One fine day last August, a group of jet-lagged but excited journos got on a bus from London to Longcross Studios in Surrey, UK. Once a giant tank testing ground, it was currently the home to the wardrobe, armory, makeup department, and one of the sets of Clash of the Titans. After an extensive tour of the grounds, where we were shown concept art, a miniature version of Argos City to scale, the makeup studio and photos of the actors going through the painful process of their daily spackling (including one of Heath Ledger with his iconic mouth scars but no other makeup), the armory, and one giant dead Harpy, we settled around some tables to lob questions at producer Kevin De La Noy and stars Sam Worthington, Gemma Arterton, and Mads Mikkelsen. Later we checked out Argos City and snuck in a few minutes with director Louis Leterrier as well. And yes, we saw Bubo.

For more, check out Moviefone's 10 Things to Know About 'Clash of the Titans'

SAM WORTHINGTON, PERSEUS

Have you seen the original?

I watched it before I started to familiarize myself. Got about halfway through it and kind of nodded off, to be honest. I think it's a bit, you know, corny. You know, the messages aren't kind of relevant to now. I think the performances are a bit, you know, tame. And there's stop-motion, which to be honest, is good, you know? Harryhausen, for what he did and how he did it - I read a book on him - it's quite incredible. But, you know, the only reason to do [a remake] - it's not Casablanca, to be honest. It's worthy of a remake. And especially with the technology we have nowadays to bring it up a bit, turn it up to an eleven.



There's a theory that the true sign of an action hero is they can take a beating, that they take more damage than they dish out. What kind of beatings have you been taking?

I think any actor that talks [his] beatings up is just talking himself up. I tend not to kind of bring them up, right? I know what I've took. The boys know what I've took... Let them whinge about their little knee scrape! They know who took the most. And that's true - I do believe any hero is a person that can be knocked down. A failure isn't a person that gets knocked down; a failure's a person who stays down. And to me, I think the great heroes taking the beating, get knocked down, and stand back up again. And Perseus is defined as one of the great heroes in literature, so you've gotta take that on board.

We've seen you on Pegasus...

I hate that f*cking horse, man. Have they told you that? How I hate the horse? I hate it. I hate it.

Have you been riding a horse as well?

Ride a horse? I can't get near the f*cking thing without it eating me. It tries to bite me. It's got an attitude problem. It's done more movies than me. It's done Alexander and f*cking Prince of Persia, so it's all f*cking hot sh*t now, isn't it. It doesn't come out of its trailer, mate.... I wanted [our relationship onscreen] to be more antagonistic, I wanted to punch it in the head the first time I met it like Arnold Schwarzenegger does to the camel in Conan. I thought that would have been a real cool set-up. It has a go at me, I punch it, but we went [with] another option. It still has a go at me, but we've played it as if Perseus is, if it's got an attitude problem and it's angry and frustrated for whatever reason the horse has decided, then Perseus has a bond with that. He's not scared of it, he's intrigued by it. And then Io comes in and she's like the controller or has another kind of relationship with it. As well as calming the horse down, she's learning to calm Perseus down.

What are you most excited for people to see in this film?

I've got a nine-year-old nephew... and he is a barometer for me in the sense of truth, because he'll put a box on his head at Christmas time and pretend he's a robot for 24 hours. He's the ultimate actor. Never loses character. If we can surprise him and make him get excited and get him to go back again and have a laugh, then that's what I'm excited about... And I hope that if he does that, other people are gonna go, "Man, the Scorpiochs are cool," and all that stuff, which you're gonna do anyway. It's a fun movie.

GEMMA ARTERTON, IO

Sam was just here and said you had to find your character over the course of time. So have you figured out who Io is?

We figured it out now. Yeah, she's changed quite a lot actually, and because she's very enigmatic, I had to work a lot of who she was myself rather than it being in the script. So I think the way I describe her now is she's like a guardian angel, even though she's not heaven-sent. But she's... very otherworldly. She's been touched by the gods, so she has powers, healing powers... but she's also cursed in that she can't age, she's kind of trapped within these gifts that she's been given. And quite similar to Perseus, actually, in that grappling with being a human and at the same time having these godly... traits. Anyway, her role in the film is to guide Perseus through his journey and help him, mainly to realize that he should... open up and embrace his godlike-ness in order to defy the gods, which is what both of their missions are. So throughout the film she kind of comes in and advises him and around Io, Perseus becomes quite vulnerable and we see another side to him which we don't see with the rest of the characters, with the boys. She's kind of like a mother figure rather than a romantic kind of... they're much more like brother and sister or like a mother [and child] or something. She's very protecting and she brings a real feminine touch to the film.

