Sitting in a booth at a LoDo restaurant one recent morning, Brendan Fraser and Eric Brevig make an affable tag team.
Although Fraser has distinguished himself in such indie features as “Crash” and “Gods and Monsters,” he has become something of a “blue screen” veteran, starring in movies such as “The Mummy” and its sequels (the latest opens next month).
Brevig has worked the moviemaking trade from a different direction. Before directing his first feature, “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” he was the special-effects whiz on “Hook,” “Men in Black” and “Pearl Harbor.” He won an Oscar for best visual effects for Paul Verhoeven’s “Total Recall.”
Fraser plays Trevor Anderson, a scientist who, along with his nephew, Sean (Josh Hutcherson), travels to Iceland to pursue the work of his vanished brother, a volcanologist with a serious fondness for the works of Jules Verne. They are aided — sort of — by Hannah (vivacious Anita Briem), whose own father was a discredited “Vernean.”
“Journey” is even more dimensional than its newfangled 3D Fusion System technology hints at. For the film’s characters, there is lots to work through even as they ooh, aah and uh-oh their way through a bold new world.
The director and actor (also an executive producer) sit talking about performance, technology and the remaking of a classic adventure.
Fraser: Hello this is Brendan, and this is the sound of Eric eating.
Brevig: (Makes mouthy sounds into the recorder.)
Post: Do you remember your first 3D movie?
Fraser: Oh yeah. It was “Jaws 3.” It was pretty disappointing. Then there were all these red-and-blue kung-fu movies in the ’80s. They were always misaligned and gave me a headache. That’s what I knew of 3D until until Eric showed me.
Brevig: Brendan completely got the lack of depth of the characters in the script I showed him and came to the first meeting with the Jules Verne novel, an antique stereoscopic viewer (keep an eye open for one) and a way for the Trevor-Sean relationship to work.
Post: You’ve been traveling a lot with the film. Any anecdotes?
Fraser: There’s always an 80-year- old grandma or a kid reaching out to grab at something.
Post: Trevor, Sean and Hannah make a fine trio.
Brevig: Often in these movies, the actual characters and their emotions and motivation are left out. It’s lost in the gimmicky stuff. It’s odd for a guy who used to be an FX guy to say that.
Fraser: I was thinking about it this morning, brushing my teeth. These characters are all misfits. They all have some sort of issue in their lives. Then they fall down this volcanic tube and, kersplash. Call it a baptism of sorts, but they’re reborn at the center of the Earth. They become a quasi-family.
Brevig: That’s really the message — finding family even if you’re not family.
Post: Did you shoot in Iceland?
Brevig: So much of the film takes place on a set, so we wanted to start the movie in a real place. No place else looks like Iceland.
Fraser: The alternative was a place called Asbestos Quebec.
Post: Are you serious?
Fraser: That’s what we said.
Brevig: It was in an old mine. The safe limit was something like .05 percent. This was 50. We didn’t go there.
Post: Are they teaching blue-screen acting yet?
Fraser: People ask me if you need to do anything different working in 3D format and the answer is “No.” It is high- definition, so less is more, but otherwise … Eric took I don’t know how many weeks or months to do a pre-visual of the entire movie. There’s a video- game version of the whole movie we could look at.
Brevig: I think that’s where a lot of blue-screen movies fall down. Actors are a little bit lost without enough information. The audience looks to the actor’s face in much the way a kid looks to its mother’s to see if what’s going on is important and real. The most important thing about visual effects isn’t the effects; it’s people’s reactions to it. Some of the most enjoyable moments are that combination that combines concern and release, like when Trevor falls. He’s gonna die, he’s gonna die, he falls on his butt.
Fraser: They dropped me on my head, man.
Brevig: It was a very realistic performance. I have to commend you on that. That wasn’t your head, by the way.
