Word: katzenbergers
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...first, Katzenberg didn't recognize the risks of treading on such literally sacred ground. The Moses story is central to three of the world's major religions. "It is so much more complicated, so much more challenging than simply making a movie," Katzenberg says. Just putting together the script raised enough delicate questions to fill the Red Sea. How to portray the Egyptians as cruel slave masters without antagonizing the Arab world? "We were very careful with skin tones to show that the slave population was multicultural, multiethnic," says Tzivia Schwartz-Getzug, an expert in interfaith relations who was hired...
...filmmakers decided a close relationship between Pharaoh's son Rameses and an adopted brother Moses would be more compelling than their interacting as uncle and nephew. Some other dramatic devices were also invented. "We have 88 minutes to tell 70 years in the life of Moses," says Katzenberg. "We can never be a literal retelling of the Bible. We've edited God, but we have not rewritten...
Making Moses a brother to Rameses allowed the filmmakers to deal with another sticky problem: how to make Rameses II, considered the greatest of Pharaohs, more than a one-dimensional villain. In fact, Katzenberg says, the filmmakers returned from an early field trip to Egypt so impressed with the majesty of the pyramids that "we found ourselves not wanting to simply portray Rameses as the bad guy." Casting Rameses as a contemporary of Moses' enabled the filmmakers to show him as a loving adopted brother who wants to carry on the great legacy of his father...
...voice of God was one of the more difficult choices in the film. "Every race and color and creed has a claim to the voice of God," Katzenberg says. Using an idea of producer Cox's, the animators put together a scratch track that was an eerily effective chorus of every character in the film, with the dominant voice morphing from man to woman to child. But consultant Schwartz-Getzug vetoed that approach, saying some people would be offended if the voice of God sounded--even momentarily--like a woman's. Kilmer ended up supplying the voice...
DreamWorks flew in dozens of religious experts and clergy for repeated discussions about the film. And Katzenberg did his homework, reading up so extensively on the Bible that he began to sound more like a yeshiva student than the college dropout he is. But as Katzenberg discovered, everyone's a movie critic. An elderly Fundamentalist minister didn't like the drawings; a rabbinical scholar complained that in the Bible "God has a great line" that wasn't in the film, and also objected to the fact that Moses, who should be around 80 when he returns to confront Rameses, looks...