Hey folks, Harry here with the latest set/behind-the-scenes visit by Mr. Beaks... this time it's all about BLADE TRINITY, BATMAN: INTIMIDATION and the wonderful world of David Goyer and the making of the "last" of Goyer's Blade Trilogy at New Line, this time with him as the top boss man calling all da shots. Here ya go with Part One:
It ain’t so bad being David Goyer.
Having recently returned from Vancouver after wrapping BLADE: TRINITY, his sophomore directorial effort following up the nifty ZIGZAG, Goyer is now hunkered down in an editing suite at Henson Studios piecing together his film, while somewhere in Iceland, Christopher Nolan is calling action for the first time on the newest BATMAN movie, which, as Goyer told us during the lengthy interview you may read at your leisure below, is essentially his untouched first draft. Meanwhile, every comic property short of KICKERS, INC. is being offered to the heavily tattooed pulp scribe of DARK CITY and the last two BLADE movies. Tell me you don’t want to be this guy.
Fighting a nagging head cold and a bad movie hangover from having stupidly tried to watch DICKIE ROBERTS: FORMER CHILD STAR at 3:00 AM when I couldn’t sleep, I bopped my way cross town to Henson Studios, where Goyer screened fifteen minutes of footage from BLADE: TRINITY for a small cadre of internet journalists. My verdict? Looks like fun. This installment certainly boasts the most involved storyline of the series, introducing a new band of vampire hunters called the Nightstalkers, as well as the Big Daddy Kane of bloodsuckers himself, Dracula. There’s lots to read below, so I’ll stop yakkin’ and let you get to it.
For the record, the conversation includes a brief Q&A in the editing suite, which then moved outside to the courtyard, where we listened to the tortured bleating of Henson employees still outraged over their recent sale to Disney.
The first question I got on my recorder pertained to the f/x houses involved.
Digital Dimension is doing a lot. They’re doing a lot of the “ashings”, which are way, way more sophisticated than they were on the second film. And there’s different kinds of “ashings”, too, because there’s different kinds of weapons. So, they’re doing a bunch. There’s probably, like, a hundred ashings. Giant Killer Robot... they’re doing a bunch of stuff. They’re doing CG stuff, and transformation stuff, because the main villain turns into a sort of beast creature at the end. They’re doing some vampire dogs. Who else are we using? Amalgamated Pixels. I don’t know… about nine different vendors.
How many f/x shots are there?
400? I don’t know. It may be 450 by the time we’re done. It keeps going up.
Goyer then moved on to talk about his crew.
On the crew, there was a good combination of seasoned people, and I took chances on newer people, like my wardrobe designer, who did REQUIEM FOR A DREAM. I have a sort of indie prejudice. So, there are a lot of people like that that I gave shots to. My production designer hadn’t been a production designer on a lot of stuff – he’d done a lot of Fincher commercials – but he was Art Director on FIGHT CLUB and Supervising Director on MINORITY REPORT. So, he stepped up, and he’s a genius.
What about the cast?
Well, yeah. Parker Posey is in it, and John Michael Higgins from BEST IN SHOW and A MIGHTY WIND. We’ve got Natasha Lyonne and Patton Oswalt in it. I’m trying to think of other indie people… Eric Bogosian.
Who does he play?
You’ll see a little snippet of him. And then we’ve got people like Triple H, who I loved. I was, to be honest, resistant to him. It was New Line’s idea. I met with him, and I was really skeptical. *Really* skeptical. But not only did he do a great job, he’s a super cool guy. I loved him, loved him, loved him, loved him. Loved him so much, I wrote more stuff for him in the movie. He ended up having very good comedic timing; he was very good at making fun of himself. He got it. He totally got it, and understands how to make the transition.
Who does he play?
There are sort of five bigger vampires in the film. Parker Posey is the leader of the vampires, so she’s one of the two big villains. There’s another villain who’s sort of resurrected, and he’s King of the Vampires, but she’s the Stephen Dorff of this movie. And Triple H plays her bodyguard. And then there’s another guy named Callum Keith Rennie. Some people know who he is; he was in MEMENTO, and he plays one of the other vampires. He’s a really good actor.
