Driving ‘Mortal Engines’
AFTER giving us the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit films, Oscar-winning film-maker Peter Jackson returns with Mortal Engines, which he co-wrote and co-produced. What was it about Philip Reeve’s work that inspired you to adapt it to the big screen?
Back in 2006, when I was first tipped off about the books, there were four (now there are eight). I read them as a fan because somebody told me they were great. Even though the idea of traction cities was interesting, what inspired me were the characters.
Mortal Engines is the story of Hester Shaw and Tom Natsworthy and the characters they come across along the way. The backdrop is fantastic, but it’s the characters that jump out at you when you read these unbelievably good books.
What is Hester Shaw like?
Hester is antisocial, feral and damaged, having been raised by a psychopathic robot. She has never had a relationship with a real human being since her mother died when she was a child. She is carrying that sorrow and pain, and she wants to kill the guy who murdered her mother – all she has been thinking about for 15 years.
Her story is about someone who has to find the humanity in her she never knew she had.
What can you say about Tom Natsworthy?
He is a cheery, funny, social and optimistic glass half-full kind of guy. But he ends up being ejected from the city, landing on the ground outside London with Hester. He doesn’t know how to survive, because he has lived all his life on a traction city and has never set foot on the ground.
What made Hera Hilmar the right actress to embody Hester?
Hera, like her character, is a bit of an enigma – with that classic Ingrid Bergman type of mystery about her. She knows Hester and is the sort of reserved person who understands the character.
It’s interesting to have a complex, powerful villain like Thaddeus Valentine, played by Hugo Weaving, confront them.
I love working with Hugo. Valentine is interesting because the best villains believe they are doing the right thing. The worst are the ones who are villains all the time.
But Valentine is not like that; he believes that what he is doing is the best decision.
What kind of world are you depicting in Mortal Engines?
It’s a world set in about 3 500 years from now, after what was known as “The Sixty-Minute War”.
Something with a name like that isn’t going to be very good, is it? There has been a cataclysmic event that happened probably not too far away from our time and that wiped out most of the world.
But our story isn’t postapocalyptic, because the world’s been rebuilt and it’s a different place.
The attention to detail is extraordinary.
If you are making a movie in a time you are not familiar with and that is fantastical, you never want to talk down to it or make it trivial. In creating a society different to ours we took a lot of care in putting in all the detail we could to make it believable. We tried to create the most believable world we could.