La era del hielo 3

Ray Romano returns as Manny the Mammoth, John Leguizamo's back as Sid the Sloth, and Queen Latifah brings the love of Manny's life - Ellie - to life once again on the big screen in Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. This latest adventure finds the prehistoric friends eagerly anticipating the birth of Manny and Ellie's first child. As the mighty Mammoths prepare for parenthood, Sid the Sloth and Diego the saber-toothed tiger (Denis Leary) are forced to face the fact that Manny and Ellie are forming their own new family and that might mean it's time for the group to break up and go their own ways. But as usually happens, Sid gets into trouble - with dinosaurs, no less - and it's up to his long-time traveling companions to band together to save the silly sloth.

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs Press Conference

Are there any new challenges coming back for a third time?

Ray Romano: "Well, the same challenges as always, just recording without the other actors being there. We had to do one scene, particularly, the laughing scene because Manny never really laughed before. That was a little [difficult]."

Director Carlos Saldanha: "I had to tickle him."

Ray Romano: "Yeah, yeah. The hardest part was just the physicality of it, standing in front of the microphone and pretending that you're wrestling with a dinosaur. It's kind of weird. You've got to get used to it."

How tricky is it with a lisp?

John Leguizamo: "The whole thing is pretty tricky. This one, I was trying to…I was a single mom, representing single moms - two jobs, three kids, T-Rexes are like teenagers - so it was trying to find that vulnerability. I guess it's easier being alone in that room, if you guys have been there. I don't know about everyone's vulnerability. It's kind of embarrassing to be that soft, whatever. But it was cool to go that far. What Ray said, it's always really hard to make that voice really pop on screen so it feels alive. So when you're getting hit and choked and all that, to get yourself really in that physically agitated state so that it really doesn't get flat, doesn't feel kind of like…"

Ray Romano: "I got a question. Can't they invent, because that's what it is… it's so hard, you've got to pretend like you're running and you fall down a thing, and then if you move like this [to the side], then that guy over there starts yelling at you. Can't you record it with one of those things that Madonna wears? Or you can't do it because you need the big boom mic?"

Carlos Saldanha: "The Madonna recording technique? The tricky part of it is sometimes if you have many people there, you have to have the quality of the recordings be perfect. Any little noise, I remember, I don't know if it was one of John's sessions or one of yours - there's some banging."

John Leguizamo: "Oh, the construction."

Carlos Saldanha: "You could hear a little bit of it but then the sound designer guy, the sound technician was saying that little sound already is going into the voice. So it has to be clean. That's the difficulty. We're always thinking about that because we get a lot of other questions from the talent, just, 'It would be great if…'"

Ray Romano: "We could move."

Carlos Saldanha: "Exactly."

John Leguizamo: "Have a treadmill so you could be running."

Carlos Saldanha: "Yeah, you're falling down, you're running down the scene."

Ray Romano: "Because every other scene we're falling down something."

John Leguizamo: "Screaming, getting smacked."

Carlos Saldanha: "But you guys did it yourselves perfectly."

Queen Latifah: "Probably the only difficult thing for me was trying to be pregnant and in labor but hide it from these guys at the same time. So it was like, 'Ooh, oh, everything's okay. Just go on.' Fake these labor sounds and the difficulty and pain that's involved in that, but other than that it was good."

How did you decide to acknowledge the timeline and let dinosaurs exist in the film?

Carlos Saldanha: "That's funny because when we did the first movie, we went to the museum and did the whole research and all that stuff. We were talking to this very great guy from the Museum of Natural History, the paleontologist. He was saying, 'When you do the Ice Age, everything's good. But there were no dinosaurs in the Ice Age.' So we knew it. So when the third one came, when the concept came through, discovering this world of dinosaurs, it's not so much that dinosaurs lived in the Ice Age. The concept was more they discovered this world of dinosaurs that nobody knew existed. So we tapped into that. We weren't going for the Discovery Channel-kind of accuracy. We were going for the fun of like what if these two worlds lived in the same spot and how much fun we can have with that. Also, we played through the whole thing about Manny as a character was always the biggest thing on earth. That was some of his lines in the first one. We had it again on the third one and we said, 'Okay, let's play with that.'"

