Jake Is All The Colors Of The Rainbow

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Over at Slash/Film they chatted up the director Mike Newell yesterday. It's mostly about Prince of Persia, which I'm about to get to, but there's also a big bunch on the Harry Potter films - Newell directed Goblet of Fire, which seems underrated to me in the hierarchy of those films - and he's got some interesting stuff to say on those too.

But back to PoP. They ask him about whether he thought about casting some one for the Persian character who maybe might've been, you know, a little more tan than Jake, and Newell has this to say:

"No, I did not. Now, I didn’t do that because what I felt was that this was going to be a great, big movie with– that was produced by one of the great brands of American culture– well, two of the great brands, if you like; I mean, you know, Disney is one and Jerry is another– and that therefore, what I should do was to look to their requirements first. But what I absolutely did do was to say that the girl should– and I looked very hard at a lot of actresses from Bollywood, for instance, and some from Turkey and some actually from Iran, two or three from Iran, and so I got very, very interested indeed in that.

And what stuck from that was the look of the girl and the behavior of the girl. In fact, what we had was the next kind of marvelous English actress out of the box. You know, she was 21 when we made the movie, and she’s absolutely tremendous. But those researches in the Bollywood girls and the Iranian girls and what not had left me with a very strong impression of how this girl should behave, what she should look like and the fact that she was a kind of aristocrat. And Jake is not an aristocrat at all; he’s a street kid who has found himself taken into a royal family because he’s an orphan and the King likes the look of him, and it’s a kind of crazy act of sentiment on the King’s part. “I like the look of you, boy. Come and you’re going to be my third son.” But with the girl, she, for me, needed to be very authentic indeed, and she needs to have this Eastern look to her. So the casting process, I never had any doubt. It was me that brought Jake in toward this. From the very first moment that I read it, I knew that he was, for me, the one to beat. I saw lots and lots of excellent people, but I never found anybody who beat my idea of the character, who did my idea of the character, better than Jake, and I convinced Jerry of that.

But the girl, as I say, the girl really was– I was looking for an Eastern princess, and all the time I was meeting these wonderful, beautiful girls, I was learning about Eastern-ness."

Is that not one of the most awkward things you've ever read? He just seems to skirt around the fact that they needed somebody with name recognition there at the start - this is a "great big movie" made for giant corporations, after all - and then he slides into something about the girl should be the one to be ethnic, but then they figured eh, we tested a buncha ethnic broads and we can just make the Whitey McGee girl we do hire - aka posh Brit lady Gemma Arterton - ape them, sorta.

I mean, whatever, I get Jake all oiled and jacked-up this Summer, so I'm certainly not gonna bitch. But Mr. Newell, you have got to work on your answer to this question, sir.
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