I think that if you just look at what's happened in our own lives
on what may seem a rather superficial level,
but 15, 16 years ago, we didn't have the Internet,
and everything working as it does today, with all our handheld devices,
the whole revolution of the social media.
Imagine the massive shake-up in our own lives that's gone on,
so that the degree to which Jane Foster can argue
that just because we don't understand or have complete experience
of a blond god from another world coming to live amongst us,
it doesn't mean that miraculous things can't happen.
And if you'd told Christopher Columbus that a small piece of plastic
would connect you to back home, to Genoa,
when he landed in 1492
to tell them that he'd just discovered America,
he would have perhaps laughed in your face.
A few hundred years later, it's all normal.
Anyway, the basic notion of accepting the suspension of disbelief
for some of the miraculous qualities in the picture
that search for a certain kind of credibility
were caught by Natalie Portman's passion there
and by, I think, some well-written work from our team of writers.
When we talk about the sort of emotional core of the film,
which exists in a picture
that essentially has always drawn the reaction
when we screened it early on, and we always wanted to have it
draw the reaction of being fun, it's a fun experience,
it's a summer movie, it's something to enjoy in a beautiful way.
But nevertheless, at the centre of it,
you hope there are these other things, including here,
I think beautifully played between Tom Hiddleston and Chris Hemsworth,
this moment where Thor believes
not only has he lost his home and is forbidden from returning to it,
but that he has lost his father.
The reaction to this news
and the way in which he articulates quite tenderly, quite vulnerably
his response, I think, is beautifully done.
The act, if you like, of Loki is wonderfully, seamlessly done by Tom,
who evoked by way of a sort of model for the character,
the character of lago in Shakespeare's play Othello,
who is, if you like, the great actor in Shakespeare,
a terrifying character who is a sort of sociopath,
who will disguise every real feeling
under the mask of something authentic and genuine-seeming.
Well, here, this dynamic between two brothers
who really, I think, do love each other, but have this complicated relationship,
as Loki's burgeoning knowledge of who or what he might be
and therefore who or what,
especially what might be available to him,
is occurring inside him, questions being asked,
and they play this very delicate scene so well.
I was most impressed by them,
and I like the fact that it's in this neutral arena,
this quieter, simpler place,
another series of contrasts to the sometimes very busy
and spectacular world of colour and complexity,
in terms of the layout of shots,
to something very simple and focused.
Loki, of course, can't resist the idea of picking up that hammer.
This was, again, a great touch from Kevin and Craig and co.
To suggest that he could be irritated
by that extra-nice Loki moment.
The writers involved in our film have done a wonderful job,
from the story's shaping that Joe Michael Straczynski
and Mark Protosevich did across various drafts of the screenplay
that were there just before I arrived,
that gave this kind of hero's journey arc, the exile and the return,
that I certainly was very excited to try and further develop and enhance.
And then with Ashley Miller and Zack Stentz,
who came in and then worked with me initially
on how we bring that contemporary Earth element to the story
and allow consistency of tone across that,
and there were many excellent drafts that came out of that process.
And then, with my great friend Don Payne,
a brilliant writer from The Simpsons, of course,
we took this yet further
and really looked into the fun to be had from a character like Erik Selvig,
and Erik Selvig and Darcy very much developed by Don
with his particular sense of fun, and in collaboration with them.
So, Stellan, for instance, came to rehearsals early on
and was key in trying to make sure
that there was nothing sort of merely functionary about these characters,
but that they have, as you can see in the look in his eye there,
he just carries that sense of worry.
This is a man who knows he's dealing with a government organisation
who can put him in jail.
And when he reacts here to Clark Gregg's last farewell instruction,
you feel the depth of his relief.
That contribution with Stellan, talking in that case to Don,
and coming up in this particular scene
with some ideas about how Selvig helps us to understand
via Chris' very excellent performance,
once again showing yet another colour in Thor.
Very surprising what we see of Thor in this scene
from the man we saw in the very first scene,
and it's partly brought out by Stellan's character asking him some questions
about who he is and what he finds meaningful.