"Part of the character story of Manny in this movie was about him overcoming his own fears and him also thinking he could control the world. He could have the baby and make the world perfect for the baby. So the dinosaurs created this ginormous obstacle that put him back into this like, in a way, it made him realize that he needs much more than just his, in a way, ego that is there to have this life with the baby and have a life with the friends and all that stuff."

Ray Romano: "Also, in your defense when you say dinosaurs weren't in the Ice Age, well, animals don't really talk either."

Carlos Saldanha: "Yes, technically. We created, too. We took creative liberty to make something that was entertaining, fun, and not trying to go for the scientific accuracy. We just created this parallel world that they never collided until this movie."

Ray Romano: "By the way, 90% of the population doesn't know that dinosaurs didn't exist during the Ice Age so don't tell anybody."

Director Mike Thurmeier: "One of the fun things I liked about this movie is it sort of felt like genre bending, like King Kong or something. Like they go to Skull Island and there's all these crazy creatures, or Journey to the Center of the Earth. For me, it was the exact sort of same thing, just sort of like a science fiction movie kind of jammed into the Ice Age world."

Did you go back and watch the other movies to get into the same mindset? Why don't the dinosaurs talk too?

Queen Latifah: "That's for Ice Age 7."

John Leguizamo: "Dinosaurs speak."

Ray Romano: "Now, come on. Dinosaurs don't talk. That's ridiculous."

Carlos Saldanha: "Well, the concept behind it was that dinosaurs were creatures from a long time ago and they discovered that, so that's why they don't talk. They didn't evolve as much as our guys."

Ray Romano: "[…]People think I'm just talking when I'm doing Manny, but there's actually a voice that I'm doing. I have a couple lines from Ice Age 1 that kind of ramps me into Manny. 'I'm not going,' is a little more nasal-y and then I'm Manny."

Does stand-up help?

John Leguizamo: "Yeah, I think doing one-man shows, you're used to being alone and having to create the whole thing by yourself made it a lot easier. At first it was kind of shocking. You're like, 'So where's Ray? Where's Denis? Are they late?' They said, 'No, they're not coming.' So I said, 'So where's the film?' Then there's no film, there's just this script that you've got to make come to life. Then you start to go, 'Wait, maybe this is kind of fun. I don't have to be worried about being embarrassed. I could be here in my underwear. They wouldn't even care.' You just have a great time."

Ray Romano: "But you've got to get used to it, as a comedian. Except for Carlos and the sound guys, nobody's really there laughing at what you're doing, so you've got to believe that it's funny."

Carlos Saldanha: "I'm laughing on the inside."

Do you see yourself in the animated character?

John Leguizamo: "You see little gestures. You recognize little bits that you know you said when you said the line. But the rest of it, you're not really watching yourself so it's hard to tell."

Ray Romano: "But they're filming you. On occasion, they would film us."

Carlos Saldanha: "Yeah, we film you guys so if we need to go back and take a look at the expressions, because you keep saying, 'Oh, I don't have anyone to act with.' But you guys are acting as you're doing the lines. You don't see it but we're seeing it and we capture little nuances, little things, the way you change your eye, the way you move your eyes, the way you move your mouth. Those little details that the animators look to that as inspiration to really find what is natural to do with the animation."

Is it easy to get into character right away?

John Leguizamo: "It's harder to get out of character than it is for me to be into character. I end up talking like thish for about a week. I realize, 'Oh shoot, I'm still...' I even hear myself right now sounding like that. So that's what happens for me."

Ray Romano: "Mostly I just do a couple of the lines and I get into that voice that I think Manny is like. It's funny because everybody thinks the couple movies I've done, people just think you're you. But in your head, you hear your voice. You're doing a character. You're hearing your voice different. It's maybe only to your ear, but you are doing it. I mean, does this sound like Manny right now?"

Carlos Saldanha: "A little bit, yes."

John Leguizamo: "But I love the theory that he's thinking of."

Carlos Saldanha: "But the reason why we cast this talented group of actors is because we love the quality of their voices. We love the comedic timing. And also together, even though we are not together, but when we put the characters together in animation, they come to life beautifully together. I think I cannot see Manny not being Ray. I cannot see Ellie not being Queen Latifah. I cannot see Sid not being John. It's just like it's something that they are together. You can never separate those characters anymore. The reason why it's so great is because you can expect them to work together."

