Taglines: Half human. Half god. All hero!
Trouble-prone Percy Jackson is having problems in high school – but that’s the least of his challenges. It’s the 21st century, but the gods of Mount Olympus seem to have walked out of the pages of Percy’s Greek mythology texts and into his life. Percy has learned that his real father is Poseidon, god of the sea, which means Percy is a demigod – half human, half god. At the same time, the powerful gods on Olympus are feuding, which could launch a war enveloping our entire planet.
Now, Percy must prepare for the adventure of a lifetime, and the stakes couldn’t be higher. With ominous storm clouds brewing over Earth and his own life now in peril, Percy travels to a special enclave called Camp Half Blood, where he trains to harness his newly discovered powers and prevent a devastating war among the gods. There, Percy meets two fellow demigods – the warrior Annabeth, who is searching for her mother, the goddess Athena; and his friend and protector, Grover, who is a brave but untested satyr.
Grover and Annabeth then join Percy on an incredible transcontinental odyssey that takes them six hundred stories above New York City (the portal to Mount Olympus) and to the iconic Hollywood sign, under which burn the fires of the Underworld. At journey’s end rests the fate of the world – and the life of Percy’s mother Sally, whom Percy must rescue from the depths of Hell itself. Percy Jackson: Half human. Half god. All hero!
Fox 2000 Pictures presents “Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief,” the big screen adaptation of author Rick Riordan’s #1 New York Times bestseller, Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief. The first of five books in Riordan’s series (the final installment, The Last Olympian, hit bookshelves in May 2009) was published in 2005 and won several awards, including a New York Times Notable Book honor of that year; Best Book of 2005 from both the School Library Journal and Child Magazine; and a 2006 Bluebonnet Award nomination from the Texas Library Association.
“Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief” filmed in Vancouver, with additional locations in Las Vegas, New York City and Nashville. Twentieth Century Fox releases the film in theaters everywhere on February 12, 2010.
Author Rick Riordan, who taught Greek Mythology for a many years in middle school in California and Texas, came up with the idea for the first Percy Jackson book, which led to four additional novels and a huge fan base numbering in the millions, after reading the sagas of the ancient Greek heroes as bedtime stories to his son, Haley.
“When I ran out of myths, my son became disappointed,” the author relates on his website. “He asked me if I could make up some new stories with the same characters. I remembered a creative writing project I used to do with my sixth graders, which allowed them to create their own demigod hero, the son or daughter of any god they wanted, while having them describe a Greek-style quest for that hero.
“Off the top of my head, I made up Percy Jackson and told Haley all about his quest to recover Zeus’ lightning bolt in modern day America. It took about three nights to tell the whole story and, when I was done, Haley told me I should write it out as a book.” Those three nights ultimately became a yearlong odyssey for Riordan (pronounced Rye-or-dan) in completing his first book for young readers (he was already an established author, having written several prior novels, his first being the Tres Navarre private eye thriller, Big Red Tequila, in 1997).
“I picked a few of my sixth, seventh and eighth graders and asked them if they’d be willing to ‘test drive’ the novel,” Riordan continues. “I’m used to showing my work to adults, and had no idea if kids would like Percy. I finally understood what it must be like for them, turning in an essay to me and waiting to get grades back! Fortunately, the kids really liked it. They had good suggestions, too.”
The book was published in 2005, but it would be another five years before Hollywood would bring the first of the Percy Jackson stories to the screen. While the studio explored turning Riordan’s first book into a movie, the author continued the series by penning a new novel each year between 2006 and 2009.
Chris Columbus was attracted to “Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief” because, as he relates, “We haven’t seen the world of Greek Mythology in a story like this before,” he elaborates. “I think Rick Riordan tapped into something quite unique, juxtaposing the world of the ancient Greeks with the underbelly of contemporary America.” Columbus is no stranger to the world of fantasy.
In addition to launching the “Harry Potter” film franchise by directing the first two films and serving as a producer on the third, he gained a tremendous following with three of his early, original screenplays: “Gremlins,” and “Young Sherlock Holmes.”
Columbus describes his new genre effort as a contemporary adventure meets Greek- Mythology film, as opposed to a pure period-piece Greek myth with gods in flowing robes sitting on billowy clouds. “This story has a sense of reality and an epic quality while still portraying a sinister, supernatural battle between good and evil,” he explains.
To adapt the book, Columbus chose Craig Titley, with whom Columbus and his producing partners at 1492 Pictures had worked on the hit comedy “Cheaper by the Dozen.” Titley’s scholarly background in Greek Mythology was a timely bonus. “Chris knew I was getting a Ph.D. in mythological studies when he sent the book my way,” Titley relates. “I thought this was a perfect assignment for me because my head was swimming in Greek myths, monsters and heroes. And it’s actually the kind of movie I’ve wanted to see since I was a kid. Mythology has always been hip, and there’s kind of a mythology renaissance going on right now in pop culture.”
Even before Titley turned in his screenplay, Columbus and producer Michael Barnathan pitched their ideas for a “Percy Jackson” movie to the studio, later designing initial conceptual artwork to further illustrate their ideas. “This concept art had Chris’ vision and tone for the movie,” Barnathan says. “It was important for Chris to design some monsters and creatures based clearly on old Greek mythological art and concepts, but take it in a new and fresh direction. So, we started our approach on paper with conceptual art. The studio got very excited and saw that this could be bigger than just a young adult story.”
Once they had a visual motif for the project, the filmmakers next turned to the script. “It’s a wonderful book, but it’s impossible to incorporate all the book’s elements into the movie,” explains Barnathan. “What we tried to do was retain the essence of the story, characters and the world that Rick created, and put it in a cinematic context.”
