The Croods Celebrity Interviews & Giveaway Prize Package w/ $25 Visa Gift Card!

March 17, 2013 | 659 Comments

The Croods is a prehistoric romp made in terrific 3D, so real we thought the effects were burning us at one point!

“The Crood family dynamics, though unfolding a few million years ago, feel like they could come from your own household. Like most fathers, family patriarch Grug (Nicolas Cage) is fiercely protective of his wife and three kids. His hyper-vigilance has kept his cave-bound family safe, secure and….super- bored. Grug’s strong and dutiful better half, Ugga (Catherine Keener), accepts her husband’s “fear is good; change is bad” mentality, as does their son Thunk (Clark Duke), who’s content with the static status quo. Feisty mother-in-law Gran (Cloris Leachman) never tires of needling (or sometimes assaulting) Grug; and stone-tough toddler Sandy might be the fiercest Crood yet.” Until the next step in the evolutionary scale comes along, Guy, as played by Ryan Reynolds!

A group of NYC area bloggers got to sit down with 3 of the cast members of this animated movie, what an amazing privilege that was!

We had an opportunity to talk to Ryan Reynolds and Emma Stone and ask them how the process of an animated movie was different than live action, and they agreed that in some ways it was easier, but the process was far more lengthy. Emma Stone told us, “You just go in for a couple of hours every couple months. It’s the greatest. You get in there, and you realize the directors and the animators have been working tirelessly 12 hours a day every single day for years.” The process of making an animated film and getting on the screen takes years. I thought it would be much quicker than that! It is the actors who only get called in every once in a while to spend a few hours performing. The animators, and the rest of the staff are working all day over the course of several years! Who knew an animated movie could take longer than a live action?

We had a question for the gang, how is it to take a break from current work to come in for 1 day to do some scenes for an animated movie? Ryan and Emma both agreed it was not difficult to get into character after being away form the film, that it was kind of fun and refreshing.

And having seen the movie, I thought these 2 worked really well together. And guess what? They told us they only worked together one time, at the very beginning of the process. 1 time! It is hard for us to realize that these actors are really acting, they have to make believe they are acting with each other when the other actor is not there, and they have to be able to act with the CGI that has not yet been combined with the movie!

And the funniest part for me? Ryan Reynolds on working with Nicolas Cage: he met him for the first time just before coming to talk to us, in the lobby of the hotel!

And yes, we got to interview Nicolas Cage as well. I was dying to ask if he still kept in touch with Cher!

Nicolas Cage is a seasoned veteran, he must have been through decades of these press junkets. One of the things I enjoy about being a parent blogger is that we are not official journalists, we can have a conversation with these folks, we can sometimes go off topic and talk parenting. And in this movie Nicolas is a parent, a very over-protective parent, so naturally we asked if this represented him in real life, he said to a point, but that he was more flexible than Grug.

One of the bloggers also mentioned that he looked like Grug the caveman! Mr. Cage was not thrilled about that until we explained that his expressions were copied so remarkably well.

“when you’re doing this process, they have a video camera on you at all times. And the animators will look at my facial expressions from the video tape and I think incorporate that into the drawing.” And that’s it in a nutshell, the extreme attention to detail, that when the actors are in character and voicing the animated character, the animators are watching them closely and adjusting the animation to the movements of the actors faces. Wow.

Lastly, Nicolas Cage explained to us how his improvisations made it into the movie in one scene, “When Grug is having a kind of a mini-nervous breakdown because he’s feeling like he’s losing the attention of his family. And everyone is starting to fall for Ryan’s character. And so because he doesn’t have the great genius that Ryan’s character has, he starts to have this meltdown and starts talking about how he’s inventing all these great ideas and these things. And for some reason, inexplicably, I went into this sort of jazz riff kind of blues talk. And I don’t know why I did that. But, that stayed in the movie.”

Yes, we had a chat with Nicolas Cage, that was amazing. And here’s the pic!

The film release date is March 22, 2013 and is being released by 20 Century Fox and DreamWorks Animation!

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GIVEAWAY:

One lucky reader of the GayNYCDad award winning blog, will receive a Croods gift package containing:

- $25 Visa gift card for a family adventure at the movies
- Belt plush doll
- Coloring Book w/ crayons

Prizing is courtesy of 20^th Century Fox and DreamWorks Animation!

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Disclosure: I received free entrance to a preview of the movie. All opinions are 100% honest and my own.