And this very, sort of, bonding scene between the pair of them,
I think, is very honest.
It's very open, it's a scene that we understood early on in screenings
was one where the audience actually did enjoy
seeing Thor just like us and trying to put his life back together.
We know that the movie isn't going to end there,
but we also know it's not gonna be easy for him,
whether it's getting back to home
or whether it's getting to find a home on Earth,
especially as we see in this scene
that Selvig is naturally suspicious and protective of his,
as it were, surrogate daughter in Jane.
These two were so enjoyable to work with in this scene,
and Stellan comes in so prepared, so available, so ready, so different,
so "ready to play," as he might put it,
that they really were such marvellous collaborators.
They did, however, provide us with a problem in this scene,
where we also had a fight and a series of drinking contest moments
at the end of how we finished it.
We wanted to finish simply on a kind of upbeat moment,
and of all the scenes in the movie,
the end of this was re-edited maybe 150 times,
and it took a long time before we went for
what is usually the preferred option, which is the simple one,
especially in the hands of two very good actors,
of a real and, in this case, pretty funny look from Stellan Skarsgård.
We know he's gonna get into trouble with that.
The visual effects here give us, once again, Loki's return to Jotunheim,
and the chance for Loki to face,
but not reveal to his father,
exactly who he is.
We did some additional photography in this scene
and it was to exploit one of the qualities in Loki
that we felt we could,
by virtue of how good Tom Hiddleston's performance was,
also include, aside from him being a genuine brother,
and being a hurt brother
and an ambitious and perhaps rather jealous brother,
to be mischievous and dangerous is a necessity for Loki.
Even if one does not necessarily suggest that he is preternaturally evil,
but that his capacity for wrongdoing is emerging, forming,
shaping itself before our very eyes.
This scene allows us to see a more calculating Loki at work.
Someone who is playing the poker game
with another master player, his real father,
but his real father does not, at this point, know that this is his son.
He was abandoned, after all, and he would have assumed,
and another version of this scene suggested this,
that Odin would have killed that bastard child of yesteryear.
So, this becomes a scene of many levels
between two very calculating, dangerous guys
who are used to the world of brinkmanship,
and two good poker faces.
We return to Heimdall's observatory
where again, you, in this scene, get to enjoy
the power of Idris Elba's performance.
First of all, the look is fantastic.
I can't imagine another actor who would carry off this incredible costume,
which Alex Byrne, I think, has triumphantly presented
as the kind of look that a guardian,
a man who really is the person who says,
and we believe him, "Thou shalt not pass."
In wonderful, wonderful golds and with a great shape, great design,
it's a marvellous frame for an actor.
And in it, you have Idris Elba, whose voice we slightly amend
to just maximise the beautiful, rich, dark, warm tones in it,
because, as the single representative of Asgard out there,
we wanted, every time we heard and saw him,
to be aware of this memory of the guardian,
the man whom you disobey at your peril.
It's nice to go from him
to something as relatively mundane as Jane's caravan.
This is the moment in the movie,
in a way, where it could go several different places.
Thor is without his powers, he's starting, he's reborn, if you like,
and so, this is a moment where we understand,
maybe with Loki's activities in the worlds above,
that it's the calm before the storm.
But it's the calm in which the audience have a chance to take in this new Thor,
and, I think, fully invest in him
and perhaps invest in the idea
of some kind of relationship between him and Jane.
It is difficult in a big action film
to allow the room for romance, if you like, or a kind of
chemistry between perhaps the central boy and gal,
having any extra dimensions,
or even just having a feeling of authenticity
to whatever level that's pursued.
It isn't the case that these things have to be grand passions.
I suppose what you want to feel is that they like each other,
that they get on, that they're listening,
that it's a relationship in which, slowly,
you're interested in what happens,
and in which you might invest.
It can't be overburdened
by suddenly becoming the grand passion of the ages,
and yet, there is much to value
out of these instant connections
between, in this case, people from other worlds.
Many people have asked me about the sort of Shakespearean influence on this.