The score is going to be co-written by Terence Blanchard, who does a lot of Spike Lee stuff, and RZA. They’re doing it together. They’re not actually swapping scenes; they’re writing together. We showed the rough cut to them last week. There’s a lot of temp music in there, and… some of the kind of house stuff that’s been in the last two films. And RZA said, “This sounds a little too British. We need to bring it back home a little.”
The plot is… Blade and Whistler, at the beginning of the movie, are doing what they do. The Vampires are doing two things: a) they’ve been looking for the progenitor of the vampire race, who’s Dracula, but he’s 70,000 years old, and the whole idea is that Dracula is just this tiny piece of the jigsaw puzzle that Stoker happened to hear about. So, he’s got many names, and Dracula is only one of them. We actually refer to him as Drake in the film. And at the beginning of the film… the movie opens in a rock, which used to be Sumerian or Mesopotamian. The whole idea is that Dracula, or Drake, was also the genesis of Dagon, the Sumerian god, even some of the Lovecraft stuff. He’s sort of like the “Patient Zero” of evil. He’s been at the beginning of all of these myths. Imaginative Forces, who did all of the Precog stuff in MINORITY REPORT, they’re helping me with a sequence in the middle of the film where we sort of walk through history. And the idea is that all of these symbols related to Drake have permeated our culture. Anyway, the vampires are looking for him because he’s dormant and he’s a Daywalker. The idea is that all of the vampires are Daywalkers, and eventually they lost that ability because, they think they’re pure, but they crossbred with humans. That’s one of the reveals. So, they’re looking for him, but at the same time they’ve decided to “out” Blade, and wage this PR campaign. So what they’ve done is frame him. In this movie… this movie is the one that’s most set in the real world, so the FBI and the local cops are after Blade, too. People talk about Blade in the Weekly World News, and stuff like that, because nobody believes in Vampires. They just think Blade is a psychopath running around killing people, because when he kills a vampire, it doesn’t leave a body, just ash. So, that plot’s sort of going on in the first act of the film. What’s happening is that Vampires have managed to turn everything around and shift the paradigm. And Blade and Whistler are getting fucked *bad*. It becomes apparent that Blade and Whistler are forced to go on the defensive so much that they need reinforcements, and the reinforcements are the Nightstalkers, which is sort of Whistler’s contingency plan that he’s been training on the side. This group of Vampire hunters, with his daughter, and it’s not as complicated as some people think in terms of who his daughter is. To kind of help pick up the slack, when they are introduced in the movie, Blade is extremely resistant to (their help). There’s this whole generational thing, because they’re younger and their methods are totally different than Blade’s. He’s very antagonistic toward them, and they are antagonistic towards him, but they’re forced to team up. Jessica Biel, Ryan Reynolds, Patton Oswalt (absolutely resplendent in his FANTASTIC FOUR t-shirt), Natasha Lyonne and a couple of others – there’s about six of them – are the Nightstalkers. And if it’s successful, we made a deal with all of them to do a Nightstalkers spin-off as well. Jessica and Ryan, in particular, ended up being amazing. Ryan, when I first met with him, I thought he was funny, but he needed to be credible as an action star, and they both trained for about six months, I’m not joking, six days a week, three hours a day lifting weights and fighting. I know everyone always says they did their own stunts on this film, but the only stunts that both of them didn’t do was when we threw them through glass. When we threw them through glass, we didn’t want to risk cutting them. In fact, almost every time we did throw their stunt doubles through glass, we ended up cutting the stunt doubles, and they had to go get stitches. But every single ounce of fighting in the film, they did. I know I’ve seen some stuff on the web… like, “How are these guys going to be credible?” When people see it, they won’t even question if it’s credible. Ryan put on twenty-four pounds of muscle. You’ll see. He’s unrecognizable. Jessie lost weight, and basically looks like Linda Hamilton in T2. They were both amazing. And then Dominic Purcell, who plays the king vampire, trained for this sword fight at the end of the film, and it’s all him.
Apple giving up the swag?
They were amazingly stingy. They didn’t give us anything. There’s two other Apple scenes; they gave us the equipment… to use, and then if we wanted, we could buy it for 60% off.
With the Nightstalkers, it seems like you’ve got vampire hunting as an extreme sport.
