Six years ago, it was a very. very simple idea
that we wanted to base a game around a character,
and a character that you could actually see onscreen.
We thought that the game was the strong point of it
but we began to hear all these people talking about Lara
and saying, you know, "When's her birthday?"
And people were talking about this character as a real character.
They actually thought she existed.
She's a great character, and she's a great role model
and she's got an energy and a charisma for life.
We really wanted people to identify with the character.
And we had a real sort of dilemma
because we knew that this character was gonna have weapons.
And you know, you get into your mind sort of a muscle-bound,
sort of, you know, clumbering…
And that wasn't what we wanted.
We wanted something that was very agile and people could relate to
and it became a woman.
She has all the things we love about James Bond.
She's got all the cool stuff
and she's got all that sexy intelligence.
But she's also Indiana Jones and she's got..
She's a real straightforward person.
The timing for us was such a cultural change in society.
From men and women, the way that they all think,
the way they even watch movies, listen to music. play video games.
A huge swing, which Lara kind of just got swept along on that phenomena
and actually was picked up and used as an icon for it.
The fact that she's a girl and enjoys it and is curvy.
I think that's wonderful, that it's all of that
and the fact that she's also really good at all these things.
And not good because she's as good as a guy.
Good because even if she was competing with a guy.
She might win.
But just because she's a better fighter, not because she's a girl.
Action!
Hold it right there or I'll shoot you in the back.
You gonna shoot me, Alex?
Lara, give it up. These guys are gonna kill you.
The one thing about Tomb Raider, it's big all around.
Lara Croft is big everywhere. And I think that's what's so appealing
as a project and challenge.
That you've got to satisfy a lot of people in a lot of places.
I was just as much a snob
about a film made about video games as anybody.
I'd never seen one that worked.
But as they asked me for probably the third and final time,
I sat down and thought about it seriously.
And I thought, "You know what? This actually is a really cool character.
"This is a female action hero."
And we haven't seen one of those for a while.
- And track the camera across. - I do this, this, and then stay there…
Simon had a very. very ambitious and specific point of view
with regard to the intensity of the action
and the scale of the movie,
that was very impressive.
We needed someone who didn't blanch and quake
in having to face a big action sequence
but as well as some very emotional dialogue sequences.
- You said you were a lawyer? - Yes.
And the study of clocks is a hobby?
This is an obsession.
It's very complicated, and Simon gets it on all levels.
The world that she operates in is sort of the best of everything.
You can have action, adventure.
But because she goes into these weird underground tombs,
you can have surreal sequences as well.
So, there was no limit to what I could invent.
And so that's when I said, you know, "I want to do Tomb Raider."
- We got roll video. - Stand by.
And, action!
Mr. Powell!
Hold your fire!
Well, we can do it my way
or we can all come back in time for the next alignment
and you are welcome to try and kill me, then.
Lady Croft, tell me…
Cut it! Do it again.
Stand by, please.
I've really only ever had one choice for Lara.
I couldn't think of anyone else apart from Angelina Jolie.
She peeks around, comes back. This goes off, bang, bang, bang, bang.
She had everything. I mean, to me, she was invented for the part.
Sometimes I can read a script, and a lot of times
it doesn't turn out to be half as good as we hoped it would be.
And this one is 10 times better than I imagined.
…like that into the background.
And then I met Simon and everybody
and I talked about what it was gonna be like
and how intense it was gonna be.
And a really strong movie, and not cartoony, not stupid, and not camp.
We wanted to offer up a new experience.
New elements, new locations, a new story line.
As well as with the character, Lara,
to really flesh her out
in a real way.
Almost answer all those questions that the game never had to deal with.
The way to make this work is to take it seriously.
I wanted to make a character that people thought was real.
She sweats, she bleeds, and she gets emotional.
She's not a cartoon character who has a perfect end to every scene.
Do you know what day it is, Hillary?
The 15th.
And that is never a good day.
The way he talked about it, and the way I could talk to him
about acting, work, and characters
and just the things that he imagined,
I knew he was gonna make a great film.
He has an enormously large vision of this movie.
There's a size to everything,
which is very, very impressive.
But at the centre of this global adventure,
the core of the story is about a daughter's relationship with her father.
I had to look for someone that would measure up to Angelina.
So, I thought, why not her real father, Jon Voight?
Again, I wasn't sure whether they actually wanted to work together
so I kind of approached them separately.
And they loved the idea.
