After more than four decades of continuing popularity, one of Marvel Comics' most enduring and compelling comic book creations opens on the big screen, continuing Marvel's superlative track record of bringing its classic characters to motion picture life: Blade, X-Men, Spider-Man, Daredevil. And now, this summer, The Hulk arrives.
Committed to bringing the Hulk to authentic life, director Lee and his effects teams logged countless hours to assure a creature true to the essence of Kirby's powerful seminal artwork and Lee's mythic stories. Designers and artists returned to the original Hulk character conceptions to honor the Marvel traditions and place the creature in a motion picture world, grounded in reality, dictated by time-honored practice and colored by comic book convention.

ABOUT THE PRODUCTION
The character of "The Hulk" first appeared in a series of six Marvel Comics in 1962 as the creation of writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby. Two years later, the creature was pitted opposite Giant-Man in #59 of Tales to Astonish, and in the next issue of the series, earned his own separate story in the comic book. By 1968, the Hulk had taken over the entire book, which was then re-named The Incredible Hulk; the series ran to issue #474, ending publication in 1999, and was quickly resurrected in a new series (first called The Hulk, changed back to The Incredible Hulk with issue #12), which continues current publication without signs of slowing. It seems in the world of heroes (Super, anti- and other), it's hard to keep the big green man down.
The immense popularity of the creature also spawned a successful CBS television series (1977-1982), which starred Bill Bixby as scientist Banner and bodybuilder Lou Ferrigno as the Hulk. Following cancellation of the series, fans' enduring affection for the tale of hunted scientist and his angry alter ego urged network executives at NBC to bring back the Hulk to the television screen and ultimately, three more telefilms were created and aired in the late '80s. Hopes for a fourth instalment were dashed when Bill Bixby passed away from cancer in 1993.
During his career as a Marvel Comics character, the Hulk underwent several changes (early on, the creature was grey, not green, and a nocturnal being). Throughout, however, he was always linked to his alter ego, scientist Bruce Banner, and the two were intertwined in a constant, uneasy relationship. It was this relationship that seemed to keep alive the fans' enduring devotion to Banner/Hulk and exactly this yin-yang dynamic that made the character ripe for a cinematic appearance.
Executive producer and co-creator of the Hulk character Stan Lee remembers, "When I was younger, I loved the movie Frankenstein, starring Boris Karloff as the monster, and I also loved Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. One day, I figured, 'Boy, wouldn't it be cool to combine the two of them and get a character who can change from a normal human into the monster?' I always felt that in the movie Frankenstein, the monster was really a good guy. He didn't want to hurt anybody - he was just always being chased by those idiots holding torches and running up and down the hills. So I thought, 'Why not get a sympathetic monster, but let it be a guy who can change back and forth?' So, the Hulk became the first Super Hero who was also a monster."
Producer/screenwriter James Schamus, Ang Lee's longtime filmmaking partner and collaborator, comments, "Unlike a lot of other Super Heroes, the Hulk is a Super Hero, a monster and a person, and the various Hulk comics include the drama between generations of families, the quest for his origins, how he came to be who he is, the mystery of who he is, all of those things."
It was the character's internal conflict and the dramatic dilemmas it posed that also attracted producer Gale Anne Hurd to the property. "I always thought the story of the Hulk, as presented in the Marvel Comics, had elements of a Shakespearean tragedy that had great cinematic potential," Hurd says. "There was real, elemental drama of the human condition in this character. What I always liked about the Hulk was that he was a hero, but not really a Super Hero, not when compared to the other Marvel crime-fighting characters. The Jekyll and Hyde conflict intrigued me. Part of it is a cautionary tale, not only about the demons that we have to come to terms with inside ourselves, but it is also a bit of a commentary about the ramifications of having the technology to create a Hulk. The comic book dealt with Cold War issues, but we've been able to update it and it's relevant, if not more relevant, now."
Hurd, whose many blockbuster credits include Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Aliens, The Abyss and Armageddon, understands the notion of using computer graphic imagery (CGI) to further a film's characters and plot. She points out that the wait to make the film was fortunate as it allowed technology to catch up to the special needs of the Hulk. "The great news is that over the course of the 12 years this project has been in development, the technology caught up with our passion for the project. We now have the technology to create the Hulk the way it should always have been approached. Now, with CGI, with the techniques that have been developed at [leading visual effects house] Industrial Light & Magic, we are able to go beyond what could've been imagined on the television show or even on film. There might have been ways to put the Hulk onscreen before now, but it wouldn't have been The Hulk imagined by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby," the producer comments.