“One of the big changes we made was upping the age of Percy and his friends,” Titley notes. “In the book, he was twelve years old. It was just much more fun to make him seventeen. With that age, we could play with Percy and Annabeth and their relationship.”
“To me, this story was perfect because it had this whole great world of Greek Mythology populated by monsters we could create and design and put in our world,” says Columbus. “And, the heart of the story is about a young man who wants to save his mother and find out who is his father is. So that made it a very emotional story. The kind of story I respond to as a director.”
“The movie is very much about parent-child relationships,” Barnathan amplifies. “It’s the theme that runs through it and is something that connects many of Chris’ movies. At the heart of his films there’s family. In ‘Home Alone’ it’s a boy who’s lost his parents. In ‘Mrs. Doubtfire,’ the kids are trying to keep their parents together. Here, it’s a boy trying to find his father while rescuing his mother – to put his family back together.”
“What drives Percy to go on this huge journey is that he wants to save his Mom,” says actor Logan Lerman, who plays Percy. “For him, that’s bigger than saving the world. During the journey, he finds out that his mother is alive and Hades is holding her captive. So, Percy tries to find a way to get to the Underworld and have Hades release his mom. That’s what drives him to travel cross country and face the [creatures] Hydra and Medusa and undergo lots of other wild adventures. Yes, he goes on this huge journey with his two friends to retrieve Zeus’ stolen lightning bolt, and save the world. But, it’s really about getting his mom back.”
Lerman nabbed the role of the titular hero after Chris Columbus had caught a screening of the western “3:10 to Yuma,” in which Lerman co-starred, opposite Russell Crowe and Christian Bale. But the wheels were set in motion before then. Columbus recalls the casting process: “My assistant, who’s been with me for several years, told me a couple of years ago that if I was ever looking for a young star to be in one of my films, I should check out this movie, ‘3:10 to Yuma’, in which this young man, Logan Lerman, had a key role. I watched the picture and thought he was an amazing actor. When it came time to cast ‘Percy Jackson,’ I thought of Logan. When I met him, I thought he had the essence of a potential movie star. Then, he did a screen test and I was completely blown away. Logan is like a forty-year-old person in a seventeen-year-old’s body. His instincts are so remarkable. Logan has a sense of reality and intensity about him that I haven’t seen in many young people. He’s that fantastic.”
Lerman relished working on such a large canvas. “This is a big movie!” Lerman exclaims. “I’ve never been part of a movie like this, on this level. The size kind of takes you back every day. And, with Chris Columbus attached, this amazing filmmaker, I wouldn’t want to put my career in the hands of anybody else.
“I didn’t realize what I got myself into when I started,” the young actor notes about winning the film’s title role. “I’m like, ‘who did I fool to get to this point?’ It never really hit me until I got to Vancouver [to begin filming] and saw these amazing sets. They built The Parthenon, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mount Olympus and the enormous Lotus Hotel and Casino.”
Keeping a watchful eye on Percy is his best friend, Grover, a mythological creature known as a satyr – a half man, half goat related to the Roman mythological creature Faunus. Grover has been entrusted with protecting Percy on their transcontinental odyssey, which is a challenge for Grover on two fronts: He’s a newbie at the protection thing, and in typical satyr fashion, he has a keen eye for the ladies. The latter fact didn’t go unnoticed by Jackson during his research for the role. “Satyrs are wild creatures,” Jackson notes. “Grover has issues with women. In mythology, satyrs always hung around with nymphs. In this story, Grover has a big crush on Persephone [Hades’ wife, played by Rosario Dawson] and she has a crush on him. But, he’s not used to a goddess liking him because he’s just a satyr.”
Jackson, who grew a goatee for the role, emulating the slight tuft of hair adorning a goat’s chin, also reveals that his character “has a lot of other issues, like insecurity. He’s really immature as Percy’s protector. He’s a junior protector, not a senior protector. He doesn’t even have his horns yet.” Then, the performer’s comic persona returns when he adds, “it’s weird because the more I did the character, the more I became Grover. I really started to feel like a goat. At home, I was eating cans.”
While Columbus knew and greatly admired Jackson’s work from Ben Stiller’s hit comedy “Tropic Thunder,” the director was initially unfamiliar with the female lead he would ultimately help choose to play the crucial role of the demigod Annabeth — Alexandra Daddario. Daddario was brought to the filmmaker’s attention by his longtime casting directors, Jane Jenkins, CSA and Janet Hirshenson, CSA.
“We had screen tested a lot of women for the role of Annabeth,” Columbus relates. “When I saw a video test Alex had done in New York, I was intrigued. We then put her on film and I had never seen anyone’s eyes photograph like that. She was mesmerizing. I also realized she had a tremendous amount of chemistry with Logan and Brandon.”
Percy Jackson & The Olympians: Lightning Thief (2010)
Directed by: Chris Columbus
Starring: Logan Lerman, Brandon T. Jackson, Alexandra Daddario, Sean Bean, Pierce Brosnan, Steve Coogan, Rosario Dawson, Catherine Keener, Kevin McKidd, Joe Pantoliano, Uma Thurman
Screenplay by: Craig Titley, Chris Columbus
Production Design by: Howard Cummings
Cinematography by: Stephen Goldblatt
Film Editing by: Peter Honess
Costume Design by: Renée April
Set Decoration by: Peter Lando
Music by: Christophe Beck
MPAA Rating: PG for Action violence and peril, some scary images and suggestive material, and mild language.
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Release Date: February 12, 2010
