Christopher Webster [Film Festival 06.24.08] movie news interview scifi horror action



Alex Proyas, director of the highly influential Dark City and The Crow, sat down with Blake from Twitch to talk about what we can all expect from the imminent release of the extended Dark City director's cut dvd. Along the way, the director also revealed his opinion on the current state of Hollywood genre cinema and why he hopes that hardcore science fiction, in particular space opera, make a serious comeback. Unfortunately, the director's doesn't reveal anything at all about his new apocalyptic thriller Knowing. continue through the break to read some of the interview highlights.

****


On the Dark City: Director's Cut

"The general pace of the movie is quite different. The director’s cut more or less is the version I had originally sent out when I was first testing the movie. We had problems in testing and it’s why the studio had us add in the voice overs, which I thought was rubbish really! My instinct then was when something wasn’t playing right to speed it up and I’ve never been happy with that, so this version is back to a more leisurely and thoughtful pace it was meant to be. The voice over from the beginning is gone of course. There is also a few scenes added back that were ditched that I think are perfectly good scenes and I have no idea why we dropped them then."

On Science Fiction

"I grew up reading a lot of science fiction and even now we still aren’t at the point where we can make really hardcore science fiction movies. This is really my genre of choice..."

"Doing a big space opera is something I’ve always wanted to do. To this day it’s still tough to convince the powers that be to go in that direction. I’ve always dreamt of doing The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester or something like that. We are just not there yet...."

"I love Star Wars but A New Hope is a pretty straight ahead no frills shoot ‘em up. George Lucas has layered each subsequent movie with a great deal of complexity..."

"Successful movies are like pop songs – very simple structurally and they avoid the danger of being over complicated. Sometimes these baroque ideas of literature don’t wed with the 3-act structure of your typical commercial movie..."

****

Read the interview in its entirely here

You might also like

Leave a comment

Your Comment