The press junket for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows was held in New York this weekend, and our own Jeff Heller was there to cover it. The first panel consisted of Will Arnett (Vern Fenwick), Brian Tee (Shredder), Tyler Perry (Baxter Stockman), Stephen Amell (Casey jones), Stephen “Seamus” Farrelly (Rocksteady), and Gary Anthony Williams (Bebop). Unfortunately, Megan Fox had to cancel due to illness. Below are some of the highlights of the press conference.
Will Arnett talked a bit about the evolution of his character from the first film:
“I think it was important overall for everybody that we kind of knew what we’d done right in the first movie and what we’d done wrong, and we wanted to kind of capitalize on the things we did right. We wanted to have more fun and kind of tell a story that really resonated and made sense within the canon of the Turtles. For me it was kind of fun to be able to come back and do something a little bit different. He’s kind of on this path that you think is kind of shady but ultimately has a sort of a little bit of redemption, so that was good [He] had a little bit of something to do. But overall it was important to kind of make a bigger, more fun exciting Turtles.”
He also talked about a scene in which Vern is interviewed courtside at a New York Nick’s game, which they shot during a live Knick’s game at Madison Square Garden.
“That was awesome. We get to do a lot of cool things in our job, but the novelty has still not worn off, that you get to go to MSG and shoot and be courtside. We shot during TV timeouts – they had like four of five of them. So we rehearsed the day before, went in, and it was the first scene that we shot in the movie. Luckily we had a 18,000 strong audience to watch our first takes, so it was kind of like we had to get it. It was kind of nerve-wracking. We had to do the same scene basically a few times, and in that scene Mikey shoots a peashooter at me and I spin around like I’ve got something on my face. And I think that initially people just thought I was at the game with Alessandra Ambrosio, which is awesome for people to think that. Jason Sudeikis was on the other side of the court and he texted me and he’s like, “You keep doing like the same interview and you’re spinning your head around. What are you…?” He thought I was losing my mind. I’m like, “No, no, that’s a film crew, man.” But he’s a super-dumb dude, so…”
Brian Tee discussed what element he brought to the role of shredder, who was played by Tohoru Masamune in the first film:
“I think I wanted to bring a groundedness, I guess a humanness to Shredder. I think over the years, even in the movies in the ‘90s, you never really saw a face, there was just this mask and this kind of presence, and to bring that, along with this groundedness and this human form is really what I wanted to do, you know? He’s got to be kind of the baddest of badasses, if I can say, in this movie, and you know, to have that groundedness is what I really wanted to bring.”
Tyler Perry discussed his research into the role of Baxter Stockman.
“Well, when I first got the call and I got the offer, I went back and tried to do some research and then I go, “wait, he’s black. Oh, okay.” So when I saw the history of him, I was like “Wow, this animation kind of looks a little bit like me, if my hair were different.” So that’s where we came from, with the producers and the director, they were very clear on what they wanted him to be and how they wanted him to be, so I just kind of surrendered to the whole vision and it all fell together. For me it’s like lay back, let’s figure out what’s going to work here and then follow that direction. And it all worked well, so I’m very excited about it.”
Jeff Heller asked Perry how different he thought the film would have been if it were called Tyler Perry’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows (and by doing so, achieved a previously unrealized goal of making Will Arnett laugh). Here’s what Perry had to say:
“First of all, the budget would have five million dollars, and we would have finished it in seven days. So I’ll let you take that and run with it, but it would have been a lot different, trust me. But what I love about working in this kind of environment is because I get an opportunity to be a student. I’ve been doing my own thing for so long, I get a chance to put all that aside, go in to someone else’s set, sit back, learn and pay attention, and that’s what was really exciting for me. I think I had more fun and more excitement off camera when I was watching and paying attention than I did on. So I get it. But no, it won’t be Tyler Perry’s Ninja Turtles.”
Earlier incarnations of Baxter Stockman have had him eventually transforming into a mutant human-fly hybrid, but Perry made it clear that he has no idea if that will happen in the films:
“Everything about everything that happens in the Turtles in this whole world is top secret. So you will probably know before I know if that ever happens, is what I’m saying.”
Stephen Amell touched on his take of this incarnation of Casey Jones, and how he approached bringing him to screen:
“Well, they did me a big favor by giving Casey Jones, who’s been in the Turtles canon since the inception of the Turtles basically, a unique backstory in this movie in that he’s a corrections officer. And we don’t get in this movie quite yet the full-fledged five alarm fire Casey Jones that a lot of fans of the Turtles and the cartoon and the comics are used to. This is a Casey Jones that’s trying to figure out what his path is. So we get glimpses of that, but the fact of my motivation is that I’ve bumped up against the idea of being a police detective in the New York City Police Department my entire life, and it hasn’t worked out. That allowed me to take a Casey Jones and make it my own. This was my first big studio feature film and I was actually worried that it would be rigid, because I didn’t have any idea. And obviously we wanted to honor and respect what was on the page, but beyond that I found it to be one of the most collaborative invested sets that I’ve ever been on, just in terms of let’s make the best scene possible. And a couple of times we would put a scene on its feet, wouldn’t work, so we’d just go back to the drawing board, do it again, and come up with new things. And I know for my character personally, I’d constantly have the writers and the director and the producers coming up to me and saying, “cool, we got that. Let’s give this try. Let’s try a new line here, let’s try this there,” and you’d be amazed, I know for me personally, a ton of that stuff ended up in the movie, so that’s a very fun set to work on in that type of environment.”