And I can't say any of it was remotely, if it is, there,
that it's only because Shakespeare nicked
some terrific story ideas and plot points from great writers of the past,
and we continue to steal from him.
And one situation that clearly was a big hit for him
was the idea of putting people together from different worlds,
the Romeo and Juliet, if you like, of it all.
And so, the beginnings of that starts here,
which is simply that a new and humble and modest Thor is listening,
and is asking questions and is caring about someone else.
He is interested in someone else.
And that generosity of spirit, of course, is incredibly winning for us, for Jane,
and you see a quite honest beginning to a relationship
that leaves the question mark of exactly how far can it go
during the context of this story?
And what kind of weight can it hold,
and can it do that whilst still allowing for it to be fun?
And I think that many people have commented about this scene,
that it's their favourite scene in the movie.
You get some wonderful simple things, which are, this look, for instance.
Natalie Portman looking at someone
and letting us understand that she may feel something for him
that is even beginning to surprise her.
I think that that qualify in her performance,
subtle, brief, rich,
is one of the things that sort of helps distinguish the picture
in terms of how it approaches certain things.
We're trying not to work too hard, but just for it to be real,
and I think that she's very real, very convincing there,
she's very, very charming
as she laughs about the Hubble/Hooble mix-up.
This is a handsome shot of our hero.
All the way through shooting, between Mr. Hemsworth, Ms. Portman,
and all of them, Kat, Jaimie, all the boys,
Tom and then some of the other Warriors Three,
who I'll talk about in a little while,
one was constantly reminded
of what an amazingly handsome group of people,
marvellous to look at.
Here, the Warriors Three are disputing what to do.
Josh Dallas plays Fandral,
and he does so with an English accent with great aplomb,
marvellous debonair dash.
And he's matched equally by the tremendous Ray Stevenson,
who you'll know from his brilliant turn on the HBO TV series Rome
and many, many other films.
I worked with Ray many moons ago,
and it was a pleasure to bring his incredible screen gifts.
He's got such a great face for movies.
Handsome lad who knows how to be still.
He's matched here by Tadanobu Asano, a great star from Japan,
who brings to the role of Hogun the Grim inscrutability,
but an enigmatic, playful intelligence
and a sort of deadly capacity for physical violence.
You know that when he speaks, it's gonna be important.
There was great camaraderie between these four,
and it really fuelled the quality of the scenes,
the sense of that bond between them, and loyalty and fun, of course.
It's true to say that there was more of the Warriors Three and Lady Sif shot,
and once again, not through lack of qualify from them,
but through a simple traffic jam of elements
that we wanted to put gracefully into this world of the film,
it wasn't possible to include everything.
But they had great fun.
And some of it now infuses this part of the movie
where once again, we enjoy the fact of the gods coming to Earth.
Here, the rhythm of the film, as it switches so instantaneously,
is a great tribute to the gifts of our editor, Paul Rubell,
who was a wonderful collaborator throughout.
A marvellous and award-winning editor, and very musical.
I always think it's very helpful if an editor is musical.
He plays the piano, but he has an intuitive feel
for the length of a cut and the feel of a cut,
and has so many tricks at his disposal
to do with being able to use everything we can.
Whether it's split screens, or accelerating shots,
or flipping and flopping shots,
really, we used every kind of trick in the book here,
and he had that in addition to the great treasure trove of visual effects
that produces things like the Destroyer.
So, we bring the Warriors Four to Earth.
This is a fun moment and one that is tough to get just right.
It's very nicely underpinned by Patrick's music.
There's a part of the magic of movies,
the character Volstagg was not in the shot that you saw,
we filmed him separately afterwards, and we put him into the shot.
The kind of thing that seemed necessary in post,
and only possible because you're working on a great, big Marvel movie
where that kind of thing can happen.
It was one of the numerous moments where I thought,
"Gosh, if I had this opportunity on previous films,
"they'd all have cost squinty billion dollars."
But I hasten to add that's not what this cost,
but it does provide the chance to get things right.
Just before we head into the last phase of the movie,
which is full of action and destruction,
it's lovely to have had, including the cup drop,
a piece of delicious daft comedy.
