Tagline: And you wouldn’t like him when he’s angry.
“The Incredible Hulk,” to be directed by Louis Leterrier, will return to the roots of the long-running comic series, combining a well-developed character storyline with incredible action and fun. Zak Penn, who previously collaborated with Marvel on X2 and this summer’s smash hit X-Men: The Last Stand, is writing the script. The project is being produced by Avi Arad, Kevin Feige and Gale Ann Hurd and will be executive produced by Michael Helfant and Ari Arad.
“The Incredible Hulk” kicks off an all-new, explosive and action-packed epic of one of the most popular superheroes of all time. In this new beginning, scientist Bruce Banner (Edward Norton) desperately hunts for a cure to the gamma radiation that poisoned his cells and unleashes the unbridled force of rage within him: The Hulk.
Living in the shadows–cut off from a life he knew and the woman he loves, Betty Ross (Liv Tyler)–Banner struggles to avoid the obsessive pursuit of his nemesis, General Thunderbolt Ross (William Hurt), and the military machinery that seeks to capture him and brutally exploit his power.
As all three grapple with the secrets that led to The Hulk’s creation, they are confronted with a monstrous new adversary known as The Abomination (Tim Roth), whose destructive strength exceeds even The Hulk’s own. And on June 13, 2008, one scientist must make an agonizing final choice: accept a peaceful life as Bruce Banner or find heroism in the creature he holds inside–The Incredible Hulk.
Welcome to the explosive new chapter in the Super Hero franchise that’s captivated the world for more than 40 years. Universal Pictures and Marvel Studios bring the action-packed epic motion picture of one of the most captivating heroes of all time to a world that’s been anxiously awaiting it-The Incredible Hulk.
For decades, the brute strength and touching vulnerability of this character have captured the imagination in all of us who are unsure of how to manage the passions that lie buried within. While we try to keep our tensions in check, there is a creature that embraces the pure rage and limitless aggression-living inside one brilliant man who finds his alter ego more and more impossible to suppress. And you wouldn’t like him when he’s angry.
We find scientist Bruce Banner (two-time Oscar nominee Edward Norton, American History X, Primal Fear) desperately hunting for a cure to the gamma radiation that poisoned his cells and unleashes the unbridled force of rage within him: The Hulk.
Banner has been living in the shadows-cut off from a life and the woman he loves, Dr. Elizabeth “Betty” Ross (Liv Tyler, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Strangers). Living as a fugitive to avoid the obsessive pursuit of his nemesis, General Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (Oscar winner William Hurt, Into the Wild, A History of Violence), he knows that a military machine seeking to capture him and brutally exploit his power is always only a few steps behind.
As all three grapple with the secrets that led to The Hulk’s creation, they are confronted with a vicious new adversary known as The Abomination, a monstrosity whose destructive strength exceeds even The Hulk’s own. Portraying the human incarnation of this powerful creature is noted Academy Award nominee Tim Roth (Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs). As Emil Blonsky, Roth imagines a Super Soldier whose lust for power manifests itself in The Abomination. And to defeat this nemesis, one scientist must make an agonizing final choice: accept a peaceful life as Bruce Banner or find heroism in the creature he holds inside- The Incredible Hulk.
Joining Norton, Tyler, Hurt and Roth for the film is an accomplished cast including Ty Burrell (National Treasure: Book of Secrets, Dawn of the Dead), who portrays Leonard, a man competing for Betty Ross’ affections, and Tim Blake Nelson (Syriana, Holes), who takes on the role of Professor Samuel Sterns, a cellular biologist who quite possibly holds the key to Banner’s quest for a cure.
The behind-the-scenes team of The Incredible Hulk is led by a seasoned group of Super Hero and action film veterans, including producers Avi Arad (Spider-Man series, X-Men series, Fantastic Four series), Gale Anne Hurd (Terminator series, Armageddon, Aliens) and Kevin Feige (Iron Man, Fantastic Four series, X-Men series). The film is directed by noted action filmmaker Louis Leterrier (The Transporter series, Unleashed).
Before the Production: Hulk Smash: A Brief History of the Hero
With his off-the-chart strength, size, durability, speed and fighting skills, The Hulk has achieved the enviable status of one of the most popular Super Heroes of the last century. Created by writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby, the character debuted in May 1962 in a series of Marvel Comics.
A young writer, Lee had just finished the first of the Marvel line of books with a then unknown team called the Fantastic Four, and he was looking for a hero who wasn’t as handsome or pretty-someone, or something, totally different who could capture the imagination of Marvel’s readers. Lee and Kirby wanted a “misunderstood hero.”
Lee remembers, “I had always loved the old movie Frankenstein. And it seemed to me that the monster, played by Boris Karloff, wasn’t really a bad guy. He was the good guy. He didn’t want to hurt anybody. It’s just those idiots with torches kept running up and down the mountains, chasing him and getting him angry. And I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to create a monster and make him the good guy?'”
Wondering how to bring a new twist to Mary Shelley’s classic character as imagined by director James Whale in 1931, Lee recalled another favorite from his childhood: Robert Louis Stevenson’s half-man/half-monster, depicted in director Rouben Mamoulian’s 1931 classic, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. “I combined Jekyll and Hyde with Frankenstein,” Lee tells, “and I got myself the monster I wanted, who was really good, but nobody knew it. He was also somebody who could change from a normal man into a monster, and lo, a legend was born.”
Lee and Kirby imagined Dr. Bruce Banner, a nuclear physicist who was forever changed after a freak accident during the testing of an experimental bomb that showered his body with gamma radiation. (Notably, Lee, a big fan of alliteration [think Sue Storm, Scott Summers, Peter Parker], preferred to give his heroes the same first initials in both their names, therefore Bruce Banner was born.) Whenever seriously angered, adrenaline would course through Banner’s body and he would morph into the fearsome Hulk, a creature of limitless power and endless aggression. When enraged, he became a brutal menace to society, but would learn to use his powers to help the weak and helpless. Dr. Banner would spend the rest of his life battling to control the fury of his alter ego and do good with The Hulk.
Though the series was initially cancelled in March 1963 after six issues, The Hulk immediately went on to guest star in “Fantastic Four #12” and, shortly thereafter, became one of the first members of The Avengers, appearing in the first two issues of that famous series. Two years later, he turned up opposite Giant-Man in “Tales to Astonish (#59),” earning his own story in the very next issue.
By 1968, the popularity of the character caught on with audiences across the globe. The Hulk had taken over the entire book of “Tales to Astonish,” which was then renamed “The Incredible Hulk.” The series ran all the way to issue #474, when it ended its publication in 1999; it was quickly relaunched in a new series titled “The Hulk.” With issue #12, the name was changed back to “The Incredible Hulk,” and the title remains one of the most prominent in the Marvel library today.
For almost half a century, audiences have responded to the fact that Bruce Banner and The Hulk are two sides to the same man. They have been fascinated by the idea that he represents the extremes of the id and superego that Freud believed controlled us all. When Banner is The Hulk, his consciousness is buried in the monster, and he has next to no control over his green counterpart’s actions.
Lee offers that he originally thought it’d be fun if the monster and the man “both hated each other. The good guy, Bruce Banner, doesn’t want to turn into the monster and wishes he could cure himself. The monster thinks of Banner as a weakling and wishes he wouldn’t have to change back to Banner.” And their battle for dominance raged on for decades while readers devoured it.