While the technology and interest in "comic book" movies may have auspiciously dovetailed, Marvel, as producer and Marvel Studios CEO Avi Arad points out, is very sensitive and selective when it comes to allocating its characters and their worlds to filmmakers.
"At Marvel, we view our comic books and characters as our children and we have to find them the appropriate surrogate parents, filmmakers who will bring something special to the project. Whenever you hear the word 'comic book,' some people see a fist with the word 'POW' on it. What they are really about are characters, very interesting people who have gifts and curses and complicated lives. Our movies must be made by real filmmakers and real actors because it takes tremendous range to play and deliver these roles," Arad notes.
Producer Hurd, whose ability to assemble extraordinary ensembles of filmmaking and acting talent to create just that sort of dynamic, understood the keen sense of balance that would be a requisite of the project's director.
She notes, "We always had Ang Lee on our list of potential directors. So when Universal suggested it, Avi and I felt that Ang would consider it because there is no more complex character than Banner/the Hulk. It's the ultimate split personality - two individuals that need to live with each other one way or another. They are tied in genetically, but they want to destroy each other and themselves at the same time. Looking at Ang's movies, I felt his keen interest in the inner soul, his sense of humor, his interest in family dynamics, in the relationships of fathers and sons, his inventive action in Crouching Tiger - he had all the ingredients to make a great movie."
"We always thought that Ang was an incredibly interesting filmmaker because he never repeats himself," Arad adds. "He moves seamlessly among the different genres and there are very few directors who can handle anything. Because our character Bruce Banner and his alter ego the Hulk are deeply rooted in rich drama, you really want someone who is an actor's director. With Crouching Tiger, you saw that he could deliver something that was rich and epic in scale, but at the core, what really made that movie successful was that you cared about the characters."
James Schamus concurs with Arad, noting that the tale of the Hulk plays to Lee's interests and strengths. He adds, "We moved the script in directions that would allow Ang a chance to grapple with certain ideas - the familial conflicts, the search for Banner's past, the genesis of the Hulk. More importantly, I think that Ang also sees the emotional, positive side of the Hulk. He understands that the Hulk isn't simply a monster that is there to scare us, but that everyone has the Hulk in them and there is something very enjoyable, very empowering about experiencing hulkness. So, he was very interested in, for want of a better term, the entertainment side of the Hulk. He wanted to make it a very pleasurable experience, too."
The director himself says, "I had just finished Crouching Tiger when the studio approached me about The Hulk. It seemed like an interesting extension of my work. I called it my new Green Destiny [referring to the fabled sword in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon]. The early Hulk comics were especially inspiring for me - the energy and dynamics of Jack Kirby's drawings, the dramatic freedom of the stories Stan Lee created. They dealt with huge issues and fears, and finding within those fears the will and imagination to understand them. I feel that everyone has a Hulk inside and each of our Hulks is both scary and, potentially, pleasurable. That's the scariest thing about them."
Lee adds that The Hulk also offered the opportunity to delve into a variety of potentially opposing themes and topics, and the challenge of balancing and connecting them attracted him as well.
He continues, "We addressed this question a bit in Crouching Tiger. How do you take a popular genre, like the martial arts film, and approach it with intelligence, without making it too cheesy but still fulfilling the demands of entertainment? We had similar challenges with The Hulk, but that is what is exhilarating about it. I think it's possible to treat this mixture in a very emotional way as well. The Hulk, like Crouching Tiger, is a weird combination of pop culture and realistic drama. I think by nature, these two aspects don't want to get along but I try to mix them. How much should be realistic? If it's too realistic, how can you believe in a green giant or that people can fly? How to combine something that is visually exciting, very free, almost like a childhood fantasy, with the reality of psychodrama, comedy, romance. These are contradictory elements, but to me, they represent the dilemma of my own life in filmmaking. The toughest thing for a filmmaker is to keep it balanced. It's like walking a constant tightrope and that's a thrill for me."

