Coming out on April 15th is Walt Disney Studio’s latest film, “The Jungle Book.” Directed by Jon Favreau, it tells the familiar story of Mowgli, an orphan raised in the jungle, who must seek out Man’s Village for protection against the murderous tiger, Shere Khan.

[All non-attributed photos and video courtesy of Disney.]

At a press junket, Director Jon Favreau, Producer Brigham Taylor, and Actors Neel (“Mowgli”) Sethi, Sir Ben (voice of “Bagheera”) Kingsley, Lupita (voice of “Raksha”) Nyong’o, and Giancarlo (voice of “Akela”) Esposito gathered to discuss the process of conceptualizing and realizing “The Jungle Book.”

Jon Favreau: [On why remake “The Jungle Book” now.] “…We (Favreau and Chair of Walt Disney Studios Alan Horn) had common ground of both having great affection for this property. And the question became ‘if we love it so much in those other forms, why do it now?’ And as he pointed out to me…you saw ‘Life of Pi,’ you realized that the technology may have come to a point where you can actually tell the story in a different way, and maybe bring something that just existed in his imagination while he was growing up, onto the big screen…100 years ago was the book, 50 years ago was the animated film, and now 50 years later, it’s time to update the film for our generation.”

Neel Sethi: [On becoming part of the cast.] “It felt like it was too easy, like that shouldn’t have happened so easily. I just auditioned once and Jon really liked me. The first time I met Sir Ben Kingsley and Lupita…I voice recorded with Sir Ben and I met you (Lupita) at D23…and that was a lot of fun. I got to see my face!”

Giancarlo Esposito: [On how he got involved with the film.] “…It’s synchronicitous, because for me, this story came from my Mother…I come from divorced parents and I have a brother, so my Mother would read this Law of the Jungle to us because it was us three–we had to survive! It was the three of us, and so it really meant something very deep inside me. It’s like I tell my four girls now, ‘never leave a man behind! If you go to the bathroom or anywhere, never leave anyone behind!’ So it plays through.”

Sir Ben Kingsley: [On getting into character.] “My secret to my performance I discovered later, which is odd, but I had an intuitive feeling/grasp of something in him…and I realized later, that I actually am playing Kipling, that Bagheera is…the voice of Rudyard Kipling in the story. So…although I didn’t recognize it, sometimes an actor’s intuition is buried, and you don’t realize what you’re mining as a source of energy until, perhaps, afterwards. I’m privileged to be the voice of Kipling, a man I greatly admire and love and when I was in…the Cubs, actually, which is before the Boy Scouts, our troop leader was called ‘Akela.'”

Lupita Nyong’o: [On getting involved with the project.] “This is my first voice-over role, and I was attracted to it because Raksha is like the Eternal Mother. She chooses to take care of this creature who is not one of her own, but as though he was…I did a session…really early on, and then a few months later Jon called me in again, but this time he had Neel’s performance captured and that really grounded the Mother-Son relationship for me. To see the vulnerability of this boy and the love he had for the wolf–it only made my love for him grow even more. And it’s such a beautiful image to see these two very different creatures have this very real bond.”

Brigham Taylor: [On producing such a unique film.] “The biggest job I had was to find the right filmmaker…we knew when Alan (Horn) talked about making this title, what we could do with this title, and we all imagined what it could be, we started to figure out what kind of skill sets we needed to pull that off. We needed someone who had the warmth and humanity to inject it with the charm and with the thematic quality you know you need. And you also had to have someone who knew how to master this incredibly complex thing, because we knew there wasn’t going to be a live animal on the set. There couldn’t be. In fact, to portray it the way Kipling had imagined it, had envisioned it, perhaps even for the first time, because he was envisioning a live action world with a child living amongst these animals…we needed someone who could do all that, and when you looked at the list, it whittled down to one guy.”

Favreau: “…And he wasn’t available…”

Taylor: “…And then we called Jon.”