David Yates Talks About ‘Tarzan’ and ‘Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them’ with USA Today
Jul 01, 2016
Interviews, News, Yates, Yates Interviews
David Yates, the director of The Legend of Tarzan and the upcoming Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them did a Q&A with USA Today and told how he pulled off two massive blockbuster releases in one year.
When asked about what exactly attracted him in the script for The Legend of Tarzan, Yates responded that the screenplay, written by Adam Cozad and Craig Bewer, caught his attention due to its “fun elements that you would enjoy when you went into the movie theater” – elements like action, great landscapes and amazing animals. Yates mentions also being excited about the prospect of working in Africa and producing a type of action/adventure/romance film that he hadn’t seen for a while.
The Legend of Tarzan relies heavily on the use of CGI and according to Yates the biggest challenge he faced was creating the world of the movie and making it feel romantic and heightened, yet believable.
Yates was still in the process of filming The Legend of Tarzan when he got the script for Beasts sent for him. Once the filming of Tarzan ended, Yates moved directly to working with Beasts. He gives special credit to his editor Mark Day, who according to Yates, had one machine that had Tarzan on it and one machine that has Beasts on it, which allowed Yates to switch between the two all the time. While the work load seems heavy, Yates says that working on the two films was:
“All doable, all perfectly fine, but literally there wasn’t a single day when I was working Beasts that I didn’t at least peek at Tarzan in some shape or form.”
While to some extent working on the Fantastic Beasts felt like a homecoming to the Harry Potter world familiar to Yates, he says that the experience felt different, because this time around it is not Hogwarts and it is not about kids, but rather about grown-ups, as a result of which the film deals with “very adult themes”.
The Legend of Tarzan premieres in United States on Friday July 1, 2016. The Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them will hit theaters later this year on November 18th.