Were you a fan of mythology growing up?

Yeah, it's really funny you say that. My mum is an astrologer, as a hobby, and so when we were growing up, instead of reading us bedtime stories, she'd read us Greek myths from this little book we had which is falling apart, and I loved them, absolutely loved them! Because they're about these gods that are so flawed and they have egos and they mess up all the time and they're competing with each other, and I love the fact that these gods are so flawed, even more so than the humans sometimes.

Then I was a massive fan of the [original] film, Clash of the Titans, because Mom had taped off the TV Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans and we had them on video, but not all of them - you know when you tape something and you get the adverts in there and you haven't got the end 'cause something else is taped over it or something - so I had Clash of the Titans but not in its entirety. We used to watch it all the time, me and my sister, to the point where we could, I can still recite bits from the film, so when they asked me to read for this part for the film, I was like over the moon. And I remember phoning my mum when I got the part and telling her - you know, when I phoned her and told her I was in Bond [Quantum of Solace] or Prince of Persia, she's like, "Oh yeah, whatever." You know, it didn't really rock her world. But when I got Clash, she was like, "Yeah! That's one that I know! Oh, that's gonna be brilliant."

Are you ready for the large amounts of press you're going to be doing for Clash when it's about to come out? Have you talked to Sam about that?

Well, Sam's sort of going through it now because he's got Avatar coming out soon, and he had Terminator, and he sort of said to me, "You don't know what's gonna happen. It's gonna hit you like a wave and it's gonna hurt." You can imagine him saying, "It's gonna f*ckin' hurt." And I'm like, "Yeah, alright Sam, whatever." But you know, I just don't know. I don't know what's going to happen. I really hate the fame thing. [laughs] All the stuff that's attached to it, all that rubbish, and so I'm trying to brace myself for it, and I'm... trying to organize myself so I don't give myself too much to these people. It can really upset your life. But I don't know what's going to happen. It's kind of inevitable because people are going to see these films, and my friend emailed me the other day and said, "I'm in New York and there's a huge poster of you in Prince of Persia!" And I'm like, "What the.... That's insane."

It's scary.... but it's also exciting because I really can't wait to see these films. But... I don't think you can ever prepare yourself for what it's like, so hopefully people will be kind rather than cruel.



MADS MIKKELSEN, DRACO

I understand that your character Draco is a new character.

I wouldn't know. I haven't seen the original.

Can you tell us more about Draco?

He's the leader or the general of the honor guard, the bodyguards of the princess, basically, and I said before, he's heading towards retirement... At this time when we meet him, we're going on a journey with Perseus, reluctantly - I don't want to go, I have a different plan to save the princess. I think we should hide her in the woods and wait until the storm's over, but we got orders so we have to go with him.

So is the relationship between Perseus and Draco antagonistic?

No... we know from the very beginning Perseus, that he's a demi-god, so I mean, there's no way I can compete with that, anyway. But what I do need him to do is bring out that god-side in order for us to succeed in this mission. Or let's put it this way: even if he brings the god-side, we have a very small chance, but that is the only thing we can do. And he's very reluctant to do that. He wants to stay a man. He wants to do this as a person. And of course, that doesn't really get good odds for me and my soldiers.

So how much of the stunt work were you actually able to do yourself?

I think actually I've done it all. I don't think there's anything I haven't done. It's been a priority for the stunt guys that if they could make us do it ourselves and look good, that's what they were aiming for. Obviously, if it didn't look good in the end, or [was] too dangerous, they would take over. And the stuff I've done has been pretty tough but not dangerous. They've allowed me a chance.

LOUIS LETERRIER, DIRECTOR

This is quite different from the original film, obviously.

Well, yeah, because I love the original film. Just like you guys, I grew up watching this movie. I think I saw it before Star Wars, so this was like my first, like, "Wow!" experience, you know what I mean? So I just didn't want to do it like the same but just different, so the only way to make it mine... was really to make it personal, therefore to rewrite the screenplay... I could incorporate in my vision of the film and then change the rest... And then thinking about it as more than just one movie, you know, creating a universe, creating something that can expand and have small relationships that can bloom or get complicated.

