Everyone knows that action scenes are made up of skillfully edited segments that flow in an exciting sequence, but each little bit could be a full day’s work on the set.
Perhaps those behind the scenes documentaries on DVDs don’t do justice to the acting challenges of this work. In "Spider-Man 3‘s" glider chase between Harry Osborne and Peter Parker, James Franco had to make sure that in each little segment, he was consistently angry at his nemesis.
"It’s really a case of working myself up for those 20 seconds and making sure that whenever I do those 20 seconds it matches what happened in the last 20 seconds and keep that continuity of performance over the course of a month and a half," Franco said.
And even with wires holding him up, standing on that glider was no picnic either. "It takes a little athletic ability to appear that I’m balanced on the board. I mean you have to some balancing even though you’re wired in and look good doing moves, I guess."
Even more traditional fight scenes, like an old school brawl between Peter and Harry in Harry’s mansion, were drawn out over epic timeframes. "I shot that for a month and a half as well. And on a normal movie, I probably would have shot that for a week at most. I guess they just take their time and make sure that everything is absolutely perfect on these movies. I think it’s a rule, the bigger the action scene the more spectacular it is, the longer it takes to shoot, the more meticulous it is."
And from Franco’s process over to worldwide box office news … Now that "Spider-Man 3" is done demolishing Asian opening day box office records, the wall-crawling money machine has his sights set on Europe. (Let’s just say the web-slinger was met with open arms … and wallets.) France and Italy now have a new record-holder for opening day grosses. And Belgium and Egypt! Germans ate the thing up, too, but it looks like the weather was too nice to provide a record-breaker there.
So now the question is pretty simple: Will "Spider-Man 3" break the record for biggest U.S. opening day of all time? The current record-holder is "Pirates 2," which hauled in over $55 million on July 7th of last year. And if Spidey DOES break that record … could Jack Sparrow snatch it back only a few weeks later? (Meh, who cares? I just want some good movies.)
Source: Variety
