Eight Below Q&A with Paul Walker, Bruce Greenwood, Moon Bloodgood, Jason Biggs and director Frank Marshall





			EIGHT BELOW	Search all of phase9.tv

			Continued from page 1 Frank, I was quite impressed with Paul’s sleigh driving. At the beginning he makes a sharp turn, I think he was being modest about his skill? FRANK MARSHALL: Well that was the fourth take. The first three weren’t so smooth but they got it in the fourth! PAUL WALKER: The trick is that when you fall you have to get up and chase the sled. FRANK MARSHALL: Oh yeah those dogs just keep going. They just want to run and run and run. You have to stop them with a command or a brake. Frank, how many dogs did you audition for this and how did you manage to pin it down to the ones that you finally got? FRANK MARSHALL: It was interesting because I knew that it was a kind of a dog ensemble movie and that the dogs needed to be pretty distinctive. You needed to be able to pick them out and they also needed to have a personality of their own. Basically I needed a different looking dog for each role particularly the lead roles of Maya and Max. I looked at a lot of dogs. I looked at 50 or 60 dogs that also had to have some semblance of training at that point. You couldn’t just pick a dog off a website that looked right. They had to do a lot of things that required them to have been trained from when they were pups and luckily D.J. who played Max had the look of a pup and he had great energy. He was smaller and the trainers called him ‘the cheater’ because when he went to the mark he’d always cheat forward he’d never stay, he was always cheating in what he was doing. He had this sort of boundless energy that I was looking for in Max. And then Maya also had this wonderful face, this sort of motherly noble face, a really pretty silver colour, not very big and I was thinking that maybe she should be big but it sort of fell in once I narrowed it down. Then the twins sort of looked like each other, I just picked the two prettiest dogs I could find. Unfortunately the one poor choice I made which turned out to be Paul’s favourite dog was Shorty the all white dog. I almost made a huge mistake when we were first putting the group together. I thought that the easiest thing would be to have the white dog be the leader. I’d just met these trainers and the head trainer who is a very quiet guy walks me over and said, “You don’t want to do that”. He was right. This dog was my nemesis. He would never do anything that we wanted him to do but on the sled he was fine. So his role was diminished in the movie. Frank there were some days when you got quite frustrated with the dogs? FRANK MARSHALL: Yeah we had two funny things happen. There’s one scene where all the dogs come out at the top of the hill and they’re all looking at the birds and the trainers got them all set and we rolled. Maybe they all had the urge at the same time but suddenly they were all off peeing everywhere! It was infectious. The hardest thing for the dogs to do was to look tired and hungry and when Maya is hurt and they’re supposed to be following her we had to do this wide shot. It was difficult because there were 12 trainers for the six dogs and they had to be far enough away to be out of shot. Well the further they got away the less control they had and every time Shorty would just come bounding through, so finally I just took him out. Do they actually sleep like that in the snow? FRANK MARSHALL: They’re the only ones that actually like to be out there in the cold. They have the fur and everything, and they stay warm by getting buried in the snow they all sleep outside. PAUL WALKER: When they have their full winter coats, which they had for this movie, they look the prettiest. The trainers told me they’re more than comfortable in minus 30 degrees Celsius, so if you bring them inside they’re too hot. Paul, speaking of the extreme temperature in the opening sequence, were you thrilled to be running out there in your boxers? PAUL WALKER: I didn’t find out about that until the day before we shot it. FRANK MARSHALL: Well I thought that maybe he wouldn’t want to do it. PAUL WALKER: Conveniently enough it opened just about when INTO THE BLUE was screening so Disney heard that some people thought that I looked decent enough with my shirt off so they thought that it might be a good idea to start a movie with that. So I said to Frank, “Just know this, I’m not stupid!” Paul, do you find it limiting in the sort of roles that you get because you look decent with your shirt off? PAUL WALKER: Yeah, maybe. Maybe a little. But I don’t mind having to chase things down, chase things that I like. Like RUNNING SCARED for instance. I’m extremely competitive so when people start trying to count me out or try to categorise me I start getting hungry so I think that it works better for me that way. I love those type of movies. I think that there’s a certain time and place for different types. I like dark movies but at the same time when I’ve watched too much news and I’m feeling a little down I like to see something that’s a little more upbeat and it just depends on the mood at that particular time and that’s why I jumped on board for both these projects. FRANK MARSHALL: One of the things we tried to do was to show the world about Antarctica’s differences. For instance you have to warm up your ice cream and one of the other things we discovered in our research is there’s this thing called the ‘300 degree club’. I think you go a little batty down there because there’s no light and there’s all that snow so they’ve created these games for themselves. One of them is when the temperature drops to minus 150 degrees Fahrenheit. All those that want to join the club get into a room and pump in the heat and get it to 150 degrees Fahrenheit above and then they all run out and touch the south pole and then run back in. Crazy right! But it’s a 300-degree swing so this was our sort of junior varsity version, it was a 131 degrees Fahrenheit, but they were out there. PAUL WALKER: It still involves a lot of alcohol though! Talking about crazy Frank, how many times did you make Paul and Jason run in and out of the sauna and in and out of the snow? FRANK MARSHALL: I think it was eight, yeah eight times. And what was the actual temperature when they did all this running in shorts? PAUL WALKER: That was one of the warmer days actually. FRANK MARSHALL: I’d say probably minus 10 degrees. Frank why the change of title from ANTARCTICA as in the original Japanese movie? FRANK MARSHALL: We didn’t have the rights to use the title and in a funny way I thought it was a little bit National Geographic, but the basic reason was that another studio had the rights to the title. I liked EIGHT BELOW because it referred to several different things: below the equator, below zero and eight dogs! And possibly eight takes of Paul and Jason in only their shorts? FRANK MARSHALL: Yeah, I can add that to the list! Paul could you tell us a bit about the upcoming Clint Eastwood movie [FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS] that you’re in? PAUL WALKER: It was a great experience. Clint Eastwood is a great guy. All the things you hear are true. I was there everyday, day in day out. It was tough but he never lost his cool, he was always in control. I liked it because it’s not so much about the heroics - it depicts war for what it really is. These guys are now like brothers. These guys go off, they fight, their best friend dies right next to them and they don’t cry about it. They have to push forward. The story is really about the unsung heroes, the guys that raised the first flag and all of whom were basically killed by the time the photograph made it back to the States. So these guys were pulled in to raise the second flag, which immortalises the second raising. The original flag was replaced because the marine core they love their souvenirs. They knew that first flag was significant, so they pulled it down. But what was immortalised was the photograph of the raising of the second flag. So those guys were called home. They were immortalised and they were labelled as heroes, and they were basically tools against their will. They were tools to help generate funding for the remainder of the war [World War II]. These guys were sent around on a nationwide tour to help generate several billions way back then - that’s the gist of the story. FRANK MARSHALL: When Paul talked about chasing down roles and things, he called me and he said there’s this role that I really am moved by and I don’t think that anyone’s thinking about me for it so I encouraged him and I put in a couple of calls to say that there’s a really good actor out there and you might not be thinking about him because it’s a different kind of movie but I think that the perseverance really paid off. Eight Below - movie information PHASE9 movie review Back to movie interviews
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