“Thor” director Kenneth Branagh said film needed both earthly and fantastic elements

SAN DIEGO — Director Kenneth Branagh said he and the team working on “Thor” looked to the original comics for inspiration but were very cognizant of making the tone appropriate for the film as well. Like many of the original “Thor” and “Journey Into Mystery” comics by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Branagh wanted the film to spend time both in Asgard, the realm of the Norse gods, and on Earth.

“I was passionate that we should have a contemporary Earth sequence to the movie,” Branagh said. “I believe, (as) they do in the comics, that we can live in both places and people can travel maybe to both places potentially and that we can find the tone.”

The tone, which had to encompass both the grandiose world of Asgard and Thor’s fish-out-of-water sequences in New Mexico, was a key issue, Branagh said at Comic-Con. He said props and production designer Bo Welch and Academy Award-winning costume designer Alexandra Byrne were inspired by the comics but also tried to present imaginative textures and elements.

“When you know that people travel through space, when they live in the world of gods, it isn’t just a question of just metal or just molded kind of human material,” Branagh said. “So we’d always just try to look at it, see what we saw in the comic and then try and reinvent, re-imagine, go back to some original source. That got everybody very excited, so you want to try to be pure and classical in it but bring in new twists.”

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