James Mottram
Idris Elba’s Shere Khan is a disfigured, revenge-seeking monster in Jon Favreau’s dark new version of The Jungle Book. He and Ben Kingsley, who voices wise panther Bagheera, tell James Mottram about their roles in the groundbreaking film
hile Hollywood rarely has any qualms about remakes of classic films, it’s rare to find one that lives up to the original.
Purists might argue that director Jon Favreau's The Jungle Book for Disney doesn't hold a candle to the studio's own 1967 cartoon, directed by Wolfgang Reitherman, which put a groovy spin on the stories of Rudyard Kipling.
But with its stunning combination of live action and groundbreaking photorealistic computer-generated imagery, it is certainly a beautiful-looking beast.
Ten-year-old newcomer Neel Sethi, who plays Mowgli, bounds through a virtual jungle where he meets a wide variety of digitally-created creatures.
Their voices are provided by a host of A-list actors, including British stalwarts Sir Ben Kingsley – as Bagheera, the panther who finds Mowgli in the jungle – and Idris Elba as Shere Khan, the disfigured tiger who wants this “man-cub” gone from his habitat.
“It was great to play Bagheera,” says Kingsley. “I am rather taken with the relationship between a child and an animal.
"One of the first films I ever saw was Never Take No For An Answer, [a 1951 film, directed by Maurice Cloche-Ralph Smart, about] little Peppino and his donkey Violetta. That relationship is so beautiful. There's something quite extraordinary, in mythical terms, about the child and the animal, and the one protecting the other or being hunted by the other."
Kingsley – who also worked with Favreau on Iron Man 3, in which he played the villainous Mandarin – says the voice for Bagheera "evolved" over time.
"I did the voice-over and then towards the end of my sessions – there were four or five of them altogether – Jon did show me some footage and it was thrilling to see how my voice had been embodied in this great beast," he says. "A little bit like Archibald Snatcher, it was extraordinary to have my voice embodied in [the 2014 animated film] The Boxtrolls."
Like Kingsley, Elba – star of TV hits The Wire and Luther, and movies including Marvel's Thor and Netflix's first original feature film, Beasts of No Nation – had previous experience of voice-over work. He can be heard as the bullish police captain in Disney's hit Zootropolis, which is still in cinemas, and will soon appear as a sea-lion in Pixar's Finding Dory, the sequel to underwater adventure Finding Nemo.
“I’ve done some animation work before but this was quite a big, unique experience,” Elba says, adding that the chance to work with actor-turned-blockbuster-director Favreau drew him in.
"Consider that he brought [the Marvel Comics-inspired] Iron Man to life and now is about to bring The Jungle Book remake to life," says Elba, who praises the calibre of his co-stars, including Bill Murray as friendly bear Baloo, Scarlett Johansson as the deadly python Kaa and Christopher Walken as the giant primate King Louie. "He's an actor's director, without a doubt. But also a genius filmmaker – a visionary, actually."
Indeed, it must take a genius to envision Kipling's world in this way. Sethi was filmed on a soundstage in Los Angeles (the one used to shoot TV drama Mad Men, as it happens). But, almost everything else was created on computers, much of it by British digital-effects company MPC. Favreau's reference points were classic animal films such as The Black Stallion – he wanted the visual-effects team to capture a similar weather-beaten look.
He also made a decision not to use much motion-capture, the filmmaking technique in which actors are covered in sensors to record their movements and expressions to help craft digital characters. Instead, when the actors recorded their lines, they were filmed and the footage was given to the animators for reference. Elba reckons this allowed him to put his own stamp on the character’s look.
“I think you can be very influential,” he says. “The animators live and die by what you bring, the expression to your voice. I go up at the end of my sentence and they figure out a facial expression that works, and what they do is they film you and see how your face moves.
“They don’t mirror that … Shere Khan and I don’t look alike at all, but they mirror what my mouth might be doing, where my eyes might be and so on.”
After impressive early reviews for Favreau's film ("a substantial hit", predicted trade paper Variety), its success seems guaranteed – so much so, that The Hollywood Reporter reported on Monday that Favreau and the film's writer, Justin Marks, are in talks to make a sequel.
This is good news for Disney’s film, but where does it leave the other, unrelated Jungle Book adaptation, which was shot last year by another actor-turned-director, Andy Serkis?
He has become something of a motion-capture pioneer – with the technology used for his performances as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings trilogy and in King Kong and the Planet of the Apes movies, among others – and, unlike Favreau, used it extensively in his film, which also features a star-studded voice cast, including Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett and Benedict Cumberbatch.
The film was scheduled for release this year, then pushed back a year – and this month, Warner Brothers announced it has been delayed again, until October 2018.
Officially, this is to allow more time to create “an unprecedented level of psychological and emotional nuance” in the performances, Serkis said on his Facebook page.
But putting a bit of distance between the two projects will also surely be a relief for him, given the expected reaction to and the success of Favreau’s film.
After all, Hollywood might be the biggest jungle of them all.
The Jungle Book is in cinemas now
artslife@thenational.ae