Before now, coming back to the big question of why they're here,
of taking Thor home.
But of course, it being the kind of movie it is,
we're not going to make it as easy as that,
and there's going to be a significant sequence now
where the Destroyer, called by Loki, comes to Earth
to deal with Thor and prevent his return.
First, of course, Loki has to deal with Heimdall,
who's been registering suspicion.
And I love, by the way, this shot
and the way it evokes the kinds of work
that were done by the French VFX vendors BUF,
Pierre Buffin and his team with Nicolas Chevallier,
a great team there who were able to give us
both the incredible water effects
and the beaten copper, space-aged qualities
to the outside of the observatory.
This marvellous effect with Heimdall
and the freezing that comes out of the Casket of Ancient Winters.
I love the water in the background of this shot
and the idea of encasing Heimdall like this.
Back on Earth, we had other things to contend with.
In New Mexico, quite splendid though it is,
and although some of this is enhanced,
we had our own challenges with the weather.
Not with the arrival of the Destroyer, but with four seasons in a day,
sometimes 50-mile-an-hour winds,
sometimes hail, sometimes snow, sometimes rain,
literally all in one day.
And so, sometimes working out quite what we could shoot
or if we could still shoot was pretty difficult.
Once again, Darcy, it seems to me,
is a great representative of the audience,
and Kat Dennings played her beautifully.
She has a great comic gift and is also extremely smart.
She's one of those characters who allows you to believe
that there is a very different kind of individual in there,
beyond the surface of a very quick-witted,
sort of cynical, sarcastic individual.
And it seems to me she scores in almost every moment she speaks,
and it's very valuable.
What it gives you, as you approach these big sequences
at the end of the movie, is a chance to orchestrate.
You know that somewhere you want to go from fun to laughter,
to thrill, to exhilaration, to violence,
to big music, to little music, to rhythm, to excitement,
and so, there's this thriller throb to some of the action here.
Camera moving all of the time,
interrupted by this, the great weight of the Destroyer.
In planning this sequence,
I remember it was one of the first things I did when I arrived in New Mexico,
and down this very street,
where the beautiful Jaimie Alexander is just about to hide herself,
I walked with 30, 40 colleagues,
and we tried to work out where we needed to be,
and how we needed to shoot all of the following and in what order.
This was as complicated logistically as anything on the picture,
because it depended on certainty about when certain bombs would go off,
when things that blew up out of the bottom of the road would be buried,
when the special effects would be buried,
when the second unit could come in
and shoot the scenes that they needed to do.
So, for instance, you won't be surprised to know
that was Kylie Furneaux, her stunt double,
not Jaimie Alexander, who did the biggest of those leaps as Sif.
That had to be scheduled at a time when we were off doing something else
so that Vic Armstrong and his team had the entire town to himself.
And so, the make-up of this particular sequence, the orchestration
and, indeed, the working with the Destroyer who, on the day,
was sometimes a complete replicated model, but immobile.
Sometimes it was just a large pair of lighting clamps
with some gaffer tape at the top of it
to indicate what the Destroyer looked like.
But it was one sequence in which both myself
and my very excellent first assistant director, Luc Etienne,
would call out through megaphones,
across the sounds of huge fans creating wind or this kind of debris,
exactly what was happening, so that here, Jaimie would know,
"The Destroyer's arriving on your left, there's smoke on your right," et cetera.
There needed to be a clear path through,
even when out in the open, not against green screen here,
although sometimes we did, indeed, use green or blue screen outside.
But here, you needed both the benefits of the actual debris
and wreckage of cars and fires that we did provide live.
But you constantly needed to tell people what might be happening up in Asgard,
what was happening with the Destroyer himself,
and keep people firmly in touch with what we're after.
This brings us to the moment story-wise that we'd really been aiming for
that is so inevitably connected to the moment
where Thor walks into the movie for the first time as a grown-up,
a man who is unwilling to sacrifice anything,
so selfish is he.
And in the moment that follows now,
we have a man who has learnt that he must, can and should be able
as a great leader, as a great king,
but simply perhaps not as a god
but as a man, be prepared to sacrifice everything.
