14 facts about the movie "John Carter"
Courtesy of IMDB user “orinanime”, here are 14 facts about the movie “John Carter”, set for release on March 9, 2012.
1)
2012 marks the 100th anniversary of the character John Carter.
2)
A fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom series of books since childhood, Director/Writer Andrew Stanton says he was inspired to bring John Carter to the big screen in his first foray into live action because he had always been attracted to the concept of a human finding himself on Mars, among the creatures of a strange new world.
3)
John Carter screenwriters Andrew Stanton, Mark Andrews and Michael Chabon discovered they had something in common when they met: they all still possessed the John Carter drawings and artwork that they had done when they were boys.
4)
Filming of John Carter began in the UK on January 4, 2010. The bulk of the movie’s stage work (along with exterior sequences set on Earth) was filmed at Shepperton Studios and Longcross Studios over a four-month period.
Then production moved to Utah for an additional 12 weeks of shooting, with locations in Moab, Lake Powell, the Delta salt flats, Hanksville,
and Big Water — a vast mesa of granulated shale and sandstone set before a towering ring of red cliffs that border the Grand Staircase National Monument.
5)
On Saturday, June 5, 2010, crewmembers, working on location in Utah, found a large bone protruding from the ground.
The Bureau of Land Management confirmed it was in fact a Sauropod bone — either a femur or scapula — from a dinosaur that could have been 60 feet in length.
An excavation is currently taking place to retrieve the rest of the prehistoric skeleton discovered by the John Carter crew.
6)
Over 1000 extras were used for the battle scenes between the Zodangans and the Heliumites.
7)
The Ancient Barsoomian typography carved into the walls of the sacred temples in John Carter took their original design from actual markings found on the surface of the planet Mars.
8)
Working from the original source material, a linguist was hired to create the entire Thark Martian language, using just a few words mentioned in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ novels.
9)
The actors playing the tall, green Thark characters had to learn to walk on stilts to film the scenes with John Carter, giving the correct eye-line contact for the dialogue.
10)
Over 120,000 Swarovski crystals were used in Dejah Thoris’ Zodangan wedding outfit, including her dress, the train, crown and cuffs, and each stone was applied by hand one by one.
11)
Stunt Coordinator Tom Struthers was delighted and amazed that Taylor Kitsch did 98% of his own stunt work, including an 85-foot jump in the learning-to-walk sequence, a 65-foot jump in the arena, battling the ferocious white apes, and a 250- foot long series of jumps in the Martian wilderness.
12)
The approximate number of costumes designed by Mayes C. Rubeo for the film was 1,800.
13)
383 yards of material were used for just one of Matai Shang’s silver Thern robes and the robe took approximately 250 man-hours to make by hand.
14)
While filming in Utah, the film crew came across a small space center called the Mars Society Desert Research Station. No one was home but the Website reads: “Teams of hard-working volunteers, working in full simulation mode in the barren canyon lands of Utah, continue to explore the surrounding terrain, cataloging more way-points, and analyzing the geology and biology of this fascinating and remarkably Mars-like region.”