My article on National Treasure: Book of Secrets — including interviews with Nicolas Cage, Jon Voight, Diane Kruger and director Jon Turteltaub — is now up at CT Movies.
Incidentally, Voight just might be the first filmmaker outside of the local film industry that I have interviewed, albeit in group settings, more than once. About nine years ago, I and several other student journalists from across the continent took part in a series of phone interviews with the cast and crew of Varsity Blues (1999), and Voight was one of the interviewees. And at least two things haven’t changed since then: one, he gives very long answers, so if you’ve only got him for 15 or 20 minutes, you only have time to ask a few questions; and two, he bids farewell with a “God bless.”
Also interesting was a debate I had with some of my colleagues over whether to mention a plot element that was given away in the original teaser that played before Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End seven months ago. The plot element in question is presented in that teaser as a fait accompli, and in the trailer released back in August, it is presented as something that the characters are going to do. But in the most recent trailer, released in November, the bits that refer to this plot element are a lot more obscure — and so it was felt that mentioning this plot element would be giving away a spoiler. In fact, none of my colleagues seemed to remember those earlier trailers, and so they said I had “spoiled” the movie for them just by having this discussion. And yet, I’m sure I can’t have been the only one in the theatre who knew this plot element was coming when we saw the finished film itself.
So … can something be a “spoiler” if the studio has already made it part of the publicity campaign? (One friend of mine deliberately avoided hearing anything about Terminator 2: Judgment Day before that film came out, and was pleasantly surprised when it turned out that Arnold Schwarzenegger was playing a good Terminator this time. But the studio had been announcing this fact in its promotional material for months.) What if the studio has backed away from revealing it so explicitly, as seems to be the case here?
Feel free to comment, and if you do, feel free to say what you think the “spoiler” in question in National Treasure: Book of Secrets is.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In