In Doomsday, a lethal virus codenamed Reaper slaughters thousands of people,
leading to the authorities containing the infected behind Hadrian's Wall in
Scotland. 30 years later, a group of specialist (led by Mitra) are
despatched into the quarantine zone to find a cure...
The good news is that Battlestar Galactica creator Ronald D. Moore is
scripting the new movie, itself a remake of Howard Hawks' original. The
producers are Marc Abraham and Eric Newman, who helped remake Dawn Of The
Dead, while original producer David Foster is also involved.
No word on the director yet, but I'm personally glad Moore is working on
this. He's proven he can re-invent things with BSG, while the premise itself
-- of a shape-shifting alien dug up in the Arctic -- should involve some CGI
monstrosities.
Carpenter's remake was a seminal film that stands up to scrutiny even today
(the make-up was the last hurrah for non-CGI creatures in many peoples
minds) but I'd curious to see what 21st-Century tech can achieve...
"I've never been against popping out sequel after sequel -- Saw, for
instance, has an ingenious plot that you can do it with that -- but [Wolf
Creek] was designed to be a particular kind of horror film, not the kind of
film you can just pop 'em up. They get trashy. I'm really proud of the film
and I don't want to just put out a piece of shit -- so if it takes two or
three years, it doesn't matter."
Anyway, Aronofsky returns after years of absence with The Fountain, a sci-fi
love story starring Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz.
ComingSoon.net: I feel like a hypocrite because when I talked to you in San
Diego after watching the movie, I suggested that you don't do any interviews
and just let people figure out your movie for themselves. I definitely got
more out of it on second viewing.
Darren Aronofsky: Well, thanks! I think the first 20 minutes often sets the
audience apart, because we were trying to mirror that feeling of sci-fi or
graphic novels where the first 80 pages or so, you don't know what's going
on, then suddenly it starts to make sense and a whole world starts to flesh
out. I think that with "The Fountain," for the first 20 minutes, people are
like "What's going on?" but then it suddenly starts to make sense. If people
get that far, they're in.
CS: Has the movie changed a lot since the version I saw in San Diego a few
months ago?
Aronofsky: There's a slight change that I tinkled with three or four months
ago. There was a line that Hugh Jackman wanted in the film that I loved, but
I couldn't figure out how to cut it in, which is that line in the trailer:
"Death is a disease; there's a cure, there's a cure and I'll find it." That
was not in the first cut. What happened is that San Diego was the final cut,
and then there was this one thing that kept us battling in the edit room for
a long time, and it had to do with the order those scenes were right around
that part of the film. I think we all made the right decision and a few
months ago, I kind of figured out in the middle of the night. I had one of
those "oh!" moments and I approached Jay, my editor, and said, "Will this
work?" and we threw it together on our own to look at it, and me and Jay
thought it was much better. Sometimes you just need that time. It happens to
me, I look back at "Requiem"-and that's the reason I don't watch "Requiem"
or "p" any more, 'cause I know I would see things and I'd be cringing-but
luckily, the one good thing that came out of waiting for our release date
was that we had the time to make it a little better. I think that's what did
it. What's funny is that it's actually exactly how the script is now. We
moved away from the script and changed it a little bit, but then I figured
out a way to bring it back to the script.
CS: One of the themes of this movie is obsession, whether it be to find the
Tree of Life or find a cure for death, so I'm sure a lot of people must
assume that this movie was your obsession, having spent so much time trying
to get it made.
Aronofsky: (laughs) I got a comment on that! For me, it's not about
quantity. It's about doing the film that you believe in. Filmmaking is such
a hard job, there's so many disappointments, there are so many challenges,
there's so many roadblocks, especially when you're trying to do something
different that's not exactly in this small box. But it's all I know how to
do, and so I just believed in this material and it just rang true from my
gut and I just had to get it done, so here we are.
CS: Do you think once the movie hits theatres, you can finally find some
closure and leave it behind you?
Aronofsky: Absolutely. A good friend of mine, another filmmaker, once told
me, "You never finish a film, you abandon a film" and I think that's true. I
think it all finally settles in when I get that DVD, packaging,
mass-produced, and I'm like, "Okay, this is the movie and it's all done."
CS: But these days, directors like Ridley Scott are doing massive reworkings
of their movies, releasing "Director's Cuts" so would that be something you
might ever do?
Aronofsky: No, I've been lucky with all my movies. My final cut has been my
cut. I think at some point I'd love to do a remix of a "p." When we mixed
that, there was only Dolby SR, and I'd love to discrete remix of it at some
point, which is kind of like tinkering after it's all done, but it's just
updating it for the latest technology and doing an HD version of it.
