Tintin Forums

On the MailOnline website, and in today's Mail on Sunday Live magazine supplement, Spielberg on how he discovered Tintin, and set about creating the movie.

I don't quite agree with the "turkeys" bit; Golden Fleece is not a bad film.

Jack Nicholson as Haddock? "Heeeeeeeere's Archie!" as opposed to "...Johnny!"? Brrrrrrr!!!

What a top article, its a fantastic read!

What I love is that I finally have an answer to what exact adventure Spielberg first saw which sparked his interest in Tintin.
It's fascinating to note that 'Crystal Balls' first got him interested and more so the fact he could not even read the story as it was in French..
It's a first rate thrilling adventure, which is undoubtedly Herge's most frighting tale..

I'm still wanting to know if Spielberg has a favorite of the series.. anyone know?

Finally, does anyone have a link to the original French review which started all of this in the 80's??? Preferably translated?
It would be great to read the review which started the idea..

Rod

I don’t think there is just one specific one; he has said fairly regularly that it was repeated comparisons to Tintin - that the name kept coming up which led to him investigating further. But again, this is drifting the thread off topic, so let’s just keep this to points about the Live magazine article.

I have to say for me the high-point is the picture of Jamie Bell and Stephen Spielberg holding the wire-frame model of the [i]Unicorn[/i]; I couldn’t quite make out what it was at first (it’s partially obscured in the paper version, as another photo overlaps it), but it is much clearer in the on-line version. This is a movie with so few props, that to see the physical object that the cast must have used to allow them to handle the ship convincingly for motion capture was a proper “behind the scenes” moment.

I was trying to find something connecting "Raiders of the Lost Ark" to Tintin and I found this aricle published a month ago in the French Figaro newspaper.

Low and behold, would you believe it, a totally different story? Although it still tells of Spielberg reading mentions of Tintin in the French reviews of "Raiders", it claims that "Il n'y prête pas plus d'attention que cela" ("he did not pay it any more attention")!

It was only a few months later that he got his first Tintin book: "Crab with the Golden Claws", given to him by screenwriter Melissa Mathison who had discovered Tintin while babysitting for a French family.

Mathison wrote "E.T." and was married to Harrison Ford.

No mention of Spielberg and Herge talking on the phone, though it does go on about Herge's assistant Alain Baran meeting the people at Universal in 1983 for the initial negotiations.

Curiously enough, it mentions that Mathison's script for the Tintin film was based on the "Congo" story. I'm surprised that even back then they did not consider the controversy surrounding it.

Apparently, Roman Polanski was also interested but wanted something based on "King Ottokar's Sceptre". I wonder if it was due to the Nazi-invasion sub-plot and his own experiences during the war?

Right, whose version do we believe?

I've heard it reported in those more general terms too, Jock, but in the first two paragraphs of this Live magazine article, Spielberg does seem to be saying that it was actually repeated comparisons to Tintin in one specific review of Raiders in a specific French magazine that drew his attention to Tintin.

SInce this Live magazine article is a first hand account is by Spielberg himself, rather than a piece where his words are being loosely paraphrased by journalists, perhaps we should assume that this version is the truer one, and earlier accounts about repeated comparisons in numerous reviews of Raiders are less accurate versions of the story.

Edit: WHile I was writing and posting this, I see that mct has added the post above about the different account in Figaro. I was presuming Spielberg's own account in the Live magazine article would be the more accurate, but I suppose he might be oversimplifying it in his memory!


With respect to your generally faultless eye for people wandering off topic, since Rodney is wondering about the specific Raiders review that is the entire subject of Spielberg's first two paragraphs of this Live magazine article, surely Rodney's query is actually bang on topic for this thread! ;)



To be fair to Spielberg, I don't believe that the lead-in introductory paragraph in red (where the turkey word is used) was written by him (as I'm sure you realised too). This paragraph refers to Spielberg in the third person, so it's clearly not part of the otherwise first-hand article by Spielberg. It was no doubt written by some editor or sub-editor who presumably thought that a more accurate way of making the point - eg: "Filmed versions of Tintin have all been less artistically and commercially successful than the original books" - wouldn't have been punchy enough. Well-written newspaper articles are often wrecked by inaccurate headlines, sub-headings or intro paragraphs that casually miss the point of the actual article in favour of a desperate attempt to sound punchy, controversial or opinionated; it's one of the many depressing habits of the British press.


Anyway, quibbles about the intro aside, Spielberg's article is very interesting. I think the fact that on discovering Tintin as an adult, he instantly seemed to see it as raw material for a movie - "I said to Kathy (Kennedy), my fellow producer, ‘We’ve got to make this into a movie. Where do we start?’" - reveals a lot about the way he sees the books. I sense, from this kind of article and from the trailers, that Spielberg has more understanding and appreciation of Hergé's storytelling than he does for the point of Hergé's clear-line flat-colour artwork style and the power that has on a child reader.

Like everything everything I see or read about the new Tintin movie (articles and trailers), this article leaves me in two minds about what to expect. On one hand, for all Speilberg's talk about precisely matching Hergés pallette and respecting the books, when I read him describing characters like Haddock or when I watch the trailer, I don't feel that Spielberg has completely "got" the Tintin books at all, and find myself doubting that the film will bear much resemblance to the artistic or literary style of Hergé's work. On the other hand, Spielberg's clearly thrown himself into this project with huge skill and excitement, and I'm hoping that at least it'll be a really good, exciting Spielberg movie in its own right.

I think he's probably right that whether an audience is able to suspend its disbelief and forget about whichever artificial medium is being used pretty much comes down to how much you can draw the audience into the story. This being so, I shouldn't be pre-judging the film on the look of the stills and trailers, but should suspend any judgement till I've seen the movie. (I sense an understandable defensiveness against early criticism in the way Spielberg reminds us that everyone thought Jaws was gong to be an expensive flop.) I'm certainly prepared to have my prejudices and reservations shattered!

Don't forget Peter Jackson co-directed the movie and the Tintin books helped him learn to read. So we'll have both people's take on Tintin.