Yeah. There’s a bunch more weapons, and things like that. Patton Oswalt plays this sort of weapons designer in the film. I figured this is the third permutation of these films, and in the wake of all of this, there’s been ANGEL and UNDERWORLD and things like that. This movie takes into account the fact that over the last decade these kinds of films and television shows have permeated the public consciousness. BLADE was one of the films that started it, so I wanted to look back on all of it with that knowledge in place.
What does Natasha Lyonne do in this movie?
The idea is that the Vampires want to use Drake’s blood so that they can all become Daywalkers, and Natasha Lyonne plays a biochemist in the film, and… they’ve decided that… the whole big rift between Blade and the Nightstalkers is that the Nightstalkers point is that killing Vampires piecemeal is totally ineffective. You just can’t kill them one-by-one; you have to do something bigger. So, they’re developing a biological weapon that will only kill vampires, and the way that they’ll do it is they’ll release it – it’s a virus, and they’ll release it into the human world, and it’s dormant in humans, but it’ll destroy their food supply. It sort of encodes to vampire DNA. And the reason why it’s been ineffective up until now because the vampire DNA is so spotty and hodgepodge and fucked up with each successive mutation. And then, when Drake shows up on the scene, they’re like, “Oh my god, we’ve got the guy who’s got the pure DNA strand.” So, the irony is the vampires need his blood, and the Nightstalkers need his blood. And they’re trying to get a blood sample from Drake, so they can interfuse it with the virus. It’s called the Plague Era. We didn’t show any of these scenes, but Abigail is an archer in the movie, so she loads up with that. And what happens is, the vampires eventually track down where Blade and the Nightstalkers are, and slaughter a ton of people, and destroy all of the virus, but there’s a tiny bit of it (left). The Nightstalkers operate like Al Qaeda; they’ve got sleeper cells, and they’ve got other hideouts and stuff. So, when a bunch of them get killed in the third act, a couple of new ones show up and there’s another hideout, and you realize that Whistler’s been training them to adopt these new methods. Some of these characters would show up in a Nightstalkers movie as well. They’ve got a little bit of the virus, and they’ve basically only got enough for one shot.
Did you have any reticence with using Dracula as a character in this film?
I went back and forth, but it’s twofold: a) Blade comes from the TOMB OF DRACULA comics, and if you’re going to do a third film – the second film was, “What are we going to do with a bigger threat?” So, I hit upon the idea of doing THE DIRTY DOZEN, where he’s got to team up with the vampires. But if he’s got to team up with the vampires, there has to be something bigger than the vampires, so that’s how I came up with the idea of the Reapers. But you couldn’t just do the Reapers again, because we’ve already done it. So, it seemed like the obvious way to go was to have Blade go up against Dracula, since he’s the granddaddy of vampires. But by doing that, hopefully, with scenes like in that goth shop, and stuff like that, we’re very self-consciously playing on, “What does Dracula mean, and where does all of that come from?”
I mean, I had a little bit of reticence, but ultimately it just seemed like the right way to go. Originally… we had this idea of doing the third film set in the future, much more of an I AM LEGEND scenario, where you were going to actually have it take place forty years in the future, since Blade is half-vampire and doesn’t age as fast. They’ve shifted the paradigm; humans are in concentration camps, and they’ve put these particulates in the air, so there’s only two hours of sunlight a day. That was all really cool, but then I felt like part of the fun with BLADE is the fact that it’s set in the real world. So… I changed my mind.
On the last two films, you were writing for different directors. What did you write… for yourself, knowing that you were going to direct it this time?
One of the things that I did was that I put scenes in this movie that were either cut out of the first two films. Sometimes, they were cut out before we shot them, and sometimes we actually… there’s one scene that is on the DVD of the first BLADE in the deleted scenes. It’s this lame, lame, lame scene that… wasn’t how I envisioned it at all, and I just decided that I was going to do that in this film. When I first started writing the script, I wasn’t necessarily going to direct it. I was going to do something else for New Line, but then Lynn Harris, one of the producers, suggested that I do it.
What scenes from the first film are you putting in this one?