And that just worked so well
because they're having these emotional scenes
between a father and a daughter
and they really are a father and a daughter,
so they're completely real.
I've missed you.
And I've missed you.
It's a very special thing
because our relationship is very, very similar to these two people.
They have similar loves.
They have a similar sense of adventure and want to set things right.
Curious about life, curious about the past.
I took it without having read the script.
| said, "I'll do this. We're gonna do this together.”
And then I read it and I was delighted and surprised
at the story. I said, "This is a great story."
She's full of fun and fire
and is certainly enjoying everything about this adventure.
It goes into mysticism, foreign locations, intrigue. drama.
There's no end to it.
- Time to save the universe? - Absolutely.
This film has a high-tech, scientific element.
It has arch villains and comedy-relief sidekicks.
Don't start.
It's an action film and an adventure.
Each sequence is like…
It's kind of got everything in it.
There's mystery there, there's betrayal there.
They sweep us into these extraordinary sets
and take us to these exotic locations.
It's James Bond, Indiana Jones
rolled into a young, attractive, modern girl.
I couldn't figure out how I was gonna act this character.
And Simon, he said, "No. You have to become this person."
And so, I worked really hard to be able to jump in her world and her skin a bit.
We wanted to give her the opportunity
to get in absolutely the best physical shape, mental shape
and to look as much of an expert as she could
in all the areas that she's gonna have to pursue.
I'm trying to learn how to fight, not just pretend in front of the camera.
I'm doing a bit of everything. Taking yoga and strength training.
Weapons training.
It was great, 'cause after three months,
I'd lost any kind of touch with my normal self.
Lara is very, very much a girl.
I wanted her to have her curves.
And yet there's something tribal about her.
We worked on certain things of the hair.
I wanted her to have a Mohawk, and she kind of does.
There's a braid that goes like this.
Also, I wanted the clothes to be monochromatic,
mainly just to keep it about the shape.
Somehow, there's something about how Angelina is herself
and how her clothes are, that have kept her
slightly separate all the time from her environment.
And you could show Angelina five pieces of fabric that are grey
and she knows which one exactly will suit her.
Lots of pyjamas. About 60 pairs.
So, I'm just gonna come tighter on this camera. Okay?
It looks great.
Then the whole debate started about what colour they are,
what kind of pyjamas, you know. What are they made of?
Simon kept saying, "I want them to flutter. They have to flutter."
There was something very technical about the clothes.
It took us weeks to figure out the belt harness
and how the gun harness and the straps around my legs
would stay on and stay up.
It was kind of really complicated.
Angelina had really, really strong ideas about what she didn't want to be like.
She didn't want to look like a biker girl,
you know, with torn-off clothes and really worn out stuff.
So the clothes, we wanted everything to be flattering and fitting
like, you know., she wears.
And the shorts… It took me until, ! think, two weeks before filming
to agree to get into a pair of shorts.
Just to get me to walk around in these clothes.
I felt like I was naked for the first few days.
Lara Croft, she's so sexy. She knows exactly what she wants.
And, she knows she's capable of doing lots of things
and having fun with it.
Do you want me to shout, "One, two…"
And then you go under, or can you just take it yourself?
Right. So, I'll take that thing. I'll take that moment. I'll readjust.
- All right? - Okay.
We talked about in the beginning of this film,
that the big thing for me would be to learn what I could from this person,
kind of become her as much as possible.
So, I wanted to be able to do as much as I could.
Okay, throw it at me. I can do this.
Angie had to go in training for this for quite a number of weeks.
And I assumed I'd be shooting most of it with a double
and we'd just be shooting close-ups of Angie.
And then I went to see how she was getting on, and she could do it all.
And I thought, "This is fantastic."
Go!
It was all her. We did not use a double at all.
You know, she does double, triple somersaults,
coming right to the floor and then taking her right back up again.
And that is something for a leading lady.
Your star, to do that was absolutely incredible.
Well, they got what they came for.
How are you going to get the clock back in 15 hours?
I'll be calling in a favour.
These movies are really often quest movies.
It's all about finding something and going to strange places to do it.
I wanted to go to real locations
that were exotic and unusual to the audience.
It was hard to think of places that hadn't been seen a lot on film.
- Go over! - 247, take three.
And, action!
Cambodia is one of the most beautiful places in the world.
Angkor Wat is what, the largest spiritual building in the world.
And it was stunning.
