“The Hobbit’s” Richard Armitage: Out of the Shadows, “Into the Storm” - See more at: http://movies.inquirer.net/15023/the-ho ... ep2Mp.dpuf

Richard Armitage stands at the eye of the storm in New Line Cinema’s tornado-disaster thriller, “Into the Storm.” The British actor who gained international attention as “The Hobbit Trilogy”’s Dwarven warrior Thorin Oakenshield, literally flew to Michigan directly from the Trilogy’s set in Wellington, New Zealand to shoot the twister film. “Yes, I came straight from The Hobbit movies to do this—the flight was my break,” Armitage laughs.
“It’s difficult to prepare for a film like this,” Armitage says. “Even after studying the script and doing your work, you walk on set and run into an unpredictable set of circumstances. The tornadoes in this film are extreme and the way they are creating the effects is extreme too. Just trying to stay on your feet and keep your eyes open isn’t easy. But I like that! I like walking into a scene thinking it’s going to be one thing and then seeing how it gets turned on its head. It becomes a bit of an endurance test, which is great.”
Armitage stars as Gary Morris, a vice principal and father of two teenage boys, who over the course of the story’s roughly eight-hour span has to fight to get his high school graduating class to safety and also find his son, who is trapped in the storm. “He’s an ordinary man caught in extraordinary circumstances,” the actor describes, “someone who isn’t really a hero, but who has to step into the boots of a hero in the moment. I like to think that Gary is behaving in a way that he is not necessarily conscious of. It will probably take him some time to realize how close to death he has come.”
When asked if he thinks he’d react that way in the same situation, his answer is thoughtful. “I hope I would, but the truth is that you never know. Most guys think they would, but it’s a different thing to actually be in that situation. Would you run in or run away?”
On the morning of what would become the most terrifying day of their lives, many of the younger citizens of Silverton were anticipating one of the best: their high school graduation. A seminal moment in everyone’s life, it’s generally marked by memories one hopes will last a lifetime. Such recollections are usually expected to be good ones, but that’s not what the kids, teachers and parents of Silverton will have.
As vice principal of Silverton High School, Gary is largely responsible for making sure everything goes smoothly at the ceremony. However, even before he leaves his house that morning, the weather report gives him pause.
Armitage notes, “On any given day, Gary has a lot on his plate. He’s a vice principal, an upstanding member of the community, prominent in the school and somebody that the kids look to for support, someone they rely on. And he’s the father of two teenage boys, Donnie and Trey, whose mother died, so he has to be both mom and dad to them.”
“Richard is a very charismatic actor,” director Steven Quale states. “He has a quiet but commanding presence, and he brought a lot of inner strength to the character who, because he’s not the top dog at work, has had to learn to be very diplomatic. He’s a caring father, too, and he’s trying to apply that diplomacy to his home situation. Of course it doesn’t necessarily always work as well with your own kids.”
Armitage, who originated the part of Thorin Oakenshield in Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey,” most recently reprised his role in the second part of the Trilogy, “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug,” and will appear in the final film, “The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies,” due out in December.
His first film in the U.S. was the 2011 hit “Captain America: The First Avenger,” directed by Joe Johnston and starring Chris Evans in the title role. Armitage played the super hero’s nemesis, Heinz Kruger, in the film.
Opening across the Philippines on Thursday, August 07, “Into the Storm” is distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company.
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“Into the Storm” – a first look into a tornado
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BY NIKOLETA MORALESIN FILM/CINEMA · HIGHLIGHTS · INSOMNIA — 31 JUL, 2014
Into-the-Storm-web

In the span of a single day, the town of Silverton is ravaged by an unprecedented onslaught of tornadoes. The entire town is at the mercy of the erratic and deadly cyclones, even as storm trackers predict the worst is yet to come. EXTRA talked to Chicago born Sara Wayne Callies who plays Allison, a single mom and a tornado-chasing scientist in “Into the Storm,” which comes out on August 8.

EXTRA: What can we expect out of this thriller?

Sara Wayne Callies: I am really excited to see it. This is my first studio movie. The goal is to give the audience a firsthand inside of a tornado. I think we did a very good job. That idea of sirens going of and you are not with your kid. I know exactly how that would feel. I thought there was something very human about it. It’s raw. This is a move where much of the shooting was done by the actors themselves. A lot of the actors were holding cameras as we were shooting.

What was the mix between special affects and real raw footage?

It was an impressive mix. The director understood how important it was for the actors to have practical effects. If you have a movie just against the green screen can be incohesive.

Who is Allison and how do you relate to her?
She is a professor of meteorology hired to locate the tornado. On top of that Allison is also a single mom who feels incredibly torn between her job and her daughter. She misses her and feels guilty. I can relate to it as a working mom. I have two kids – my daughter is 7 and my son is 11 months, we adopted him at birth. Actually, my daughter is in the movie.

How so?

