First, sorry to everybody for the lack of updates last week but I was in holidays.
THE HOTDOG ARTICLE
We thought that noone would miss the first big article about Hitchhikers. But we didn miss it. Gladly, DarthBastard posted the article on Duke’s forum. In its september issue , the UK film magazine “Hotdog” made a good small article about the upcoming movie.
it’s not that long, but the article quotes Martin Freeman (Arthur), Sam Rockwell (Zaphod), Robbie Stamp (executive producer) and Garth Jenkins (director) !
According to Robbie Stamp, they have two distincts advantages to make the movie : ‘I genuinely think finally we had a script that worked – writer Karey Kirkpatrick had access to Douglas’ hard drive full of ideas, and the raw energy and enthusiasm of Nick and Garth who had absolutely a vision of how this could look”.
Garth told the magazine that the film is a “peach of a project”, “first and foremost a comedy” and not a typical CGI molested SF movie. It’s with this idea in their head, that they decided to work with Jim Henson Creature Workshop to make the Vogons and Marvin.
According to the magazine, the movie will be a further evolution of Adams’ universe with brand new features including the “Point of view gun” and Humma Kavula (played by John Malkovitch). And indeed I can say that the new features are quite important in the movie. That’s Sam Rockwell’s point of view too : “It’s different from the book, the TV series and the radio play. But it is from Douglas Adams”.
Speaking about their own parts, Martin Freeman says that “We didn’t want to go for that Uncle Bulgaria look – apologies to fans of the Wombles… It’s a bit more low key than that, as opposed to the ‘I’m and uptight Englishman’ look”.
And Sam Rockwell tells about Zaphod that “A lot of it I’m ripping off from my mate Vince Vaughn, who has this fascination with doing Elvis Presley impressions… He’s kind of like Jeff Spicoli from Fast Times at Ridgemont High meets Beetlejuice, and alot of my stuff comes from Bill Clinton, Elvis Presley and a little bit of George W Bush.” And what about Zaphod’s head : “Ah… ‘The Head Thing’. It’s a surprise – there may not be a second head, all I can tell you is Zaphod has a lot of repressed energy.”
You can see a scan of the article here( thanks to DarthBastard again).
MOVIE TIE-INS EDITIONS
MJ Simpson spotted on his website some days ago that there will be tie-ins editions of the five Hitchhikers books for the US and the UK market. There will be new covers of course but the most important thing about them is that there will be movie related introductions wrote by executive producer Robbie Stamp. Robbie informed MJ Simpson that “the piece, which covers the movie’s development as much as its production, will include exclusive interviews with the principal cast”. US editions will be published in april in both paperback and trade paperback formats by Del Rey.
SMALL UPDATE ON THE OFFICIAL WEBSITE
Not much but you can see a pop-up message written in strange language when you enter the official blog. In fact it’s Pitman’s shorthand. if you click on the drawing of what must be a Babel fish (it turns yellow when you pass the cursor over it), you will have the english translation “WAIT HERE – We apologise for any convenience.
