THOR (2011) | Behind the Scenes of Chris Hemsworth Marvel Movie #1

the

marvel

universe is called the universe for a reason it's a great place in the

movie

up to this point we've explored a lot of the earthbound heroes we're going to a cosmic level with

thor

the challenge is really this combination of the spectacular visual and physical world of asgard the world of the gods with the world of contemporary earth well one production designer did an amazing job he had a wonderful sense of unique vision but his source material was always there he just pushed him up to it and that's what i was going to need asgard and the other time and even earth the challenge was the multiple dimensions of other worlds when you sit down and study all the comic book spreads they are very different from one spread to the next so your visual cues are everywhere i have one foot in the land of jack kirby that spawned i think the iconic images of

thor

i have one foot in norse mythology and i have one foot in beautiful modern architecture perfect zen style so that there is the space for these elaborate characters and costumes breathe asgard needs to find a way to capture what kirby designed and created on the page and find a way to translate that into a wonderful new size scale that looks amazing on film and beau's team did a beautiful job imagining these things and it was not an easy process he went through many many designers and many many designs to get us to this place in talking to Ken we had decided that Asgard is inhabited by warrior gods but they live in the upper part of the nine realms their privileged perspective on the universe must be so advanced and elegant that it must not be cluttered with normal details that we associate human beings with technology the construction of buildings the methodology of their architecture is so advanced that the human brain cannot even comprehend it this film it didn't have a lot of green screen, they built these amazing huge sets, it could have been very ethereal and god-like, but they paid a lot of attention to pay homage to that viking age that is all norse. the mythology that thor is based on i came here and i walked through the sets and i thought ok thats it i dont have to do much i just show up put on the armor and let it happen the throne room was amazing that was the scene i was looking forward to the scene with loki when he's on the throne is such an archetypal image in the comics and i walked into that set and i thought this costume with these horns and the spear on this throne in this room you got your chance can you bring me your urgent kill you are the king there is a lot of restraint in asgard so that these very elaborate costumes and larger than life almost godlike characters have space around them and the focus is on them there are such a plethora of options within the almost 50 years of thor comic seems like great artists you need someone of great taste i think to find ways you can take your hat off to certain iconic and inspirational versions of the characters but let contemporary cinema live that's how you usually see yourself more or less is good luck alex byrne a costume designer she is an oscar winner she is not afraid of the kind of theatrics of some of the cultures obviously i started with comics i would say the biggest contribution to asgard was jack's original artwork kirby the world he created is amazing asgard in that that singular voice of this is the expression for asgard a good example is if you saw seth you could immediately tell by how she looked that she was from asgard because the population of asgard wanted to keep the idea of the graphics from the comic where he shades the crowd and keeps it very monochrome and that seemed like a really good way to keep the population of asgard present but not distracting and we have actors we have faces they have human proportions and the biggest challenge of this is how to make them they look like real people, even though they are gods, but they are real in terms of not people wearing silly clothes.

We're trying to hint at things that are technological and really advanced, but we can't really show them in a way that makes them feel like they're from our world, so it becomes challenging and I think a lot of the things that we try to to do is just make it a really awesome costume here's a couple pictures of thor that you can see it was done very soon you can see a lot of the norse designs that are on it this is the actual norse symbol i took apart and put it together I abstracted on his armor and then this was the attempt to try and modernize it it's based on some sort of thor ultimus design but it crashed into a modern take on some norse designs one of the things we were trying to do was play around a lot with the fabric weaving in and out with metal just to give a different feel of asgard it's a different culture a different place so it's not something we usually see nowadays what we use i think the most challenging thing was trying to find all these characters that they had to fit into asgard that you're trying to figure out if they lived here, if they were part of this culture, how much influence they have from outside and trying to strike that balance was a challenging part, but it was also the fun of the project, one of the things that I enjoy doing work. in these projects it's kind of being a happy medium between what the comics are trying to bring to an illustrative realm that adds a little more reality to it and then having the constant designer as the basis for them to actually work from. to bring it to life, the cape is particularly demanding because it has to look magical in the comics, kirby uses it as a great graphic device for movement, tension and drama, so we needed to have a cape that could have that amount of expression but i also mark the shape and proportion of

chris

when he's not moving and then he waves and moves, he flies with him when he fights the physicality in the movement it's a big component of these costumes you can draw webs to the end of the world but we wanted a layer that was going to behave in a way that it didn't in post production and we developed the layer in the workroom and that fed into the way the artists drew and we ended up with a layer that does everything we wanted it to, not it's done in place production if you believe in thor's personal charisma his character's journey you have to give him an intention to terra void this applies to cape this applies to helmet applies to discs you have to ask why it's ok so why do you need the cape can you tell us a story about your position if it helps you move better or worse gives you an image point out to other characters the helmet or what it's used for it's ceremonial it's aggressive you always find a reason and then alex goes She's really good at doing that I have to say we have a great cast because clubs aren't easy they don't take five minutes to put on it's about an hour in the costume it's just capes and bits and pieces and the first two weeks we've been sweating and dying on this stuff, then they came up with these cooling vests that I think race car drivers wear which is basically a little vest with pipes that cold water runs through and can cool you down.