My daughter said “I want to do that.” I told her “You have to do it the old fashioned way. You have to win it.” She was game and almost nobody on set knew who she was. I wanted it to be fair.

What were your thoughts when you read the script? Have you experienced any tornadoes?

A big part of the movie is that this is real. I did, a while back. I was driving on a beautiful day and all of a sudden the sky turned black. The rain was so heavy that I couldn’t see the car in front of me. I called my husband and he said you are heading right towards the Tuscaloosa tornadoes. They were on the ground throwing cars into the air. We started doing press for the movie a few days ago and I had forgotten about that. My husband reminded me about it. I had repressed it because it was the scariest thing. It was as close as I came to dying.

(EXCLUSIVE) Richard Armitage: The calm before the storm
From battles with Middle-earth's evil creatures to surviving nature's wrath, English actor Richard Armitage goes headlong, and all heart, into the storm

by Annie S. Alejo
August 4, 2014 (updated)


Without his long beard, oak shield and that general dragon-slayer countenance, Richard Armitage looks far removed from the Dwarf-Prince, Thorin, the character from “The Hobbit” trilogy that brought him to international attention. Playing a “regular” guy – a single dad to two teenage boys and a town’s assistant principal – in the upcoming disaster movie “Into the Storm,” some seem startled at how Armitage really looks.

He is actually tall (a little over six feet – of course he’s not a dwarf), with this easy-on-the-eyes Hugh Jackman appeal. He still has that piercing stare, but it isn’t the sword-wielding warrior in him that prompted director Steven Quale to cast him as every-man Gary Morris; rather, his quiet presence, a quality that keeps this reluctant hero grounded.


Richard Armitage believes ‘(There’s a) kind of catharsis that happens by going to see a film like this’
Armitage has been in one effects-laden movie to another and he is not complaining. “I really enjoy a good special effects movie,” he tells Bulletin Entertainment. “I enjoy watching them and I also find them very thrilling to be in because it gives you an opportunity to use your imagination when you’re creating something that’s beyond it.”

He shares, “It’s difficult but it’s no more difficult than when you… were doing role play as a child. Your imagination is limitless.”

To the extreme

To help his cast along, Quale did not just rely on computer SFX; he used practical effects like torrential rain towers and 100 mile-per-hour (mph) wind machines to simulate the storm. Armitage recalls a daily work schedule from about 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and shares, “I think it sort of stayed with me. At night, I could still hear that wind machine.”

He adds, “I guess for people that have been through an extreme situation like that, there are certain sounds and certain sensations that never leave them…”

With carefully crafted storm sounds and painstakingly researched visual pegs to help the effects team recreate the tornadoes, the result is a harrowing look at nature’s destructive force and a picture of what it could be like if one were there. The movie unleashes four different kinds of tornadoes on a quiet town. This development, and even the widespread destruction, sort of calls to mind those depicted in the 1996 tornado movie “Twister.”

However, in this age of super storms and natural disasters the likes of Hurricane Sandy, the Japan tsunami and even the devastating “Haiyan,” the possibility isn’t a question anymore; the destruction no longer imagined. Nevertheless, Armitage is careful not to make such comparisons.

“The movie was never meant to emulate any particular single real event,” he points out. He does admit they scoured footage online to help them with the task at hand. “You find real-time footage of people that have filmed these storms. The things that one would think were advantage for a film actually happened in real life – people were filming them on their iPhones,” he relates.

“But you are absolutely right, the biggest storms are here… they show themselves more than ever. It’s just something that we have deal with, and think about,” he says.

BLACK SKY
Richard Armitage plays single dad Gary Morris, seen here in a scene with his two teenage sons
The nature of things

If the tornadoes are characters in the movie and its “found footage” filming style oft-discussed in the press, it should be noted that the movie also touches on social media and technological advancements.

Armitage agrees that the film shows “how close we get to the extreme circumstances, and we don’t really realize that in a single moment, they could take your life.”

Although Armitage hasn’t been a huge social media fan, he admits his opinion of it is being altered daily. “You just have to look at what’s happened in the last few days and the way that social media is enabling people to actually be in contact with their loved ones.”

Again, without emulating anything, the film echoes some truths – from stormchasers on TV who may or may not propagate the “chasetertainment” coverage; and daredevil pals with GoPro cameras that do stunts for kicks and YouTube clicks.


Human bond

Beyond the SFX spectacle is another truth at the heart of the movie: human connections. How, after being battered by nature, we pick up the pieces by banding together, finding strength in each other. Armitage says they fought hard to bring that out when they were working on the characters.

“It’s a strange phenomenon that we like to watch films like this (and) see a certain amount of destruction for entertainment. But what happens is that we look to this human courage and human resolve to reassure us.” He adds, “(There’s a) kind of catharsis that happens by going to see a film like this.”

In the end, he hopes that “audiences come away with a certain elevated heart rate” after watching the movie, adding that some might simply “enjoy a good disaster movie” while others might give more thought to social media or climate change. “It’s not a film that’s designed to do that but it would be perfect if it did.”

