If you’ve been paying close attention to Noah‘s marketing over the past couple of months, you might have noticed some of these fantastical elements that Darren is talking about. Despite Paramount’s best efforts to save them as a surprise, a couple of things have slipped out here and there. Most notable are The Watchers, towering giants that are described as fallen angels in the Bible who look over Noah and protect him.
“The Bible has these fallen angles that people called giants,” explained Darren. “It was a challenge trying to figure out how to portray them though and how to do something that hasn’t been done before.” He told us that there have been many, many giants on screen in the past and he didn’t want to just have angles walking around on Earth, “that would just look really bad,” he said.
“We were hanging out in these lava fields in Iceland and we knew that Iceland was going to be our aesthetic for the entire movie. Even the way the ark looks, it was shot in New York, but we pushed it towards Iceland. We were looking at the lava rocks though and we could actually see the shapes of faces in them, just by the way they formed and whatnot. And we were sober when this was happening, by the way.” [laughs]
To get the movement down for The Watchers, Darren actually reached out to some old friends, the ballet dancers from Black Swan. “I stuck different boxes on their feet and gave them crutches and we stop-motion captured them at ILM and did all different types of movement work with them. So that’s how the creatures came alive.” He explains that he wanted The Watchers to walk with a limp so they looked like they were imprisoned on Earth, with “husks of rocks” locking their spirits to the ground. “We all really loved this idea of them being malformed and crippled,” he said.
It was now halfway into our brunch and with food on our plates (and in our stomachs), the conversation turned towards some deeper material. For all of us, the most polarizing element about Noah was how it portrays its titular character. Completely subverting expectations, the film shows him as a complicated, and fanatical individual.
“The bible says that Noah was righteous, but what the fuck does righteous mean?” asked Darren. I had just brought up to him how interesting it was that most people grow up with this image in their head of Noah being a good and righteous man, and many of the audience members who see this will probably expect him to be portrayed as such in the film.
“Being righteous is a balance of justice and mercy,” Darren told us. “As a parent, you can think about it this way. If you’re too just to a child, you can destroy them with strictness. If you’re too merciful, you can spoil them with kindness. Being a good parent is figuring out that fucking cocktail. For us, it was very clear that God wants justice because he sees the wickedness of man. But by the end and by the rainbow, he finds mercy and forgives man and gives man a second chance.”
“Noah doesn’t really have a character arc, he just follows what God says. When we were writing it we said, “let’s connect Noah to God’s arc.” In the beginning of the film, he sees the wickedness of man and he wants justice. By the end, in that one scene [Darren asked for no spoilers here], that’s the exact same moment as when God made the decision to wipeout mankind. We tried to personify it in that moment. So the whole film leads to that, because that’s the height of God’s decision and we kind of gave it Noah. He learns mercy at the end and thus becomes righteous.”
