http://new.philstar.com/entertainment/796878/a-look-into-prometheus-3d-creating-david

The character of David represents PROMETHEUS's “company man.” An androgynous android with personality defects, David is the eyes and ears of the Weyland Corporation that funds the Prometheus mission. Explains Ridley Scott: “If I had a giant piece of metal [like the Prometheus], I wouldn't send it off into deep space with only computers monitoring it. I don’t care how cleverly they work. I'd have a man on board, and the man would be a company man as Ash was in ALIEN.”

“He's not quite one of us,” confirms Executive Producer Michael Ellenberg. “There's a bit of Rutger Hauer and a bit of Ian Holm, but this is a very different spin, too. He's very smart and sophisticated, but also very young and if the beings they find are beyond good and evil, he may not fully understand good and evil. He's working his way through it in terms of his own consciousness and deciding whether he has an agenda or not.”

There's no big reveal for David's corporate agenda, as there was for Ash in ALIEN. Instead, he lays his cards right on the table. “From the get-go you know exactly what he’s doing when he's doing it,” says Scott. “He doesn’t even get bored, and works around that in his own world. He can switch off if he wants and switch back on. He’s the housekeeper.”

Fassbender says David is unlike anything that has come before in the ALIEN universe, to which PROMETHEUS shares only strands of DNA rather than direct links. “I didn't really look at any of the previous films,” says Fassbender. “Once I got the part I didn't re-watch the old ALIEN films. I watched BLADE RUNNER, actually. I’m just trying to make a very sort of ambiguous sort of character with this guy. And very sexually ambivalent; sort of almost androgynous. We’ve been taking references from David Bowie and Peter O’Toole in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA. This is the kind of guy that, when he says something, the audience are like, 'Is he for real or is he taking the piss here?'”

Adds Ellenberg: “Ridley's modelled him after a number of classic actors. And while everyone's been asleep for two years, David's been awake, so he's had time to study our scientists' research and come into his own. Over the course of the movie he thinks he understands what he wants out of life and I think he's very surprised by what he sees.”

His uncertainty reflects on the crew of the Prometheus, who are all fearful of David's motives on board. “They're just really not sure about this guy,” Fassbender continues. “There’s a kind of resentment against robots, and so they kind of treat him a little bit like an outcast. Then the audience are like, 'Does this guy have feelings? He’s a robot. Is there jealousy there? Is there envy? Do his feelings get hurt by the way people talk to him?”



An interesting aspect of David's character, in connection with PROMETHEUS's grand themes about questioning the origin of humanity, is that as an android, David is well aware of who created him. “He even asks Holloway, 'Why did you make me?'” reveals director Ridley Scott. “And he says, 'Because we could.' So David responds, 'How would you feel if your maker said that about you?' Does David have feelings? You fucking bet he has feelings.”

Fassbender says he's been imbuing the character with all the unrestrained emotion the script will allow. “I’m making him a very sort of vain and sort of patronising kind of character,” he explains. “There’s a massive ego within him, I’ve realised, because it’s open knowledge to him that he’s far more advanced than his human counterparts. In a response to their non-acceptance of him he develops a bit of a haughty sort of attitude around them. He likes to be right all the time.”

His reference material extends beyond film, too. “I sort of took my walk from Greg Louganis. He was a high diver in I think the early ‘80s and I remember watching him when I was a boy. I always remember he used to walk in a certain way to the edge of the high board. Little things like that just might help.”

One element of David that didn't make the final character was an Afrikaans accent, that Fassbender abandoned on day one. “There were a lot of different ideas that I had in terms of what I was going to do with his voice and we tried different things,” Fassbender remembers. “At one point I wanted to do South African, so I was doing one take and doing my Afrikaans accent and Ridley was like, 'Okay, it’s kind of interesting.' He’s like, 'Do one in the Afrikaans and then do one in English.' Then in the end we said, 'Okay, we’ll stick with the English. Let’s just get rid of that idea!'”

Alright guy's vote Prometheus, if only to piss Aeus off! 


http://au.movies.ign.com/articles/122/1224080p1.html