In this case, it means his life.
Natalie Portman asks that question,
but perhaps as an audience we already know.
He's doing what has to be done, he's doing what a hero would do,
not the act of a man who thinks he's a hero,
but simply he does what has to be done. It ends up being heroic.
This is not about Thor, this is about resolving things with his brother.
Crucially, it's about saving the people and the town that is Puente Antiguo,
and saving the lives of those who have come to help him
and from whom he has learnt and grown.
The way Chris Hemsworth does this,
the Patrick Doyle music to accompany it,
the way in which it takes place in the format of a sort of Wild West fight,
the showdown, a kind of high noon moment,
all of this, I felt, had a sort of leanness and simplicity to it
that I thought was part of the story of the hero.
And we wanted to maintain surprise
about how brother Loki would finally react to this,
and whether that could and should change his mind.
Can it end in peace?
And the answer is, of course, it can't.
And we wanted the surprise, not of the blast there,
but of a sort of trick, a piece of Lokian mischief
which takes the Destroyer's beam away,
appears to perhaps indicate that Thor has persuaded him,
that he will understand, but, no.
A sneaky trick, the smack the back of the hand,
and the clearly fatal blow takes us to the point
where perhaps we've always known we must arrive,
which is at the death of Thor.
The death of a man who did not think, the death of a man who did not care,
the death of a man who was selfish,
the death of a man who disregarded his family,
his home, his friends,
and in a sense, symbolically at least,
that man, that creature had to die.
He had to give it up. He had to sacrifice it.
He had to become, to use Odin's word,
"worthy" in that act of sacrifice.
That act of sacrifice from a god,
perhaps, could lie the seeds, perhaps instant,
as they say, enlightenment comes to those who find it, redemption.
And it's a redemption, triggered partly by a father's pain
and a father's pride.
And so from Odin,
we go back to that other hero of the film,
trapped, but no longer, Mjolnir.
And this leads us to a moment that we discussed over and over,
how visually, emotionally, musically, effects-ly,
we could bring together this moment
that we hoped, maybe in a movie theatre, could have the audience cheer
if they loved him as much as we did,
and if they valued the idea of that happening.
The God of Thunder is back in charge,
powers restored,
armour back on his magnificent god's frame,
announcing his success to the world,
providing awe and wonder in those who watch him.
And now, a chance to have revenge and some fun, as well.
This musical cue was written probably three, four, five times.
The action sequence here,
exactly what could Thor do to potentially trounce the Destroyer?
This was something that, even though it's visual effects intensive,
we worked on for almost the entire period of the shoot.
Two things needed to happen,
this needed to be an absolute example of the awesome power
of a fully restored, fully motivated, truly heroic Thor,
and it also needed to happen quite swiftly,
because we know that dealing with Destroyer
will not be the only thing Thor has to deal with
before the end of this film.
He needs to get back home,
and this needs to be taking care of business
and taking care of business spectacularly,
but efficiently and briskly, so that we understand
what a superhero is when he's at his best.
He's efficient, he just gets on with it, and is a very good neighbour.
So now, the film takes on a different kind of pace.
Earth is protected, Puente Antiguo is saved,
there's some business to take care of,
which is the issue of the return of S.H.I.E.L.D.
and Clark Gregg's very funny reading of this last moment with Thor
before he needs to return to Asgard.
And it also, I suppose, lays out the possibility
that Jane Foster and Selvig may work with S.H.I.E.L.D. in some future world
where that research, which has brought her so close
to understanding how and where Thor is from,
may perhaps be developed into something that could
tell us yet more stories.
Meantime, back on Asgard,
Loki allows access for the Frost Giants.
And lonely Heimdall looks to have been outwitted.
I'm sure that can't happen for long. One feels his frustration in there,
and I certainly wouldn't want to try and tie up Idris Elba
in any way that restricted him.
We shot these sequences in the New Mexican desert,
and it was one of the areas
where it was so, so much a signature of the picture
to see whether it would work successfully
to put these costumes from these Asgardians on Earth.