It's amazing. So beautiful.
The lilies and the reflection, it's unbelievable.
Originally, I wrote the idea to be the Great Wall in China.
But it was not possible to organise getting to China in time.
The alternative was to build the Great Wall in Scotland.
And the prospect of shooting in Scotland in the winter
didn't appeal to me that much.
And also, when I thought about it,
I realised that the Great Wall would only give me sort of one big element
and I needed so much more.
So, I looked around the world for other great settings
and I happened to come across Cambodia.
Now, all the time you're walking and you're trying to see her.
You walk amongst those temples
and the scale is so enormous, and the detail so rich,
that it's beyond comprehension.
You can only just marvel.
No films have been shot there since the early '60s
so there's a whole generation out there that have never seen a film
set in that environment.
And also there's great undiscovered temples there in the jungle
that have been abandoned for 400 years
and so they have trees growing up through the roofs of them.
And you just can't build that kind of scale and reality
and have the real insects, the actors really sweating because it's so hot.
It looks totally real because you're there.
And, action!
You must get the clock back, Lara, and destroy it.
Things happen that you couldn't really plan.
256 okay, take one!
We had 100 Buddhist monks in orange robes
suddenly walk past you. So you turn all the cameras around.
And say, you know, "We have to have that in the film."
Because how often do you get 100 Buddhist monks
walking past this temple?
She comes here to centre herself, to find help.
And they heal her.
I think the lesson learned here is to listen to people,
to be open to things, to look around you.
She's led by the magic of the place.
The Cambodian sequence is a very mystical part of the film.
It's where a lot of things come together in terms of the story
and in terms of Lara's understanding of her past and herself.
You know, it's kind of, in a way, is the spiritual heart to the film.
And I think it touched us all in quite a profound way.
It's actually magic here.
I just stepped out in the middle of chanting
and I don't think I've ever been so calm in my entire life.
I think that's my favourite costume.
And it's almost the only bit of colour in the whole film.
And it is, in fact, oddly, a colour that she loves.
They give her some pieces of fabric which are in the monastery.
And it's inappropriate for a woman to wear the orange,
which the monks wear.
So, we had to kind of try and make her look
like she'd been given something by them,
but without wearing the colour that they wear.
Simon put her so that the sun shone from behind her.
And I just thought she looked luminous.
And cut, cut, cut.
And pull it, stop.
It did take a, you know, huge amount of organisation.
We had to send people over here
you know, months in advance to arrange everything.
We've recruited pretty much all the staff you see here
'cause as the locations team, we've been here the longest.
You were all very good. Timing was perfect.
Everybody's been well well impressed by the locals.
Same with the extras. They've been phenomenal, you know.
'Cause, they've never done this before. This is the first time.
Come on, guys!
They've never had to pull down the east gate at Angkor Thom.
It's not a normal thing.
It's not a day job for these guys. They're rice farmers.
Come on. Pull!
Pull! I's coming!
The extras are terrific. Some of the best extras I've worked with in the world.
You know, they're natural actors.
It's been, you know, one of the most pleasurable experiences for me
shooting anywhere in the world.
Through this film and just being in this environment,
I've learned a lot about the world.
It seemed so small. And this girl packs up.
Her life is about exploring the world, understanding what it's about.
And so, I got to do that, and it changed my life.
To me, these sort of archaeological action-adventure films
are all about sand.
And so, I made this edict
that there would be no sand in this film whatsoever.
So, I thought, "What isn't like that?"
Well, snow isn't like that.
So I wanted somewhere to represent Siberia,
so we ended up going to Iceland.
It gives me a lot of variation on location.
There's lakes with icebergs, different sorts of mountains, rolling hills.
So, I can get a lot of different environments.
You all right, Angie? You getting cold?
This movie, it deals with a lot of the elements.
So, we've got, you know, the ice and sledding
and, you know, rocks of ice.
Iceland, an extraordinary and awe-inspiring place to go to.
Endless miles of whiteness
that was, in fact, solid ice, not even snow.
It's an unbelievable place to go and a great opportunity to see that.
There was an idea that we'd sort of charge across the glacier
on sort of four-wheel-drive Land Rovers.
But then suddenly, Simon got to Iceland
and they had these Ducks, these amphibious vehicles.
All right, stand by.
And he just went, "We want those."
So in the end we sort of went travelling along on these amphibious craft.
Taking a unit of that size onto the glacier
was quite a thing to organise, really.
