Our Warcraft Movie Week is almost meeting its end. Today we have Paula Patton, who plays a half-Human and half-Orc chracter Garona Halforcen in the film. It's pretty challenging to act in different ways in the movie, and Paula Patton also talks about how to prepare this movie. You can also find the Chinese version of interview
here.
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Could you tell us your character in the film?
I’m playing the character Garona, who was half-Orc, half human, and the first time I became aware of Warcraft was through the script, and Duncan, our director, called me in and he had always seen me for the role, for his words. Then, basically showed me everything and all of the drawings that they had done and what their intention had been. And after doing the script, which to me, read like an epic novel and I was surprised that it was based on a game because it had so much depth to it, so much history and backstory for each characters. We met, and essentially in the room he said, “I'd like for you to do this,” and you have to do those negotiations later and such, but I basically said yes right on the spot.
So you weren’t familiar with it before you got the script?
I wasn’t, I wasn’t.
How did you get up to speed?
Well it took a while actually. I thought I’d just be able to play the game, takes-- turns out that I'm not brilliant and you have to be quite brilliant to play the game and so I watched people play the game, but just don't have the skill level, the brains. I’m more of a I guess left-brained person but I definitely wanted to, but I was able to watch over peoples’ shoulders, see how the game is played.
Actually your character is very special, because you are kind of between the Orc and human. What’s your understanding of this character in this whole movie?
That’s what’s really interesting about her is that when you meet her, this is her first introduction to the human world and she knows she’s different. She’s grown up as a slave to Gul’dan and basically had to fight, scratch, eat her way into having any respect from the Orcs and has sort of gotten by sheer will alone. And now she finds herself in this human world and a person who’s been quite hardened by life, is fascinated by this communication with humans and you see her vulnerabilities start to have a run-in. It’s an interesting world because you don't know where she's going to go, you don't know where her loyalties may lie, but you also see somebody change greatly during this time period within a movie, which was what was exciting for me to play it is that she grows and moves and changes in so many various ways that it was quite challenging.
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What was the biggest challenge for you on it?
Actually it was a physical challenge and then there was a challenge of playing the character. I mean physically, to be able to emotionally feel like, I wanted to be able to feel that I could do as many things as Garona does within my human capabilities, you know? That took a lot of training sessions obviously and I learned how to ride a horse on this movie, I learned swordplay and knife and sticks and all kinds of things I didn’t know before, which was great for me and also kind of helped me build this character because for me usually, when I take on a character, I try to find a real person. If I was going to play a journalist, I would want to maybe ask you if I could follow you around, but half-Orc, half-human, there’s no Orcs to talk to and where was I going to find-- I don't know how to play this and it was very challenging for me because what I think is interesting about this movie and different than other movies is that Orcs are not necessarily bad or good; they are like humans. There’s some good, there’s some bad, there’s some shades of gray and the humans, there’s obviously some bad and good and such and I think it speaks about our world and where we live in and the countries that fight each other and such and finding common ground and understanding that we all have one essential part, and in this movie, Orcs most certainly have a heart. So that, I don't know if I was answering that part of the question, but that was what was I think interesting about the role and her.
Talk to me about working with your director. How did he help you?
He’s great. Duncan is somebody that I talked to a lot beforehand. It's my job as an actor to bring as many ideas forward, and then it’s his job to say yes, no, and craft it with you. So in that way, it was a collaborative process to find out who Garona was. For me, it was a series of looking for-- I felt like she had to have something that was not necessarily animalistic but just something that when she entered the human world, she felt like somebody that may have lived in the Amazon Jungle their whole life and then suddenly find themselves in Hong Kong, Tokyo, New York City, what are these sights, what are these sounds, what is going on? And how she’d react to it and that she’s developed different senses in her world, a stronger sense of intuition, hearing, sense of smell is more acute. So anyway, we together created this character and he’s amazing in that way. He's definitely got a vision, he knows what he wants to create and he has the confidence and the openness to take on your ideas and some get shot down and some get taken.
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Is there anything in particular you're looking forward to when the film is finished? A scene you're looking forward to seeing.
Kind of. I mean this is what was great, although I’ve never worked at a movie that had blue screen really. I mean maybe in a couple scenes, but the fear of course is that-- who are you going to be interacting with. What was great about this movie is you can see these sets, we have amazing sets. There is some blue screen, but even though all the Orcs are played by real people so you look in their eyes and there's just something that you can't capture digitally that is in a human being, you know what I mean? The soul. It’s just, that’s just beautiful and so he made and made this film easier to do than probably other movies of this kind of high level technology and such that we have to do, but still there is a blue screen. I’m sure when I watch the movie, I'm going to be so surprised that the stage I was on is actually acres and acres of jungle or forest or who knows. That I do feel like I’m excited to watch it because I think I’ll watch it like an audience member and really be quite amazed, especially because the actors we work with are in gray suits and they've got little white balls all over them and then they’ll be Orcs and they’ll be in the environment and it’s going to be quite vast. But thankfully they gave us enough real stuff, as an actor it still gave you enough to grab a hold of and make this world seem-- or these world seem as real as possible.
Which part of the whole filming part is your favorite?
Oh gosh. It’s hard to say favorite, but I think what I quite enjoyed quite a lot was the physical challenge. There’s the horse, jumping off horses and fighting and such that for me it was fun because you don't get that opportunity as a woman very often. But there was also just great, what was really great about this movie, it's an action movie, it’s an epic and it's based on a game and you have these really deep storylines. Though those days can be kind of hard on you mentally and emotionally, it's always that challenge, that feeling of when you’ve accomplished it and you try to make these characters as real as humanly possible. It was quite I should say satisfying as an actor that it wasn’t just action, that it was some deep emotional content that we were working with and scenes that we had to do that were not shallow in any way like a lot of times happens with this caliber. You don't have time to get into the deepness, but we certainly did.
Oh, thank you. Even though the half-Orc should be stronger than the human, did you do workouts to practice?
Yes, I did. I worked out two and a half hours every day for six days a week and then when I got to Vancouver, we started adding in an hour and a half of horse training every day and another hour to two hours of stunt training. Like I said, swordplay, various physical areas of physical defense, defensive arts.
For how long? Two and a half hours a day for--
For six days a week.
For how many weeks?
When I wasn’t working, I did that maybe two or three months and then I was lucky they-- in the filming at the beginning was light for me so it allowed me to play catchup and allowed me to get really well versed with being on a horse and feeling very confident about that and with the sword. Any day that I had off, I would be doing that, and then the days that I worked, I would work out for an hour before I came to work every day. Still do.
But the thing about Garona is yes, she's a strong girl but she's not as strong as an Orc, but what has gotten her by, what has made her a survivor is that she's quicker, she's smarter, she knows where to hit. Her strength comes from her mind and from her spirit and basically she has my idea of her quote is by any means necessary, I will survive. To quote a disco song.
There’s no singing in this film right?
We might do a bard, you never know. Not yet, but I want to do my own version with a video.
