![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/227\/2014\/03\/noah-bucket.jpg\" "\\"noah-bucket\\"")
<\/a>More good news for Noah<\/a><\/i> from the foreign market: the film, which already had a strong opening in South Korea<\/a> a couple days ago, had a similarly strong opening in Mexico yesterday<\/a>. In both cases, the studio says the movie\u2019s opening days were on par with the opening days for Gravity<\/a><\/i> in those markets.<\/p>\nSeveral reviews of the film went online Thursday night (or Friday morning, if you live on the east coast) \u2014 you can read my own first review<\/a> here \u2014 and it currently has a 73% score at Rotten Tomatoes<\/a>.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the interviews and profile pieces and making-of stories keep coming.<\/p>\n The Associated Press<\/a> has some interesting quotes from director Darren Aronofsky. For example, on his<\/i> first reaction when he read the story as a child:<\/p>\n \u201cThe first time I read it, I got scared,\u201d the director says. \u201cI thought, \u2018What if I\u2019m not good enough to get on the boat?'\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And regarding the controversy over whether his film is a \u201cliteral\u201d take on the story:<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s strange that the conversation for a little bit has turned into a controversy about literalism,\u201d says Aronofsky. \u201cWhat is literalism when it comes to interpreting and making an artistic representation of the text? Is Michelangelo\u2019s David a literal interpretation of what David looked like?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Hugh Hewitt<\/a> has an extensive radio interview with Ari Handel, who co-wrote and co-produced the film with Aronofsky. Among other things, Handel talks about why they decided to make the Nephilim a major part of the film:<\/p>\n HH: How quickly did you settle on this? I mean, when did you decide that\u2019s how we\u2019re going to do it?<\/p>\n AH: Pretty early on, because we got to that line about the Nephilim, and we knew we had to deal with it. We couldn\u2019t ignore it. How are we going to handle it? And that helped us get into this kind of tone, and we thought that tone was a really interesting one, and would be a really interesting one for modern audiences, because we\u2019d be taking a Biblical epic, we\u2019d be doing something that was grounded in the text, but that was completely unexpected and would let people see the story in a new light they hadn\u2019t seen before, but not one that was just arbitrary, but one that came from Genesis.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n He also comments on how the film draws the viewer\u2019s attention to certain characters who do not<\/i> get on the Ark:<\/p>\n AH: This is what this is about. At some point, if you\u2019re going to do the Noah story, you\u2019ve got to look at the fact that the characters who made it onto the boat had to deal with the fact that nobody else did, and that\u2019s a painful idea. And no one wants to think about the people who didn\u2019t make it onto the boat. People want to think about the people who did make it onto the boat. But the fact that people didn\u2019t, and that hurts, well look, we know it grieves God\u2019s heart to do this, and it must have grieved Noah\u2019s heart and his family\u2019s heart that these people didn\u2019t make it on. There\u2019s a lot of pain and suffering involved in this. It\u2019s not a light idea. It\u2019s a heavy idea. So we wanted to really make the audience feel that, and feel it not by having like a really mean, evil, nasty person not make it on, who we don\u2019t have to have empathy for, but feel it for someone who we do have some empathy for, because these are all human beings.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The Telegraph<\/a><\/i>, in England, for some reason quotes some things that Russell Crowe said in Brazil during his recent promotional visit to that country<\/a>, e.g.:<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I started this process, I probably had a very limited understanding of Noah, which I believe is true of most people,\u201d Crowe told journalists in Rio de Janeiro, the third stop on his promotional tour.<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of people think they know the story but what they recall is children\u2019s stories from Sunday school and not what the Bible says.<\/p>\n \u201cThis story is contained in every religious text. Noah is in the Qu\u2019ran. People from all over the world outside of religion have flood mythology.<\/p>\n \u201cIn my eyes, Noah is just a normal man and, as he begins to realise the full weight of the task he\u2019s been given, it weighs down on him.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The Wall Street Journal<\/a><\/i>, interestingly, profiles not the writers, director or actors but the people who played a key role in the look<\/i> of the film: production designer Mark Friedberg, cinematographer Matthew Libatique and visual effects supervisors Ben Snow and Mark Driscoll. It includes this interesting detail about the animals:<\/p>\n Mr. Aronofsky, who directed \u201cBlack Swan\u201d and \u201cRequiem for a Dream,\u201d sought to avoid standard-issue creatures<\/a>. \u201cHe didn\u2019t want them to be the sort of animals you expect in a Noah\u2019s Ark story,\u201d Mr. Snow says. \u201cWe did a whole lot of research even into extinct animals, like Victorian drawings where they\u2019d only heard descriptions of animals, and they came up with these crazy versions. We also looked for real animals but unusual ones. So we couldn\u2019t have a male lion or a zebra or a giraffe. We\u2019d have a springbok or something less obvious.<\/p>\n \u201cWe did put a few pachyderms in there,\u201d he adds. \u201cIt\u2019s actually something the studio requested. They wanted something the audience could latch on to.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The Journal<\/i> also has a slideshow<\/a> that includes some behind-the-scenes shots.<\/p>\n And finally, The Los Angeles Times<\/a><\/i> looks at how Aronofsky has been working on this story ever since a diorama of Noah\u2019s Ark at the Museum of Jurassic Technology<\/a> caught his eye 15 years ago.<\/p>\n My own interview with Aronofsky and Handel will go online next week. Stay tuned.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Director Darren Aronofsky says the Noah story scared him when he first read it, co-writer Ari Handel talks about feeling sympathy for people who were left off<\/i> of the Ark, and the visual-effects team talks about researching extinct animals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1116,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[1321,1996,19,54,1995,1997,1890,224,143,55,63,174],"class_list":["post-16017","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-ari-handel","tag-ben-snow","tag-box-office","tag-darren-aronofsky","tag-hugh-hewitt","tag-mark-driscoll","tag-mark-friedberg","tag-matthew-libatique","tag-nephilim","tag-noah","tag-noah-2014","tag-russell-crowe"],"yoast_head":"\n