One is… I got a lot of shit in the first film, because there’s a scene where Stephen Dorff says, “We’re all going to be vampires, like every human race. The whole human race is going to be vampires.” A lot of people were saying, “If they’re all going to be vampires, what are they going to feed on?” And we had a scene… N’Bushe Wright in the first film *says* that to Stephen Dorff, and he shows her these humans that he’s set up in a kind of coma situation where they basically blood farming them. But when we filmed it, it was just looked lame, so we cut it out of the film. So, I decided to do that scene, but a hundred times bigger. There were only four bodies or something like that, so we kind of did that version of the movie, but there’s literally thousands and thousands of bodies. It’s just really big.
And then there was a ten minute sequence at the beginning of BLADE II that was cut out for budgetary reasons because we went to Prague. We’ve never really used the Charger in any real action sequences, and I always loved that sequence, so I literally took that nine-or-ten page sequence and just went, “Plunk!” And that’s the beginning of this movie. It’s a sequence that was its own thing, so after that machine shop that you saw, it leads to this whole long extended car chase scene where Blade is in the Charger, and there are vampires in cars and on motorcycles. It’s just mayhem, and he’s shooting, and the cars are rolling over and exploding, and … (describes elaborate action sequence).
I’m a big fan of the car chases in THE FRENCH CONNECTION and BULLITT, so it was done very old school. I like it; it’s got this 70’s feel to it. It’s decidedly not Michael Bay.
What have you done in this one that you wanted to see in the previous two films?
One of the things is that… some of Norrington’s offbeat humor in the first film, that humor appeals to me as well. There wasn’t as much of that in the second film, not to take anything away from Guillermo, who’s a dear friend of mine. I thought that was something that we missed in the second film, so that dark, fucked-up sense of humor is in this movie. In a weird way, I thought the first film was edgier in different ways, and this film goes back to that. One thing that I was disappointed with, and it was in the scripts for both movies, was I didn’t feel that there was actually much suspense, or any real scares. I mean, there were a couple. So, I was determined to craft some really suspenseful sequences. There’s four or five that are just good, old fashioned suspense.
It also feels more like a comic book.
I know more about comic books than Norrington or Guillermo. Guillermo knows a lot, but… the challenge is not making it so internal that only comic book audiences get it. I think we had a nice balance.
Can you talk about the different powers that the vampires have? And the stunts?
Vampires, with the exception of Drake. My whole reasoning was, because he’s the progenitor of the vampires, he’s got some abilities they don’t have – being able to go out into sunlight and shapeshift. I took that from the Stoker stuff. Actually, there’s a scene where he talks about Bram Stoker, and how Stoker basically gave him a lot of bad PR. He derisively refers to it as “Stoker’s Little Fable”. So, he has new powers; the rest of the vampires don’t have new powers, per se. We changed… the way that they die and ash, and things like that. Even simple things, like in the first film, there was only one layer when they ashed. In the second film, we had two layers, and then we built the skeleton underneath. In this one, for all of the ashings, there’s four layers: there’s skin, then there’s sort of two layers of organs, and then there’s the skeleton, so that there’s a lot more interactivity. We’ve got slow motion ashing; for instance, there’s this shot where Blade stakes a woman and then kicks her so she spins. And as she’s ashing, she spins, so she’s got this dust devil sort of (look). There’s just a lot more interactivity in terms of the way they go down. If a guy gets… staked in the head, he’ll start to ash from the head first. There’s a scene where somebody gets staked in the head, and then Blade kicks him in the head, and sort of kicks his head off, but the rest of the body is still ashing. I mean, a) special effects have gotten more sophisticated, but b) it just occurred to me, as we were watching the other movies, that there was a lot more fun we could have in terms of the visual effects. One of the reasons that you didn’t see a ton of Wesley action… I showed Abigail’s thing, where we had four vampires ashing there, but there’s, like, three major action sequences with Wesley and the vampires where he’s ashing thirty, forty, fifty vampires, and it’s just too dry without (the finished f/x). Even I can barely stand to watch it right now. I mean, we’ve been seeing the film-outs from Digital Demensions’ tests, and they look really cool. And they’re way above what we did in the other film.
When you were writing when you came up with this, or was this something where you were watching different stunts being done… ?