And the track up to the glacier, it was a very narrow road.
Quite steep and some sharp turns.
So, it amazed a lot of people that we actually got them up there.
It's such an alien environment.
You know, we were working on top of this massive glacier the size of Wales.
Go up the hill 10 feet and then walk down.
And you really felt you were at the butt end of the world,
but it is a stunning landscape.
Cut it. Okay, good.
Got that? Use that one.
This area has its own weather system. And it's completely unpredictable.
So you're dealing with the wind and cold
and rain, and sleet, and snow,
which makes shooting here inhospitable.
It's not a country. It's an ice cube!
You're left with no doubt as to…
You know, that nature is kind of the boss there.
It lends an element that you could never actually
do with C.G.I. or special effects.
You can almost sense the Norse gods.
There is a real primal feeling to it
which we could never duplicate on a stage.
Iceland was freezing.
And dog sledding in Iceland was just wild!
It was hard not to feel like Lara Croft when I had guns strapped to me,
I'm dogsledding, I'm on a glacier, and every once in a while
the dogs would be a little uncomfortable in an area
'cause you realise there was a crack that went down a mile
and they just didn't want to go over it.
You're gonna come downhill now, from up there.
It's extremely dangerous 'cause there's huge crevasses everywhere.
They say if you fall down one, you're never gonna come out.
Because they're V-shaped and some of them are very deep.
Guys, stop! Stop.
We had to take a lot of precautions.
We have safely guides that lead us through the path.
So we can't just run around like we normally do.
But it looks very dramatic.
And that's why you come here. We come here to get the real thing.
Here we go! Turn those on!
Wow.
When I started this film, I knew I wanted to have incredible sets.
And I went to Kirk Petruccelli
and he just came out with these brilliant designs
and built these things on such enormous scale
that it blew me away as much as anybody.
I mean, you always ask for the moon,
but you know, in this case I actually got it.
I really didn't realise the scope of it until I came here.
These sets are insane!
One of the themes of the game is the collision
between very modern and very ancient worlds.
And we wanted to really embrace that in the production as well.
The overall look of the film will be
kind of the colliding of super modern with super ancient.
We've taken ancient structural elements, the Angkor tombs
and assigned modern geometries to the tomb itself.
We actually did build the tombs full-scale on stages
because in a way, it would make the action more real.
So we ended up with these incredible environments.
It's mind-blowing. I mean, completely mind-blowing.
These guys created these, just, utter worlds, you know.
We've taken what's called an orrery,
a complicated system of the planets in alignment moving
and turned it into an ancient, super-sized
mechanical key to a puzzle.
With a time-lapse camera, you're gonna see structural elements come together.
First you'll see large shapes, then you'll see finishes going on.
Then come the mechanics, the super mechanics of the orrery itself.
The technical side of it was quite difficult.
You've got nine planets and the sun.
How do we make the nine planets miss each other?
The orrery set was actually very difficult
because it's a very mechanical set
and there's a lot of elements in there
that are actually not only difficult, but dangerous.
It was all made out of steel, and all the arms are swinging around.
And if you are standing in the wrong place, you will get cut in two.
Lara!
It's very dangerous.
You're quite high up and revolving around.
And there's nothing beneath you.
But Angelina, she seems to have no fear.
Cut it, cut it! Great. Great.
Visually we're going for a giant wave coming down the slope
and out into the archway over there.
We've got two huge dip tanks out there.
There's 70 tons of water coming down in one go.
We're going to get this wave coming out,
which Lara Croft's gonna run underneath.
Yes!
What, do you have enough cameras?
I think at one point I had 14 cameras on the big set piece
Just because these events are unrepeatable, it only happens once.
But that's what's fun about these movies.
It's almost like being in the action film yourself.
Here we go. Roll video.
- Stand by. - All right.
322 only, take one. "A" camera.
All right, action!
I'm running through this orrery with water just crashing down,
a tidal wave coming.
There's planets exploding. debris falling.
I'm not even acting.
It's just like go from here to here, and don't get hit by anything.
You go all over the world, you go into these fantastic sets,
you have these great action sequences.
But at the centre of it, you love this person.
I mean, you just want to be with Lara Croft the whole time.
I'm very excited because the movies that I saw
when I was young, growing up…
This is so full of extraordinary stuff.
I've just been blown away by this film.
I don't feel like I shot a film.
I feel like I've been on an adventure and I just survived it.