Natalie Portman Reveals The Jaw-Dropping Number Of Ways One Thor: Love And Thunder Scene Was Shot
Filmmaking can be a complicated act. Sometimes what looks like a simple shot that lasts just a few seconds will take days, weeks, or months to get right. Pickup shots will happen months or weeks after a movie has wrapped, and reshoots can sometimes take place weeks after a movie is finished and done.
Movies that are technically complicated and filled with post-production work and CGI shots — like the upcoming and already approved-by-Looper Marvel Cinematic Universe release "Thor: Love and Thunder" — are sometimes broken down into hundreds of different shots, which are composited together to make a single 20-minute scene. There's a reason it takes months for some films to emerge into the light.
Between the retakes, the alternate scenes, the ones that end up on the cutting room floor, and the fact that sometimes studios will demand reshoots, there are sometimes whole storylines that can end up being lost in the editing process. Actress Natalie Portman recently revealed that there is one scene in particular in "Thor: Love and Thunder" that required 20 different takes. But in this case, it appears to have been an actor-dictated choice.
One emotional scene was shot in nearly two dozen ways
The rest of this article contains spoilers for "Thor: Love and Thunder."
In a recent interview with IndieWire, Natalie Portman revealed that one particular moment in "Thor: Love and Thunder" was shot several different ways by director Taika Waititi — an unnamed, but very emotional scene. "The interesting thing was how we had room to workshop them. We filmed 20 different versions of (a scene). There's a few pivotal emotional scenes, but we did really, really different things, many different times," she told the website.
The actress did not dive into the specifics, though it's quite possible that she was referring to one emotionally pivotal scene that involves Jane Foster (Portman) and Thor (Chris Hemsworth) breaking up. But she was more forthcoming about the scenes that were deleted from the movie's final cut. The actress revealed later in the interview that certain scenes with Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson) and Jane weren't included — these moments help explain Jane and Valkyrie's friendship after Jane picks up Thor's mantle.
As further noted by Portman, "[t]here were whole sequences, planets, characters, and worlds that didn't end up in the movie that were hilarious and amazing and (that) we spent a lot of time and energy on, and certainly the entire crew also designing and conceiving."
"Thor: Love & Thunder: The Waititi Cut," anyone?
We already know about some deleted scenes from Thor: Love and Thunder
As Portman said, there were entire sequences cut from the film. How many precisely? While we don't know for certain, we do know that at one point, there was a four-hour cut of the film. Taika Waititi and Chris Hemsworth spoke about the cut to Collider, where Waititi clarified, "It was about four hours. And a lot of time on set ... We were talking about this before, like when, in the moment, you're like, 'This is the greatest thing that anyone's ever filmed in the history of filming things.' And you get into the edit. You're like, 'I still kind of like it.' And then, after about six months of it being in the movie, you realize it was fun on the day but it doesn't have any business being in the movie."
What kind of things could we expect to see in a four-hour-long "Thor: Love and Thunder?" According to Christian Bale, there were two previous MCU actors who were supposed to show up at some point in the film who wound up getting cut. "I got to work with Peter Dinklage," he explained. "That's not in the final film, but I got to work with him. He's fantastic. I got to work with Jeff Goldblum. He's not in the final film either. As you see, a lot of stuff ends up on the cutting room floor even though it is beautiful, brilliant stuff (via Game Rant). It's unclear what kind of interactions Eitri and the Grandmaster would have had with Gorr, but it's a good bet things wouldn't have shaken out too well for them.
And thanks to a lawsuit currently in process, we know Lena Headey had a role in the film that was ultimately cut, too. She's never appeared in the MCU before, so it's unclear who she would've been. For our money, she would've made an exceptional Hera against Russell Crowe's Zeus. So one can only hope we'll see all of these cameos one day. It would make for some great bonus content on Disney+.