Peter Rabbit (2018)
Christmas Eve, 6.15pm Sky Cinema Premiere
Co-starring Rose Byrne and with James Corden on vocal duties, Peter Rabbit pits Domhnall Gleeson against a host of computer generated woodland creatures in a movie that demands plenty of imagination and much physical exertion on the part of the young Irish star. He tells The Guide more . . .
It looks like this lm gave you an opportunity to channel your inner Buster Keaton… Domhnall Gleeson:
Actually, I’m a massive Buster Keaton fan, but Buster Keaton was a genius and I’m not a genius! But hey, you may as well take your inspiration from the best. It’s funny. Kids today love Buster Keaton, but there’s a real shying away from letting a scene play out in a wide shot, as he famously did. We shot some scenes that were like that but they inevitably ended up getting edited and tightened, which I found a little bit sad.
Those who saw you on stage in The Walworth Farce won’t be surprised by your slapstick skills, but was it nice to show that side of your craft on the big screen?
Yes, there are some things that you just can’t do, and it’s hard to take when you nd out that you’re not cut out for it. It would make me sad if comedy proved to be one of those things! In some ways, the sound of people laughing is the purest of responses. You can’t really fake a laugh; you know immediately when people are faking it. There’s something lovely about making people laugh through lm. It’s something very real. That’s why a lot of my favourite lms are comedies.
You’ve had CGI and green screen experience on Star Wars and the Harry Potter movies, but was it particularly tough to shoot this movie, where practically everything you’re acting opposite isn’t actually there?
It’s very di erent. They actually build almost everything on Star Wars, except that you’re not in space. When it comes to any huge things in the distance or any explosions, those are things you have to imagine. It’s the personal things that are the problems. When the scene calls for you to be talking to someone or something that isn’t there, that’s the issue. Luckily, one of the conceits of Peter Rabbit is that I don’t know that bunnies and animals can talk. That only becomes an issue towards the end of the movie. It was certainly an issue with the ght scenes, though. We choreographed those scenes a lot; but they were fun!
What about eye-lines? There’s nothing worse than when they are o beam, but it all looks seamless in Peter Rabbit…
Thank you! The director [Will Gluck], Rose and I can take a lot of credit because we were real sticklers about that. We really tried hard to imagine what was going on in every scene with the animals. You really have to paint a clear picture in your head, and that’s where the animators look after you. They could make you look stupid and make themselves look good, if they wanted to, but thankfully they didn’t do that on this lm!