The phrase “it’s big in Europe” might draw some epic eye rolls from those in the States, but in the case of Mortal Engines, it’s true.

Author Philip Reeve released the first of a quartet of young-adult sci-fi novels in 2001 and sparked a massive hit — so massive, that The Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson wanted to make it his next film adaptation in 2008. As he explained to reporters on the Mortal Engines set in New Zealand last year, that plan fell apart at the time when development on The Hobbit picked up. With the film rights set to expire years later, Jackson felt it best to hand the directing reigns to Christian Rivers, his storyboard artist of the past 25 years.

Now Mortal Engines is finally revving towards theaters at the end of the year. But, let’s face it, Reeves is no Rowling. The U.K.-based book series didn’t have the same impact on the U.S. as Harry Potter, so that first teaser trailer playing ahead of Star Wars: The Last Jedi screenings may have raised more questions than answers for those not in the know.

Mortal Engines is based around the fictional concept of Municipal Darwinism, a system where cities are rebuilt as mobile Traction Cities and roam around the planet devouring smaller cities. (Think Howl’s Moving Castle but on wheels.) It’s in this alternate future where we meet Hester Shaw (Hera Hilmar), a woman on a mission that will lead her to cross paths with a young apprentice, Tom Natsworthy (Robert Sheehan), both of whom are destined to change the course of their future.

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Image via Universal Pictures

With a cast that includes Hugo Weaving, Stephen Lang, Colin Salmon, Jihae, Ronan Raftery, Leila George, and Patrick Malahide, Mortal Engines may end up sparking the next Hollywood franchise — assuming enough people come out to see it.

Last year, Collider joined a group of reporters on the film’s New Zealand set and, over the course of two days, learned the ins and outs of this imagined reality — a reality Jackson says “feels more possible now than in 2008” when he first started working on it. Here's what we learned:

