![]() ![]() They filled the space with Persian and Indian miniatures (small traditional paintings) and ornate Iznik pottery, and “made it very glamorous with drapes and lights.Cast - Will Smith, Mena Massoud, Naomi Scott, Marwan Kenzari, Nasim Pedrad One of Jackson’s first “bouncing-off points,” inspirationally, was a wooden Burmese monastery, which she resurrected as the sultan’s palace and painted gold. She says that “there were early discussions about shooting somewhere like Morocco," but ultimately “the demands that were going to be made of the set were so particular that it would be kind of nuts to try to build it into a location.” The desert and Cave of Wonders scenes were shot in Jordan, but most everything else was built from scratch to accommodate massive dance sequences. She called her contacts in India and gave them “quite precise instructions on what we were looking for, and then they shipped over a couple of containers, filled with pots and timber, and a lot of that lovely basketwork.” From there, she began constructing Agrabah and the sultan’s palace on a massive soundstage in Surrey, England. Jackson envisioned Agrabah as a bustling, vibrant port city, “heaving with details and stuff.” Early on, she made a trip to Morocco and did a “big haul with lots of architectural details-doors, windows, a lot of timber.” She did research on Iranian architecture and mosaics. So you take the bits you want, and I think that’s part of the joy of this film. And it’s not set in a certain period it just kind of is. ![]() “For me, it was really a very blank canvas in a sense, so I could just go to the parts of the world that I love.… I’m very happy in the East, and my mind wanders off in that direction when there’s no restrictions, so that was where I ventured to. He didn’t want it to be of any particular religion or race, and to keep it in this imaginary world,” Jackson says. “Guy wanted it to feel very international. So Ritchie made Agrabah’s location purely fictional. While many viewers assume that Aladdin is set in the Middle East, the 1991 animated film draws many aesthetic cues from India, and the original folktale, “Aladdin’s Wonderful Lamp” from One Thousand and One Nights, actually takes place in China. But she says that Ritchie’s vision for Aladdin was particularly liberating, because it was so abstract. She built the sets of Bridget Jones’s Diary, Finding Neverland, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, and the first three seasons of Game of Thrones. You’ve likely spent some time in a cinematic world conceived by Jackson. Though the crew initially considered filming Aladdin on location, building Agrabah on a set was a more feasible way to accommodate the flick's large dance numbers. But the question we asked at the beginning was, Where is this imaginary place that we’ve created, and who’s living there? Who are all these people roaming around?” It’s very character driven, so you’ll find a lot of blank walls and not much detail, which is fine for me! I’m there to find all the details. “But in fact the clever thing about animation is that they don’t give you that much information. “Obviously, the animation is completely adorable, and we all know it so well and love it,” Jackson tells AD. But the unknown is in the rich, real-life particulars of the fantasy city he moves through, Agrabah- which is where production designer Gemma Jackson comes in. ![]() The known, of course, is the handsome “street rat” Aladdin, singing “One Jump” as he dashes down alleyways and vaults across rooftops, pursued by men brandishing sabers-all while wooing a disguised Princess Jasmine. When “A Whole New World” is the most iconic song of the film you’re remaking, you better be sure your version truly has “a new fantastic point of view.” And from the opening sequence of Guy Ritchie’s live-action version of the classic Disney film Aladdin, viewers are merrily disoriented by a wash of known and unknown elements. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |