The Mary Sue Exclusive: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Director and Producers Talk About the Power of April O’Neil
Important Fact: April is a bad ass in this movie.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comes out this weekend. We’ll have a full review up tomorrow morning, but in the meantime, we also had the chance to sit down with director Jonathan Liebesman and producers Andrew Form and Brad Fuller to talk about the film and April O’Neil specifically. She’s a major part of the new movie, and she’s kind of a BAMF in it.
The Mary Sue: This is very much April O’Neal’s movie. I think even more so than the turtles, which I was not expecting at all going into it. How much of a conscious choice was that?
Jonathan Liebesman: Some people come away and go it’s the turtles’ movie and some people come away and say it’s April’s movie. And I think we just wanted, because the turtles are so like male and masculine, you need a female presence in the movie. So to me, it made sense to go in with April and sort of give it a strong female presence. And also we feel like there’s not a lot of female protagonists in this genre of movies and these guys have had great success with female protagonists in their other movies.
[Ed. note: Here, Liebesman is referring to Form and Fuller’s earlier films like the reboots of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Friday the 13th, and Nightmare on Elm Street.]
I just think taking that sort of lesson into this was really cool. And getting Megan Fox was awesome. She’s kind of the perfect April.
TMS: I think she did great—she probably was the perfect for the part. [Ed. note: I know that sounds crazy, but trust me, Fox is really great in this movie.]
JL: I think when you meet Megan, what’s very surprising about her—she’s very driven. Like when she believes something, she will go to the ends of the Earth to prove it. And that’s how she is as a person and that’s something she brought to the character, which was awesome because that’s obviously what April O’Neil is all about: People not taking her seriously and her showing them that she can do any job as well as anyone.
TMS: That was part of her story specifically that I did really like. She’s on the trampoline fitness story or whatever it was at the beginning—that bird exercise. That was a nice touch, because in the first two Ninja Turtles movies, April is already kind of an established reporter. This is just her job. This is what she does. She finds these turtles. April is very much involved in their origin story and that’s…
JL: Just so you know, and that’s one thing people don’t realize is every single piece of this movie is taken from a comic book, a cartoon, the movie. Her being part of the origin story is from a comic book. One of the things. And so it’s ironic that the movie gets hammered for not being faithful but it’s incredibly faithful. Not only to one source.
TMS: I actually just went to a screening of the first two movies a couple weeks ago and it was the first time I had seen the second one in a while. And it’s—I have a lot of love for the first one and the second one was a little much. But it was, at least apocryphally, because they got so many complaints about the violence and the turtles using the weapons, that they put the first fight in the toy store essentially because they couldn’t use swords and sai so they have them use things that kids already have access to—like, my little brother got hit with a yo-yo a lot because of the second Ninja Turtles movie. Going into that, did you guys have to face any of that kind of pressure to tone down the violence?
Andrew Form: I think the hard part about this movie, about every movie brings some challenges. In this movie, the biggest challenge is ultimately who are you making the movie for? If you’re making the movie for kids, there’s one level of violence. If you’re making the movie for hard-core fans, that’s a different movie. Sometimes, you just have to pick a lane and so I felt like for us, we picked a lane hopefully that kids can go and see but people who are fans of the original will enjoy as well.
TMS: Most of your [Liebesman’s] background is with action movies, so I think that really translates well into this. They’re ninjas. There’s a lot of action to be had. Shredder’s a lot different than I think we’ve seen him before, especially with the robot armor. Was that something that you brought in action-wise?
JL: Yeah, I thought, “Listen. I want him to be formidable.” We made the turtles a little bigger and it’s just important to me that when he was faced with four big turtles that they were still the underdogs, you know.
TMS: Was there anything specific in any of the original source material that you guys really wanted to bring into the movie?
JL: Well, we wanted them to be mutants.
TMS: And ninjas, and teenagers?
JL: That’s important, though. Obviously because there was all that alien shit going on…
TMS: There’s a line referencing that in the movie, which was nice.
JL: We wanted to make sure there was “Cowabunga.” We wanted to make sure there was pizza. We wanted to make sure that the characters we created were true to the characters we fell in love with in the source material. So that’s what was important to be there.
Brad Fuller: And we wanted to make sure that Baxter Stockman is in a scene. You know, the people look for him, they can see him.
TMS: I missed him!
BF: Yeah he’s in there.
TMS: I’ll have to go back and watch again.
[Ed. note: I was forbidden from disclosing what scene had Stockman in it, but after they told me I felt stupid for missing it. Keep an eye out for him, and remember he’s a scientist.]
TMS: Back to my other… were there specific things? I know you talked about wanting them to be mutants and stick to things from the comic book. Were there any specific moments from either the comic or the earlier cartoon? One of the other movies?
JL: The pizza came straight out of—you know, that was a lot of fun. I just wanted to do that. I didn’t want to do too much of that, but they’re like, no. Just. You know, I love that [April] introduces them to pizza. She names the turtles. I read somewhere someone’s like “There’s a trend in superhero movies today to tie everything together.” It’s like, “Uh. Not really. It’s just it gives your characters more personal stakes.” I mean, Luke Skywalker you know, or Neo or Harry Potter. We’re following the protagonist for a reason. They’re integral to the story—to the hero’s journey. There’s a destiny for them to be in this movie, and that’s like a really archetypal and valid hero’s journey.
What we did was we tried to sort of figure out a story that was interesting to us and then the fun of “How can we fit the easter eggs in that story?”
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We’d like to thank the filmmakers for taking the time to sit down with us. You can read our full review of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles tomorrow morning.
- Megan Fox says a lot of girl power was cut out
- Keeping with tradition, here’s the rap song from the soundtrack
- Pizza Hut made a 12-foot-tall working pizza launcher
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