COMIC BOOK ORIGINS
In the beginning, there was the comic book - the launching pad for the Hulk - and filmmakers treated the character's origins as the Bible for all of the film's story, physical production and design decisions. The Marvel Comics style infused all aspects of The Hulk and influenced every choice - everything from lighting, camera angles, framing and transitional techniques to color choices, sound design and costuming.
Like special effects supervisor Lantieri, production designer Rick Heinrichs tried to create a realistic environment, but his arena also allowed for degrees of fantasy and the influence of the comic book source material. This balance between reality and fantasy is familiar terrain for Heinrichs, who has collaborated with filmmaker Tim Burton on a majority of his films.
"I liked his work and I think he is an artist," Ang Lee says. "Most of all, I think for a movie like this, it was important for the production designer to have visual training and an animation background, which Rick has. He completely understood the sensibility of what we were trying to achieve."
"One of the things that interested me about Ang's work was his take on the Hulk. Ang seems to be a student of Western civilization. The way he interpreted that, visually, was fascinating. He wanted to investigate these iconic images of America because, for Ang, I think there was something very Western, very American about the Hulk - men and their repressed anger and all that. Also, he wasn't interested in going specifically in one direction or another - finding some equilibrium between apparent opposites attracted him. So, that was what we explored and it was quite a journey," says Heinrichs.
Of course, Heinrichs studied the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby comics, but this creative journey led him and Lee to a variety of other artists - from late 19th and early 20th Century American painters absorbing Impressionist and Oriental styles and colors, to the later Surrealist De Chirico, whose colors and illogical, dreamlike subjects attracted director and production designer. (What Heinrichs calls the De Chirico color palette appears predominantly in Bruce Banner's neighborhood and home.)
Heinrichs notes, "De Chirico was a painter who mainly worked in Europe but there is a very Southwestern feel to his color palette - rusts, burgundies, yellows. There are some very strong hues and mellow ones mixed together and if you drive around the Berkeley Hills, you see this eclectic mix of colors. On our early scouts there, Ang would point out, 'Hey, there's a De Chirico.'"
Heinrichs favored another color combination - one used not only by Kirby, but by some of the earlier comic book illustrators.
"We also looked to the comic book artists of the early period. We borrowed conceits begun by early illustrators in both their color selections and their concepts. For instance, typically, you'll see a lit sky with a darker landscape, but if you study the works of artist/illustrator George Herriman, he would frequently switch that to a black sky with a lit landscape. We used that idea in a scene in the bathroom. We had a very dark color up above but a very light green tile below. There was something about that exchange I just loved. It turns you on your head a little bit and it's part of that duality thing, that tension between the light and the dark, between the simple and complex, the expected and the unexpected," he says.
Heinrichs admits that the Hulk's signature colors also make appearances but, he hopes, not in an obvious way. Greens and purples were used as a nod to the comic book, and as a theme that follows Bruce Banner through his life.

THE DIRECTOR AND SCREENWRITERS

DIRECTOR ANG LEE Born and raised in Taiwan, Ang Lee moved to the United States in 1978. After receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts in theater from the University of Illinois, he went on to New York University to complete a Masters of Fine Arts Degree in film production. At NYU, his short film Fine Line won Best Director and Best Film awards at the NYU Film Festival. Lee's first feature film, Pushing Hands, was the first film in Lee's "Father Knows Best" trilogy. His next film, The Wedding Banquet, premiered at the 1993 Berlin Festival, and was the second film in Lee's "Father Knows Best" trilogy. Lee's third feature film was the final entry in his trilogy: Eat Drink Man Woman. In 1995, Lee directed Sense and Sensibility, followed by The Ice Storm in 1997. Lee's next film was the powerful Civil War drama Ride with the Devil. Ang's most recent film is the critically acclaimed Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival 2000 and won four Academy Awards, including Best Foreign Film.

