"He showed me this picture of something half-painted gold and a lizard," the actress recalled during a publicity event earlier this month. "I've got kids and I thought, 'that's great but also bizarre that I'm going to be this crazy reptilian creature.' Then I saw the [movie] poster and saw a few other things and realized I'm not just a lizard creature. She's one of those fun characters - she's evil and she's temptation and she's very fun to play."
The PG-13 film, which opens today in IMAX 3-D and 2-D formats, uses digitally enhanced replicas of Jolie and co-stars Anthony Hopkins, Robin Wright Penn, John Malkovich and Ray Winstone through a motion-capture technology first explored by Zemeckis in 2004's "Polar Express." It allowed him to transform Winstone, a 50-year-old character actor whose gruff voice Zemeckis thought was perfect for Beowulf, into a Goliath with rippling abs.
The technology is more sophisticated than it was a few years ago, but the stakes remain high for the film's backers, who include billionaire producer Steven Bing. "Beowulf" has a reported budget of $150 million and will be the widest 3-D rollout in film history, but it remains to be seen whether it will attract a broad audience that includes literary types as well as teenagers looking for a high-tech fantasy extravaganza.
Neil Gaiman, the graphic novel writer who wrote the screenplay, thinks so.
"Beowulf is a remarkable, powerful story," he said. "It's the oldest story in the English language that we have, but it's always been considered incredibly problematic from a literary-critical point of view in that it starts with young Beowulf coming in and rescuing Hrothgar from Grendel and Grendel's mother, then we cut to 50 years later and he slays the dragon."
