Accord­ing to one of our forum mem­bers, zandor117, who was present at the ADV panel at Animé Week­end Atlanta, ADV’s David Williams said that the Evan­ge­lion live action movie is now mov­ing into pro­duc­tion. We have seen no other report, even though the same panel was used to announce sev­eral animé licenses that have been reported by rep­utable animé news sources.

Accord­ing to zandor117, this is what was said:

Ques­tioner: “Is there any­thing new about the EVA movie?”

David Williams: “The EVA movie is now in Production”

Ques­tioner: “Can you tell us the director?”

David Williams: “I am not allowed to say that yet.”

ADV has not yet com­mented further.

While this does not seem like full pro­duc­tion (i.e. film­ing actors) or even fully fledged pre-production like set build­ing, the main con­crete news seems to be that a direc­tor has signed on, mov­ing the project beyond the pro­posal and devel­op­ment phase. Pre­vi­ously, nego­ti­a­tions were under way with a short­list of direc­tors who had expressed an inter­est, but the deci­sion had not been made yet.

Read the orig­i­nal dis­cus­sion thread

From ANN’s Kamikaze­con report:

“As expected, a large por­tion of ques­tions revolved around the live-action ver­sion of Neon Gen­e­sis Evan­ge­lion. Green­field con­firmed that the project was very much alive, and they were cur­rently in the process of find­ing a direc­tor. While nam­ing no names, Green­field did con­firm that inter­est has been shown by sev­eral major direc­tors, includ­ing one who has won an Oscar. He also men­tioned that the prob­a­ble loca­tion of the shoot would be New Zealand, the same coun­try where WETA, the stu­dio slated to cre­ate spe­cial effects for Evan­ge­lion, is located. When asked how soon the movie would be fin­ished, Green­field indi­cated it would be at least a year, most likely 3 or 4.”

Hi there, estranged mod­er­a­tor Eva Mon­key reporting.

This past week­end (Feb. 18–20) I took a trip down to Crys­tal City to host an Evan­ge­lion panel for the Kat­su­con animé con­ven­tion. Among other top­ics we dis­cussed the Live Action Evan­ge­lion film.

Please note that the fol­low­ing is an unof­fi­cial source and should for now be treated as noth­ing more than rumor.

One of the atten­dees claimed to have an asso­ciate cur­rently intern­ing in WETA’s prop shop (for lack of a bet­ter term). He claimed that WETA artists have pro­duced more than just the con­cep­tual art­work we’ve seen thus far, includ­ing some pre­lim­i­nary 3D mod­els and so forth.

Also of inter­est is that the word around the stu­dio is that Peter Jack­son is indeed inter­ested in direct­ing this project, how­ever due to con­trac­tual agree­ments with Uni­ver­sal (?), he is cur­rently tied into work­ing on King Kong, and is unable to head up Live Action Evan­ge­lion, and may well be in line or have vouched for Live Action Eva once King Kong’s pro­duc­tion closes.

Once again, this is pure unsub­sta­ni­ated rumor, and should be taken with a grain of salt. The pos­si­bil­ity for Peter Jackson’s direc­tion may exist, accord­ing to what I was told. How­ever, this is not a cred­i­ble source and needs fur­ther verification.

Due to the lack of news of late, I felt it nec­ces­sary, if for no other rea­son than to give you some­thing to think about.

Dark Hori­zons has posted some rumors con­cern­ing Tiffany’s thoughts on cast­ing. Note, these are only rumors and cast­ing is still a long way off. Hope­fully we’ll find out who the direc­tor is before the year is out. Any­way, mov­ing on.

Tiffany stated that;

• If she were to make a cameo in the movie, she would like to play Asuka’s mother
• She toyed with the ideas of Hugo Weav­ing play­ing Gendo and Jen­nifer Gar­ner play­ing Mis­ato (a good pick IMO)

Still only minis­cule threads of news at the moment folks. A lull in the (live) action.

Thanks to Tero Niemi

Jon Lange Online
Here is the con­fir­ma­tion that this movie is in fact com­pletely un-related to the animé series, as pre­vi­ously predicted.

The film instead cov­ers, “the prob­lems with the cen­tral­iz­ing pow­ers within the EU and ver­sus the USA. Great pow­ers col­lide, God is manip­u­lated and peo­ple have their own agen­das.. Noth­ing is sacred.” In a A futur­is­tic and reli­gious sci-fi action thriller. Thus, mov­ing on…

Imdb has setup a page for an upcom­ing movie enti­tled, [E]vangelion (2004). Despite hold­ing the same title, this project seems com­pletely unre­lated to the live action movie. It is in fact a “dan­ish” movie. Don’t expect to find any details of the NGE movie, but we will see how Imdb devel­ops this page. IMDB link Apolo­gies for few updates, life has been busy on a tour of Europe.

Accord­ing to sources from Weta the movie is cur­rently in its pre-production stages. The movie, in its cur­rent form exists as sev­eral hun­dred con­cept images, a few of which have appeared in the New­type mag­a­zine, and a draft screen­play which awaits edit­ing by the cho­sen direc­tor. The project seems to have been in the works now for a solid few months with the Weta team work­ing hard on per­fect­ing visual prepa­ra­tion (Weta appear very ded­i­cated, sources telling us that they have turned down two other projects over this one).

The film will not be directed by Hideaki Anno, nei­ther will it be directed by Peter Jack­son. Rumors have been fly­ing around about who might be involved in a direct­ing sense; who could do the series jus­tice, remain true to the sto­ry­line and still pull off a fan­tas­tic movie? That is the ques­tion that Gainax have to answer.

Source: Animé Tourist

Recent Inter­net rumors sug­gest that the Evan­ge­lion movie shall have the bud­get equal to that of a block­buster, being roughly of 100 mil­lion or more. To com­pare this with other top movies; The Matrix had a $63 mil­lion bud­get and LOTR: Fel­low­ship of the Ring had a bud­get of $109 mil­lion. It is unknown where such cash is com­ing from as the income of Animé does not rival that of Hol­ly­wood blockbusters.

Like LOTR, the core of the prin­ci­ple pho­tog­ra­phy will be filmed in New Zealand.

Along the lines of a plot and adap­ta­tion of the series, recent inter­net rumors sug­gest the film will focus on the first half of the 26 episode series — pos­si­bly extend­ing the story with a later sequel — all the con­tent cov­ered within NGE is dif­fi­cult to include yet often too impor­tant to miss out.

Gainax are keep­ing hush hush about details of the flick although they have a busy sched­ule for the movie and its “pro­mo­tion”, so expect to find out more saucy details in the com­ing weeks.

Source: Animé Tourist