And in that space of the desert, on that kind of canvas,
I was very, very pleased with the results.
So, to see them there, there's something, I don't know,
very, very much in tune with modern versions of the comic books.
Particularly, for instance, runs of the comics
that had been authored by Joe Michael Straczynski,
who, in a way, was part of perfecting the modern version of Thor on Earth.
Heimdall is heroic and allows us
to just see what we can play, of the extent to which
this romantic feeling between Thor and Jane can play in the movie.
And I think it's a tribute to these two
that it carries much more weight than it might otherwise do
because of its gentleness and its simplicity.
It doesn't strain too hard,
they don't strain too hard to be super sexy, super cool, super romantic.
As a result, I think that they are all of those things,
and I think we want them to be together.
We know that this hasn't progressed into the grand love affair,
but we see that it has the potential for perhaps something very special
and that there is a connection.
Now, we head into the final phase of the film.
We're back on Asgard, and the family business has to be taken care of.
First of all, of course, we give Frigga a moment
to do what any warrior queen would do, which is to try and defend her husband.
We consciously kept the world of Asgard, these corridors,
a little emptier than you might expect them to be,
suggesting that gods know how to look after themselves,
especially gods in Asgard.
They're not expecting to be invaded.
I enjoyed reflecting Colm Feore in Anthony Hopkins' eyeball.
That's the last creature I'd wish to have hovering above me,
and it's especially creepy that as he says
Odin can hear and see what's going on,
even as his attempted murder begins,
but we know it's only attempted
because what we hoped and discovered in previews
would be the audience believing that that blow had been struck by Thor,
actually have an intake of breath when they understand it is Loki.
And let's, while he's there, the great Tom Hiddleston,
have a talk about those helmets.
That helmet was worn in two pieces, it was extremely painful.
He was very patient about it.
All the helmets were heavy and tight
in order to have the great look, the great line.
Nothing could rattle, nothing could roll.
And the combination of what the collar does,
the lines on the front of that costume, ditto Thor's,
they make it work in a very streamlined, aerodynamic way
that hints at the classic renditions of the frames from the comics,
but in the way they're worn,
in the colours, in the palette, in the textures,
it stops at being campy, stops at being kitschy,
or, at least, not to a degree
that allows us to accept a different kind of robustness to it.
Our rules about how this observatory worked means that
we could now have, instead of Heimdall's sword/key,
that was what made it work, we accepted the idea
that the other instrument that could make that work
was Gungnir, Odin's spear.
And now, usable by Loki,
because in Odin's absence, Loki runs Asgard,
that very sort of map,
that kind of astral reflective map of Yggdrasil
is now frozen, locked solid.
And we liked the idea of doing this in order to create
not a travelling light source that could take you briefly, instantaneously
through time warps to other times and places and worlds,
but now a burgeoning, building nuclear weapon.
So that Bifrost, the miracle agent of time and space travel,
becomes the agent of destruction.
But of course, although that technology is at work,
we see it frozen open,
ready to create chaos on the world that Loki must destroy,
the world of his parentage.
The idea of wiping out the race
that would prove that there are no more of that race,
so that Loki really is an Asgardian,
is part of where his passionate determination to belong
and to win his father's approval has now sort of led him to.
So, in the middle of this burgeoning, sort of technological explosion,
there is concentrated in this arena,
this now different arena, this frozen arena,
this resolution of the biblical battle between two brothers.
Two brothers whose conflict now is potentially liable
to see the destruction of part or all of the universe,
but certainly Jotunheim.
And all of this has come from a dispute, if you like, at one simple level
about their own competition to enjoy, approve, receive,
be preeminent in their father's love.
And now, with these two extraordinary weapons as equals,
and inside the dangerous,
evermore acceleratingly lethal world of the frozen Bifrost,
with the observatory and Asgard's fate spinning out of control,
you have these stakes and this action heightening with every blow, as it were.
It's a battle, it would seem, of two equals
that now spills out onto the Rainbow Bridge.
And it was this kind of image, it was rather like the horses riding across it.