So if this movie were to be a tremendous success, would you want to follow this up with a sequel?

Oh yeah, I'd love to. I mean, even if it's like a moderate success, we already have the sequel in my head, because when we started the movie, I always thought the story could, this was a little bit too small for a single movie, because it has so many characters and they're so intriguing and I wanted to know more. So I wrote a big, long storyline. Yeah, I mean, it's not ready but...

How do you convince an actor like Liam Neeson or Ralph Fiennes that you won't make them sound kind of cheesy?

Well, you have to promise them on your grave, on your head, that you will not put them in a toga. That's the first thing. "I promise that you will not wear a toga." And that's the first thing. And then the second thing is once again, keeping them involved... talking to them, talking to their people about, when you're writing... getting them excited... sending them drawings of what they will look like.... It was very important to me to have a set of rules. Gods wouldn't wear fabric; it's boring for a god. A god takes raw earth and raw metal and just molds it into armor, and that's what he wears.

You had some pretty challenging locations to shoot. We heard about Tenerife and how difficult it was to get there every day...

Eh, it was not difficult. I mean, yeah, it was long, yeah, but it was actually quite good. Wales. That's terrible... It's like down rain, side rain, and up rain. I've never seen that. It was insane!

But that's why it's real. You have to build a city like this, you have to go to locations, you have to do all that stuff to make it really exiting.

KEVIN DE LA NOY, PRODUCER

Why remake an iconic movie like Clash of the Titans?

It was timely, and we got the technology, you know? Harryhausen's work was seen at the time, that was it, that was good as claymation gets, and there was the move then into models and into digital [animation], and the original Clash of the Titans, which was strands of Greek mythology woven together... pulled together so many forces that it was deemed a property ripe for a remake, if ever there was.

We were looking at the sizzle reel earlier. There's a lot of great exterior shots, a lot of shots of the sun very low in the sea, a lot of the "rosy finger of the dawn" feeling. Was The Odyssey an influence?

No, other than it lurked in the background. What you saw in that sizzle reel, you put your finger on. First of all, something that hooked me into the project -- there was a decision, a fundamental decision made very, very early on, that we were not going to go down the route of green screen and composite digital landscapes... And for me, that was an attraction, because internationally, that's what I like doing, is accessing locations and setting up countries and things that the audience hasn't been to before, as best one can. So we made a decision not to go, as it is known because it is so successful, the 300 route.

So what you saw in that sizzle reel, you saw locations predominantly from the Canary Islands, because it was the first six weeks of photography. What you did not see there is the stuff we did in Wales in great slate mines and quarries and underground tunnels going underground into the core of those mountains, and in three weeks, four weeks time, I'm off to Ethiopia to the Danakil Depression, which is a war zone near the Sudan, which National Geographic filmed there and one or two of those sorts of things, and we're taking Clash of the Titans into that area. Bright yellow, sulfur-filled lakes and active volcanoes, to give this film, not only grit but epic - it's anamorphic. The big landscapes are very important. The world in which they're going and inhabiting should take your breath away.

Is this going to be a franchise?

Yes, quite simply yes. If the audience, storytelling, the whole thing works, then clearly there are survivors and there are deaths in this movie, but the whole world of mythology is there to be explored. And I think what will be interesting is the reception of our treatment of mythology with our slightly distinctive look. I mean, you look at the army, look at the costumes; you can see that it is based upon history. But you can also see there's a slight twist to it. It's not overt, but there's a slight twist there. And if that slight twist all comes together, it's going to meld into a movie that, without doubt, there are other avenues in mythology that this group could go to, and Perseus did through the mythological world go on several journeys. Without a doubt, there is a potential there. A strong potential.

How important is it to use practical effects in-camera whenever possible, as opposed to CGI?

For us, as a group of filmmakers, it's hugely important, and our visual effects supervisor, Nick Davis, the last thing we did together was The Dark Knight. Yet again, on that movie we did as much as we could in-camera so there was kind of a seamless blend. And it's absolutely obvious we can't make a Kraken [in-camera]; there are certain things that have to be in the realm of the digital, but where we can, we're using practical effects.

These interviews were conducted with a group of other online journalists. The trip and meals were sponsored by Warner Bros.