A new 3D animated movie on Gilgamesh is currently in preparation in Buenos Aires, and the first images that have been released are simply stunning! We have interviewed Tomás Lipgot, founder of the production company that is working on the movie, who has provided us with some very interesting behind-the-scenes information. Enjoy the reading!
Please tell us about yourself!
I was born in Neuquén, in the Argentine Patagonia but I have lived in Buenos Aires since I was 18 years old, when I came to study filmmaking. Since then, I have worked on film production and direction, especially documentaries, and have made 9 documentary feature films. On the page of my production company Duermevela you can learn more about my work.
Why Gilgamesh? What has struck you in this character, so much so that you decided to create an entire animated movie about him?
When I was 13-14 years old, my sister, who was studying Literature at the university, wrote an essay and let me read the original manuscript, in which she compared “The Epic of Gilgamesh” with Kierkegaard’s notion of despair. At that time, I was too young to understand that, but I was curious. About 20 years later, I read Gilgamesh’s text again and I was amazed at its depth, especially how it addresses the theme of human anguish when faced with death — a theme that did not lose its validity even after approximately 4,000 years.
Also, it seemed like a very powerful story to tell in an animation film. It has an incredible plot, it has a lot of fantasy, monsters and supernatural scenarios.
What preliminary research did you make prior to beginning the drawing phase? Did you consult any scholar, visit any museum and/or collection, or read any book that was particularly relevant for your work?
The research was very extensive, to write the script I used 4-5 different versions of the poem, and I read many books I found about Gilgamesh, and also about Sumer and Mesopotamia, which were unknown topics to me. I especially remember Jean Bottero’s book “Gilgamesh, The King Who Did Not Wish to Die”.
I had the opportunity to travel with my films and visit the Pergamon museum in Berlin, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and especially the British Museum. At these places, I focused my visit on the Mesopotamian section, where fortunately there were always few people. At the British Museum, I was lucky enough to be able to see and touch the original tablet about the flood, which is not the one usually on display. It was one of the most moving moments of my life (here below is a photo of this moment).
For the production of the film, we hired an expert in Sumerian history and university professor, Julio Brugos, who taught the pre-production team aspects of the Sumerian culture and writing.
From where did you take inspiration for the illustrations of the main characters? And on which basis did you reconstruct places such as ancient cities and temples?
I have no responsibility for the illustrations, which are made by my partners from the animation company “Hookup Animation“. A large team worked on that, hundreds of sketches were made until we found the image that we liked. We used historical evidence and, from the very beginning, we were interested in moving away from the Disney aesthetic for the characters.
Many of the visual elements of the city, temples, objects, etc. are faithful to the historical period of Sumer, but in some others we take some license, for example, a temple in the city of Uruk is decorated as the Ishtar Gate of Babylon, because we found it more attractive for the art of the film. It is important to note that this is a fiction film and not a historical one. Even so, these licenses that we take are framed within the Mesopotamian culture.
We recently won a contest from Epic Games, the leading video game company, which will allow us to finish the film with higher quality, in addition to giving it a more defined identity. This is the trailer with which we won.
The movie has been presented at quite a few festivals around the world in recent years, including Cannes in 2015: how was it received? To what extent was the feedback you got on these occasions useful for the implementation and final making of the film?
What was presented was a short-length trailer, which was very well received and created many expectations, but there was no feedback that made us change plans; that is very complicated — and expensive — in an animation film.
The movie Gilgamesh has also been declared “of Cultural Interest” by the Secretaría de Cultura de la Nación Argentina for its “cultural relevance and international projection”. How did you welcome this news, and how do you think your movie will contribute to the knowledge of the original Mesopotamian poem?
It was a great joy to receive the declaration “of cultural interest” from the most important cultural organization in Argentina. We hope and believe that the film will make a great contribution to raise awareness around the Epic of Gilgamesh, which in the Western world is not as well-known as it deserves to be. I also think that an animated film is a very attractive means to spread and make this story known.
When will the movie be released? What should our readers expect?
We hope it will be out in 2023. And you are going to find – I hope – a film that is faithful to the essence of the poem, entertaining and visually attractive, which will allow you to enjoy that wonderful text that is the Epic of Gilgamesh at an audiovisual level.
Can you share with us some “behind the scenes” funny details from the past years, or a new still-unseen drawing from the movie?
I don’t know if there was something funny. Like our hero Gilgamesh, the road was – and is – full of difficulties. But it may be the moment when we were doing Motion Capture, a very sophisticated technique to capture movement with people and transfer it to animation, when we rented a mechanical bull that was very complicated to assemble and use, to create all the parts of the Bull of Heaven. With a lot of effort, this experiment turned out quite well, but not long ago, for storytelling reasons, we decided to remove all of the scenes in which the bull appeared from the script.