Throughout his career as a Marvel Comics character, The Hulk has been seen in a number of incarnations. Not only has he gone from the pages of comics to television to the big screen; he’s turned from gray to green and lumbering lunk to brilliant colleague. He’s taken on aliases from Annihilator and Joe Fixit to the Green Scar and Green Goliath-but he has always retained the core element that has kept him beloved by audiences for nearly half a century. He remains indelibly linked to a scientist confused by the fate dealt him, and the two have been intertwined in a constant, volatile relationship.
Fifteen years after his introduction, The Hulk’s immense popularity generated a successful CBS television series, produced by Universal Television. In 1977, the show The Incredible Hulk, which starred Bill Bixby as David Banner and a young bodybuilder named Lou Ferrigno as The Hulk, was imagined. The series, which premiered in March 1978, was a huge hit that enjoyed a five-season run before being cancelled in 1982. Six years after the cancellation, the devotion of legions of fans prompted the network to create three more telefilms, which aired in the late ’80s. In 1993, Bill Bixby passed away from cancer, ending that legacy of The Incredible Hulk on television.
In 2003, director Ang Lee imagined The Hulk in a feature film for Universal Pictures. The Oscar-winning filmmaker captured Banner and his alter ego in an origin story, one that examined a portrait of a man at war with himself and the world. HULK told the story of a beast that was both hero and monster-whose powers embodied Banner’s waking nightmare. The film opened in American markets with a record-setting $62 million, third only to Spider-Man and Iron Man in highest opening-weekend grosses for original Marvel properties.
When Universal and Marvel decided to make the next chapter in his saga, they elected to capture the rawest elements of the franchise, selecting a French filmmaker known for his lightning-fast camerawork and passion for the television show that transfixed him as a child. Opting for a series reboot that embraces the spirit and narrative of the Bixby/Ferrigno series, the studios knew it was time to give fans exactly The Hulk they demanded. The Incredible Hulk would be full of the pulse-pounding action audiences begged to see from their hero-complete with feats of heroic strength and a nemesis even more dangerous and powerful than The Hulk himself.
Meaner and Greener: The Hulk is Reborn
When opting to make a new film that starred Marvel’s famous green leading man, Marvel and Universal were keen to bring all the action and wish fulfillment that audiences expected out of one of its preeminent Super Hero franchises. Marvel had the luxury of drawing from the seemingly endless stories of a universe its writers and pencillers had imagined over the years. Since the early 1960s, The Hulk has done most everything-from joining The Avengers and The Defenders, engaging in battle with The X-Men and becoming one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to getting married, receiving a presidential pardon and finding himself hurtled deep into subspace by The Illuminati. It was not a stretch that he could recapture his roots as hero and give moviegoers The Hulk they always wanted-one who was there to smash bad guys and save us all.
With this chapter of The Incredible Hulk, Marvel aimed to recall the storylines brought to life by Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno in the late ’70s/early ’80s show of the same name. The studio knew that Banner’s struggles as a fugitive desperately searching to rid himself of the beast that lived inside resonated with fans.
Banner frequently used the power of that creature to protect innocents he met on his journey of redemption, becoming a reluctant hero. While on the run from the military machinery that wanted to exploit his powers, Banner was forced to embrace the darker side of his personality…and to make something good out of the violence that owned a part of him. Bixby and Ferrigno underscored that throughline every season the television show was on the air, and that would prove the theme for this iteration of The Hulk’s story.
Marvel chairman and executive producer of the film David Maisel offers, “The Hulk is one of the gems of the Marvel universe, and we are excited about bringing him back to the big screen. The Incredible Hulk celebrates all the things that have kept the character beloved by audiences for close to five decades, returning to the roots of the long-running comic series and television show.”
Producer and president of Marvel Studios, Kevin Feige, admits that his passion for the project was colored by the effect that The Hulk had on him as a boy-specifically his fascination of the duality that lives in Banner. He reflects, “In the Marvel universe, we have over 5,000 characters. All Marvel heroes have virtues, and all of them have flaws. It’s that dynamic that makes the characters so appealing, so interesting for generation after generation to watch. They’re not one-dimensional characters. They’re characters with a lot of richness and complexity, and the intertwined relationship of Bruce Banner/The Hulk is one of the richest.”
Blockbuster producer Gale Anne Hurd, whose credits include landmark action films such as Aliens, The Abyss and the Terminator trilogy, agrees with Feige’s assessment. “One of the things I always liked about The Hulk is that, while he’s a hero, he’s not really a Super Hero in the same sense as the other Marvel crime-fighting characters,” she says. “Banner isn’t a character who puts on a costume and then saves the world. In fact, he rarely has a choice as to when he becomes The Hulk.
“He’s conflicted about his power, but also grasps its potential and, as such, is able to transform his curse into heroism,” Hurd continues. “That’s one of the things that makes this character so relatable. There’s a part of all of us that wishes we had the ability to let go, to let someone or something stronger than us take care of the situations we sometimes find ourselves in. Everyone has a little Hulk in them; this movie is about embracing that.”
Marvel executives and the producers were adamant that the story they wanted to tell in The Incredible Hulk was about the heroism Banner would learn from grappling with the creature inside him. But, true to the roots of “The Strangest Man of All Time” whom Lee and Kirby created, Banner never set out to be a hero; indeed, this role was forced upon the brilliant researcher who longed for a quiet life of complicated hypotheses.
Stan Lee explains: “Banner was looking for a way to cure himself from being The Hulk. All he wanted to do was to be able to be somewhere in a laboratory and be left alone long enough so he could work on a cure. He was a scientist, but he was never able to do that. There was always something happening.” Indeed, the bad guys just never let him be.
“The key phrase on this film is ‘Hulk is Hero,’ says Feige. “We’ve already explored some of the darker, angst-ridden sides of The Hulk. This time around, it’s about the wish fulfillment of being able to tap into strength within you, something stronger than yourself. But if harnessed the right way, and if you’re the right person, it’s a strength that can be used for the power of good. It’s a universal notion and one of the reasons that The Hulk is one of the most popular characters of all time.”
To bring this new chapter in the saga of Bruce Banner and his green-skinned alter ego to the big screen, the producers began their search for a director who shared their vision for a new path for the franchise. The search quickly ended after they met with French filmmaker Louis Leterrier, best known for the action-packed films that launched the career of international action star Jason Statham, Transporter and Transporter 2, as well as the critically acclaimed martial-arts film Unleashed, starring Jet Li, Bob Hoskins and Morgan Freeman. It was apparent from the first meeting with the inexhaustible Leterrier that he was an invigorating, inspired choice to direct The Incredible Hulk.
“From the beginning, we all agreed that Louis was a natural fit,” says Hurd. “It was obvious from his previous films that he had a great sense for tremendous action and stylish camera work, but when we met him, we realized that he shared our passion for the genre. He really, really loved these characters.”
“Louis has the unbridled enthusiasm you want in a filmmaker to get the tone of the fun, exciting, heroic action that The Hulk is all about,” states Feige. “He came to us with a vision for how he wanted the film to look. His ideas and what he brought forth to us in storyboards and concept designs just blew us away. He is a superb visualist who understands the importance of combining a well-developed character storyline with incredible action and fun. Where The Hulk goes, action and chaos follow, and Louis completely gets ‘Hulk Smash.'”