CS: Also, having some money to throw into it might allow you to do some
things you weren't able to do originally.
Aronofsky: Well, we mixed "p" in like 5 days, which is just absurd, but I'm
pretty happy with the mix. I think we did a pretty good job, and I like the
way it feels and looks. I'd love to do a 10th Year Anniversary, so hopefully
that will happen at some point. Ten years in '08, so we got a couple years.
CS: You just have to make sure you don't go all George Lucas and start
putting in new characters using CGI.
Aronofsky: No, no, I wouldn't go that far. That's obsessive.
CS: Going back a bit, you started making this movie a number of years ago on
a bigger budget with a different cast. How did you end up with Hugh Jackman
after Brad Pitt dropped out and you had to start all over again?
Aronofsky: To be honest, Hugh wasn't even on my initial list, and that's
because I hadn't seen him do anything except for his "X-Men" work. He's
great in that and that's a very difficult thing to do, but I didn't really
know his work. Then I saw him in "The Boy From Oz," the thing he won the
Tony for, and even though he plays a singer-songwriter who's married to Liza
Minelli, which has absolutely nothing to do with the character in "The
Fountain," he had such passion and charisma and commitment and fever, that I
was just like, "I have to see what this guy thinks of my script." When he
read it, he just really got it, so that's how it all worked out.
CS: What was his reaction after seeing the completed film? It must be a very
different experience than making the movie since there's no way to know what
it will be like when edited together.
Aronofsky: What was his reaction? You'll have to ask him, but he told me
it's not only the favorite film he's ever been in, but it's his favorite
film. But you have to ask him, because I can't quote him. He was really
happy with it, but it was really strange because the day I showed him the
finished film was also the night Rachel went into labor. It was a very
surreal night.
CS: Do you ever stick around to see the movie with an audience to see how
they react?
Aronofsky: I think the last time I'll see this film ever will be tonight at
the premiere in L.A. I think once it's done-I'll probably watch it again on
DVD just as a quality check, just to make sure it's correct-but I won't ever
see it again after tonight.
CS: Did you watch it in Toronto or Venice or any of the other premieres?
Aronofsky: Oh, no, no. I watched it actually in Spain at this film festival
outside of Barcelona called Sitges, which is a fantasy film festival,
because it was a really young, youthful crowd and the projection was
beautiful and two of my best friends in the world were there, so I decided
to watch it with them. You see a film so many times when you're making it,
that at a certain point, you just have to stop watching it or otherwise, you
can get lost in the ego conversations in your head about it. You get lost in
so much stuff in your head. That's why I haven't seen "Requiem" since it
came out, or "p" since that came out, so it's been a long time. Even if it
comes on TV, I'll watch it for ten, fifteen seconds, smile to myself and
then move on.
CS: I deliberately avoided reading the graphic novel until after seeing the
movie, but I was surprised how much of the story and images were similar to
the movie. Did you get any inspiration from Kent Williams' art in the
graphic novel while shooting the movie?
Aronofsky: I did steal a few shots from Kent. When he breathed the ring in
and it turns into the Queen, that transition I got from Kent. I think Kent
definitely had his own vision, but you can just see how connected the
scripts were. It wasn't that big of a difference between the two movies.
CS: When you went back to redo the movie, starting from scratch on a lower
budget, what did you end up changing?
Aronofsky: Well, if you look at the battle scene, right there was $15-20
million dollars. That was a big thing, getting rid of that. Then there was
the big action sequence in space, which is the thing that I probably do
regret not having done, but there was that big action sequence on the outer
surface of the ship that I wanted to do, but that we couldn't afford either.
CS: When I visited the Montreal set, I saw the spaceship and I saw the other
Tree of Life, but were the other locations also done on the soundstage like
the lab and hospital?
Aronofsky: Everything was a soundstage, except the museum sequence and
Lillian's farmhouse, of course, but everything else was built. The way [the
production designer] interrelated everything was very inspirational to me.
Everything comes out of Tom in the space ship. All the other sets and
designs come out of the same type of material, same type of colours, same
type of background as what was happening on that tree ship. Things like the
throne room with all those candles hanging, why did we have those candles?
Well, if you stick a character in front of it, those candles go out of
focus, and they look exactly like the starfield of Tom in space. The
Christmas lights on the rooftop behind Rachel also go out of focus and
become a starfield. You'll start to notice as you watch it again; you'll see
celestial objects floating throughout all the time sequences. That was
certain stuff that we did and there's a lot of that type of thing.
CS: It must have taken an insane amount of planning to cut all that together
and make the transitions work. Were some of the delays of the movie done to
get extra time to get all the editing and post-production done?
