Percy Jackson and the Lightening Thief Press Conference

15th Feb 2010

Percy Jack­son and the Light­ning thief tells the story of Percy Jack­son, an ADHD and dyslexia suf­ferer, who finds out that he’s the son of Posei­don, god of the sea. As if find­ing out that he’s a demi-god (half god, half human) isn’t enough, Zeus, king of all the gods, thinks that Percy has stolen his light­ning bolt, a weapon more pow­er­ful than any nuclear weapon. After train­ing at Camp Half Blood, where he meets Anna­beth and Grover, he’s forced to go on a jour­ney to res­cue the light­ning bolt with the fate of the whole world in his hands.

I was lucky enough to attend the press con­fer­ence for this and got to ask them some ques­tions myself. Enjoy!

What was it about Logan, Bran­don and Alex that made you think they were your characters?

Chris Colum­bus: Once we knew that I needed a slightly older lead man I remem­ber see­ing 3:10 to Yuma and his per­for­mance impressed me, and I kinda knew when I met Logan that this is Percy Jack­son. The stu­dio wanted to see his screen test, he did the screen test and he was spec­tac­u­lar, basi­cally blew every­one away. He had this intu­itive abil­ity as an actor, that’s kind of rare for a 17 year-old and I was just amazed that his instincts were so far beyond his age. That being said, it was a com­plete plea­sure work­ing with him, it wasn’t like from other pic­tures that I’ve been in which are like act­ing class, when the child actor says one line and you have to cut before they look into the cam­era. He’s a bril­liant actor and I truly believe he’s gonna go on to some very big things far beyond a typ­i­cal movie star, I think he’s gonna be one of the great actors that we’ve seen. Then I had to find some­one with some chem­istry with him and I’d met a lot of young women in Los Ange­les and the prob­lem is all of these women don’t eat, so they weigh like 25 pounds and they can barely pick up a spoon. So finally when Alex came in she was for­mi­da­ble, she was strong, she was tough, I believe that she was a real demi-god or god­dess; when I put the two of them together, they had a tremen­dous amount of chemistry.

Pierce and Bran­don, its hard enough hav­ing to act oppo­site some­thing that isn’t there, to be added by CIG later but how hard is it to act with bits of your own body that aren’t there and have to be animated?

Pierce Bros­nan: I didn’t expect blue tights…or orange socks. Chris is very clever, he sent me the script and he sent me this delight­ful repro­duc­tion of me as a cen­taur, as Cairon. It was very flat­ter­ing with mus­cles and every­thing but then came the real­ity that day I had to get on to flo­res­cent green painted stilts and put on the blue tights. You have to be a bold man to do such a thing, espe­cially to walk out onto the set with 200 young peo­ple who are very buff and you’re sup­posed to be this wise, bold hero. Its all in a day’s job though, I’ve gotta try.

Bran­don T. Jack­son: At least you didn’t have bal­let shoes, I had bal­let shoes that they gave me and we had tights and orange socks so they can draw the legs in and we had to cre­ate the walk, like you walk­ing on your tippy-toes; so we got these beau­ti­ful peo­ple on the set and I’m try­ing to stay cool as pos­si­ble but you know, it was good because Kevin did a great job with draw­ing the legs in and so on.

Steve and Kevin these are rel­a­tive small roles but given the stunts involved was it a walk in the park or is it actu­ally harder than doing some­thing where there’s no CGI?

Kevin McK­idd: The thing I find the hard­est was, and it sounds like it should be a dod­dle, was the open­ing shot of me walk­ing out of the water, I thought I’d be done by lunchtime but I think it took 2 days to do that shot because it just looked like I was walk­ing down to get the paper from the cor­ner shop and it just didn’t look right. We had to find a way of mak­ing it seem like, because when you’re 40 feet tall, your bones are much big­ger so there’s much more kind of drag and momen­tum and all that kind of stuff. I found that really tough, and I didn’t think I would.

Steve Coogan: For me, yes it was a dod­dle. I turned up for a week in Van­cover and got to kiss Rosario Daw­son and when you’ve got visual effects around you, half the job’s done for you. The rest of it is just tap­ping it up a bit I suppose.

There seems to be strong female char­ac­ters in most of the fan­tasy films. Is that impor­tant to you?

Alexan­dra Dad­dario: It’s very impor­tant to me. I read a lot of scripts for women that are the girl­friend, or the hot girl or the side, or you’re just there to wear a dress or what­ever– there aren’t that many very strong char­ac­ters for women or strong lead­ing roles or films based around women. There are some but I think I lucked out, in that this is my first big movie and I was able to play a char­ac­ter that was fully devel­oped and very strong. I think it’s impor­tant and I think there should be more of that.

Percy Jack­son is based on a series of books, which might be a series of films. Are you look­ing for­ward to or are pre­pared to play your char­ac­ter for more movies?

Logan Ler­man: Yeah I mean that was a big topic of dis­cus­sion when we were sign­ing on to do the movie in the first place, so it was well thought out before­hand. Yeah I’m invested into the whole series, I’m crazy about the story, crazy about the char­ac­ter I play; I hope to do all the films.