  • It’s been approximately 1,700 years since the Sixty Minute War, a great war that lasted 60 minutes but reshaped the world into this post-dystopian society we see on screen.
  • This world is largely based on the principle of Municipal Darwinism, the idea that mobile cities eat each other with the bigger, stronger cities always coming out on top. Then there are the anti-tractionists, who fight against this ecosystem. According to Jihae, Londoners might call anti-tractionists terrorist, but “they’re actually the protectors of making sure that humankind does not go complete or extinct.”
  • The producers don’t consider this story to be a post-apocalyptic dystopia. It’s more what happens thousands of years after a dystopia. “The world is coming back,” co-screenwriter Philippa Boyens, another frequent Jackson collaborator, says, “if these f—ing traction engines would stop rampaging all over.”
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    The great London Traction City was built with the ruins of the London we know, so there will be various recognizable bronze statues and Victorian elements. The transportation system, for one, is based on the look of the London bus system and the London Eye. There are three main sections to London: the Gut, which is where the lower-class blue-collar workers strip newly ingested cities for parts; the Second Tier, where low-to-middle class people, including the historians, dwell; and the First Tier, which is for the more aristocratic one-percenters.
  • Other locations include Shang Guo, “where they’re becoming more enlightened,” extras casting coordinator Victoria Beynon says. Production designer Dan Hennah explains further that this is the location for the anti-tractionists tucked away in the east. “We’re not saying it’s China. We’re not saying it’s Vietnam. We’re not saying where it is,” he says. Instead, Shan Guo is a mixture of these places. Their “alternate lifestyle,” as he calls it, consists of growing their own vegetables, weaving their own fabrics, and preserving plants and trees — a culture that doesn’t exist in the traction cities. “It's summer in Shan Guo,” Hennah mentions. “Shan Guo's a little micro climate.”
  • Then there’s Airhaven, an area where the city is built up in the clouds. The pilots of airships tend to dress for warmth, since the climate is much colder.
  • Much of this exposition will be laid out in a tour of London's museum, where Colin Salmon's Chudleigh Pomeroy, a historian, preserves relics. Some fun inclusions are a statue of Minions Kevin and Stuart, who are thought to be lost deities of the old world. An aged McDonald's sign, skulls of a T-rex and triceratops, and artifacts like skateboards and washing machines also adorn this set. Salmon remembers, “We had the kids in the other day and they were looking at all the mobile phones and I was explaining how there was a point in history where everybody was looking at their mobile phones and they were no longer communicating and all the information was stored on them and no books were read and there was audio.”
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    Salmon thought of using a Kiwi accent for Chudleigh because, in his own experience, "there's an interesting scenario whereby people of the Commonwealth look at England in a different way."
  • The scene from the first trailer is the first big action piece of the movie. London spies Saltzhaken, a small German mining town, for ingesting. Mysterious fugitive Hester Shaw, hooded to hide a nasty scar, is aboard Saltzhaken and ready to be devoured. She’s on a mission to get something — or someone — in London.
  • Municipal Darwinism has been able to thrive through lies told to the lower class. Refugees ingested by London are headed through a passport processing facility and promised better lives by the deputy mayor, Thaddeus Valentine (Hugo Weaving). It’s here Hester spots Valentine and intends to kill him. Why? Unless you’ve read the book, you’ll have to wait and see. But it’s also here she runs into Tom Natsworthy.
  • The character of Tom, Chudleigh’s apprentice and eventual love interest for Hester, has changed “quite a bit” from book to screen, Jackson points out. “We wanted to make Tom a bit more switched on and a little bit more mature.”
  • The love story between Hester and Tom was one of the first elements of the books screenwriters Boyens, Fran Walsh, and Jackson looked at in order to craft the larger script.
  • Reeves’ book series is considered part of the young-adult genre, but Rivers and the writers purposefully aged up the protagonists, noting how the story “felt like it was written for 18-20-year-olds, but the actual language of it was for 9-year-olds.” For reference, Rivers says “they’re more in the Star Wars protagonist age group. They’re not teenagers. They’e on the cusp into, what am I going to do with my life?” Boyens mentions another major change from the book. “London’s destroyed and right from the go, I just went, ‘I’m having nothing to do with that. I love London.’”
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    Weaving doesn’t see Valentine as a villain. “I don’t think it’s useful to see him as that,” he says, noting how “very boring” “two-dimensional” villains can be. He’s more a “revolutionary” trying to push the boundaries. “If you see him in the sense that Crome, the Lord Mayor of London, he's very much an old-school guy who believes in tractionism. He believes in the world as it is." Valentine, on the other hand, “is someone who really can see that the era of tractionism is dead, that they are in dire trouble, that they've got starvation problems… and that this whole paradigm of tractionism and anti-tractionism has to be smashed because on the other side of the world, there's a completely different view of how to live.” Weaving sees him as “an archaeologist,” “an adventurer,” “a pirate,” “a leader,” “an inspiration,” “a hero,” “Dr. Strangelove,” “Iago,” and “Macbeth” combined.
  • Fans of the books might be disappointed to learn that Dog, the white wolf animal companion of Valentine’s daughter Katherine (Leila George), was cut from the movie. “It was a sad day,” George recalls. “I knew about that in the second audition. I came in and I did the audition and they were sitting there like, ‘So, what do you think?’ I'm like, ‘Oh, I really, really love it. I mean, Dog, it would be so cool to have a wolf. I love wolves.’ They're like, ‘Yeah, there's no Dog.’ And so I was like, ‘Yeah, no, I hate the dog. That was a really good move.’” Weaving recommended having “dog hair all over the couch” in their home, but it was unclear if that made the final script.