Aronofsky: No, I don't think so. I think we had a pretty normal timeframe of
editing. The film was done in February, we've just been waiting for a
release date for eight or nine months. The studio wanted to release us in
the fall, so that's what it's been. We've been waiting for that, and that's
why it's taken this amount of time to get here. Otherwise, the cut and the
post for a visual effects movie was pretty much right on time.
CS: When I saw the movie in San Diego and again last week, watching the
movie was almost like a religious experience where everyone was very quiet
and respectful. I'm curious if that's been the same with other audiences.
Aronofsky: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Audiences have been very kind of silent
watching the movie. I did a lot of Q 'n' A's afterwards, and it's been a
similar positive reaction. I keep getting exactly what you just said. People
all over the world from Tokyo to Spain to Belgium to D.C., people almost
always in these Q 'n' A's afterwards come up to me and they go, "Hey, man,
that wasn't a movie, that was an experience." That to me, has been just
great, because to take someone, not just on a normal narrative journey but
to take them somewhere else, and just thinking and feeling in a way they
haven't felt before, that's a great compliment, and I've enjoyed that. I've
seen a similar reaction around the planet.
CS: I was really surprised when I woke up at 4 in the morning the day after
seeing the movie, thinking about something in the movie that really affected
me.
Aronofsky: What's interesting is most films you leave and you've got the
whole journey. When I made "p", it was a very different world. People saw a
movie once, and then maybe saw it again on DVD. In fact, "p" was
historically the first film downloaded, and it was also one of the early
DVDs and we were playing with the menus and designing all that stuff. I
think in today's world where kids are downloading sh*t to their computer, to
their iPod, people are watching stuff over and over again, so we wanted to
make this puzzle that gets richer and richer the more people see it. There's
a lot of things in the film that people aren't going to get on a first trip.
That's not completely true. There are some people who've been out there in
these Q 'n' A's I've met who get it instantly, and they basically tell me
exactly what it's about and they've gotten what it all means, but a lot of
people I think are grasping for it the first time. But I hope that it will
turn into a cult film like '"p" and "Requiem" and people will want to see it
again.
CS: For this movie, you've moved from Artisan to Warner Bros. They seem to
really be behind making movies as an art-form rather than as a commercial
venture, but they obviously must care about making their money back as well.
How's that been working out?
Aronofsky: I hope there's enough commercial elements in the film that people
want to see it, and I think it asks the big questions about why are we here?
What is life? What is death? What is love? And those are questions people
have been asking, since we crawled out of the primordial soup. I think there
is a commercial end to that, and at the core of the film, it really is a
love story between Hugh and Rachel. Another thing I've noticed on the road
is that people keep saying that when they're there with their loved ones,
they've just had an incredible experience, and I think it might be a really
good date movie in the sense that the women get to see this great love
story, they get to see Hugh Jackman's shirt off. The guys get a little Mayan
adventure and some whacked out science fiction, and afterwards you're
GUARANTEED, I promise you, a good conversation. (laughs)
CS: I wondered how you felt about American movie audiences these days and
whether you think they really want to learn the answers these days? The real
world seems so tough and awful that many moviegoers may just want to be
entertained rather than having to think about movies.
Aronofsky: I think you're right. I think definitely people want to just have
the entertainment of escape at times, but I think that people also do want
to be transported to a different consciousness and have a different
experience. You know, people aren't going to the movies anymore, and I think
for me at least, it feels like when I go to the theatre, I see something
that's pretty well advertised but I feel pretty let down as the
same-old-same-old. If "The Fountain" gives you anything, it's definitely a
very, very different and new experience.
CS: Where do you go from here? This time since finishing the movie, have you
continued to write?
Aronofsky: Exactly. We're developing a few projects and I can't talk about
them yet, but we're very, very close.
CS: In the years since "Requiem," there was a lot of talk about you playing
with other people's characters like "Batman" and "Watchmen." Have you gotten
over the desire to do that?
Aronofsky: That was all a bunch of hype. For the last five or six years,
I've been working on "The Fountain." We've had conversations on a few. I
mean, "The Watchmen" I was on for a week, literally. I was definitely
interested in doing it, and then they wanted to go right away, but I was
working on "The Fountain" so I couldn't do it. And "Batman" was a writing
gig, a chance to work with Frank Miller, but things got blown out of
proportion by the internet. I've been trying to make "The Fountain" and I'm
pretty much a one-trick pony. I get my dream project and I stick with it,
and now we're starting to figure out what to do next.
The sister blog to this weekly movie-related news service is still going
strong. Right now the blog is focusing on TV reviews for Heroes (the
excellent new superhero drama from the States), the disappointing Doctor Who
spin-off series Torchwood, and the BBC's enjoyable Robin Hood series.
** IN THE PIPELINE **