IGN have pub­lished an arti­cle con­cern­ing the live action evan­ge­lion movie adap­ta­tion. It focuses on Richard Tay­lor, head of Weta Work­shop, and his thoughts and plans for the movie.

Tay­lor: “I’ve just been to Japan pur­su­ing this, […] I think that is the great untold story to the world. It is sub­lime. It is arguably some of the most beau­ti­ful and poignant ani­ma­tion ever cre­ated, and a huge per­cent­age of the pop cul­ture world now know it, but only through a live-action fea­ture film will it tran­scend that and receive the recog­ni­tion for the art piece that it is.”

Richard Tay­lor, who views the animé as an exquis­ite art piece wants this film to be made right — so much so that he him­self will guide the pro­duc­tion and over­see the entire process.

“Now, actu­ally achiev­ing it as a live-action fea­ture film is extremely dif­fi­cult to imag­ine. Tech­no­log­i­cally, sure, it’s doable. But at an eso­teric, uni­verse level, it is an unbe­liev­ably impact­ing and dra­matic story con­cept. [It’s got] pseudo-religious over­tones, and all these won­der­ful motifs are woven into it. It’s some­thing that you can gen­er­ate over 26 hours of ani­ma­tion, but try­ing to encap­su­late that down into a fea­ture film would be a mas­sive chal­lenge. But … with the right direc­tor, I think it could be a very beau­ti­ful movie. …And that’s my big pur­suit at the moment. I’ve put an awful lot of energy into it.”

With a man like this behind the wheel we should all have some con­fi­dence. Tay­lor is ded­i­cated to the cause and he is unlikely to sell out or make unimag­in­able blun­ders as this film is a direct rep­re­sen­ta­tion of his com­pany. But most impor­tantly he is some­body that loves the orig­i­nal animé; this Evan­ge­lion film could still be some­thing great.

“We’ll be blessed just to work on it. But it would be an oppor­tu­nity for us to look at it at a dif­fer­ent level if [Weta helped pro­duce the movie].”

Source: IGN: Weta Head hopes to Co-produce Evan­ge­lion
Thanks to Chris Davis and ‘The Dit’

For​tune​.com have just recently pub­lished an arti­cle enti­tled “Animé Explo­sion”.

“From Poké­mon to Full Metal Panic, the animé indus­try is doing every­thing the rest of show biz isn’t: embrac­ing tech­nol­ogy, cod­dling fans—and mak­ing a killing.”

Daniel Roth dis­cusses the cur­rent state of the animé indus­try in the west, the approach to piracy, new tech­nol­ogy and fanat­i­cal otaku. The arti­cle cen­tres on John Led­ford, CEO of AD Vision; pri­mar­ily his busi­ness strate­gies, his encoun­ters with fans at his door at 2am and of course, the live action Evan­ge­lion movie. The arti­cle goes on to men­tion fan-subbers, the enter­tain­ment indus­try and var­i­ous ADV acqui­si­tions. In dis­cussing otaku (extreme animé fanat­ics), Roth gives brief men­tion of the live action evan­ge­lion situation:

“Since 2003 [Ledford’s] been shop­ping the idea of mak­ing a live-action ver­sion of Neon Gen­e­sis Evan­ge­lion, […] Led­ford signed on the Weta Com­pa­nies, […] to come up with plans for what the Evan­ge­lion world might look like. But instead of micro­manag­ing the project, Led­ford had Weta answer to two Evan­ge­lion fanat­ics at his company.”

Through bad­ger­ing and exten­sive com­mu­ni­ca­tion with Weta it shows that ADV are tak­ing this film very seri­ously. This isn’t going to be a cheap knock off; ADV sim­ply can­not afford to offend the great major­ity of their cus­tomers. And to that means it seems they want to do things right, with or with­out Hideaki Anno.

“Richard Tay­lor, Weta’s co-founder, says he’s never expe­ri­enced any­thing quite like it. Twice a week he’d have a con­fer­ence call with the fans at ADV, send­ing them ren­der­ings of his designs for things like the 100-foot-tall robots and get­ting in return their ency­clo­pe­dic take on the inter­pre­ta­tions. “These are peo­ple who could be con­sid­ered schol­ars on the world of Evan­ge­lion,” says Tay­lor. “We had to appease them and find their approval.”

It fol­lows on to men­tion a meet­ing between Tay­lor and a pro­posed pro­ducer at the San Diego Comic-Con in an attempt to ‘jump-start’ the pro­duc­tion. Bud­get­ing is also men­tioned and it seems ADV has raised $100m of the $120 mil­lion they need.

The fans are also mak­ing them­selves heard – a lot. Even more so than those who enjoyed Lord of the Rings:

“We get a lot of e-mails, a lot of let­ters from peo­ple around the world about Lord of the Rings. But we get 25 e-mails about Evan­ge­lion to every one we get about Lord of the Rings,” says Tay­lor. “And Evan­ge­lion has not even been made yet.”

