Don't ever let anyone tell you that adapting a beloved franchise for film is an easy task. Overly impassioned fans are always the first to cry foul when a detail is off, even slightly, adding a sense of pressure for the cast and crew of a movie project to "get it right."
It was certainly a sense of pressure that was felt on the set of M. Night Shyamalan's "The Last Airbender." Speaking with MTV News, actor Dev Patel said that he and his colleagues may not have replicated every single "Airbender" scene to the exact detail, but they captured something more important — the "essence" of the story.
"I think we really captured the essence, is the main thing," Patel told MTV. "Capturing the essence is important to me."
Patel acknowledged the devotion of the "Airbender" fan base, saying that there were times when he and his co-workers felt the pressure to live up to the hype.
"I think everyone feels a tremendous pressure," he said. "Some fans, they're just merciless. They don't want anything but that cartoon. Basically, I don't think any director — any good director — will take that and photocopy it onto live-action. It's just impossible. The whole reason you do a film like this in live-action is so you can put humans in the places of those characters and make it more human and make it more depthy and sort of spontaneous, you know? The spontaneity and the grittiness a human brings."
For his own part, Patel tried to look at the source material to bring his interpretation of firebending Zuko to life. That said, he also brought his own ideas to the character.
"We really tried to balance some of the parts in the cartoon where my character is always angry in the first season," he said. "He's screaming at his uncle. 'Shut up, uncle!' I was trying to find the balance between staying true to the character and toning it down and also putting yourself into it so you can really believe in him."
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