I haven't quite counted how many pieces it takes to put this on you, but it's amazing work, I mean it makes you stand up. Sure, you know you can't sit down in jeans and a T-shirt to order a frappuccino in this costume. The costumes we wear are pretty tough, so when we walk we don't slouch, we stand up because we physically can't bend down and that helps. It helps you carry that strength that that posture that a superhero would wear changes your center of gravity so the entire physique of the character you know it's all a costume it's the sexiest armor out there I'm actually saying it now but I would Don't say it in front of others because they get annoyed but they can clearly see if you're taller but I'm wider wow helmets the helmet was a big deal I've done helmets before but not on this scale and that was great because we had digital shapes of the actors so we could sculpt them because the helmet has a lot to do with the proportion of the face, the eyes, the jaw line because they have to work close-up in all my adaptations a long time ago, I kept thinking when I'm I'm going to cuckold because it's almost like the last piece of the puzzle becomes the character and there's also something on the forehead like what it does here that makes you look from underneath, which makes you forget mischief you know it's good to have you back this comes in two pieces and the back that's the back piece there and then this comes out ah like this and joins like this there she is in all her glory if you look at a characters like heimdall the merging of the worlds that created beau and the designs alex came up with are so perfect they really feel like they were created by the same hand head forward looks a little more aggressive than you cant really talk about heimdall without talking about the bridge of the rainbow because pime dolls is kind of a tap to turn it on or off and to point it to your destination we wanted to find a way to make space travel exciting and necessary to our story how do you get from a place? to the other and then how do you rise to the challenge of perhaps the most colorful image and one of the most memorable in all of comics? asteroid island in the sky that is asgard at the top of the universe down to earth we needed to find a real bridge that we feel and then we needed the image and kind of symbolic value of a bridge to suggest how energy particles of people or beings and sends them back and we wanted through light energy also light energy that could occasionally evoke a rainbow we found that a bridge and rainbows though were good strong individualistic starting points and then our job was to make it cool We spent a lot of time generating various versions of what the rainbow bridge should look like and we look at it completely in the rainbow, we look at it just moving, pulsing electrical energy from electrons and it's somewhere there and it's never really static. of locked in an appearance that relates to the mineral quartz so if the rainbow bridge was built with quartz that is very much the light that would emanate from it we have also had contact points so when the asgardians walk on the rainbow bridge there is contact and you feel the energy of the rainbow bridge which i think is a cool effect in the

movie

s.

It's nice to have a visual or physical representation of a suitable environment that explains what's going on here. This is the portal from Asgard to the other nine realms. where the bi-cross connects to the rest of the universe you need the physical twitch to illustrate we always played with banishing to earth in early drafts it was viking age land and we fleshed out that story for a while but we started to realize the contrast between asgard and earth in that case were equally foreign to the audience and it didn't work so well we realized we could break a completely different avenue by bringing it to contemporary earth after having designed asgard yotenheim the heimdalls rainbow bridge Earth is like a vacation by comparison, yet it has to fit within a cohesive universe within the film.

I liked the idea of ​​sort of an idealized small town america, in this case sort of a small town new mexico with sort of a hopper. quality to the design of the streets in some of the buildings and for those shapes to reflect and resonate some of the shapes in asgard because we needed both to celebrate the distinction between the worlds and the focuses and to make all of these images feel like they belong to the In the same movie, what we decided early on was that Asgard and the nine realms are up there and are causing disturbances in the sky, so the concept I wanted was a small town in a vast desert with a big sky. in the land that thor was thrown into by his father to be almost a character so that you would look at this city and its inhabitants and develop some empathy for them so that when the destroyer came to earth and began to exploit it you would feel it in your Heart , I mean we wanted to feel real and I think we did.