  • Katherine used to have such a close relationship with her father, but Valentine is now “choosing survival over anything else,” which George says is “a really hard thing to find out” for Katherine. She goes from “being a little bit naïve and a little bit living in a bubble” to finally using the strengths she’s had all along. Chudleigh, in a way, becomes a “surrogate father” for Katherine, Salmon says.
  • Ronan Rafferty plays Bevis Pod, an engineer apprentice in London who falls in love with Katherine after this mysterious Hester tries to murder her father. “Initially, I loved how Bevis felt like an outsider desperate to be involved in some way in helping his city without a clear path, without a clear understanding of how they could do that,” Rafferty says. “So not like your main hero who generally has a clear idea about that.I was enjoying his confusion on what to do, and it's only until he meets Katherine and understands more about the world that he can formulate a plan, an idea, and an impulse for what to do.”
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    As Rafferty’s physical appearance confirms, Bevis won’t be bald like he is in the book. “I'm not dressed like that,” the actor says, “but we're all quite grey and silver and kind of monochrome, and we all have this grey-ish, whitish hair, so it's a pretty clear interpretation of that, I think, but fitting their aesthetic for this role.”
  • Weaving remembers initial plans to learn “lots of sword fight training,” but then “things have transpired to make that not possible.” Instead they cut down the choreography for some of the main actors and had them learn “five beats at a time” the day of shooting. Hilmar, on the other, did nearly all of her own stunts. She calls it more “emotional stunts” and “passionate enragement” — “not just fighting, but out-of-control fairway.”
  • During a fight sequence, Hilmar accidentally hit a double while working through new choreography. “I didn't think that this was going to be a thing,” she says. "I just thought I'll hit him with a stunt guy and we're all padded… and my hand just went [smack]. I've never hit anyone in real life before. Oh, my God.”
  • Stephen Lang plays Shrike, also referred to as a Resurrected Men. When people die, their bodies are often brought back in a bionic form, though they have been stripped of their hearts and souls. “He gets these flashes, these extraordinary memories that he doesn't know what to do with,” Lang says. “But, somehow, he knows because of his inability to hurt a child that there's a link there. So, he's constantly looking.”
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    “The logic of Shrike is that he is a machine," Hennah explains. "He has a human brain and human eyes and he has human skin that has been pretty much mummified by now. So, it was a human skin that was being fed by his internal mechanical organs. Oxygen and blood transfer his system pretty much the same as anybody, but that element has deteriorated considerably and worn out in places."
  • Lang, a familiar face from the motion-capture-heavy Avatar, didn’t perform traditional mo-cap for this character, but production did shoot his movements for reference. He donned a grey suit and a head extender to raise the eye line of the character. It is, as Lang deems it, “faux-cap.”
  • The crew experimented with different insects, including a cockroach and preying mantis, for the look of Shrike. Lang also researched predatory birds and, through “a very, very happy accident,” he found a YouTube video of ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev performing Swan Lake. “I began to watch him, I began to see Shrike,” he says, “because when a ballet dancer moves, he doesn't move his arms. He doesn't do the counterweight that we do when we walk: right foot, left arm; left foot, right arm. He doesn't do it. He keeps his arms back because he was doing a swan, and he looked like this folded bird and just that powerful thing.”
  • The “Kong-alizer” is a voice modification unit that helped Andy Serkis transform into King Kong for Jackson’s film. With Mortal Engines, it was re-dubbed the “Stalker Talker” for Lang’s Shrike.
  • Shrike and Hester have a hostile father-daughter relationship. The Resurrected Man found Hester after she had been orphaned and has been raising her ever since. But when we meet these characters in Mortal Engines, he’ll also be hunting her.
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    Hester begins the film “completely feral,” according to Hilmar. “I kept cutting out lines because I didn’t want her to speak a lot,” she explains. “I think that comes from living with someone like that and she’s been on her own for a long time.”
  • Hester’s scar, which comes in two pieces, takes about 30 minutes to apply. Hilmar notes they tried the “old prosthetics stuff for one day,” which took considerably longer. With this newer prosthetics makeup, her team can “melt it” on her face much easier. While the scar was described on the page as covering her eye, the scar in the film is lower on her face, allowing Hilmar to offer more eye expressions through her character’s mask.
  • Strole is a scavenger platform that’s been the home of Shrike and Hester for years. The Resurrected Man’s dwelling is a coulrophobe’s nightmare, filled with various clowns and dead-eyed dolls. The set was partly inspired by a “trench buster” tank in New Zealand’s World War I memorial.
  • Lang was drawn to the character of Shrike, whom he likens to the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, by the many contradictions within him. “For a character that’s been emptied out, he’s really full,” he says. “For a character who detests memory or has no use for memory, he's completely obsessed with memory. For a character who is absolutely heartless, he's got the biggest heart in the world. So, how do you play that? How do you justify? What does all that mean?”
  • Jihae plays the anti-tractionist Anna Fang, “a fearless, ruthless fighter” equipped with an extendable longsword, twin butterfly knives, and big, ornate guns. The actress describes her as someone who may seem like a villain, but in fact is someone scarred by a traumatic past. Anna pilots the Jenny Haniver, an airship she built from scrapyard parts.