Adds producer Avi Arad, “Louis really understands the depth of the character of The Hulk, as well as the tradition the character is steeped in. And being French, he claims the love story comes naturally to him.”
Leterrier, who grew up in Paris where Marvel Comics were not readily available, tells that his love of The Hulk stems from the ’70s television series. “Being French, I was not so exposed as a young kid to comic books, basically because we had only the French and Belgian comics,” he says. “But the TV show was huge in France, and that shaped my strongest memories of The Hulk.”
Like all fans, Leterrier loved the energy and the action of the series, but it was Bill Bixby’s take on a man with deep internal conflict and the dilemmas his power posed that struck home. The director notes: “Bixby’s portrayal of this character was so emotional and lovable as he tried to befriend people and re-create a new life every episode. Every time he was creating the foundation of a new life, the foundation was broken when The Hulk appeared.”
For the same reason he was drawn to his other films, Leterrier admits he loves protagonists who don’t fit a stock mold: “Bruce Banner is an antihero. He doesn’t want this power, but he knows he can’t give it up, because if he gives it to someone else they would harvest it to create evil. That’s the whole journey of this character; it’s a journey of acceptance. Every one of us has anger built inside. Some control it better than others. Banner understands that anger can easily be transformed into courage.”
As the origin story had already been told on screen, Leterrier was ready to enter Banner’s story mid-action, not at the point at which the physicist is irradiated and discovers his powers. He was also eager to make use of recent technological achievements to help him tell the story. Adds the filmmaker: “It’s an amazing thing to be given the opportunity to tell this story with all the technology we have today. The Hulk has such a rich tradition for me to draw on. We’ve got a great story, and we’ve got the action, the excitement and the rush that people associate with The Hulk. Our Hulk is definitely a hero, and our Hulk smashes!”
Monsters and Saviors: An Incredible Cast
When it came to casting The Incredible Hulk, Leterrier and the producers were determined to assemble a troupe of actors who would deliver an adrenaline-fueled summer film distinguished by solid performances. “Audiences these days are extremely discriminating,” says producer Hurd. “It’s no longer enough to have great CGI characters and really terrific visual effects. You have to have a story that’s powerful and characters that you care about and a journey that’s worth taking. Even though we have great source material to draw from, from the many years that ‘The Incredible Hulk’ comic has been running, you have to sift through that and find the best story to tell and the best actors to tell it.”
To help present this chapter in The Hulk’s saga, the team would search for a performer who was not only capable of conveying scientist Bruce Banner’s brilliant intellect and dark conflict, but an actor who understood everything about The Hulk’s universe and would contribute creatively over the course of production. After the filmmakers met with two-time Academy Award-nominated actor Edward Norton, the search was over.
“Bruce Banner is a very complex character, and therefore a very complex role,” offers producer Feige. “When Edward came on board, it totally upped the ante; we knew he’d be able to bring a whole new dimension to the character. He’s one of the most exciting actors of his generation. His immense talent and his ability to transform into a particular role made him the ideal choice to take on the character of Bruce Banner / The Hulk.”
For Norton, lending his interpretation of one of the world’s most beloved Super Heroes was something he took quite seriously. He has been intrigued by the Banner / Hulk story since he was a kid. The actor notes: “Bruce Banner is the guy who monkeys with the secret forces and gets burned by them in a way that ends up isolating him, exiling him to this lonely existence. There’s something in the story of a lonely, moral guy in this self-imposed exile, trying to protect the world from this terrible thing inside himself that I think people relate to. They like the story of the oppressed, chased, hunted man who has this righteous bite-back when you push him too hard.
“When you’re a teenager, there’s a terrific fantasy in that,” Norton continues. “It’s that feeling of being lonely, of being outside, and the fantasy that if people push you too hard, you’ve got this thing that’s going to rise up out of you and defend you. That taps straight into the way you feel as a teenager, and that’s where it starts.”
Offers Hurd: “When Edward Norton came on board, he brought not only his terrific acting ability and the dramatic sensibility we’ve seen in his Oscar-nominated performances, but he also brought great insight and love for this character and these stories. Edward is not one-dimensional. He likes things that aren’t necessarily on the surface. He likes to go deeper and find things that are mythic. With a larger-than-life character like The Hulk and a larger-than-life villain like The Abomination, he’s got a really terrific canvas to explore the material in a really enormous way.”
Fortunately, her director agreed. Leterrier provides, “Edward was a perfect actor for a film in which there is a race against the army, a race against himself and his feelings. He brings in that emphatic sadness and intellect without being too big with his acting. It was really good to have somebody who was very internal, because that’s what Bruce Banner is. The Hulk is external and his primal self. Coupled with the substantial creative direction Edward provided throughout our production and postproduction, we wouldn’t have our Hulk without him.”
Norton returns the compliment to the filmmaker, and he looked forward to their collaboration. He offers: “When Louis and I talked about it, he was aesthetically drawn to the same things I was. His reference points were more films like Alien and other films that were not too bright and glossy-that had some grit to them. He talked about using handheld cameras a lot and about having the visual experience be dirty. By that he meant not always perfectly composed, but there’s a certain sense of chaos and horror-film aspect to it. I liked that a lot.”
One piece of The Incredible Hulk that has endeared the saga to fans for so long is the love story between Banner and his former Harvard co-ed/girlfriend (and wife in certain chapters of The Hulk series), brilliant biologist Betty Ross. It’s the tragedy of their romance-the fact that they’re doomed to be apart until he finds a cure-that makes Banner’s pain so much more unbearable. Betty’s love and empathy for Bruce has never wavered and, though the relationship is complicated, she has a connection to him that allows her to find humanity in his green alter ego.
Leterrier responded to the fact that Betty’s empathy would equal Bruce’s downfall at the hands of his nemesis, Betty’s father, General Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross. He offers, “Banner would not have fallen back in Ross’ claws if it wasn’t his love for Betty and the mistakes he makes because of her, and I loved that dynamic.”
To play the pivotal role of Betty, the filmmakers turned to Liv Tyler, a fan favorite since her memorable casting as the immortal Elvish princess Arwen in Peter Jackson’s epic The Lord of the Rings trilogy. “Liv is not only a classic beauty, but an undeniable talent,” comments Feige. “Her roles in such blockbusters as The Lord of the Rings and indie favorites like Stealing Beauty have helped her develop a unique blend of dramatic and action-adventure experience that is perfectly suited for taking on the role of Betty Ross.”
“We really needed someone who could step up to the role-someone who could bring the right combination of intelligence and strength to the character,” adds Hurd, who worked with the actor in the ’90s juggernaut action hit Armageddon. “She had to be fearless but, at the same time, have a vulnerable side. Liv is perfect; she’s smart, accessible and beautiful-the embodiment of the character.”
Something Tyler didn’t know she was getting herself into was the physicality the role demanded, especially acting against what would become a 9′ creature inserted into the film through CGI. The actor, however, was up for the challenge. She laughs, “Even on The Lord of the Rings, I didn’t really do this. I was reacting to things that weren’t there, but I wasn’t necessarily interacting with things that weren’t there. I was never physically carried off by something.”