The public is incredibly sophisticated. You can't fool them with cheap synthetic versions of the stuff. of course inspirations from the comics and inspirations from the new mexico desert it's truly one of the most beautiful places I've ever been and there's so much amazing scenery in such a small area it's amazing to have a set or 360 to have beautiful mountains and a kind of of wide open spaces being in the middle of this vastness meant there was a bit of asgard to the feel on earth you also know that up there is an island in the vast sea of ​​space and down there new mexico is an island in the vast sea of ​​desert , the other thing i was hoping to achieve was to echo the design of asgard so in asgard you have the heimdall observatory which is the royal entrance to asgard via the rainbow bridge to a central palace flanked by buildings in our city from ancient source we have a street leading out of the desert flanked by buildings leading to an old car dealership that in a strange way echoes the shape of the palace asgard is a versionmuch more modest and heartbreaking of asgard, however i think it visually echoes the other one, i built the whole new mexico city, very nice restaurants, shops and things in a very personal little country town that was in stark contrast to the big castles and kingdoms what do you know in asgard in her story in the fight between thor and destroyer to me it reads like a showdown in a western town so i thought let's take a look at a western town and that led me to tom ford's ranch we got people who were there for six months in new mexico built on this set and the work they did, they took a town that was once silverado and 310 to yuma and turned it into this real little town in central america that i think anybody would love being a part of this city which, as you can see, is a western pueblo we are turning it into an actual pueblo that is not totally typical of a small New Mexican pueblo will be the kind of modern evolution of an old pueblo that maybe started out looking like something like this looks now it will take several months of work to get this to a place where they can film it we are going to basically start with the infrastructure work putting up sidewalks telephone poles street lights parking meters roads the things that make a city modern and then we'll be going to redo the facades, put up signs, and then there's a whole layer of sets that really bring it to life.

The stage design was just amazing. It made our job a lot easier because we were surrounded by all this atmosphere. as you walk you're like i'm not on set i'm not on set but you are it was so amazing and every time we had to blow up one of the buildings or set something on fire a little tear just rolled down the side of my face because I thought I can't I can't see this destroyed because we were going to blow up this city we needed to have as much control as we could so we could specifically build an improved comic a little bit more the colorful look slightly brighter than usual for the old bridge city was a choice that allowed us kind of control over the framing before we went oh because we're good in profile getting into the outlines of all of that was was fun I think one of the biggest thrills was seeing the worries and thinking on earth because with shot asgard we know it works and then you think i think i know what it will look like but what will it be like when these guys start walking through a small town in america.

Probably the biggest challenge is merging the Asgardian world with the human world because they're so different styles, so we acted in the

scenes

that are just human, you know, and we did it like a normal movie and then. all of a sudden we had a scene with asgardians where you know the asgardians come and visit us and they moved away from this kind of heightened reality and then the two worlds met we were confused as to how we should meet tone and performance wise so that we can all make it look believable that was very strange going to earth we are looking for thor and we got to the window where we found him this was like finding you and then the looks on the faces of natalie pullman the face of stalin skarsgard was looking at we go which movie we are in i dont think so oh excuse me lady siff and the warriors three and i was glad i did things here and on stage first because where you inhabit the scale of asgard you bring that to earth because you were able to have that emotional memory this is what you are keeping your gods on earth beau welch has made it very real has made two separate worlds relatable has made it so real you can say you know what i grew up in texas i have been in a city like that i have lived in a city like that with a main street and everything and these settings here in asgard are something you could see in your dreams the movie constantly contrasts it has a beautiful element about from asgard to earth and then from gods in these costumes to people from the land you know in humans and with the fight sequences you know you have big dramatic flights and stunts and magic and all sorts of stuff and then melee you know a bunch of guys who beat each other like hell the environments they they live these characters just breathe truth and reality and you are the most fanciful and wildest in the cinematic universe and yet they feel as real as the room we are in. sitting there, what we want to do is bring images to the screen that people haven't seen before, regardless of what they've seen in a Marvel movie before, but haven't seen in a movie before, at the same time giving it the wonderful wish fulfillment aesthetic of that relatable hero of a journey of redemption is hard with a great action story to really hope you can claim original or unique visuals but i think thor's structure provides that and i think we've been brave enough to meet that challenge and visually really enjoy the scale and scope which was exciting hello here's today's daily fact when you think of thor it's hard to think of a face that represents the character other than superstar

chris

hemsworth

but in the moment From the casting call Chris nearly lost the role to none other than his own brother Liam, who was called in and was in the creator's top five picks. chris was finally slated for a new addition where her sibling rivalry pushed him to do his best and he finally landed the world famous role remember to click below to subscribe on the side for more great content