- Logan picking up that point you are surrounded by Brits on this movie was it a different type of set for you - did you get the sense of humour as well?
Yeah, yeah it was definitely a different kind of set because I was working with a bunch of classical British theatre actors I definitely felt a little bit under-prepared. But it wasn’t too uncomfortable.
- Milla did you do all of your own stunts? And when you sign on for a movie like this is doing your own stunts something that you always insist on?
I do 90% of my own stunts but with the corset and the 90lbs skirt me and my stunt double did take turns because neither one of us could survive it. But when you see my face on screen it is me.
- And to everyone else you are wearing these fabulous costumes so did that make the stunts and the sword fights more difficult?
Luke Evans: It was the boots - they have heels these boots.
Matthew Macfayden: It was the heels on the cobbled floor. Nobody told us about the cobbles.
Paul W.S. Anderson: One thing about doing a period piece is all the costumes and the Cardinal Guards, these guys are fighting so many of them, there were a lot of people wearing these boots and at the end of every day of shooting, we shot that fight scene for about a feet, there would literally be a hundred boot heels lying everywhere.
- Because the movie was shot in 3D does that change how you behave with a sword and how you move?
Ray Stevenson: It does in a sense because with 3D the camera can almost see around you so you can’t traditionally lay off for safety and move the camera position.
Everything has to be on point and everything has to be on target so the discipline of our training, and we had phenomenal training and it had to be of such a high standard.
But with that intensity and that focus meant that when we actually came to filming we were actually a lot more freer and be who we were meant to be trying to be and not worry about the fight because all that groundwork had been done. But it does add a heightened discipline to the sword work.
- Orlando we have seen you handle a sword on the big screen before so were you disappointed that you weren’t involved in any fight scenes this time around.
No it was quite nice to have the power of the British Empire behind me so I didn’t have to lift a sword.
- The movie was shot at the Babelsberg Studios had you shot there before and what was the experience like?
Paul W.S. Anderson: I had produced a movie Pandorum that had shot at Babelsberg so they were excellent studios and I knew all about them.
They had very big stages and we needed the big stages for the sets that we built - the movie was primarily, 70% location and 30% stage.
Obviously we used a lot of big historic locations which were fantastic - when you have Milla and Christoph (Waltz) walking down some of these huge walkways talking you can do that on location but when you need to start blowing things up, which you need to do on a movie, you have to do all that on stage. But we had to build them big so that the stage proportions would match visually the locations.
- I am very proud that I introduced my kids to The Three Musketeers with Dogtanian...
Luke Evans: Thank you.
- They have seen it on the stage and when they saw a poster for the movie they got very excited about it. But the film has been given a 12a rating which means kids can see it - I have seen the film so I can now take them knowing it is fine so what would you say to parents who might be a bit concerned?
Paul W.S. Anderson: I set out to make a family movie because this is the first film that I have made since I had a family and I was thinking about movies that my daughter might like to see in the future.
Milla Jovovich: She is four and she is allowed to see it.
Anderson: There is no blood in it, just a tiny bit on Mads Mikkelsen’s costume, there is no nudity and no bad language, just a couple of words. I think it just depends on how sensitive your kids because the only thing that it does have, even though it avoids all of those things, it has an intensity in the action scenes - if your kids are up for that then I would definitely say go for it.
Milla: Can I just say that the intensity in the action sequences really is just about the skill of the actors when doing these scenes - I would be more inspired as a child than freaked out by the intensity.
It’s not violence, it’s certainly tense, but it is beautiful and inspiring.
- Paul I was going to lead on from that the movie is quite dangerous in parts and there are some dramatic moments so how did you make it child friendly? And was it something when you went into it that you had in mind to make it available to a wider audience?
Definitely. It starts with something as simple as thinking about what you are going to see - are you going to see blood? I mean it is a little unrealistic as these guys decimate dozens of Cardinal Guards and you have all these bodies lying around and yet there is not one drop of blood.
But that was the intention as I really saw this movie as a big popcorn entertainment movie; it was the kind of movie that I had gone to seen when I was a kid and really enjoyed.
So a lot of my films have a lot of blood in them so I feel like I have got that out of my system so I am happy to make one without.
Luke Evans: It also meant that we got to leave much earlier in the evening because you didn’t have all the blood to take off.
Milla: Popcorn entertainment is what it is and that is great but this movie is so much more faithful to the books than so many movies that I have seen - for the first time in film history that D’Artagnan is playing by an eighteen year old, yes he is older now, but it is the first true life D’Artagnan.
It’s the first time that we are seeing young kids playing the parts that they should be playing as they are written in the book - when you see these kids playing the King and Queen and you see Christoph and M’Lady circling like sharks around Freddie and Juno; they are young and they are vulnerable.
Read the second part of the interview here.
The Three Musketeers is released 12th October.
FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw
Tagged in The Three Musketeers Paul W.S. Anderson