Once the star-crossed lovers were cast, Leterrier and the producers looked for a performer to play the man who has dedicated his life to capturing The Hulk, General “Thunderbolt” Ross. Says Leterrier: “Once we had Edward and Liv, we had to find Liv’s father. Since Liv is a beautiful, tall woman, we couldn’t get a little, round general. I had to find a mountain of a general, as Thunderbolt Ross was this big, scary mountain of a man in the comic books. I wanted somebody who is rare, somebody you are not expecting and who hasn’t been in these parts before.” Oscar winner William Hurt proved to be the ideal choice.
As he is also a big fan of The Hulk comics, it wasn’t a difficult decision for Hurt to tackle the role. “I found the comics deeply moving,” recalls the actor. “I believe in The Hulk, absolutely. That’s why I did the movie. My son is an even bigger fan-he knows everything about the series. We spent hours talking about Ross’ development and the relationship between Betty and Banner.
“Thunderbolt Ross is a conflicted man,” he continues. “He’s caught between his love and loyalty to his daughter and to his country. And he’s obsessed with stopping Bruce Banner and his alter ego.” This fixation, explains Hurt, ultimately takes his character to the point of putting his daughter in danger. “Ross starts to lose understanding of what he’s doing, and why,” says the actor. “He ends up ignoring his primary instinct as a parent and, ultimately, he’s humiliated by the fact that the thing he hates most in the world saves his daughter’s life. That’s a heavy emotional toll.”
Every good hero needs a villain and, while Banner has General Ross, Banner’s alter ego needed something more visually monstrous-especially to battle a powerhouse as awesome as The Hulk. In The Incredible Hulk, The Hulk finds himself taking on one of the most formidable adversaries from the comic series. General Ross may be Banner’s greatest nemesis, but he’s not alone in his quest to destroy The Hulk-The Abomination has him in his sights as well.
Elaborates Feige: “When we first encounter Banner, he’s been on the run for five years, looking for a cure to this thing he fears within him. He is being a hero in the way he thinks is best-by staying on the run, in the shadows, away from those he loves and those who want to harness his power for evil. It isn’t until he reencounters the love of his life, reencounters his old foes and a powerful new one, that he realizes that perhaps the monster within is actually a hero within.”
The filmmakers cast British actor Tim Roth as Emil Blonsky, a special ops soldier with a thirst for domination and glory. After Blonsky volunteers for General Ross to become exposed to the same gamma radiation that transformed Banner, Blonsky eventually becomes The Abomination-a foe dwarfing The Hulk in both temperament and power. The soldier morphs into the creature through two different procedures. The first is through a series of injections of Super Soldier serum from General Ross, which begins his evolution into a military machine. The final, full transformation into The Abomination is as a result of a transfusion of Bruce Banner’s blood from the unethical Dr. Sterns.
While The Hulk can revert into Banner when the adrenaline that courses through his arteries subsides, there is no going back for Blonsky once he accepts the inoculation. His body eventually reacts to the radiation by mutating into a monstrosity whose spinal column and other bones (which he can use to skewer his enemies) protrude outside his body, resulting in a pale-green, color-reflecting mutant that has powers greater than those of The Hulk.
Emil Blonsky, suggests producer Avi Arad, is the perfect antagonist: “People who want to be villains are good villains. What happens to Blonsky is no accident; he brings it on himself. He sees the power The Hulk has; he wants it, and he takes it. He looks at The Hulk as a personal challenge. It’s like the fastest gun in the West-if you take this guy down, you are the ultimate bad ass. That’s Blonsky’s mind-set, and he’ll stop at nothing to destroy him.”
“Blonsky is an action man who is unimpressed by anything,” says Roth. “He’s seen it all; he’s tired, and then he sees The Hulk. He realizes that there is a whole new game, and he wants to be part of that. He wants to own the power.”
Roth likens Blonsky’s thirst for power to an addiction. “Once Blonsky figures out there’s an adventure to be had, he goes for it. He lives for the buzz,” explains the actor. “The injections start small, but when he realizes that they give him an ability to use his body in a way he hadn’t been able to, he goes after the big hit: ‘Enough of these little shots. I can run fast; I am bigger, stronger, smarter… I want more.'”
Bruce Banner’s condition has complicated his longtime romance with Betty Ross and, after five years with no real contact with him, we find Betty trying to put the past behind her. The man who is competing for her affections is fellow suitor Leonard. (In one of The Incredible Hulk’s many nods to fans, this character is named after the infamous psychiatrist who attempted to cure Banner while saving Betty’s life [after her unfortunate encounter with Spider-Man’s archnemesis Sandman]. His dabbling in gamma technology would eventually turn him into the 6’ 6″, 380-pound Doc Samson. But that’s another story…)
Leterrier knew that he needed the competition for Betty’s affection to be someone who “was a little older, somebody that Banner could respect.” The director comments of Leonard, “That’s the problem; the guy is amazing. He’s a great doctor; he’s handsome; he’s funny. It was tough to find somebody with all these qualities.”
The search ended when Norton suggested the producers and Leterrier meet with actor Ty Burrell, a performer with whom he had worked in 2003 in Lanford Wilson’s off-Broadway play Burn This. Recalling his conversation with Norton, Leterrier laughs, “I was like, ‘Wait a minute. Ty Burrell, wasn’t he the jerk in Dawn of the Dead?’ Imet him, and he was so funny and charming. I told him, ‘You are Leonard. Banner and you can interact; you can have the right connection.'”
Pivotal to the story of The Incredible Hulk is Banner’s search for a cure that will allow him to rejoin society. Tim Blake Nelson was cast to portray Professor Samuel Sterns, a cellular biologist who may hold the key to Banner’s quest (and, in Marvel lore, eventually becomes the massive-craniumed evil Leader, future foe of The Hulk). Sterns and Banner have been in communication throughout Banner’s exile. While they have never met, Banner believes that Sterns’ research could lead to an antidote. What Banner doesn’t know is that Sterns really wants to create more versions of the infected physicist. The audience is asked to question, once again, just who are the monsters?
“Sterns is brilliant, but he is also ethically challenged,” explains Nelson. “I think that’s what’s really appealing about a lot of the characters in The Incredible Hulk; they get to explore this sort of id within themselves, this dark side that comes out as a kind of monstrosity. I don’t think Sterns considers himself a villain whatsoever. In fact, because he is so brilliant and so convinced of his own brilliance, he’s beyond any sort of opprobrious morality. As long as he’s discovering and breaking new ground, he feels his life is worthwhile. He doesn’t get too concerned about what’s good, and I love that kind of character.”
With the cast locked and cameos secured for both The Hulk’s creator and the bodybuilder who is forever associated with the character, it was time to begin building a creature that was half-man, half-beast…and the world he would attempt to not destroy.
Building “The Strangest Man of All Time”: Visual Effects
Naturally, the majority of Super Hero movies rely on CGI to assist the beleaguered, costumed human heroes as they morph from their aliases. While CG effects help them achieve their powers to fly, web sling, retract adamantium claws or walk through walls, The Hulk is the rare hero who must be completely constructed through CG. Still, he needs to be an organic part of his environment, and the audience has to believe that a 9′ tall green menace is battling a psychopath called The Abomination-and that the two are raining destruction upon Manhattan as a terrified populace scatters.
Of the challenge of bringing The Hulk into this world, producer Feige explains: “Louis’ vision for the film was that it had to be a visceral, fun-on-the-run action movie. The way you do that is not necessarily by lingering on visual effects sequences. You do that by adding the effects sequences into the mayhem and into the excitement of the scene you’re putting together-whether it’s a car chase, a foot chase, or whether there are helicopters and armies coming in. This movie is about adding all that action and chaos to the real world, with practical environments. Louis designed this film so that when you put The Hulk into it, you totally buy that he’s part of that environment.”
Creating The Hulk
The process would logically begin with the green guy himself. The filmmakers went through hundreds of iterations and countless sketches to get the final design for The Hulk perfect. “The preproduction process was endless,” admits producer Arad. “We had files upon files upon files. Everyone has an image of The Hulk in their minds, but we needed to move forward and make it this Incredible Hulk.”
Director Leterrier knew what he expected of the final design for his protagonist. “I wanted something überhuman,” he states. “I wanted to feel texture, skin, veins. It was really important for me to hone in on a great looking Hulk.” He adds that the team wasn’t interested in doing simply “a bulked up Edward.” “We wanted to do something different, where Hulk has this iconic shape,” he says.
To accomplish this task (among many others), Leterrier and the producers would turn to visual effects supervisor Kurt Williams, veteran of such Marvel blockbusters as Fantastic Four and X-Men: The Last Stand. Williams, a fan of The Hulk since his brother introduced him to the comic as a boy, partnered with the Academy Award winning visual effects house Rhythm & Hues for the action-adventure. His team would ultimately be responsible for seamlessly blending more than 900 visual effects shots- 450 of which are full key CG character shots-into the film.
For the behind-the-scenes crew, it was just as important to protect the legacy of The Hulk as it was to update his look with the tools at the VFX team’s disposal. To achieve the first objective, Williams and company returned to the launching pad: the comic books. “From a conceptual perspective,” Williams says, “it made sense to go back to the source material-the classic Hulk origin and all the things people love about the character, all the things that make The Hulk, well, The Hulk. We found artwork that fit into the way that we saw him-with longer hair and the classic Hulk sculptural positions he struck in those comic books. We started with that as a basis and worked outward. Then we began to translate it to the real world, which is always a challenge with comics.”
Williams knew that achieving the exact blend for a creature he believed was more “linebacker than bodybuilder,” who could be powerful, scary and, simultaneously, empathetic, was a monstrous task. The Hulk fans have huge expectations, and allowing today’s savvy audiences to connect with any CG character requires enormous effort on the part of a film’s visual effects team.
As the VFX supervisor explains, successfully translating our hero from the development stages to the movie screen is predicated on our ability to find emotional characteristics in that creature. He reflects: “As humans, we spend so much time scanning people’s faces. And the difference between being able to read a computer-generated character and a real human is a very narrow margin. But we naturally have the instinct to tell when something isn’t right. We can tell when muscles aren’t firing correctly in the face, or when the eyes aren’t moving properly; we constantly scan other human faces to read emotion.”
When they began the animation process, they knew The Hulk not only had to convey his feelings of rage and displeasure, but do so opposite a very real cast of actors. The visual effects team devised a tool set to create audience empathy for The Hulk; this allowed for the character to have a number of corporeal affectations, giving the audience visual cues to interpret what they think The Hulk is thinking and how he is feeling. Williams provides: “In the tool set, we have physical attributes like a muscle structure and vascular structure that can grow or deflate in volume. To show that he’s active or angry, for example, we can add or take a bit of saturation out of his color-things that allow us to create something humans can relate to. Everybody can relate to the fact that if you’re embarrassed, you become flushed in the face. It’s little details like those that we needed to put into this Hulk.”
Fortuitous, as Stan Lee had come to a similar conclusion more than 45 years ago. Offers Lee: “My first impulse was to make him gray, because as far as I knew, there were no Super Heroes or villains running around with gray skin. When the first issue came out, the printer had trouble with the gray color. So I talked to the technical people and they said, ‘Well, most of the other colors are easier to do; you won’t have to worry.’ I had to pick out another color, and I realized nobody had a green hero I knew of. And I said, ‘Okay, let’s make him green.’ It was as casual as that.”
Finally, size would be addressed by the designers and animators. Offers Williams: “One of the big challenges on the movie was deciding the scale of the characters. Our challenge was to create a consistent size for The Hulk throughout the movie. We didn’t want him to grow. We didn’t want him to ebb or flow. We wanted him to be one size the whole time, so we picked 9′, because it would still allow him to relate to human beings and not be so big that he would be almost alien or unbelievable. It allows you to believe he’s really there, but you still have the ability for him to believably pick up a car and throw it and show other great feats of strength like slamming the ground and creating a giant chasm in the street.”
Designing The Abomination
When reflecting on the epic battle that would be at the climax of The Incredible Hulk, producer Hurd summarizes the feelings of her crew: “The great thing about where our story takes us is that there is a clash of two titanic forces. You have The Hulk, who is our hero. He is encountering a foe much bigger, much more powerful and more dangerous than he is. And this climactic clash happens in the streets of New York City. How much fun is that?”
Originally imagined by his Marvel Comics creators as a 6′ 8″, 980-pound mutation of a former KGB spy of Soviet Yugoslavian origin, The Abomination in this iteration of The Hulk saga would be made into a superspy whose dreams of domination would make him even larger than his quarry. Roth explains Blonsky’s motivation to turn into such a creature: “He’s a fantastic soldier. He’s reached the limit of what he can do with the body that he has, so the next stage for him is evolution.”
For the filmmakers, designing The Hulk’s antagonist would be even more challenging than The Hulk. Arad offers, “The Abomination was even harder. The Hulk is very iconic, so you have a solid place to begin, but The Abomination doesn’t really have that. It was a real balance to keep him grounded, human, scary-one bump and you had Alien.”
Leterrier explains why it was so important to make The Hulk’s foe one of the fiercest creatures imaginable: Banner believes his enemy’s creation is all his fault. “Everything started in Bruce Banner’s brain: he created a monster; he created the technology,” says the director. As Banner realizes that the government is using his tainted blood and the procedure he developed to manufacture a Super Soldier, guilt racks the physicist. “When forced to face what General Ross has created-The Abomination out of Emil Blonsky, injected with a mixture of Super Serum and some of Banner’s blood-Banner has to become the hero,” Leterrier continues. “He has to face his mistakes, because it’s all because of him.”
As with The Hulk, the designers returned to base material in the comic books, but they deviated just enough to keep it visceral for the audience. Whereas The Abomination of the comics has a serpentine look, the filmmakers wanted a character that was physically a mutant version of The Hulk. They questioned, “What if The Abomination’s gamma injections have caused his bones to grow outside of his body?” They felt the exoskeleton would result in a grotesquely different structure than The Hulk-one with hard surfaces on his head, chest and back… and a spine that grows out of his skin. To complete the look, the monstrosity has huge gnarled hands.
The Abomination in this film is 11′ tall, 2′ taller than The Hulk, a fact Williams says gives him “a significant advantage in our movie.” “One stride by The Abomination is 5′ to 10′, depending on if he’s running or not,” he says. “He can move up to 30 miles an hour pretty easily. We worked from the fact that The Abomination needed to have an advantage, especially in the third act, because the character arc is about heart. At the end of the movie, The Hulk comes back because of his heart…he’s got to save Betty.”