"I hear their voices every single day about 10,000 times. But it's awesome because you find nuances of acting that you discover in one take, and then you go to the next take and you find like another element. We can. And also, sometimes we don't use a full take. We merge takes. We just get the first part of the line of this take and a little bit of that take, and then we create a take that would work for the animation. It's seamless. You don't notice it. That's the beauty of it. I keep pushing these guys like, 'Come on, one more take or a half take,' because I'm looking for little bits of magic and gold so that we can tap into each performance and put together one solid take that we need for the character. It's a lot of fun, and kudos to these guys. It's amazing."

Ray Romano: "That's the thing - that's your job because we're never in the room together. You're the one who has to match everything precisely, the tone, the energy and everything."

Carlos Saldanha: "Yeah, it takes a while for you guys to see it. But you know what's the most rewarding part of it is like we do a few sessions with all the actors, all the talent, get all the voices back at Blue Sky but then five months later, we come in with a little sequences that we made and then we show these guys and it's just so rewarding to see their eyes like really understanding what we're trying to do, and really seeing themselves or seeing the character. That for me is one of the most rewarding parts of it is just getting them to look at the stuff that we're doing with them. Like, 'Look, it's going to look good. It's going to be okay.'"

Queen Latifah: "For me, this go round was a lot easier than the last one because I just came onboard on the last film. It was kind of rough at first trying to figure out Ellie's voice and match it with the idea of what the character and what the animation was supposed to be, and just trying to find that whole thing and then I also perform. I sing. I do shows, and so sometimes I'm coming in and my voice is kind of hoarse. And then I come back and do it again when my voice is better, so I'm always fighting that challenge of being in the right voice because I've been somewhere singing or rapping or whatever."

"For this one, once we found who the character was, it was pretty smooth. Ellie, she's sweet and she's funny and she's nurturing and she really cares about the big family, like she's part of this family. So back to her question, I didn't really need to watch the last movie because Ellie has grown so much since the last movie. She's married now. She's got a baby on the way."

John Leguizamo: "She got married? When did you guys get married?"

Queen Latifah: "Yeah, just assume that we're married. She's making it these days. I'm gonna go with tradition on this one. Say they got married first. It's mammoth style. Yeah, that's my baby daddy right there. But she grows so much between the last film and this one because the last one she thought she was a possum. She was kind of like a big kid. She wanted to play with her brothers all the time and she hung from a tree by her tail for that matter. Now she's a little more mature, so it's really about kind of making sure she had that nurturing warmth in her voice. And she seems to be a voice of reason, really pushing him to go make up with Sid. If things are wrong, she's always trying to push people back together. So it was really just trying to bring that kind of love to the character."

Ray Romano: "What's funny is that the dynamic, not to bring up my show, but Everybody Loves Raymond, my show was like I was the voice of reason because there were crazy characters. The brother, the mother, they were all nuts, and I kind of had to keep that glue together. But then the wife was really the overall voice of reason because then I was the crazy one, which is kind of the same. I thought he was crazy. It was about me trying to keep him, but then you kind of reel us all in."

John Leguizamo: "Everybody Loves Manny."

What did you want to create differently about your dinosaurs, and casting Simon Pegg as Buck?

Carlos Saldanha: "Well, the dinosaur things, when we knew we were going to do a dinosaur, we always start with the same premise. 'Oh my God, there were no dinosaurs in the Ice Age, how are we going to make this dinosaur?' So when we went for the designs of them, we said, 'It needs to be an Ice Age design dinosaur.' We use the same character designer, Peter DeSève, who's an amazing artist who did all the characters for Ice Age. We brought him to try [to find] what would be a dinosaur for the Ice Age movies. What would be that design? And he came up with a bunch of fun designs, because we want it to be unique to us. We didn't want it to be just another dinosaur movie. It's an Ice Age with dinosaurs movie, so we wanted to make those characters come to life in our world we created. Also, we play a little bit [with] the dinosaurs in this movie. [It's] not so much just a creature, just coming in to destroy everything. We have mother dinosaur, we have the babies, and this whole thing about Simon Pegg as Buck and the white dinosaur, Rudy, which is sort of like the Ahab and the whale kind of thing. So there's a lot of stuff we tried to put into these dinosaurs that make them unique to our movie."

"Simon was a wonderful addition to the family. It's great because every movie that we make, like the first one we had this dysfunctional family that got together. We have like Sid, Manny and Diego coming together to become a family at the end of the movie. The second movie, we already had the family. Manny, Sid and Diego were buddies, were all there. The family got expanded with the addition of Ellie, Latifah and the possums, Crash and Eddie. So the family got expanded so now we've got a bigger family. So now we go to the third one, it's like, 'Okay, now we have a huge family. What's next?'"