And this kind of image, the idea of these two brothers,
people who we recognise with human traits, human characteristics,
fighting with real passions, real motivations,
but nevertheless fighting,
at extreme danger in an epic landscape.
This bridge in the middle of outer space,
attached to the asteroid on which Asgard rules the universe,
led to the bridge now in danger of using its power and its beam
to destroy one, perhaps more worlds if this conflict isn't resolved.
The idea, the heightened nature of all of that
seemed to me something that could be so remarkable and unusual,
and I'm very proud of these kinds of images.
I would call them epic images,
where the power of the sea, the power of lightning,
the power of space,
the power of these elements, these elemental forces
are about to overwhelm, or could they be at the mercy of these two figures?
Or one of them, if one can overpower,
but clearly, with everything that's been set up,
we always hoped that we might put Thor, the man who has changed,
the man who, at the beginning of this film,
wouldn't have thought twice about this,
now decides that it's actually a choice to make.
And Jotunheim, whatever it might be,
does not deserve the fate that Loki has imposed upon it.
And so, this idea of potentially giving up
a route back to the place where he found himself,
where he found happiness,
and where perhaps he may have found or could find love,
is going to be sacrificed in order to save Jotunheim
and the stability and peace of the Nine Realms.
Let's see whether Jane forgives him. One man who won't is Loki.
And the series of images that follow
really speak for the sort of cataclysmic ending
to which we believed a film like this could head.
Where this really is, I think,
a spectacular series of visual effects moments
that were beautifully supervised
by the brilliant Wesley Sewell and his team,
and where all of the key members of the team,
Bo Welch in design, Haris Zambarloukos in photography,
Wes in visual effects, Paul Rubell in editing,
our stunt team, Vic Armstrong and Andy,
the costumes of Alex Byrne,
the various make-ups of all our characters
from Luisa Abel, Jan Alexander in hair and make-up, quite magnificent.
And I love the look of Mr. Hiddleston as he heads off into that void.
What is gonna happen? There's a big question mark there.
And for us, the big question mark was, how do we get back to Earth?
On this occasion, we were filming this real shot,
took place on a real Friday afternoon in New Mexico
when the sun was going down.
We got that real sunset. It was one of,
if you will please, please, please forgive my language,
a sort of "kick, bollock and scramble" moment,
where everybody is running to shoot this moment
in what some refer to as the "magic hour,"
and which we in film know to be the "tragic hour,"
because you can never quite get the shot as you want it.
Here the opposite was true.
These three actors rushed, dragged them out of their trailers.
"You gotta go. The light's going, the light's going."
And we were able to get the reason we went to New Mexico,
a big sky, a sunset, mountains, three amazing actors, a great image,
and one that would allow us, as we see Jane's disappointment,
to perhaps begin the process of taking us back up
to see how all of this is resolved in Asgard.
Here, this time with the travel we've done now,
allowing us to compress the journey,
but still enjoy feeling that miraculous and strange underside of Asgard.
An Asgard, now in a kind of post-battle, post-near-apocalypse twilight,
where a little hint of what happens in the myths and in the comics,
which is, although not here, in the halls of Valhalla,
they sing and they talk and they drink and they dance,
and they celebrate their exploits, particularly led by Volstagg,
who's prone to exaggeration, of course.
There's a kind of melancholy that hangs over this at this point.
Thor has left Earth, has sacrificed the Rainbow Bridge,
has saved the peace of Asgard, has saved Jotunheim,
but of course, has lost a brother.
It wasn't as simple as saying he was right and Loki was wrong.
It was as the film has tried to be,
because the comics are and the myths are,
just a bit more complicated than that.
We find, of course, as he walks the halls,
beyond which this magnificent
Scandinavian-influenced landscape of Asgard sits,
a fine company called Whiskytree, who produced the visual effects
for the creation of Asgard here,
we find that he goes back to, what I mentioned earlier,
was really the base emotional heart of the picture, fathers and sons.
And that was the question, would he be at the beginning?
Odin says he will, but actually, although he's in the affirmative,
Thor now has second thoughts.