Motion Capture
As the performers were developing the layers of their characters, the visual effects team was crafting the layers of effects that would be seamlessly blended with the actors’ performances to give The Incredible Hulk plausibility. Perfecting The Hulk’s and The Abomination’s movements and creating a tool set of how each character moved proved to be an ongoing process. The direction of all scenes involving The Hulk and The Abomination was driven by the groundbreaking process that combines use of computer generation and motion capture (mo-cap), developed to astonishing results for Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings precious character (and Liv Tyler’s former co-star), Gollum.
Explains VFX supervisor Williams: “Motion capture is a way to capture body movement digitally, so it can be transferred to a digital character. What it gives you is human nuances you wouldn’t necessarily get from a drawn animated character. It is a key part of designing any action sequence.”
Movement coach Terry Notary was brought in to provide The Hulk’s and The Abomination’s character and movement references for the digital masters at Rhythm & Hues. A veteran movement instructor with credits such as Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Planet of the Apes and James Cameron’s upcoming epic Avatar, Notary got his start as a gymnast and member of Cirque du Soleil’s Mystère before branching out into film work.
Early in preproduction, Williams, Notary and Rhythm & Hues VFX animation supervisor Keith Roberts began the long and arduous process of creating and defining the characters’ movements and iconic positions, amassing a collection of more than 2,500 takes before they were finished. Their approach was not only to use the process to create motion for each shot with The Abomination and The Hulk, but to use mo-cap to define the differences in their movements and fighting techniques.
Offers Roberts: “Motion capture today has evolved to the point where rendered times are very short; you’re actually able to see the results in real time, so you can target a performance and see immediately if it’s the right dynamic. You have to be able to direct your motion-capture actors like you do your regular actors-right then and there. That interactivity is crucial to us, because even though the end result is a character that is computer generated, there are human movements unique to each of them.”
Working closely with Leterrier and drawing on the characters’ comic origins, Notary and Roberts came up with a basic template for movements for The Hulk and The Abomination. From The Hulk’s infamous thunderclap to the rapid lope of The Abomination, once the template was established, the team began the process of realizing the characters’ on-screen lives.
Wearing a specialized suit that enabled cameras to read and instantly transfer every angle and subtlety of his movement to two 40′ monitors, Notary spent more than two months choreographing and refining the beats, hits and kicks that define the enemies. Every movement and the driving force behind it was thoroughly explored. For his performances, Notary credits the comic books as his starting point for each character. “It’s important to pay homage to the history of the characters,” he explains. “The Hulk has a very human quality to him; he’s a heart-driven character. His movements are grounded and his physicality is very real. The Abomination, on the other hand, is a very mind-driven character. His mind is in charge, and the body just follows. He doesn’t feel everything like The Hulk. The head leads all of his movements, and his body follows.”
From the way they walk to the manner in which they turn their heads to react to stimuli, The Hulk and The Abomination share nothing, save their gamma-irradiated blood. Everything from the differences in their skeletal structures to the manner with which they regard humans was explored. The Abomination whips his head about to react, while The Hulk has a much slower, contemplative, childlike sensibility.
“One of the things we got out of the motion-capture stage with Terry and Keith is to come up with distinguishing movements,” offers Williams. “For instance, Hulk has very rounded movements, and he’s also a very defensive character. If you were to push Hulk, he might step back for a second, then he’ll come back at you. Whereas, if you push Abomination, he’s not going to move much; he’s right in your face again. So, we created these moves where Abomination can land on his back, do a quick tip up, and he’s right back into the action… whereas Hulk rolls over, jumps up, then walks back toward the fight again.”
Both Norton and Roth were integrated into their characters with cyber scanning through a process known as Mova-painting them with infrared paint, then shooting the actors with 37 infrared cameras to capture their facial performances. Leterrier elaborates on the rationale: “This way, you get a performance reference. We also shot HD reference of their faces, all the film we could get.”
Integrating Two Worlds
No one knows better than Leterrier the obstacles that may come when making a film seamless for audience members. He relates: “A well-accomplished visual effects movie is a mixed bag of tricks. You need to fool the audience, because our eyes get used to CG; you can really recognize the CG elements. If you can mix it with prosthetics, real people, body doubles, and cut around all these elements to make it seamless, the audience won’t know what came their way.”
One of the biggest challenges when working with visual effects and CG characters is that of physical production. Of course, The Hulk doesn’t just share screen time alongside the main actors in the film; he interacts with and acts opposite them. As one of the biggest stars of The Incredible Hulk would never actually appear on set, however, it was up to the visual effects team to construct proxies to represent him.
Explains Williams: “Once the movement of the characters has been defined by motion capture, the next challenge was cuing in our actors so they are able to understand how big the characters are, how they move and how quickly they move. It’s hard for people to fully understand what’s happening when you shoot scenes with CG characters, because they don’t see the creatures in front of them. It’s tough to imagine the scale and the nuances of their movement.”
The visual effects department relied on a number of visual aids to better provide Leterrier, the actors and crew an understanding of The Hulk’s and The Abomination’s on-screen motions. As every major scene was storyboarded, then computer animated through the process of pre-visualization (pre-vis), Williams was able to show the cast and crew animated images of The Hulk “acting” in scenes.
But the pre-vis didn’t solve the issue of the actors and cinematographer Peter Menzies’ camera team needing exact eyeline references. “There was no one solution we could use,” admits Williams. “We came up with a lot of different stand-ins for The Hulk over the course of production; it depended on the scene and the shooting environment. We did everything from putting Terry on stilts and using tennis balls on a telescoping pole to using cutouts of The Hulk’s face with LED lights in it-whatever made the actors comfortable, whatever made people look in the right direction.”
Two of the performers with the toughest challenges in the integration were Liv Tyler and Edward Norton. As Betty Ross, Tyler was often reacting to Norton as The Hulk, sometimes as he stood on a box for her. “We would talk out the scenes in advance, and I would try to give her a sense of what was happening,” says Norton. “It’s all very collaborative, me and Louis and Terry…the guy holding the dummy head. You had to work together to make sure Liv knew exactly what we were imagining was happening on the other side of the scene. We tried to be as specific as possible about what she was interacting with. I think it went off really well, and she did beautifully.”
For her part, Tyler was up for the challenge, even if she didn’t know what to expect for the next a.m. call time. “Over the course of the shoot, we’ve come up with all these different ways of my interacting with The Hulk,” she laughs. “Originally, I was going to be being carried by an actual mechanical arm. Then, at one point, it was going to be a huge man, and then the team came up with this brilliant idea of having two guys-because The Hulk’s width is rather large.” To add extra realism, Leterrier would ask the weapons adviser to shoot blanks in the air, just to get Tyler, along with Hurt, to react to their co-star.
Tim Blake Nelson sums up the way much of the cast felt: “It’s difficult to act against a big green sheet with an enormous, bulbous, expressionless plastic green approximation of a human form with eyes on top of it [what Leterrier affectionately called “The Hulkinator.”] But, you know, a lot of what we do as movie actors is extremely silly. We have intense conversations or love scenes-or we’re mourning someone’s death in close-up-and then there are lights all over the place, and this camera on a sled is moving at us…it’s all so unreal. So, acting opposite someone like The Hulk, who isn’t really there, is par for the course.”