He also talked about the action and stunts in this film, versus that on the show Arrow:
“They let me do whatever I wanted on Turtles, and I didn’t know that they would. I ended up doing every single stunt in the entire movie save for one stunt where I get ratcheted into a car, which I didn’t want to do, nor would they let me do. I got to get to New York a little bit before we shot, and I got to work with the stunt choreographer and the fight coordinator and build a fighting style for Casey Jones. And then on the plus side, when you’re shooting, you simply have more time. My first fight with the Foot Clan went so well that the director and the producers got together and they were just like “Amell’s last fight with Bebop and Rocksteady needs to be bigger,” and so they brought in a second unit director and an entire unit and we were out there at Pier 92 for five days just going wall to wall the entire time. And that sequence and that week of filming is probably the thing that I’m most proud of in my entire career.”
Though both are vigilantes, Casey jones and Green Arrow are very different characters. Amell went on to talk about playing a character with an earnest naiveté, versus one that’s so cynical and brooding:
“It’s very exciting. You know, the first scene that I got to shoot in the movie which is not Casey’s first scene chronologically, but it was the scene where Casey meet both April and the Turtles. And Casey thinks the Turtles are aliens, that they’re gonna eat him. And you know, that was my first day, first major scene filming, I was beside myself for the first four, five hours just trying to bring it at a level 10 out of 10. Andrew Form, our executive producer, turned to me at lunch, which was actually dinner ‘cause we were shooting nights, and goes , “Got a Casey Jones. Feels like we got a Turtles movie.” He was just making a casual comment, but it imbued me with so much confidence and so much goodwill and good feeling for the rest of the production that I feel like me personally being in such a good space because of that experience brought an earnestness and an enthusiasm to Casey Jones which, I mean, I love playing Oliver Queen, but I had a blast playing Casey Jones. It was so much fun.”
Amell dons the famous Casey Jones hockey mask in Out of the Shadows, but it was not something he wanted to keep as a souvenir:
“I don’t want to keep the mask. It doesn’t fit. You think that in the midst of this gigantic film we would have taken a mold of my face, but nope. And I wore it for two straight nights and it pushed on this part of my face and I would complain and Megan would tell me that I was a sissy so I would stop complaining. By the way, that’s not the word she used. And then the next day we were filming in an alley, and I got a sinus infection and almost begged off work for the first time in my life. So if I get to don the mask again, we’re gonna get that sucker fitted.”
Gary Anthony Williams talked about working with Stephen Farrely, and their research into their respective warthog and rhino roles:
“He’s another grown dude like me who was sitting around watching cartoons. So I was intimately familiar with the Turtles in the cartoon form, never read a comic book, till we got this, picked up a lot of comic books, he and I watched the cartoons together, watched a bunch of animal videos together.”
Farrelly confirmed their unique research together:
“In the local café where everyone was just kind of completely weirded out by two grown men watching videos of animals.”
Farrelly also talked about balancing the film with his hectic WWE schedule:
“I was concerned it was going to interview with the WWE schedule. For example, I spent] the last two days doing the press junkets, and then I just jumped in the car yesterday, drove up to Albany, wrestled last night, and then came back last night. So that was the biggest obstacle, the kind of thing I was worried about. But it was so much fun on set. It was just so much fun working with all these guys that, you know, no matter how tired you were, as soon as you hit the set the energy was up and it was time to play.”
When diversity in the film was brought up, Williams had nothing but praise for Perry’s efforts as a filmmaker:
“Thankfully this guy has really brought not only diversity, but he has opened a lot of eyes, and I’m not here to pump sunshine up Tyler’s skirt, but he has opened a lot of eyes to the fact that there aren’t that many movies that just include everybody.”
The panel consisted of two Canadians (Amell and Arnett), two African Americans (Williams and Perry), Japanese (Tee), and an Irishman (Farrelly), which did not go unnoticed by Arnett:
“So we really don’t have any white American dudes up here. This is the only panel without white American men sitting on it. We won! Martin Luther King did not die in vain.”
The famous ooze plays a role in Out of the Shadows, and as it mutates humans into the dorment animal in their DNA, each actor was asked what animal they would be. Williams and Farrelly fought over the peregrine falcon, Amell chose a giraffe, Perry a lion, and Tee a killer whale, but Arnett had the best answer:
“I got to say, I’d be a black lab, like a dog. You guys are all living out there in the wild. I’m in somebody’s house in Beverly Hills. I’m sleeping 18 hours a day, I’m watching TV, people want to pet me all the time, they feed me. I don’t have to do shit. God, you guys are dumb.”
Check back for part two of our Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows press junket coverage, with director David Green, producers Andrew Form and Brad Fuller, writers Josh Appelbaum and Andre Nemec, and Turtles Noel Fisher, Pete Ploszek, and Jeremy Howard.
