00:04I think one of the key things for most historians and for us
00:08was the letters of Pliny the Younger
00:10who actually witnessed the explosion
00:14and recorded it all
00:15and he wrote a series of letters describing it
00:17over the couple of years after the eruption
00:19and those letters are very, very descriptive
00:23they detail the falling ash
00:25they detail the fire
00:27they detail the Bay of Naples
00:29with the water draining
00:31which is where we of course get our tsunami and tidal wave from
00:35so he provided quite an accurate description
00:38of what the disaster was
00:40in fairly broad terms
00:42and in fact he was so descriptive
00:44that for a long time
00:45no one really took him seriously
00:47they thought he kind of made a lot of this stuff up
00:50because no one believed that a disaster of this kind
00:52could actually happen
00:58I was a huge fan of Kit from Game of Thrones
01:02Game of Thrones is something that my wife and I became obsessed with
01:05and we came to it late actually
01:08the first two seasons had already run
01:10and we got it on iTunes
01:12and just watched all of the episodes back to back I think in two days
01:16and it's a terrific show and it's got a terrific cast
01:20but for me there was one person who I felt really popped
01:23and that was Kit
01:25and I felt this guy looks like a movie star
01:27he really stood out from the ensemble
01:31and I met him and I was continued to be very impressed by him
01:35and he wasn't the gladiator that we needed
01:41but he assured me that he would get there
01:44and he became very disciplined and very focused
01:46on kind of getting that gladiatorial physique
01:49which is what you see in the movie
01:55I think we're making a disaster movie
01:57and if you're to believe the disaster
01:59and to believe that people are really in jeopardy
02:01and that this destruction is really happening
02:03it has to be realistic
02:05you know there were two ways we could have gone about making this movie
02:08there was the kind of like the way we did it
02:10which was we built big sets
02:12and we shot on them for real
02:14and we had ash falling
02:15and we had real flame
02:16we had people on fire running around
02:19obviously there's computer generated images in the film
02:21but we tried to give everything a basis in reality
02:24and even the physics of the computer generated stuff is real
02:29it's not kind of cartoony
02:31it's like when a rock falls
02:33it falls at the right speed
02:34it falls at the right velocity
02:35it really looks like a rock
02:37and if it hits someone on the head
02:38they react the way they would do
02:40if they really got hit by a rock
02:42there's nothing kind of cartoony about it
02:44there's no wire work in the movie
02:46there's no overly elaborate stunt work
02:49it's all real
02:50and I think that gives you an investment
02:52in the movie and in the characters
02:54that you wouldn't have if you didn't believe it
02:57because obviously the other way to make the movie
02:59is kind of just to shoot everything against a green screen
03:01and go for a kind of 300 style film
03:03but for me that's a spectacle
03:06but that's a very kind of comic book spectacle
03:08and it's not what we were trying to do
03:14it's definitely, I mean you have to build a lot more
03:16but I think that's good for two things
03:19a lot of the shots in the movie are totally real
03:22you know on a movie of this scale
03:23I think you would normally imagine
03:25most people would imagine
03:26it has about 2,000 visual effects shots in it
03:28we only have 500 visual effects shots in the movie
03:31and one of the reasons for that
03:33is we could shoot a lot of the movie
03:34practically on set for real
03:37and that's why it was so unpleasant for the actors
03:39because quite often we'd have a whole street
03:41and it would be filled with flame
03:43and explosions and ash falling
03:45and it was, you know
03:47would it have been easier for the actors
03:49just to kind of run around in front of a green screen with nothing?
03:51yes, of course it would
03:52but would you have really got those performances?
03:55I don't think so
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