I was fairly impressed with this bit, and I'm suprised there is no trivia or any apparent messages about it. Was this some serious CGI going on to make the actors look younger or something different? I've never noticed this technique before. It was incredible and amazingly convincing.
Damion Crowley
Now get in the pit and try to love someone!--Kid Rock
I think they did a casting call to find guys who resembled the four main leads at the same age, and also used a lot of makeup. At least to me, the guys playing Frank and Hawk did not really resemble Clint and James Garner from their early TV roles all that much.
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I totally disagree - I though the actor playing the Young Frank, in particular, was very like a young Clint Eastwood - so much so that I wondered if they'd somehow reworked old footage and digitally inserted it into the cockpit set.
Neither- the young Frank is in fact played by Toby Stephens, a British actor who also starred in James Bond´s Die Another Day as the evil Gustav Graves.
It is our choices that show what we truly are... far more than our abilities.
Well, I wouldn't quite go that far, but the guy did do a good job of acting like Clint Eastwood.
What I've found odd is the fact they used these young actors, yet Clint decided to keep the voices of the old-timers. So you can see the young Toby Stephens talking with a very raspy and weary voice (Clint's own voice). That was a bizarre choice to say the least.
shareIt was an interesting idea. Casting younger lookalikes with some makeup was a good idea since in the era before CGI became as common as it is today you were never going to make those old geezers look like they were in their 20s. Overdubbing the voices was a neat idea about how to connect the characters. But the problem is that older men don't sound like they did 40 years ago. So you have these young guys who look like their older counterparts talking with "old guy voices." Epically with Eastwood and Garner, because we know what they sounded like 40 years earlier and it wasn't how they sounded in 1998.
Perhaps a more effective solution would have been to get some sound engineers to pitch and otherwise doctor the voices to sound younger or even to bring in some impressionists who could better sound like a "young Cline Eastwood/Garner/ect" and overdub the voices that way.
The one that I liked best was the young Gerson.
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I thought everyone of them was totally on point in every way. Appearance, behavior, characterization mannerisms, facial expressions... F-ing everything. I was so hopeful at this opening segment. I thought it might be on a par with The Right Stuff. Like a fictional version. I was sadly disappointed.
Perhaps they should have done some other scenes with the look-alikes later in their careers. They could have used color 16mm film or super 8 to capture the feeling of the 1960's.
This is true. A montage of Frank with the Skylab team, that sort of thing. Hawk taxying in a SR-71. Jerry chatting face to face with Marylin Monroe with JFK in the background...
Money probably.
SpiltPersonality