15 years after How to Train Your Dragon debuted, the live-action adaptation landed in Los Angeles on Saturday, as Gerard Butler and director Dean DeBlois continued their roles at the helm of the franchise.
Butler, who played Viking chief Stoick the Vast through all three animated films, returns to the role for the live-action project, joking that when he first heard it was happening, “I was like, ‘Are you guys crazy? That’s going to be terrible.’”
But he did have some “questions,” and DeBlois told him to come “spend a day in Belfast and see what we’re building, what we’re preparing, how the dragons are going to look, how the world is going to look, and when I saw that I was like ‘OK, I get it all.’ I mean I kind of got it anyway, just wanted to play a bit hard to get,” he joked to The Hollywood Reporter at the premiere.
And as for playing the same character again in essentially the same story, Butler noted, “When I watch myself, there’s moments where I go, ‘That’s very like how I did it before,’ then there’s moments where you just go completely different. What I did want to do was be fresh, coming in there and starting as a new story and suddenly I’m embodying that all day long — I didn’t get to do that when I was just doing the voice. I wore my pajamas every day.”
The star’s return almost didn’t happen, DeBlois revealed, noting that Butler was initially unavailable and booked in back-to-back projects in the window the movie planned to shoot. The news that he would have to cast someone else in the role was “kind of distressing to me,” the filmmaker said, but then the actors strike happened and shifted production schedules in a way that allowed him to do the film. “When Gerry came in I felt a great sense of confidence and comfort like, ‘Oh, this going to work now,’” DeBlois said.
The adaptation is DeBlois’ first live-action film, after writing and directing the three animated How to Train Your Dragon projects. He noted he had “been publicly saying I didn’t like this trend, and it’s true — as an animator I don’t freely like the idea that live-action movies come along and replace the years of hard work that we put into it, that made it a classic in the first place. But I did appreciate that they were talking to me, and so Universal’s the first studio to actually take a chance on a writer and director of the animated movie.”
He continued, “For better or worse, it has that continuity to it, but I promised [the studio] even though I hadn’t made a live-action film before, I would do everything I can to deliver the wonder and the emotion of those original stories to the screen.” DeBlois added that there were a couple of key scenes where they went shot-for-shot with the original — particularly revolving around Mason Thames’ Hiccup and his beloved dragon Toothless — but they also were able to be “a little more experimental in other parts of the movie.”
One of those big changes was filling out the character of Astrid, with DeBlois commenting he always felt “she was a little bit underserved in that first animated movie.” Nico Parker plays the role, which America Ferrera voiced in the animated films — the two actresses haven’t spoken about the adaptation but Parker emphasized, “She’s so wonderful and I hope that she sees and she likes it.”
Recalling her reaction to learning a live-action film was coming, Parker said, “I never tell my friends when I’m auditioning for things because there’s that awkward thing of then you don’t get it and you see it on a bus and they think it’s funny to be like, ‘Oh my God, you auditioned for that,’ and it’s still a pang of pain. So I never tell them but with this one it’s such an iconic film and I’m such a huge fan and my friends are such huge fans and it’s such a big deal that I was like, ‘Guess what I’m auditioning for?’ Because I knew that even if I didn’t get it I’d be seeing it on opening day.”
She added, “The fact that we’re here and actually I’m in it is so surreal.”
How to Train Your Dragon hits theaters on Friday.
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