UNITED KINGDOM: OLYMPICS - Film director Danny Boyle unveils the Olympic opening ceremony concept with the stadium set to become a giant meadow, complete with cows and a cricket pitch

Record ID: 330812

  • Title: UNITED KINGDOM: OLYMPICS - Film director Danny Boyle unveils the Olympic opening ceremony concept with the stadium set to become a giant meadow, complete with cows and a cricket pitch
  • Date: 14th June 2012
  • Summary: JOURNALISTS SITTING LISTENING TO BOYLE SPEAKING BOYLE SPEAKING WITH EXECUTIVE PRODUCER OF THE LONDON 2012 OLYMPIC GAMES OPENING CEREMONY STEPHEN DALDRY LOOKING ON MODEL STADIUM IN FOREGROUND / BOYLE AND DALDRY SPEAKING OPENING CEREMONY VOLUNTEERS LISTENING (SOUNDBITE) (English) ARTISTIC DIRECTOR OF THE LONDON 2012 OLYMPIC GAMES OPENING CEREMONY DANNY BOYLE, SAYING: "There's sheep and cows and horses and they'll be very very well looked after even better looked after than our volunteers!" WIDE OF ROOM JOURNALISTS LISTENING (SOUNDBITE) (English) ARTISTIC DIRECTOR OF THE LONDON 2012 OLYMPIC GAMES OPENING CEREMONY DANNY BOYLE, SAYING: "You tend to try and keep these things secret and people think in terms of secrets. And of course part of the modern would means that you can't really do that. All of the volunteers have phones and they all take pictures of things and we've asked them not to tweet them and send them around the world. But with so many thousands of people, not just the volunteers but crew everything its impossible to keep secrets and also we didn't think it was the right way to go about the show really... this idea of secrets. We wanted things to, we want the show to unfold in front of people and want rather to think of it as a puzzle really about where we might go to from here." VOLUNTEERS LISTENING BOYLE AND DALDRY TAKING QUESTIONS (SOUNDBITE) (English) ARTISTIC DIRECTOR OF THE LONDON 2012 OLYMPIC GAMES OPENING CEREMONY DANNY BOYLE SAYING: "The Olympic fever or the appetite, enthusiasm for this makes you realise that we have a responsibility to deliver the dream, the ideal, the Olympic ideal and what people hold, the values people hod about that." WIDE OF ROOM WITH MODEL IN FOREGROUND VOLUNTEERS/JOURNALISTS LISTENING (SOUNDBITE) (English) ARTISTIC DIRECTOR OF THE LONDON 2012 OLYMPIC GAMES OPENING CEREMONY DANNY BOYLE, SAYING: "These are enormous undertakings and like they always say its the biggest thing any country does apart from mobilise for war which gives you an idea and yet this is a celebration of peace. So that gives you some idea of the inherent contradictions that go on in these kind of events. The battering around of these simple naive dreams you have about Olympic ideals and then the realities of actually organising them and getting everybody together and putting them on." BOYLE AND VOLUNTEERS GATHERED AROUND STADIUM MODEL FOR PHOTO CLOSE OF BOYLE VARIOUS OF VOLUNTEERS BOYLE WITH VOLUNTEERS WIDE OF BOYLE AND VOLUNTEERS GATHERED AROUND STADIUM MODEL
  • Embargoed: 29th June 2012 13:00
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  • Topics: Arts / Culture / Entertainment / Showbiz,Sports
  • Reuters ID: LVA6QV5PZURHU47OPUMSL9II4CAP
  • Story Text: London's Olympic Stadium will be transformed into a British meadow complete with fields, cows, ducks, a horse-drawn plough and a game of village cricket for the opening ceremony of this year's summer Games.
    Film maker Danny Boyle, artistic director of the London 2012 Olympic Games opening ceremony which takes place on July 27, said on Tuesday (June 12) he wanted to recreate a classic rural idyll for the opening scene of the three-hour event.
    At either end of the stadium there will be "mosh pits" filled with standing members of the public.
    One side will evoke the spirit of the Glastonbury music festival, a huge pop extravaganza held on a dairy farm in southwest England, while the other will reflect the Last Night of the Proms, an annual classical music celebration.
    "Obviously this is our green and pleasant land and as I said there's a real cricket game that's going on and real animals that are using the land and this is Glastonbury Tor (hill), this is a representation of Glastonbury Tor," Boyle told reporters huddled around a model of the opening set for the ceremony.
    "This land two hundred years ago was a meadow and it went through an extraordinary transformation and obviously one of the delights of the legacy if you like is that we will be.. this whole event will be handing back a part of the park to London really and east London especially," said Boyle.
    "There's sheep and cows and horses and they'll be very very well looked after even better looked after than our volunteers!" Boyle added.
    Boyle, an Oscar winner for his acclaimed "Slumdog Millionaire", said repeatedly that he was "bound to fail" in any effort to encapsulate the spirit of a nation with a single ceremony, but hoped everyone would take something away from it.
    He also said that the rising urban population, and the problems of life in British cities, would be reflected. But there were few signs of that at a news briefing to unveil the look and feel of the Olympic launch event.
    The four countries of the United Kingdom are represented with giant representations of their emblem flowers -- the rose for England, thistle for Scotland, flax for Northern Ireland and daffodil for Wales.
    The Olympic athletes will walk around the meadow, made up of mini-fields separated by hedges and a river, and electronic group Underworld will provide the soundtrack.
    The model display featured clouds made of cotton wool, and Boyle promised to provide artificial rain in case the real thing failed to materialise - hard to imagine at a time when wet weather has dominated London's skies for days.
    "One of these clouds will provide rain on the evening just in case it doesn't rain! So we're ready for all eventualities cos if it does rain, you know, we won't need our rain that we have developed in these clouds so we will have some rain coming out of one of the clouds."
    The ceremony, which costs around 27 million pounds (42 million USD) to stage, is titled "Isles of Wonder" inspired by William Shakespeare's play "The Tempest", and the opening scene unveiled on Tuesday is called "Green and Pleasant".
    Expected to draw a television audience of more than a billion people, the ceremony will start at 9 p.m. local time (2000GMT) and is due to end at around midnight.
    Boyle acknowledged that it would be hard to keep proceedings on schedule, particularly with a procession of some 10,500 athletes keen to savour their place in history.
    Boyle also vowed to make the ceremony a spectacle for the crowd in the stadium as much as for the huge television audience watching at home.
    Explaining why he was revealing details of the ceremony, which involves 10,000 adult volunteer performers, 13,000 props and a million-watt PA system, Boyle said:
    "You tend to try and keep these things secret and people think in terms of secrets. And of course part of the modern would means that you can't really do that. All of the volunteers have phones and they all take pictures of things and we've asked them not to tweet them and send them around the world. But with so many thousands of people, not just the volunteers but crew everything its impossible to keep secrets."
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