The Jungle Book director Jon Favreau has told TEN that he did not consider remaking the Disney classic as the biggest gamble of his career, and that the experience of bringing Marvel's Iron Man to the big screen stood him in good stead.
As is the case for many other film fans, Disney's 1967 animated version of the Rudyard Kipling story is a touchstone movie in Favreau's life, but the prospect of bringing characters like man-cub Mowgli, bear Baloo and panther Bagheera to a new generation in a live-action and CGI adventure filled him with excitement, not fear.
"I think both this and Iron Man benefitted from nobody really thinking it was that important of a property when I was being hired," he admitted.
"It wasn't like Star Wars [The Force Awakens] where everybody knew from the beginning that that was this huge, important undertaking. Jungle Book seemed like something 'take or leave it' - as far as the source material, Disney was very open to changing it."
Jon Favreau with The Jungle Book stars Ben Kingsley (Bagheera) and Neel Sethi (Mowgli)
Favreau told TEN that it was actually his own emotional connection that brought the new film closer to the 1967 movie in terms of plot, character and tone. However, he wanted his version to have a "more mythic" quality and be closer in spirit to Kipling's source material. "I didn't want it to just have 3D visually," he explained, "I wanted it to have more dimension, character-wise."
Neel Sethi as Mowgli with Baloo, who is voiced by Bill Murray
The film has been widely praised - and Oscar-tipped - for how newcomer Neel Sethi, who plays Mowgli, interacts with animals and environments that have all been created using the latest technology. For Favreau, the idea of going to an actual jungle and later matching it with CGI sounded like "a nightmare".
The seamless interaction of Neel Sethi with The Jungle Book's 'technological animals' is one of the movie experiences of 2016
"But building the whole world from scratch like Avatar and being able to exaggerate scale and affect the weather and conspire every detail to tell the story? As a filmmaker [that] was incredibly intriguing," he said.
The finished film is a case of 'great indoors' rather than outdoors: in Favreau's own words "everything but the kid" is thanks to effects and computers.
"There's no jungle, there's no animals. Most sets were smaller than this room [hotel suite]," he revealed. "It was tiny - we wheeled the sets into the stage. We filmed it in downtown Los Angeles; we were never in a real jungle environment at all. We were in a swimming pool outside once, that was about it."
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The Jungle Book opened last week and has been tipped to take over $1bn at the global box office in the coming weeks. Before the film had even reached cinemas there were reports of a sequel - and Favreau already has plenty of ideas.
"We were talking about a sequel long before the article!" he laughed. "For me it makes sense: there's a lot more stories to tell. Opening up the door to the Kipling source material [means] there's a lot of other stories."
