#Alan Taylor

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Rebecca (1940), dir. Alfred Hitchcock // Interview with the Vampire 1.02, dir. Alan Taylor

[crazykuroneko]

[lelliefant]

If you want to know why the Loki fandom has drifted away, just look at what Disney/Marvel did to him.

He was incredibly powerful—they made him weak and helpless.

He was smarter than everyone else—they made him a fool.

He was a prince—they made him a corporate office drone. They literally put him in a cubicle.

Loki was an alien—they made him an ordinary guy.

He was flamboyant and colorful—they put him in beige. They actually made him act as if he was excited to wear a beige uniform.

The real Loki would never have tolerated a uniform of any sort, much less something so bland. He was never a soldier or a cog in the wheel. Loki is the piston.

Loki was a deeply wounded, angst-driven son with complex motivations—Disney made him an uncaring narcissist who suddenly sees the error of his ways (in one episode) and has a total personality swipe.

Loki was iconoclastic—they made him ordinary.

They took the most interesting and volatile character in the MCU and warped him into an Everyman role, and somehow everyone bought it. Apparently because they used the same actor with the same face—?

Really think about it. If another actor had started playing Loki for the series, they couldn’t have pulled it off. Series Loki is not the same character as Loki from Thor 1, Avengers 1, and Thor 2. He’s as different as the moviemakers in charge of the productions are. (The directors of Avengers 1 and Thor 2, Joss Whedon and Alan Taylor, simply had the grace and humility to take their cue from the original vision of Kenneth Branagh.)

If you don’t actually pay attention to Loki’s character, motivations, logical action, or his history, and you’re only interested in being entertained, I guess it doesn’t matter. This is just a superhero movie character, so who cares if they turned him inside out to conform with a simpler, less challenging archetype?

He’s their property, after all. They can use him however they want to. If they want to chew him up and spit him out as a naive, lovelorn mensch because that’s the Disney protagonist formula, they can and will. If they want to put him into a buddy-cop procedural, as if he were an ordinary human person whose shtick is a magic kit, they can.

A lot of you who are constantly defending the Loki Series are not really thinking about it. Maybe you’re just happy he has a show to his name. Maybe you don’t care; you just want more “content.” Maybe you don’t want someone spoiling your fun.

Maybe you think you’re being the loyal crowd by “defending” Loki. You’re not seeing that Disney did worse than kill him off—they unmade him. They put the God of Mischief into a blender with the Disney formula, audience response data, standard storytelling tropes, a limited range of plot lines, and a great deal of money, and out came this golem with Loki’s face on it.

You might revile me for saying all this because that’s easier than facing the truth or questioning the Powers That Be. There will always be people who can’t tolerate having their beliefs challenged.

I have seen nastiness on this hellsite toward people who question and protest what the majority accepts—but that’s just a reflection of the real world. It’s never going to work out well for those of us who see things differently and who don’t shut up about it. So, why do we keep annoying everyone with our dissenting opinions?

In my case it’s because I actually do care about Loki. I care enough to tell the unpopular truth, as I see it. Because, to me, Loki isn’t just an MCU character. He is representation.

He was a survivor of abuse and scapegoating by his own family. He was an outsider who defied convention and took on great challenges, despite everyone in his world trying to push him down. He shirked the role he was forced to play and chose to define himself instead. He saw the hate and scorn directed at him from all sides and laughed.

He struck out on his own into the unknown—which is incredibly hard to do, even if you had been given the support to believe in yourself.

The Loki Series did get one thing right: Loki is a survivor. He’s survived misinterpretations before, and he will survive Disneyfication. Maybe the public will tolerate a warped mischaracterization of him for a while before they lose interest, but the God of Mischief prevails. Thor1 Loki will always be there, smirking triumphantly from the shadows.

[nalyra-dreaming]

Great thread on an interview with Alan Taylor!

Credit to @amaryllist!

Video:

[iwtvfanevents]

On the video you can watch director/executive producer Alan Taylor and titular vampire Jacob Anderson talking about the tap dancing scene, and a clip of Jacob and Steven G. Norfleet rehearsing. Transcript and sources are under the cut.

Rewind the tape —Episode 1 highlights

One of our favorite bits of trivia is...

No doubles were used in Louis and Paul's tap dancing scene! Steven G. Norfleet is a professional dancer, and Jacob Anderson learned to tap dance in less than a month, over Zoom, while he had COVID.

What's a favorite fun fact of yours? Is there a line that was adapted straight from the page, or smartly repurposed? Did one of the people involved in the show say something interesting about the episode? Was there any review of the pilot that had you nodding and cheering as you read? Does any of the paintings that show up on the episode have an interesting meaning?

Reblog with your highlights, or make a new post with the tag #vampterview to join the conversation!

And, if you're just getting caught up, learn all about our group rewatch here ►

Transcripts and sources

Katie o'Shaughnessy Chatting with Alan Taylor! (Director/ Executive producer S1 IWTV!):

K.O. And with the dancing as well, I'd wondered, between Louis and Paul, the tap dancing scene, was that, how much of that was them and how much was doubles?  A.T. Like, entirely them. We had we had doubles come in, in case we wanted to do closeups of their feet and stuff, and we had the doubles standing by and almost never used them, because… Paul, it turned out, we'd cast because he was a wonderful actor with a heartbreaking quality, but it turned out he was a professional dancer too. We didn’t know that when we hired him. So Paul had it down and Paul was helping Jacob, who would spend his weekend half dancing with the coach. And so when the time came to shoot it, we didn’t need the doubles, and the energy between these two guys as brothers was so good that we didn’t want to, you know, break it with cutaways to professional dancing. So, yeah, wild. K.O. That’s amazing, I would have assumed it was doubles.