"We brought in Buck, which was a great little character, a swashbuckling kind of fun [dude]. It was also dysfunctional, which was great because our families are this kind of odd 'no matter where you come from, who you are, you're part of the family.' We all embrace him and it was a wonderful cast choice. I love his movies Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz. I always love that, his comedic timing and his voice, the quality of his voice. His energy I think worked great with these guys. When we bring somebody into the family, it's like bringing your in-laws. You have to see how everybody feels around it, so we have to listen to all the voices with that voice in the middle to see if that voice belongs to the family, and he belonged."

Ray Romano: "It's tough for me when you bring the new guys in because I know they're going to get all the laughs. In the first movie, it's always the little guys. I'm like, 'Okay, Sid gets all the laughs.' In the second one, I go, 'There's two new, Crash and Eddie.' In the third one, there's another new little guy."

John Leguizamo: "If they're big, you know they're not going to take any material."

Carlos Saldanha: "I love all my children. I love you all."

Where would you like the characters to go in a sequel, and will they all have to be 3-D now?

Carlos Saldanha: "Yeah, it looks like that's the way to go. We were excited and surprised when we decided to do 3-D. This was like a couple years back, three years back actually, that we started to say it's going to be in 3-D, it's going to be our first movie in 3-D and what is going to be 3-D. Then there was this huge vision from the studio saying that 3-D is the next big thing. Everybody's making movies in 3-D. We're talking about three years ago. Then say three years from now, there will be way more theaters showing 3-D so if you don't have a movie in 3-D, you don't have space. You have to. We thought, 'Let's do it. Let's face that challenge,' and it was great. It was a lot of fun to pursue that new technology, just to make it work. I was very curious to see, it would be great to create the Ice Age and be able to be a little bit of a part of it, feel like you can touch the characters."

Ray Romano: "If there's a short answer to this, then tell me. The animators draw it, it's unbelievable. Do they have to draw it different when it's going to be 3-D? How do you make it 3-D?"

Carlos Saldanha: "It's a post process. After we finish animation, after we render, we render what they call the two eyes, the left and the right eye. That creates a completion of depth."

Ray Romano: "So it's nothing to do with the animators? The animators just do their thing?

Carlos Saldanha: "No, it's more of a post process that we do. We have to re-render the frames. We have to recreate the frames, integrate all the layers and the idea of it."

John Leguizamo: "But you did some good stuff too because some 3-D movies don't even pay attention that it's a 3-D movie. There was a lot of stuff that looked like it was shot like it was coming towards the screen and played up to the 3-D that made it really exciting."

Carlos Saldanha: "The difference is for our creative process, it was more when we did the 3-D, we had just to be more aware of composition and camera placement in animations because there were some tricky rules like, 'Don't break the side of the frame. Try to keep everything in the frame. Wide lenses and flat lenses, try to be aware of those things.' So it didn't change the way we created the story, but it changed a little bit of the way that we perceived."

Mike Thurmeier: "It's a new way to think because now you're not just dealing with flat space. We're dealing with depth too, so how you feel immersed in the movie changed it. But I love the tangibility of it."

And what do you see happening in the next movie?

Ray Romano: "Manny seems to be like 12 years behind what's really going on in my real life. I think in the next one, he's going to be on Cialis probably."

John Leguizamo: "There'll be Peaches and there'll be Prunella."

Ray Romano: "Peaches, she won't want anything to do with me. I mean, yeah, I guess the natural progression is the kids will get older. I guess Sid will find a woman finally."

John Leguizamo: "I'll get a couple, I hope. Hopefully those hot springs with a couple of sloth females. That'll be hot."

Queen Latifah: "I'd love to see him with a woman. I can handle two lisps in the movie. I really would enjoy seeing that, but I don't know. I'd love to see something happen with Peaches and growing up."

Ray Romano: "We don't want to be grandparents."

Queen Latifah: "No, but I'd like to see her hit those teen years and start [acting] out a little bit. Am I going to have fun with her or is she going to drive me crazy? One or the other. But I think that there's a lot to play with us having a daughter now because kids grow up so fast in these movies, so I definitely would like to see some fun happen around that."