With roughly three months to go before its international release, the film has entered its final stages, active scoring is going on in Los Angeles and final sound mixing beginning in Wellington, New Zealand, and completely rendered animation is being finalized every day. Spielberg and Jackson invited ComingSoon.net down to Jacksonâs state-of-the-art post-production facility in Wellington to view completed portions of the film as it comes together.
Park Road Post, Jacksonâs purpose-built facility nestled in the upscale Wellington suburb of Miramar, is exactly what youâd expect a filmmakerâs home away from home would be like. A cozy, arts and crafts style interior surrounds three mixing stages, a foley room, several editing and mastering suites, and the main theater. Designed by the artisans at nearby Weta Workshop, the main theater is classy and opulent in the way no commercial theater would bother with. Designed to replicate the feel of being outdoors in a Spanish or Italian plaza, the walls are lined with faux-tiled roofs, statues and columns, and the ceiling is a deep blue, studded with twinkling lights as if it were the night sky.
Seated at the front of the theater, facing the very comfortable seats lined up stadium style within, is Jackson himself, looking as scruffy and un-kept as he did while making the âLord of the Ringsâ films, with only a hint more grey in his hair to mark the passage of time. Next to him is a large LCD television with several cameras around it allowing the audience to see, and be seen by, Spielberg and his producer Kathleen Kennedy, who are seated in a similar theater several thousands of miles away in LA.
This early morning screening is actually the reverse of much of âTintinâsâ production life, Jackson described, as he often had to wake up at four in the morning during capture to join the production as it took place in half a world away. The time difference (Spielberg himself has never traveled to Wellington) is but one of the unique features that make âTintinâ so different from any Spielberg film before.
The collaboration actually began six years earlier, in 2005, when Spielberg asked Weta Digital for a feasibility test for putting a computer generated Snowy (Tintinâs faithful dog companion) into a live-action âTintinâ production. Jackson, still in the midst of production on King Kong at the time and with a full crew at his disposal, took it upon himself to shoot the test on the set of the âVentureâ with himself in the starring role of Captain Haddock (Tintinâs faithful non-dog companion).
The lights in the theater dimmed for the first of the three clips shown that morning, Jacksonâs original test. It consists of Jackson, in full Haddock costume, walking along a dock and explaining how he was perfect for the role and had dreamed of playing him ever since âgrowing a beard at seven years old.â He tries his best throughout to ignore the CGI dog jumping around his heels before accidentally knocking it in the ocean and diving after it. The sum total of the test was to convince Spielberg ânot to do Tintin in live-actionâ the director said. It did, however, convince him that âI had a partner in crime in âTintin.'â
That partnership, which Spielberg describes as âdoing a crossword puzzle with a friend,â would lead to a film which, when it is released this fall, will have been in one stage of production or another for six-and-a-half years.

Once that work is done, Spielberg and his actorsâJamie Bell, Andy Serkis, Daniel Craig, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Gad Elmaleh, Toby Jones and Mackenzie Crookâcongregated on a soundstage in Los Angeles to begin capturing The Adventures of Tintin.
âItâs like shooting a super 8 film,â Jackson explained. âThis was a lot like that, except instead of a camera youâre running around with a PlayStation controller,â Spielberg agreed. âYou become the focus puller, the dolly grip â I actually lit it with some help from Weta. I did a lot of jobs I donât normally do.â
Despite that new way of working, or perhaps because of it, âTintinâ is immediately recognizable as a Spielberg film. The director chose to shoot in a conventional style, staying largely away from the extended, whipsawing camera moves of many motion captured CGI films; instead using cuts to move his action along and physics to determine camera placement as much as possible. He also shot his actors in the same way he would a live-action film, moving the camera for each close-up and getting new performances for each set up, Jackson explained.
âHeâd do 6 or 7 takes with Jamie and then set up for a new shot with Andy and do 6 or 7 takes with him,â Jackson said. This was quite a departure from the way James Cameron shot Avatar where he would capture the entire master shot of a scene and then pick his camera angles after the fact, sometimes years afterwards. Spielberg instead picked his angles as he went, essentially building his edit during the capture process, though he has reveled somewhat in the ability to âshootâ pick up material whenever wants.
âI could pick new shots now, or even a month from now, and weâd still be able to get them in in time for release,â he said.
Still, the largely âconventional approachâ he picked is obvious as soon as the second clip begins playing. This part is brand new with several sections in various stages of rendering. It also boasts the first released section from John Williams score, just two days old at this point, which has been quickly mixed in to the dialogue and sound effects in order to make as complete an experience as possible.
It begins with Tintin being chloroformed at his front door and driven off, prompting Snowy to leap from a nearby window onto a passing fire truck, then from car to car and eventually cow to cow as he races to keep up with the abductors. Itâs replete with the kind of light visual gags and tight editing weâre used to from âfunâ Spielberg films and the score matches the look in kind, a kind of light, jingly mashing of âE.T.â and âIndiana Jones.â Which, in many ways, sums up the tone of âTintin,â which though photo-real can quickly flip to being pure cartoon.

âItâs a mixture of action-adventure, slapstick, satire, itâs a strange mix,â Spielberg said, and sticking to that tone was something they tried to do throughout the script-writing process, which Spielberg maintained was the most important part of putting âTintinâ together and took almost as long as designing the film. âWe always return to story, plot, characters,â he said.
For that they turned to âDoctor Whoâ writer Steven Moffat on Jacksonâs (an admitted âWhoâ fan) recommendation, due to the similarities in mixed tone which would have to be brought out. And when Moffat had to return to the show after turning in several drafts Jackson brought in Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish to finish working on the screenplay because âwe wanted to have a European sensibility, we wanted to have writers who were âTintinâ fans,â Spielberg said.
Like many film adaptations, Spielberg and Jackson have strived to be true to the spirit of the source material but not necessarily to the letter, combining pieces of several different âTintinâ adventures together in order to make the first of what they hope will be several installments.
âWe wanted Haddock and Tintin to meet for the first time, but that book [âThe Crab with the Golden Clawsâ] wasnât the best,â for a straight adaptation, Jackson explained. âBut âSecret of the Unicornâ goes into Haddockâs ancestry, where he comes from, making it a natural fit.â
So Spielberg, Jackson and the various screenwriters combined bits and pieces of the two booksâamong other things increasing the villainy of the filmâs nemesis Ivan Ivanovitch Sakharine (the character Daniel Craig plays, as opposed to the previously reported pirate Red Rackham)âtogether with some elements from âUnicornâsâ sequel âRed Rackhamâs Treasureâ to create the filmâs eventual story though much of âRed Rackhamâ was set aside for Tintin 2.
âThe second film would go into [âRed Rackhamâs Treasureâ],â Jackson said, which he himself planned to direct. âThatâs the idea.â
The Adventures of Tintin opens in 3D, 2D and IMAX 3D theaters in North America on December 23.