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    Jihae studied with an eight-time taekwondo world champion to pull off her stunt work. Since she’s a Korean actress, the crew catered the character to her own background. Korean writing and artwork adorn the Jenny, which also features an homage to Jihae’s “spirit animal.” The props department then emblazoned her guns with the Korean national bird, which Jihae says was “very thoughtful.”
  • Patrick Malahide (known to some as Balon Greyjoy in Game of Thrones) plays Lord Mayor Crome, another character with some heavy changes. Boyens thought he was an “obvious villain” in the book. “He’s exactly the same at the beginning and at the end. There's a lot about him that we love that we've given to Valentine a little bit more. There's that recklessness about him that sort of sits better with Valentine,” she says. So they turned Crome into a “genuine threat to Valentine” for the film.
  • When he was looking for partners to help get Mortal Engines off the ground, Rivers “drew a triangle between Mad Max, Harry Potter, and Star Wars,” and said “this film needs to land in the middle of those three.”
  • Boyens says the script was largely done by the time production started, but Rivers mentioned a few tweaks were made here and there. Input from the actors was always allowed, even if some of the input didn’t work. Hilmar, for instance, gave input on her character’s scar and choreography for a fight scene, while Jihae says she “was very determined and curious about how we were going to present the weak and present Shang Guo.”
  • Easter eggs: Salmon sported a Bilbo Baggins pin on set and the goggle screens, the electronic screens showing wanted posters around London, features Jackson’s face.
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    Though Rivers served as director, Jackson helped out mostly on second unit stunt work, notably working with Jihae on her slave market fight sequence. “Christian gives me a list of things that he wants shot and I can shoot them at some time,” Jackson says. “I get to use a camera, too,” he adds, “because I haven't been able to do any camera operating for years and I always loved doing that. So, if I ever am doing anything on the second unit, I usually get a third camera.”
  • Most of the rigs were built on gimbals to simulate the motions of a moving city. The actors even had to learn a bit of choreography, especially with the smaller sets. Since London is so immense, the choreography didn’t need to be so dramatic. But with smaller sets, especially the airship set, Hilmar described it like being on a boat. “At one point, we're inside a wheel but it doesn't move,” she recalled. “So the whole scene, we have to act it like that.”
  • Out of all the sets, the bar scene for Airhaven “got the most people sick,” Hilmar says, noting how the floor slanted from one side. “The whole set is on a rig, on an angle like that. It’s not a big difference, but there’s one thing being on a moving thing. You can understand it from being on cars or planes or whatever, but being in a [moving] room or a house, that is just really weird.”
  • Beynon notes 3,900 extras were utilized for Mortal Engines, each one taking about 30 minutes to be costumed. Some would arrive at 4:30 a.m. until all were fitted. “It’s a well-oiled machine, I can tell you that,” she says.
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    Tucked away in Wellington, surrounded by lines of suburban homes, is Stone Street Studios, where Mortal Engines set up shop. Neighbors tend to ignore the movie magic happening within its walls, where films like Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings and King Kong were shot. The “K” stage was named for Kong, while the “G” and “F” stages were built for The Hobbit. Because they are so open in the city, a member of the crew camps out at the airport to radio back when an airplane is about to take off and potentially disturb a shot. The newer stages are “pretty much” soundproof, we’re told.
  • While much of the sci-fi elements could only be rendered through digital effects, 67 physical sets were built, including the London Gut, Shrike’s workshop, the Pomerov’s museum, the slave market, and St. Paul’s Cathedral — the latter of which was the production’s biggest set piece.
  • When Jackson was conceiving Mortal Engines back in 2008, his team was considering using miniatures for the special effects. It almost got to a point where miniatures became more expensive than computer animation. “With a miniature, you have to decide on your shot,” Jackson explains. “Obviously, you've got the shot and there's a miniature DP and you decide on what the camera move is and you do it and that's your shot. The thing with digital is that — it’s something that I did and I absolutely loved on The Hobbit, which I'm sure we'll be doing on this — you can build your miniatures in the computer as such and animate your action.” The technological advances of making CGI-rendered people and digital doubles, he says, “are the thing that has really clicked in the last few years.”
  • Mortal Engines will not be shot with IMAX cameras, but Rivers is using Red 8K Helium cameras that “must be close to IMAX quality, anyway,” says Jackson.
  • An official runtime for Mortal Engines is still TBD, but Boyens says, “It’s a two-hour movie. It’s f—ing cool.”
  • Boyens notes how the writers were focused more on making Mortal Engines a complete film as opposed to thinking of sequels. That said, she notes Clytie Potts (Sophia Cox) and Herbert Melliphant (Andrew Lees) couldn’t be “lightly cast” because “they might become very important” in future sequels. Jackson also hopes to continue making movies based on Reeves’ work because the series, he says, keeps getting “better and better.” Weaving is “technically” signed on for sequels already but he doesn’t know “practically what that means.” At the very least, Jackson says “we’re able to plant little things here and there that will be helpful to us” for later films.
  • Everyone seemed to draw different political parallels off of the material. Jackson describes “a sense of consumers gone mad. You end up just feeding. The film is, in some respects, a metaphor for feeding on yourself.” Salmon points to the planet and how “the survival of the fastest” is wasting away resources. Lang, however, wasn’t drawn so much to the politics of this world. But when it comes to President Trump, he says, “To quote Patti LuPone. ‘Why? Because I hate that motherf—er.’”

Mortal Engines will open in theaters this Dec. 14. For even more on the film, click here to watch the new trailer and click here for my interview with Christian Rivers.

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