Maher Al-Samkari, author of “Neon Gen­e­sis Evan­ge­lion: R” and “Faren: A Dragon’s Tale” posted the fol­low­ing on the Modus Pro­duc­tions online forum. It is a slightly more expan­sive and some­what more revised ver­sion of a state­ment pre­vi­ously made by Tiffany Grant, Eng­lish voice of Asuka, and wife of ADV co-founder Matt Green­field. In it she adressed a num­ber of issues, but mainly adressed the issue of qual­ity, assur­ing that these films will be done by WETA with painstak­ing care.

QUOTE:“As you can imag­ine, I have received a large num­ber of ques­tions inquir­ing about var­i­ous aspects of the announced live-action Evan­ge­lion movie. As I answered each ques­tion, I would add on to my ear­lier response, which is how I came up with this “arti­cle” on the sub­ject. I hope this will address your concerns.

First off, there are 26 TV episodes and two movies in the Eva library (not to men­tion the as yet unfin­ished manga series by co-creator Sadamoto). The first goal is to pro­duce a movie that encap­su­lates the most impor­tant ele­ments of the early part of the series so that the viewer will not have to have seen the afore­men­tioned 15 or so hours of video, and still leave room for one or two (maybe more?) fol­low up films that can fin­ish off the story.

The movie is being pro­duced jointly by Gainax (of course), ADV and WETA. If you are some­how NOT famil­iar with the WETA Work­shop, this is the incred­i­ble stu­dio founded by Peter Jack­son in New Zealand that cre­ated the Lord of the Rings films — for which they just won an unprece­dented num­ber of Acad­emy awards in a clean sweep of all cat­e­gories in which they were nom­i­nated. By watch­ing the fan­tas­tic doc­u­men­taries on the LOTR DVDs, you can get an excel­lent idea of the kind of atten­tion to detail that this group gives to every­thing they do.

Also, if you have read the LOTR, I think you will see that the char­ac­ters in that iconic tome have been very faith­fully brought to life. In fact, in a film adap­ta­tion of the sec­ond most read book in the Eng­lish lan­guage (the Bible is the first), it is pretty well unan­i­mously agreed that WETA got it exactly right. Bear­ing that in mind, I have every rea­son to have con­fi­dence that the same folks who hand glued every hair on each hob­bit foot, will do a spec­tac­u­lar job with our NGE heroes.

Keep in mind that WETA will not be doing this in a vac­uum either, as they will be super­vised by peo­ple at both Gainax and ADV (such as my hus­band, of course).

As for the “slug” names used in the pre­lim­i­nary script (NOT the final ver­sion!!!) which appear on the pro­duc­tion draw­ings, they are only used so as not to refer to them as “Pilot A” and “Cap­tain B” etc. As has been widely dis­cussed, the cast will be inter­na­tional, and mostly of Euro­pean descent. Mean­ing, for exam­ple, if Daniel Rad­cliffe (Animé Insider’s sug­ges­tion — NOT mine!) were to play the lead male role, it would be pretty stu­pid to call an ENGLISH boy “Shinji.” There­fore, “Kate Rose” for exam­ple is the name they are using for the designs is in place of “Pilot of 02″ or whatever.

As no actors have yet been cast, the pre-production draw­ings are sim­ply pic­tures that are drawn of imag­i­nary peo­ple in place of hav­ing a head­less body in a plug suit. The artists are try­ing to design what a real-life plug suit will look like, and it would seem eas­ier to do (and bet­ter to look at!) if the per­son also has a head. Remem­ber — we don’t know what the suits are even made of! Rub­ber? Plas­tic? Leather? The sketches are part of the early cos­tum­ing process, and I am quite cer­tain that when a direc­tor is found, he or she will seek out the best peo­ple for the roles. It seems quite doubt­ful that they would try to find a per­son to match a drawing.

It may also be of inter­est to note that there is a gen­uine desire to cast kids of the right age to play the main roles — NOT 22 year-olds to “play younger.” There­fore, it is dif­fi­cult to spec­u­late at this early stage on who will play these roles since it is not pos­si­ble to tell right now when prin­ci­pal film­ing will begin.

The show is in VERY early stages of pre-production, so noth­ing is final yet. ADV was just try­ing to share a lit­tle Eva good­ness with every­one by show­ing off some of the thou­sands of pro­duc­tion draw­ings that have been pro­duced. I think they are fab­u­lous, per­son­ally, and I eagerly await each new devel­op­ment in the project.

I believe you can all rest easy know­ing that the films will be every­thing and more that we ever thought they could be.”

Source: Modus Pro­duc­tions Online Forum