Xfinity Hangouts: Jacob Anderson and Sam Reid:

Interviewer: Jacob, I was not prepared to see you tap dance so beautifully in that first episode. Is that a skill you already possessed or something you had to learn?  J.A. No, it’s something that we had to learn. We had, how many weeks did we have?  S.R. Like a month to prep. But, but… J.A. Yeah. But I got COVID, and uh, so I had to isolate. I didn’t have any symptoms, thankfully but… so I had to then do all of my lessons remotely in my house in New Orleans. S.R. And they sent you a board, right? J.A. Yeah, I had like, some plywood on the floor and my tap shoes, and yeah, we had like three weeks after that to just keep practicing but… And with respect to the doubles, they had two tap dancing doubles that they sent home before we shot the scene.  S.R. Didn’t even use them. J.A. So all of the tapping you see in the show is me and Steven, and we learned most of it over Zoom.  Interviewer: Amazing.  J.A. So hard. Because tap is all about sound. The lag is awful. 

Tap dancing backstage video with Jacob and Steven, from @misaraesblog

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Tom Holland in THE CROWDED ROOM (S01E07) | dir. Alan Taylor

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Dissolves in Interview with the Vampire 1.01, "In Throes of Increasing Wonder" dir. Alan Taylor (1/7)

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Oh Alan… 🖤

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Interview with Alan Taylor (director for S1E1 and executive producer of IWTV)

I haven't watched it, but they're talking about Jam's audition, Lestat's "time-stopping" power isn't actually time-stopping, praise for Jacob's acting, writers asking Sam for some VC lore, race POV in church scene's monologues etc

[taraljc]

One of the things I've been thinking about recently is how most of the things that upset me about The Dark World relate to pacing, and cutting a significant portion of Jane's storyline so that she ends up a damsel in distress for a huge chunk of the movie. It's a massive disservice to the character and the actor, and I remember really empathizing with how frustrated Natalie Portman was when Patty Jenkins was no longer available because she had mostly signed up to do the movies specifically to work with Jenkins.

But I remembered that apart from scrapping the entire original Jane and Thor ending where they break up and also Odin voluntarily leaving Asgard and decides to wander Earth for a while, that they had gone back and added scenes with Loki. I kept thinking that they were more of the banter while attempting to fly Malekith's ship, but it turns out it was two scenes that I can't actually imagine the movie without.

I had some notes saved in a file but I had to figure out where they came from so I actually dug up the original article from 2013.

Here are the excerpts that are relevant to my and probably other Loki fans interests:

[Director Alan] Taylor was very clear to say they were not "reshoots," but "additional photography," he gave some insight into the Marvel process:

"It's my experience with the Marvel process they save a portion of the budget for this and what we were basically doing. A lot of it was getting more Loki stuff, because we realized how successful he was in the movie, so we sort of "Loki-ed it up" a little bit.

"There's a scene that we probably shouldn't identify too much, that's one of the funniest scenes in the movie where Loki's a shapeshifter. That was a very, very late addition. And there's a connective thing at the beginning that bridges from The Avengers story to sort of explain how Loki is in prison or why he is in prison. That was a very, very late addition. That was probably "more Loki is a good thing," but also we decided it was an expositional link that was needed for the audience. So those are two examples of Loki stuff."

Tom Hiddleston further clarified:

"[The bridge scene and morphing] were the only scenes [added], yeah. What does it do, adding scenes? It's interesting, because I had actually always wanted there to be that scene with Odin. I remember saying when I first got the draft of the script, "Shouldn't he have a scene with Odin where you see them lock horns one more time?" So I was very glad to do that and I think it makes more sense of the references to Odin all the way through the film.

"And the morphing scene was just so fun. It was just adding more mischief, more playfulness to the character. His charm is so much of the character and is a facet I love to play. I suppose the challenge of adding stuff later is just trying to capture the same psychological and emotional continuity, because there were many months between... Of course when you're shooting, that's when you're focused solely on that particular job and then once you wrap you go off and get distracted by other things, other projects in your life. So it's having the discipline to shift back into the right gear, but it was worth it."

You definitely want to read the entire article because from a production standpoint, the fact that they were still rewriting well into post-production. like they didn't have a complete script until picture lock which I just can't even imagine. No wonder Idris Elba was so disgusted with the process that he asked specifically to be killed off in the next film. and I know that Christopher Eccleston was very disappointed in the final film because a lot of the material that he shot was cut. and the thing is if you look at all of the excise material, and all of the additional photography, it would be very easy to recut the movie into a significantly better movie in every way.

The deleted scenes with Jane and Odin by the way are not available on any of the home entertainment releases that I've seen. The only place I found them was on YouTube. If I can dig up the links, I will post them next.

[nalyra-dreaming]

So some of the BTS pix in this article were new to me - and they're pretty high res.

Bonus - Levi's face.

[iwtvarchive]

"The year was 1910..."

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