It’s barely a week until John Carter finally makes his the big screen debut, after nearly 70 years of false starts, and failed attempts, and although we (I) didn’t love the film as much as I’d hoped to, it’s still an impressive achievement.

We’ve got interviews with Taylor Kitsch, Lynn Collins, Willem Dafoe and Andrew Stanton which will be going online early next week, and you can have a read of our live blog from the (surprisingly short) press conference here.

Below are a few interviews we managed to snag while on the red carpet at last night’s premiere. They’re fairly brief, but give a nice insight into how the cast perceived working on the film. And a rather strange insight into how Dominic West creates characters.

Dominic West – Sab Than

Shooting a massive Hollywood blockbuster
It was fascinating, because I’d come from directing a BBC daytime drama in Liverpool on a budget of about thirty quid, Then I came on to the set of John Carter – one of the sets, I think there were about four in that particular studio, and just the scale of it, and the technology and the artistry of it was just spellbinding. Getting into this amazing costume, and having all these amazing makeup tattoos on you, you realise, ‘I don’t have to do anything, it’s all been done for me’.

On the inspiration he took from his two year old son
I play a despotic, selfish, mad, fighting madman, and I go all I need from my two year old son for that. Mark Strong’s character gives Sab Than this amazing weapon, and when I give my son a little sword, the first thing he wants to do is smash someone over the head with it. The relationship I have with Mark Strong is sort of father and son, and the inspiration from my little boy is that.

Lynn Collins – Dejah Thoris

On the attraction of the movie
I was attracted first to Matai Shang’s role. That’s the one I really wanted, Then I was like, ‘OK, strong, powerful Goddess. I can do that instead, I’ll go there’. It’s such a multi-faceted movie, and such a multi-faceted script, what clung to me was this line that Andrew Stanton has taken from Wall-E, into this movie that is sort of an awakening and awareness of the social undertones, of the parallels between planet Earth, and the planet Mars. This whole process became very spiritual for me. If you see in the movie there’s so much spirit. Some movies are like a whole bunch of heart. I think this movie is a lot of spirit, a lot of soul.

How it changed her as a person
I walked in with one system of beliefs, and one way of looking at myself, and I stand before you now, I would say, 360.

When you’re playing ‘strong’ you can’t play ‘strong,’, you have to be ‘strong’, and you can’t play ‘brave’, you have to be ‘brave’, and I had to stretch myself to do this character justice, and to do Andrew Stanton justice. All of that aside, what happens when you leave the film, and go back into your real life, what do you have? I was left with these amazing qualities that I summoned. Now, as the movie’s coming out it’s like, now I know I could do the second one. I didn’t really know at the beginning how I could do it, now I know. Hopefully it’s green lit, and that would be awesome.

Andrew Stanton – Director

On the production process

It was making a live action movie, and an animated movie. There’s more animated shots in this than in Finding Nemo. It’s an animated picture combined with a live action picture, so it was a live action shoot in the first half of 2010, and then for the rest of ‘10 and all of ‘11 I’ve been in an animation production, so it’s making two movies, not one.