As “Into the Storm” hits theaters, and the upcoming “The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies” barreling its way into cinemas by year-end, Armitage is quietly working on other projects – at the time of the interview he is most likely at home in the middle of playing John Proctor in “The Crucible” at the Old Vic in London. Something tells us, however, that for Armitage, a big surge is coming indeed.

“Into the Storm” opens in local cinemas on Aug. 7.

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Richard Armitage, Sarah Wayne Callies head 'Into the Storm'
Big News Network (UPI)Tuesday 5th August, 2014

NEW YORK -- Sarah Wayne Callies and Richard Armitage say they were committed to creating characters audiences will care about in director Steven Quale's action-packed tornado flick Into the Storm.
In the movie, Callies plays Allison, a professional storm-chaser who -- along with her team -- crosses paths with Armitage's Gary, a high school vice principal searching for his teen-age son and his friend, as a massive tornado roars through their mid-western town.
"We all kind of have a background in different sort of effects-heavy [projects.] This is what [Quale] does and The Walking Dead was kind of high concept and The Hobbit and everything, and I think maybe we all recognized, through the course of those experiences, that the effects don't matter if they are not grounded in something human. And, so, when I first got to the set, you know, Steve and I had dinner and it was this great collaboration of sort of me saying: 'These are the three moments I need. I don't care where they come in the movie and I don't care how we get there, but if I have these three moments, I can build you a person and then you can do everything else; you can do the rest of that world.' It was a great collaboration because we were on the same page about it and Steve was really open to it," Callies told UPI in New York Monday.
"It's something that is quite hard to write in a script, as well. So, the script was a good framework, but it wasn't until the actors came around that the real relationships started to form. And, even on the day of shooting, something might have happened in a moment that you couldn't necessarily put into a script, which [Quale] facilitated, and I think it was being open to all of those things that kept it feeling really real," Armitage added.
"Also, because we had a lot of long takes in the film, we spent a lot more time rehearsing scenes before we actually starting shooting them. And that was when we had this great collaborative effort with everybody, including the camera operator, myself, the actors and we really got a sense of what felt real for the characters because -- as silly as it may sound to an outsider -- blocking and staging are so important to understand the realities because anything that makes something seem false... You want to make it feel real, not like a cinematic movie, and so that was great.
"I also liked casting Richard sort of against type. With The Hobbit, you play such a strong, powerful, small person," Quale addressed Armitage, who was sitting beside him. "And, here, you can play somebody who is just at the mercy of a person who is in charge of this bureaucracy and all that, and trying to work all those details in. You're not the guy who has the final say, but, yet, you have to rise up and try to help these people and I just think that reluctant hero aspect was very intriguing. The everyday, ordinary person."
"We are the opposite of a summer superhero movie," Callies quipped.
The trio went on to say they were never seriously tempted to do any real-life storm-chasing to prepare for the film.
"Those guys are crazy in the sense of risking their lives in getting so close to that," Quale noted. "I'm one that likes to have an adrenaline rush and have fun, but, at the same time, I know my boundaries."
"If you had phoned and gone: 'Rich, there's a storm coming. We're going to chase it, would you come?' Of course, I would have been there," Armitage said. "And that must be what it's like. The phone goes in the middle of the night and there's a storm coming and we're going to go photograph it. Of course, you go."
So, they understand the psychology that drives some scientists and TV personalities to chase storms?
"It's like looking into the Medusa," Callies observed. "You can't take your eyes off them. They are so beautiful. They are deadly, but they are absolutely gorgeous. Maybe part of it is we live in a world that is so controlled. Our climate inside and our phones and everything, then along comes something that can level a 200-year-old city in 11 seconds. I think there is something primal in us that you just fall on your knees in front of it."
"It's plagues and pestilence. It is biblical," Armitage offered.
Quale also acknowledged that the popularity of the film Twister -- and even the more recent Sharknado TV movies -- suggests people love a good disaster movie.
"Of course, they are going to compare it to Twister, because Twister was a seminal film. But our film is a little different in the sense that it is a group of townspeople, a father and a storm chaser, and it's all these people getting together that have no common interest or no common connection and they just sort of bond and survive and live through it. So, it's more of this survival aspect as opposed to the just -- we're chasing it to try to capture the tornado [on film.] It's what they do and how they respond to live through it."
"There is no twist in our twister. There are no sharks in it," Armitage joked, referring to the Sharknado movies. "Although we've got a few ideas."
"Zombie-nados," Callies said, giving a nod to her former series The Walking Dead.
"And I just thought, maybe, orc-nados," chimed in Armitage, referencing the villains in his Hobbit trilogy. "There are infinite possibilities."
Co-starring Matt Walsh, Alycia Debnam-Carey, Arlen Escarpeta, Max Deacon, Jeremy Sumpter, Kyle Davis and Jon Reep, Into the Storm opens nationwide Friday.Karen Butler
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