SCREENWRITER/ PRODUCER JAMES SCHAMUS James Schamus has collaborated with Ang Lee on all of his films. He co-wrote and executive produced Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; he produced The Ice Storm, which he also adapted from Rick Moody's novel; produced and wrote Ride With the Devil; co-produced Sense and Sensibility; co-wrote and associate produced Eat Drink Man Woman; and produced and co-wrote The Wedding Banquet. Over the past several years, Schamus has served as executive producer on a variety of independent films, and has also been involved in four of the last nine Grand Jury Prize Winners at Sundance. In 1991, he founded Good Machine with Ted Hope, which recently became Focus Features. Under the co-presidency of Schamus and David Linde, Focus Features was formed in 2002 as the new fully independent specialty motion picture division of Universal Pictures. Recent Focus Features releases have included Todd Hayne's critically acclaimed Far From Heaven, Roman Polanski's hailed The Pianist, Neil LaBute's The Shape of Things, and Jim Simpson's The Guys. Upcoming Focus Features include director Francois Ozon's first English-language film, Swimming Pool, and Lost in Translation, directed by Sofia Coppola. Schamus is a professor of film theory, history and criticism at Columbia University, where he was recently a university lecturer. He was also the 1997 Nuveen Fellow in Humanities at the University of Chicago. He currently serves on the board of directors of the Foundation for Independent Film and Video and on the board of Creative Capital.

SCREENWRITER JOHN TURMAN John Turman's participation in The Hulk grew from his life-long love of comic books - he owns 10,000 of them. Among his collection is a Hulk #1 in fair condition that he purchased at a garage sale as a child, had Jack Kirby sign at the San Diego Comic Convention in the '70s and had Stan Lee autograph at his very first pitch meeting on The Hulk. Turman was raised in Southern California, attended Art Center College of Design, majored in journalism at the University of Colorado and graduated from U.C.L.A. School of Law. He began his film career as an illustrator and storyboard artist and has been a martial arts instructor. Though his efforts to become a superhero ended in failure, he uses the same skills writing and producing for film and television. Turman has written for half-hour and one-hour television series, as well as on a number of upcoming motion picture adaptations of comic books, including Iron Fist (for Marvel Entertainment), Buck Rogers and Prime (for Universal Pictures). His screenplay for the Silver Surfer, another Kirby/Lee creation, was given a chapter in Chris Gore's 50 Greatest Films Never Made. The Hulk is the first of John's big screen comics adaptations to be filmed. The screenwriter lives with his wife Laura (who owns a baby products company), three year-old daughter, newborn son and dog named Kirby in Los Angeles and in Maine.

SCREENWRITER MICHAEL FRANCE Michael France was born in 1962. Some time after that, he graduated from University of Florida and attended Columbia University's School Of The Arts. France's breakthrough screenplay was his 1991 spec sale for Cliffhanger to Carolco Pictures. France then went on to revive the then-dormant James Bond franchise with his script for GoldenEye, which again yielded a worldwide hit in 1995. France's association with the James Bond franchise continued with uncredited work in The World Is Not Enough, which was released in 1999. France's work with Marvel began with his adaptation of The Fantastic
Four. France moved on to adapt The Hulk for Marvel and Universal, laying the groundwork for the 2003 blockbuster film. The success of France's work in adapting the Hulk led Marvel and Artisan to hire France to adapt another popular comic character, The Punisher, which is currently in pre-production. Mike France currently lives and works in Florida with his wife Elizabeth, son Thomas, and twin daughters Annabelle and Carolynn. France is involved in a number of screen projects, including Titans, a screenplay for producer Gary Foster, which will put some very new twists on some very old myths.

READ MORE: THE HUMAN ELEMENT - CASTING THE FILM

READ MORE: CREATING THE HULK/ WEIRD SCIENCE - SCIENCE CONSULTANT AND ADVISOR

THE ART OF ADAPTATION

READ MORE ABOUT 'THE INCREDIBLE HULK' (2008)

HOME