Bryce Dallas Howard in “Pete’s Dragon”; Disney(LOS ANGELES) — There were lots of fans of Pete’s Dragon at Monday night’s premiere in Los Angeles, and star Bryce Dallas Howard was one of them.
Howard said she watched the 1977 original with her sisters “over and over again” and sought out the script when she heard it was being remade.
“I heard that they were doing it and I was curious and sought out the script,” she recalled. “When I read it I was so, I mean, it made me weep, honestly. And I thought, it’s an incredible film that I really want to be a part of and it shares the same themes and same central characters as the film that I loved as a child, but it’s something unto itself now.”
Pete’s Dragon tells the story of Pete, an orphan who claims to live in the woods with a giant, green dragon named Elliot. Howard portrays Grace in reimagining of the beloved 1977 Disney, a forest ranger determined to find out where Pete came from, where he belongs, and the truth about the dragon.
Writer/director David Lowery said he tried to recapture the magic of the original. “I hadn’t seen it since I was six or seven years old, and so I remembered the way it made me feel, how delightful it was and how much I loved the relationship between the boy and the dragon,” he said on the red carpet. “So I felt that the best thing I could do was to take those feelings and recapture them.”
Pete’s Dragon also stars Oakes Fegley, Wes Bentley, Karl Urban, Oona Laurence and Robert Redford. It opens nationally this Friday.
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