Prosthetics and makeup also played their part in blending the comic world of The Incredible Hulk with the practical and CG. Having stepped into the Marvel universe, Hurt wanted his character to look as if he had walked off the page of one of the original comic books, menacing to Bruce Banner and anyone who crossed his path. To that end, he endured hours at a time in the makeup chair. “In every one of the iterations of the comic book, there’s a theme to Ross’ look,” says Hurt of his character. “He’s got the silver hair, the silver ‘stache, the big eyebrows and all the rest of it. He’s a bold statement, and we made the decision to play him that way.”
Hurt embraced the character, and on his first day on the set, he was unrecognizable. “When William stepped out of the makeup trailer that first day, we all did a double take,” recalls Hurd. “It was as if William had disappeared and Thunderbolt Ross had taken his place. It really mattered to William that he portray General Ross in a way that fulfilled the vision of the character that the fans have. He had a whole dossier on the character he had created with the help of his son, who is probably one of the biggest Marvel fans on the planet. He was determined to get it right.”
Hulking Out Globally: Design and Locations of the Film
Principal photography for The Incredible Hulk began in July 2007, for an 88-day shoot that started in Toronto and finished at the end of November in Rio de Janeiro. From the beginning, Leterrier and the producers knew they wanted their “man on the run” epic to have a global feel to it. Feige comments: “We meet Bruce Banner walking to the ends of the earth to get away from society and be away from others. The story then begins to be his journey back toward America, toward characters he knows and loves. It takes us through South America, the East Coast of the United States and ends up right smack in the middle of Manhattan.”
Capturing Brazil
Veteran production designer Kirk M. Petruccelli led the design team in creating more than 100 sets for the film. As The Incredible Hulk begins, Banner is in Brazil, keeping a low profile and working at a bottling plant, while he continues his never-ending search for a cure. His whereabouts discovered by General Ross, Banner finds himself once again on the run. On a journey that takes him through Latin America and the East Coast of the U.S., Banner winds up in Harlem.
For Petruccelli, there was strong appeal at the idea of working on a film with such a large and imaginative canvas. Key to his establishing the visual feel was to ensure all elements reflected the shadowy world into which Banner disappeared. “One of the first things Louis said to me was that he wanted The Hulk to be as real as possible, bashing and smashing through the real world,” recalls Petruccelli. “This is a road picture, a chase movie. Banner is always on the run, and as a designer, that gave me so many avenues in which to take it and contribute to the action.”
To create the world, Petruccelli and crew blended a majority of location-based shoots with a handful of staged sets. From multiple city streets, homes and buildings, they integrated recognizable, real locations. For his part, Norton would often arrive on set and be amazed by what the crews had accomplished. He offers, “A lot of times, I came onto the set and realized that Louis and Kirk had gone much bigger with it than I had in my head-much bigger. The scale of it was really amazing to me.”
Of his interest in so many locations, Leterrier took the screenplay and literally ran with it. He wanted his action movie to be “an interesting mix of a Zen chase on one side and extremely kinetic on the other.” He knew that when Banner was being hunted- whether in the favelas of South America or the streets of Manhattan-he could “cut to him, and it’ll be calm as he’s trying to regain control. Then he won’t be able to hold it in, and Banner will just explode and Hulk out at any moment.”
The filmmakers took advantage of a number of locales in and around Rio de Janeiro. Filming portions of The Incredible Hulk in Brazil brought a look to the movie that could not have been achieved by a majority-set shoot. Some of the most vibrant sequences were filmed in the hillside favela of Tavares Bastos, a winding maze of narrow back alleys and steep steps that offered a spectacular backdrop for the elaborately staged sequence at the beginning of the film-in which Banner attempts to escape from Ross’ commandos.
In addition to shooting main and second-unit action sequences in Tavares Bastos, scenes were also filmed in a number of other locations in the storied city, including the older, colonial neighborhoods of Lapa and Santa Teresa. The team took advantage of its close proximity to Tijuca Forest, the world’s largest urban rainforest, to lens breathtaking ground and aerial sequences.
During preproduction scouting trips to Brazil, Petruccelli meticulously researched the look and design of the favelas in order to re-create on a Toronto soundstage the interior of Banner’s Rio apartment. “Because we were going to be filming in Brazil, it was even more important that our constructed interior set have the same details and textures to give a smooth transition between what was shot on location and what was shot on stage,” Petruccelli says. “The favelas are so individual-a little plaster here, a brick there, vivid colors or no color at all. They are very organic.”
Leterrier found the favelas, with their endless stairways and 3.5′ pathways quite the bustling “ant farm.” The director remembers, “It’s a little difficult to shoot in the favelas. But with the right favela people knowing we were doing everything to not abuse or destroy the space, but respecting it and making it shine to the world, we were fine. People have a really bad impression of what a favela is; it’s actually very clean, with a sewer system, some electricity, video clubs, rental video places and hairdressers. It’s a town within a town.” And to his alternate delight and chagrin, they were in the middle of Brazil’s rainy season, which was good for the dark mood of the film, bad for the cast and crew’s interest in staying dry.
One of the more formidable tasks for the team was the bottling plant set where Banner works (and has increased access to flowers and plants he can analyze for a possible cure to his gamma-irradiated cells) during his self-imposed exile in Brazil. This would be where Blonsky (pre-Abomination inoculation) has his first encounter with The Hulk. The exterior factory-yard scenes were filmed at the former Behring Chocolate factory located in the Santo Cristo neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro. But as an integral part of the first act takes place in the interior of the bottling plant, it was necessary to construct a set that would satisfy the specific parameters of the script. The action sequences were so detailed that several weeks filming would be required.
“It was a very involved sequence with tricky geography,” explains Petruccelli. “We needed a massive space we could take over and fashion to our needs-The Hulk needs a lot of space to throw stuff around.” After scouring almost every old factory in and around the Toronto area, the filmmakers found an ideal location at an abandoned glass factory in Hamilton. What followed was an exhaustive eight-week construction schedule as carpenters, painters and riggers worked in tandem with set dressers and prop masters to create the illusion of a working bottling plant. This place would eventually be destroyed in an explosive confrontation between The Hulk and General Ross’ team of commandos.
To achieve the level of mayhem and destruction the filmmakers were looking for in this and other action sequences, the combined expertise of special effects coordinator LAIRD MCMURRAY and stunt coordinator JOHN STONEHAM, JR. was called into play. To bring realism to The Hulk’s destructive fury, McMurray and his special effects crew devised elaborate wire rigging mechanisms and machinery capable of exerting thousands of pounds of pressure and pull. These apparatuses could accelerate large weighted objects at very rapid speeds to make it appear as if The Hulk was tossing or kicking them around. Working closely with McMurray and his crew, Stoneham and his stunt team were able to devise scenarios in which the destruction The Hulk leaves in his wake is rooted in high-flying reality.
Face-Off in Manhattan’s Abomination Alley
The script also called for a fight of monumental proportions in which The Hulk must save New York City and her citizens from the wrath of The Abomination. Recalls Petruccelli, “When Louis told me he wanted the climax of the film to take place in Harlem in front of the Apollo Theater, I said ‘Sure, but we’ll have to build it,’ because there was no way anyone was going to let us throw cars around, blow things up- basically trash and terrorize a historically designated area-for a couple of weeks in New York City.”