A fan even con­sulted Tay­lor dur­ing his meet­ing with the pro­ducer, ask­ing whether or not any­thing was being done about the movie:

Tay­lor turned to the pro­ducer and said, “This is why we have to do this movie.”

Source: For​tune​.com
Thanks to Derek

This past Octo­ber, at Supanova, Australia’s pop cul­ture con­ven­tion, Matt Green­field of ADV Films, and Richard Tay­lor of WETA Work­shop spoke about the prospects of Live Action Evangelion.

You can down­load pod­casts of the pan­els below:

Richard Tay­lor
Panel abstract

Pod­cast:
http://www.supanova.com.au/podcast/files/0…a_Podcast_3.mp3

Skip to 19:00 for Live Action Evangelion.

Matt Green­field:
Panel abstract

Pod­cast:
http://www.supanova.com.au/podcast/files/0…a_Podcast_8.mp3

Skip to 22:00 for Live Action Evangelion.

From Active Animé:

“On August 7 of this year, we informed all of you that the live action adap­ta­tion of Evan­ge­lion was alive and well, and that the infor­ma­tion that we received came from ADV Films David Del Rio.

“This time around, I asked the same ques­tion to Matt Green­field right after the Godan­nar screen­ing. As we all know, Matt Green­field is the one that’s head­ing the live action adap­ta­tion project of Evangelion.

“When I ask Matt, he gave me an enthu­si­as­tic thumb up, and said “Yes”. He added the he is plan­ning of vis­it­ing Weta Work­shop to find out what project they’re cur­rently work­ing on, and to see if there are changes to be made while in New Zealand in October.”

Active Animé have posted a small news snip­pet dis­cussing the ongo­ing devel­op­ment of the Evan­ge­lion movie after meet­ing with Del Rio, Cre­ative Direc­tor for ADV Films.

He says that the movie is still Live and well and that ADV are tak­ing their time to make sure the movie is as envi­sioned. It also men­tions that Weta are cur­rently busy with King Kong, but appar­ently there may be some changes to the con­cept art once pro­duc­tion begins. Del Rio is also hop­ing for a 2/3 movie deal.

There hasn’t really been any sub­stan­tial news con­cern­ing the live action Evan­ge­lion movie. As we all by now know, this is due to the strin­gent and secre­tive process of sign­ing a direc­tor for this project. Con­tracts, inter­views, short­lists and talks have to be made and all three par­ties involved must be happy with the final deci­sion. Until then no one can make any sort of pub­lic dec­la­ra­tion or pro­vide any news that would get us all excited or riled with anger.

“Galaxy Animé” ( http://​www​.gatv​.tv/ ) have just recently put up an inter­view with David Williams, cur­rently an ADR Direc­tor for ADV Films as well as DVD Pro­ducer. The inter­view is in a win­dows media player streamed audio for­mat and takes place fol­low­ing his panel at a recent con­ven­tion. The inter­view talks about the down swing of the animé indus­try over the past six months, new ‘gate­way’ shows, the upcom­ing releases and how the indus­try is on its way back up. The inter­view wraps up with a brief talk con­cern­ing the live action adap­ta­tion. To sum­marise he states that there is noth­ing new to talk about and that they are in nego­ti­a­tions with a par­tic­u­lar direc­tor. Should this direc­tor sign and take on the project and Gainax, ADV and Weta all agree with the deci­sion, then the ball will be set rolling and we may get some real news.

While still noth­ing excit­ing, it does show that behind the scenes cogs are still work­ing and that things have advanced from a mere short­list of direc­tors. Forums mem­bers are also talk­ing about some more pos­i­tive and less neu­tral replies to the bom­bard­ment of emails sent to ADV sug­gest­ing that sig­nif­i­cant news is just over the hori­zon. We’ll see. (Thanks Tris­ton Ordway)

Triv­ial Being forum mem­ber Legion has picked up the lat­est issue of Neo, a british animé pub­li­ca­tion. The full arti­cle scan can be found here: Forum Topic.

To sum­marise the arti­cle, it sim­ply states that the live action evan­ge­lion project is cur­rently on hold accord­ing to the Weta web­site (we already knew this). No major news, just an announce­ment in print.

Nick Buras has kindly informed me that Weta have updated their web­site and have included the Neon Gen­e­sis Evan­ge­lion live action movie as a ‘cur­rent project’:

Weta Work­shop Eva Project Page

As for the sta­tus of the project, which every­one has been con­cerned due to the lack of any for­mi­da­ble news: UNDER DEVELOPMENT -

QUOTE: “Weta has been design­ing a live-action adap­ta­tion of Neon Gen­e­sis: Evan­ge­lion. The film is on hold but it is Weta’s hope that it will enjoy get­ting to work on the film pro­duc­tion of this amaz­ing story in the near future.”

The site also con­tains a flash rep­re­sen­ta­tion of all their con­cept work so far, no pic­tures that can­not be found here although it does con­firm that they cre­ated the rogue image found only in a japan­ese new­type mag­a­zine, (Image). In the image descrip­tions the char­ac­ters are given their cor­rect titles.