Interviews from the Berlin premiere of THE MORTAL INSTRUMENTS: CITY OF BONES

The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones hits the big screen in severals countries this week and since Germany is among them, it’s time to share my mini interviews from the Berlin premiere on August 20.

I briefly talked to Elyas M’Barek, who plays the Vampire Lieutenant, and I asked if he had seen the movie yet and whether he liked it.

Yes. Great movie, great adaption of the book, awesome!  […] It was great being a part of this.

He also said that he hoped to return for The Mortal Instruments: City of Ashes.

Furthermore, I had the pleasure of talking to Jamie Campbell Bower who was such a sweetheart! Jamie remembered the plastic mango that he signed when I met him at the book signing event in London and his reaction the mango now being in Toronto, Canada: “amazing!”

He talked about being cast as Jace and the doubters:

It’s hard, because I do wanna prove myself […] and it’s frustrating, because I really do care about this project. And I really get it and I really understand how much it means to a lot of people, but it means just as much to me as it means to everybody else. I want to portray Jace in the best way that I can and I wanna put 120 % in rather than – ‘cause a lot of people would go in there and would put 80 % in there – and I want to put as much as much of my life in there as possible.

We’re always a big fan of TMI Source […] We know how important it is for you guys [the fans and the blogs] to know how much it means to us, because without you guys  we wouldn’t be here.

In addition to talking to Elyas and Jamie, I also chatted with Martin Moszkowicz, our executive producer, who has read every single The Mortal Instruments book.

When did you realise how big the fandom is, how many fans the books have?

Of course we knew how many books have been sold, but we’ve only seen how big the excitement is in the past few months when it got really started and when I saw what happened on twitter and on the websites, on tumblr and I actually learnt something new, I’ve never experienced something like this. I think it’s great!

About having the European premiere in Berlin instead of London and whether the City of Ashes premiere will be in Germany as well:

The decision to have the European premiere in Germany was made together with our English partners, because for a German company [Constantin Film] it’s of course important and great and there are a lot of fans from Europe here today. I’ve seen fans from Poland, Austria, Italy and I think it is so amazing that they have come here and we don’t know where the next premiere will be. We’ll see.

All the fans are so grateful that there’s a movie, fans from all over the world are excited!

 I really notice this. We get so many great responses and there have been the first pre-screenings in America, in almost every major city and the people react very positive and are happy that there’s a movie and I also think that it’s a great movie for the fans, because they know the books by heart, but I think it’s also a new experience for people who don’t know the books and then they may also read the books.

About Cassandra’s involvement:

It was great how Cassandra helped us. A movie like this is 2 hours long and the books have a lot of material so we had to summarise, to condense everything to have all the important bits in the movie and Cassandra followed the whole process, from the beginning until the end, she saw all the scripts […] and she signed off on everything, she signed off on the cast and I think it’s great to work so closely together with an author […] and she – because she is also interested in movies – has been a huge help.

We also briefly talked about Constantin Film’s special City of Bones promotion in Munich:

We wanted to do something special and didn’t only want to have trailers and TV spots, because anyone could do that, but we really wanted to do something special and I think it’s a good gag. People like it.

Martin’s comment on future The Mortal Instruments movies:

We hope to shoot all the books, we’ll start shooting the second movie soon […] and I’m very excited and hopefully there’ll be a third, fourth and fifth and maybe also a sixth movie!

Thank you, Elyas, Jamie and Martin for the interviews!

And a special thank you to Alyssa (our fearless leader) and Michael from Pure Online for making all of this possible.