The team explored a number of locations and options, but, in the end, they decided to film the sequence in three different locations over a period of several weeks. Dubbed “the biggest bar fight in history” by visual effects supervisor Kurt Williams, the clash between two titanic forces was one of the film’s most multifaceted and complex sequences. Almost 80 unique visual-effects shots were seamlessly blended with action to give audiences, The Hulk and The Abomination a fight to the end. Here especially, integration between the art department and the visual effects team was critical. Comments Williams, “Where The Hulk goes, action follows. Our mandate was to devise a scenario as realistic as possible by combining practical environments with CGI.”
An urban section of Toronto’s Yonge Street was deemed the ideal location to recreate some of the storefronts of Harlem and, in mid-September, the production was given permission to shut down a four-block section of the street where, over a period of four nights, the main and second-unit crews worked in tandem with the visual effects, special effects and stunt crews to film elaborate sequences involving hundreds of extras and a lot of pyrotechnics. To accommodate the scripted mayhem of cars crashing and buses blowing up, façades and storefronts-including a façade of the Apollo Theater and its legendary marquee-were constructed and positioned along the route.
With the aid of visual effects, the destruction continued across a two-block section of downtown Hamilton, where Petruccelli and crew erected façades replicating a Harlem street on a couple of parking lots-buildings that would be destroyed in the brutal fight along the route Leterrier and the producers called “Abomination Alley.”
Finally, the action culminated on a virtual Courthouse Plaza set constructed on a backlot at Toronto Film Studios. The set had to accommodate, among other chaos, a helicopter crash and the ensuing havoc. The project kept the scenic art mold shop busy making breakaway bricks for months, not to mention the countless “stone and marble” plaster molding and vermiculite tiles-always helpful to cast and crew disinterested in being injured by flying debris.
While filming in Toronto, the production also made good use of a local university campus, Morningside Park and the city’s Financial District. Toronto Film Studios housed the movie’s constructed interior sets, including the place where it all began, Banner’s laboratory. Other filming locations included the Canadian Air Forces Base in Trenton, Ontario, and a glacier in Bella Coola, British Columbia.
Regardless of the shoot, the cast and crew grew very accustomed to seeing their director in one location in particular: at the helm of his 15′, 30′ and 50′ techno cranes, with their telescoping arms. Recalls Norton: “Louis uses a techno crane like other people use a shoulder cam; he is very dynamic with the camera. I told him once, ‘I’ve never seen anybody more married to his cranes.'”
For Leterrier, his commitment remains to give audiences nothing less than the full-force action they want. “Part of the whole Hulk experience is that you put the audience in Bruce Banner’s shoes by literally following him when he runs down the favelas. But you also are next to him on that motorcycle through the cable cams. When he’s Hulk you want to be behind him… so the Russian arm [key camera crane] helped us to run as fast as The Hulk, be as high as The Hulk and get into ‘Hulk Vision.’ To do that, we used the Russian arm and techno crane to make you feel like you are The Hulk, so you move like him. You are fast, and you push in and you grab and throw stuff out-that is the total Hulk experience.”
Keeping The Incredible Hulk Green
At a time when more and more people and productions are supporting environmental causes and charities, the cast, filmmakers and crew of The Incredible Hulk decided that it was time to take their beliefs one step further and to apply them to their own industry.
Gale Anne Hurd explains: “When we first started having meetings back in Los Angeles about The Incredible Hulk, it brought to mind that we were dealing with the biggest, most well-known green character on the planet. Edward Norton has been a committed environmentalist for a long time, and when you have a green character and people with an environmental consciousness, the opportunity is there to put the two together.”
The production team embraced the idea. Much of the cast and crew already employed green practices at home, so bringing the same environmental consciousness to work was a logical next step. The Incredible Hulk adopted a vigorous program to reduce the film’s impact on the environment. The goal was to be as green as possible, and every department participated to reduce its waste and energy consumption-the production’s carbon footprint.
By its very nature, the transportation department on a film can be a huge polluter. One of the first practices instituted on the production was, wherever possible, to use hybrid and fuel-efficient vehicles. Transport found a source of ultra-low sulfur diesel for all diesel vehicles and generators and instituted a strict “no idling” policy on all lots and locations.
The construction department chose to forego the use of lauan, an affordable and readily available tropical hardwood that is, unfortunately, not harvested in a sustainable manner. In its place, a sustainably harvested, locally sourced yellow pine was used. Whenever possible, the pine was recycled, repurposed or reclaimed and offered for use by agencies such as Habitat for Humanity. The scenic art department crew members used zero-or low-VOC paints and took turns taking paint cans to the hazardous waste drop-off center on their weekends off work.
The craft and catering departments sourced locally grown produce and eliminated plastic grocery bags with the use of cloth shopping bags. On-set food was served in biodegradable rather than Styrofoam containers, and china and silverware were used for lunch, as were biodegradable utensils for those on the go. As a start-of-production gift to reduce plastic water bottles and take-out hot beverage containers, Hurd gave everyone on the crew a stainless steel mug. Additionally, a contractor was hired to provide and remove bins at every location and set, thereby recycling paper, plastic, glass and cans.
Other green activities and efforts instituted throughout production included:
— Paperless distribution or use of recycled paper wherever possible
— Use of rechargeable batteries by the sound department
— Implementation of biodegradable soaps and cleaners in trailers and production offices
— Installation of compost and green bins in the production office kitchen, as well as in the lunch tents and craft trucks.
Sums up Hurd, “As filmmakers, I think it’s our responsibility to be leaders and to be able to find new ways of making movies a much more environmentally conscious enterprise. The cast and crew of The Incredible Hulk chose to take the mission of the greening of our film seriously; it’s time for this kind of initiative to become the norm, not the exception, in film and television production.”
****
Production wrapped, The Incredible Hulk team said goodbye to 3:30 a.m. mountain shots, being bruised up by men in green suits, the noise that was the constant propane bomb poppers, and, of course, The Hulkinator.
Bruce Banner himself, Edward Norton, summarizes why this tortured man and his powerful alter ego have, for so many decades, remained a fascination to generations of fans, especially those who hold on to Bill Bixby’s legacy: “The reason you tuned in week after week to watch this guy’s lonely existence is that you wanted him to find the cure. You wanted him to get to come in from the cold and be a real person again-not this haunted, hunted fugitive. He lost everything. There’s an aspect of Hulk that is a little sadder, a little more tragic.”
Fittingly, The Hulk’s creator has our parting words. Lee concludes: “The thing I’m happiest about is that he has lasted this long, thanks to so many brilliant writers and artists who did that strip after Jack and I went on to other projects. Now it’s going to be a major motion picture, which I know will be great. I wonder how many Hulk sequels there’ll be after it. I’d better stay in good with the guys at Marvel so I’ll get my cameos.”
oduction notes provided by Universal Pictures, Marvel Studios.
The Incredible Hulk
Starring: Edward Norton, Liv Tyler, Tim Roth, William Hurt, Tim Blake Nelson, Christina Cabot, Lou Ferrigno, Martin Starr
Directed by: Louis Leterrier
Screenplay by: Zak Penn
Release Date: June 13th, 2008
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for brief suggestive content, frightening sci-fi images, sequences of intense action, violence.
Studio: Universal Pictures
Box Office Totals
Domestic: $134,533,885 (51.6%)
Foreign: $126,186,027 (48.4%)
Total: $ 260,719,912 (Worldwide)