Producer Joel Silver told reporters to expect a trailer for the Wachowski brothers' upcoming film adaptation of the anime classic Speed Racer sometime around Christmas. Speaking at a news conference to promote Fred Claus, Silver said the live-action movie is "a wild ride," adding: "There's going to be a trailer out at Christmas, and it's pretty spectacular. So you'll see it pretty soon."
Talking about his longtime collaborators, Silver said: "The Wachowski brothers can't do anything easy. You know, they want to make it as hard as they possibly can. So it's a movie that has a look that you have never seen before, and it's really a vast panorama for the story."
Speed Racer stars Emile Hirsch (Into the Wild) as the title character, a young race-car driver with a mysterious past and an unstoppable car, the Mach 5.
The movie will advance the visual effects seen in the Wachowskis' Matrix movies, Silver promised. "There were a lot of things [in] those films that were done in a very serious CGI format," he said. "And this is even more advanced than that. You look at a movie like Ben-Hur. I mean, they took nine months to shoot that chariot race. And they had to deal with the horses and the chariots and the crowds. And here's a movie that's made not even 50 years later, with these big, huge car races, huge crowds, and there's no [real] cars anyplace. It's all on the computer. Speed Racer is due in theaters May 9, 2008.
