At the ADV Films panel at Metro­con 2004, David Williams said the sparse­ness of news was because all infor­ma­tion released on the project was agreed to be approved by all three par­ties involved: Gainax, WETA, and ADV. He did say the movie is mov­ing ahead fine. They are cur­rently work­ing on script treat­ments and are down to a short­list of direc­tors. In a sep­a­rate inter­view, Williams said that there has been no deci­sion made yet as to whether the film will encom­pass the entire story of Evan­ge­lion or just the beginning.

SOURCE: http://​www​.ani​me​news​net​work​.com/​c​o​n​v​e​n​t​i​o​n​.​p​h​p​?​i​d​=​181

The live action evan­ge­lion movie is cur­rently under­go­ing the process of choos­ing a direc­tor. Until this stage has been com­pleted, no cast­ing or final script will be made. Accord­ing to Animé Tourist, Gainax have approved a short list of direc­tors. These direc­tors will be approached and when nego­ti­a­tion is com­plete, the rest of the movie will get under­way (the excit­ing stuff). Await an ADV press release in the com­ing months.

Noth­ing really new on the live action movie recently, await­ing offi­cial announce­ments from ADV. How­ever, here is some infor­ma­tion about Weta you may be inter­ested in. The BBC has an arti­cle cov­er­ing the super­com­puter power that lies behind Weta Work­shop. If by count­ing the num­ber of proces­sors a super­com­puter has as a gauge of size; Weta has the third largest in the world — along­side an archive stor­ing 500 terrabytes of data.

For the com­plete arti­cle: http://​news​.bbc​.co​.uk/​2​/​h​i​/​t​e​c​h​n​o​l​o​g​y​/​3​6​7​2​8​8​7​.​stm
Thanks to Vin­cent Pham

In a reply to an email ask­ing about the movie, Tiffany gave a few small extra details with respect to the sched­ule of the Live Action movie.

As we know, the movie is cur­rently in very early stages of pro­duc­tion. The main aim at this point seems to be find­ing a suit­able direc­tor to take on the project. Tiffany Grant goes on to state that it will be two to three YEARS before cast­ing takes place — so the actors they have in mind right now would have to be approx­i­mately twelve years old, so as to be the cor­rect age dur­ing filming.

Thanks to Saman­tha G

Upon email­ing Tiffany Grant about infor­ma­tion of cast­ing (I’m a 14 y/o girl who has received sev­eral com­pli­ments about my uncanny resem­b­lence to Rei), I received infor­ma­tion about the sched­ule laid out thus far. It is prob­a­bly all already known, but could serve as an update. It was received April 11, 2004:

Sin­cerely,
Saman­tha G

IMDB has put up a page for the as of yet “Unti­tled Evan­ge­lion Project” with a pro­posed release date of 2005 (now 2006). The page cur­rently con­tains very few details, stat­ing merely that the film is in pre-production, and the genre is an “Action/Fantasy/Sci-fi”.
Keep your eyes on this page.

IMDB Evan­ge­lion Page

Some Evan­ge­lion Live Action news has arrived at last. ADV has announced details about the upcom­ing GENESIS REBORN DVD, con­tain­ing the last six episodes with extended footage. In Stores MARCH 9th. We can now also reveal that this DVD will con­tain an exclu­sive sneak pre­view of the live action movie.

Neon Gen­e­sis Evan­ge­lion: Direc­tors’ Cut—Genesis Reborn ($29.98 SRP) includes episodes 24–26 in both director’s cut and orig­i­nal broad­cast ver­sions. In both Eng­lish 2.0-language and Japan­ese 2.0-language ver­sions, with Eng­lish sub­ti­tles. Includes ADV pre­views, clean open­ing ani­ma­tion; clean clos­ing ani­ma­tion; and sneak pre­view of the live-action movie:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

NEON GENESIS EVANGELION: DIRECTORS’ CUT—GENESIS REBORN
Run­ning time: 150 min­utes; Age Rat­ing: 15+
Pre-book Date: 2/10/04
Street Date: 3/9/04
For­mat SRP
DVD $29.98

The images will be made avail­able to you soon! But before then, here is a quick run down of all the won­der­ful fea­tures to do with the eva movie in the lat­est issue of Animé insider.

The pro­duc­tion images. Yes, all NEW images as promised.
Image 01: This is a panoramic view of NERV’s Evan­ge­lion Unit Hangar Bay, much like the image already seen, it shows Unit 1 with what looks like a partly dis­fig­ured horn. In the dis­tance is another tank con­tain­ing an unknown object that does not look like an eva unit. The image is also scat­tered with NERV employ­ees going about their daily jobs.
Image 02: Another shot of Unit 0, it looks sim­i­lar to the animé ver­sion although aspects of it have been mod­i­fied to look more bio­me­chan­i­cal (e.g. mus­cu­lar, ske­li­tal).
Image 03: Here is our first shot of Rei Ayanami. The image shows her plug­suit; Eva is writ­ten on the chest plate and var­i­ous small details have been changed from the animé ver­sion. We can also see Rei’s face and her appear­ance is of an Asian nature.

As for the inter­view with Exec­u­tive pro­ducer Matthew Green­field, here are the details we now know:
The script, which Green­field took time out of his hon­ey­moon to work with, is being shown around to var­i­ous par­ties in order to bring more staff and crew into the project — even though the script is a very first draft and will most likely change dras­ti­cally (depend­ing on the direc­tor).
The story will be self-contained and if suc­cess­ful, will make way for sequels. Green­field used Matrix Reloaded as an exam­ple of what he is try­ing to avoid cre­at­ing. As for cur­rent con­cept art pro­duc­tion, Weta have 12 artists going at it. This movie could take for­ever to pro­duce and we may not get to see it until 2010. But let’s hope not.

Note: Animé Insider #12 now out on Newsstands.