This is a beautifully and simply done scene between the two men.
It's about, in part,
the inability of certain kinds of males, warrior males,
to easily reveal their feelings to each other.
They do here with great delicacy
and with a sense of vulnerability that I think is touching.
I think it's beautifully and simply played by the pair of them,
and you feel the weight of the experience of the film,
that they have bought this experience, they've arrived here changed,
inspired in some ways, saddened in some ways,
and now are ready to go on with their lives.
But there's a big question mark.
Can the Rainbow Bridge be rebuilt?
Where is Jane Foster?
What will happen to Asgard's relationship to Earth?
And the beginning of the up beat at the end of our picture here
is the understanding that perhaps there could always be hope.
Heimdall says so, I listen to Heimdall.
Well, sure enough, down in Smith's Motors in this shot,
which was a shot originally planned to open the film with.
It was going to be the very first shot of the movie,
it turned into the very last, almost.
And now, as we go through these main-on-end titles,
I hope you'll enjoy this race through space,
this voyage which originally was in the body of the movie.
And it was the beginnings of a travel from Earth
up through space through various time warps here,
to this Milky Way-style galaxy through which we pass,
and then pull out another part of.
And then understand that we are now, in fact, travelling through, around
and between the branches of Yggdrasil, the Worlds Tree,
the great galactic nebulae
that Odin describes and the comics describe,
in both ancient art and in scientific versions,
as the linking web, if you like, between the Nine Realms of the universe.
And this opportunity to take the audience on a journey through space
and through Yggdrasil was something that we worked on
through the whole of the time we were making the film.
Again, this part of the movie was created by our visual effects team
and executed and much enhanced by BUF in Paris.
And although it didn't make it into the body of the film,
it was a fantastic way, I think, to go out at the end of our Marvel movie
that has tried to give a sense of fun, a sense of exhilaration,
has taken you, I hope, on an emotional journey,
but is leaving you with a sense of a forward movement,
with a sense of optimism
and with, perhaps, a sense that if there are other movies of Thor,
or other movies in which Thor exists,
that you might want to come back and see them.
My name is Ken Branagh,
and I thank you very much for watching Thor.
I'm gonna leave you now
with the answer to the question that some people asked me, which is,
"How on Earth could you possibly even start to direct a film like Thor?"
Well, the answer is unfolding to you and will do over the next seven minutes.
It is all of these people, that's how anybody can do something like this,
but I was uniquely blessed with the talent
and the kindness of the people with whom I worked.
You'll see thousands of names across this next five or six minutes,
all of them truly did have a contribution to make,
and over two or three years of making one of these pictures,
it's something you understand and appreciate
and are deeply grateful for.
So, on behalf of all of these, my fellows, my fellow collaborators, my co-workers,
once again, thank you very much for watching Thor,
thank you for listening to this commentary and goodbye.
Please, however, do enjoy listening to the amazing Foo Fighters,
who are singing and performing this song Walk
from their latest chart-topping album.
And what an honour it was to have them associated with the movie
with a lyric they might have written for us.
So, to all of them, thank you very much, indeed,
and if you'd like,
you might want to join me just right at the end of the credits
in case there's some kind of surprise there.
I'll see you there.
And so, that's the end of the film, the end of another Marvel movie,
the end of Thor, the God of Thunder.
Thor will, indeed, return in The Avengers,
and he will be directed by Joss Whedon,
a brilliant talent who I spoke to
before he came on board to do this little piece,
which I'm very delighted ends up at the end of our film,
in which I was especially pleased
to see the continuing appearance of Dr. Erik Selvig,
this time talking to the great Sam Jackson as Nick Fury.
And I find myself intrigued by exactly where they are
and exactly what they are to discuss.
What I can tell you is that what you're about to see
has some reference back into the movie Thor.
Have a look at what comes up inside the suitcase that Sam Jackson refers to,
and see whether it jogs your memory about a moment in our picture
that may have referred to it.
Loki's back.
As director of Thor and as a keen fan of Marvel movies,
I've learned maybe not to believe everything I see.
Thanks for watching.