BIG FISH producers Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen did a lengthy interview with Martin Grove from The Hollywood Reporter, in which they lay a very good history of the project, and the many challenges involved. It’s a good read if you’re interested in the film’s backstory.
Big Fish
Pearl Jam’s “Man of the Hour” in Big Fish
Pearl Jam has recorded a brand new song called “Man of the Hour” for BIG FISH, which will play over the end credits. I haven’t gotten a legitimate copy of it yet, though I just heard an acoustic version taken from one of their shows earlier this week. This was from a bootleg site that I’ll leave you to Google for yourself, and the recording quality was about what you’d expect for a tape recorder smuggled in the crotch of an obsessive fan’s baggy jeans.
That said, the song is really, really good: sad, hopeful and totally appropriate for the movie, without being too on-the-nose. What’s better, I didn’t even know the song was going into the movie until yesterday. So here’s to happy surprises.
Big Fish trailer in QuickTime
The Apple website now has a much better QuickTime version of the movie trailer, available here. Since it’s in QuickTime, you can easily stop it to see some of the stuff that moves by too quickly in the streaming versions, such as conjoined twins Ping and Jing.
Big Fish trailer up at Yahoo! Movies
Daniel Wallace just tipped me off that the Big Fish trailer is now available on Yahoo! Movies. You can find it, and a lot of photos from the production, here. For right now, it’s only available in Real Player and Windows Media Player formats, but Sony is good about getting Quicktime trailers up, so I’ll be sure to mention when/where one becomes available.
The trailer was cut together by a company called Ant Farm, working under the guidance of the studio marketing department. I like it, though we’ve been through a lot of sturm and drang over it for the past few weeks. Basically, this is a very hard movie to explain in two minutes, and the more you try to explain it, the less satisfactory it becomes. Do you need to say that Will and Edward are estranged? That Edward is sick? That Will married a French woman? That the giant eats sheep?
What I like about the trailer we ended up with is that it more or less feels like movie, without trying to tell a lot of the story. I hope people like it.