It more evolved that way. I knew that there were different things that we wanted to do. As we would do the stunts, we would say, “Oh, that’s interesting. We could do that, or that, or that.” There’s another vampire that’s leaning up against a grating when he gets ashed, and sort of Wile E. Coyote, all of the ashes go through the grating as they lose mass. We had a lot of fun with that. I can’t remember how many ashings there are, but there are over 100, and we tried to make every single one have its own little story.
Who was the stunt coordinator?
We had two. Clay Fontenot, who was Wesley’s stunt double on all three films, he stepped up, and then Eddie Perez, who’s a friend of mine, and was stunt coordinator for THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN, and was a stuntman on BLADE I and BLADE II. Eddie’s been sort of coming up, doing a lot of television shows. He did my movie ZIGZAG, and I recommended him to Norrington on LEAGUE. Even though (LXG) is sort of truncated and fucked up, Eddie did a good job on that. Our fight choreographer was a guy named Chuck Jeffries who worked on the first one, he worked on SPIDER-MAN. He’s worked on a ton of stuff.
You’re developing ownership of this franchise, even though it’s a Marvel franchise. How much of it is coming from you?
Even with the first one, a lot of it was me. Even if you know from the comic books… I mean, Blade didn’t even use a sword. He used mahogany daggers, and things like that. He wasn’t really a samurai, or anything like that. And Deacon Frost was literally a church deacon in the south; he looked kind of like Colonel Sanders. And Blade wasn’t initially even a hybrid; he didn’t have to feed and all of that stuff. And Whistler didn’t exist either. It took a while for the first BLADE to get made, and Marvel decided they liked the Whistler character so much, when Blade guest starred on the Spider-Man cartoon, they put Whistler on the cartoon, and the movie hadn’t come out yet. There was actually a legal thing between New Line and Marvel, because New Line went, “Hey, you guys don’t own that character. Goyer created that character.” It’s funny, in the first movie, it says the characters of Blade and Deacon Frost created by (Gene Colan and Marv Wolfman), because everything else was stuff that I had done. But I was the one that argued that Wolfman and Colan should have credit in the first place. Marvel wasn’t going to give them credit, and I said, “Why don’t you give them credit?” I got on the line with New Line’s Business Affairs. The funny thing is, they said okay, but then we got some call from Marv Wolfman’s people, who said that just he should get credit, not Gene Colan. I was like, “C’mon!” I was surprised by that. I said, “Fuck that, he’s going to get credit, too.”
One of the reasons Wesley loves the role is that he gets to use real martial arts. What did you learn from staging martial arts?
A couple of things: a) I decided to do less wire-fu in this film. The reason was, I just felt that it’s been done to death. I, like a lot of people, was disappointed in THE MATRIX sequels. Not only do I think that the wire-fu itself has been done to death, because it shows up in… I mean, I was watching CHARMED last year, and they had some of the characters (doing wire-fu). We’ve just seen people run up walls… a million times. I feel like, when we first did it in ’98, it was kind of new and fresh; THE MATRIX hadn’t come out. So, I felt that’s been done to death. There were a lot of great effects in THE MATRIX sequels, but I felt, particularly with the Agent Smith fights, it just seems like a video game. I started to feel like visual effects, in some degree, have become so sophisticated that you do all of these amazing shots that a regular camera could never do, but the problem is I think on a subtle level it takes you out of it because it doesn’t feel as real. So, I decided to do less of that, and try to do more stuff practically. In terms of the stunts, we have stunts that are augmented by CG, but I don’t think there’s a single stunt that is CG in the film, which is different than BLADE II. I think some of those CG shots worked really well, but some of them looked like “rubber man”, like some of the bad stuff in SPIDER-MAN. So, my approach ended up being the same thing that Chris (Nolan) is doing in BATMAN, which is much more old school compositing, and using CG to blend shots. But if we’ve got somebody jumping forty feet, we shot all of the elements practically with real stuntmen. Some of them are very sophisticated composites that involve ten, even twenty elements, but the approach is much more BLADE RUNNER, where all of the elements of the shot are real, but we’ll use CG to meld them together.
In terms of the martial arts, I knew that Abigail and King had to have different fighting styles than Blade; they had to have their own, unique fighting style. And King and Abigail have a different style from each other. What we would do is start working on that with the stunt choreographer, developing their own style. Then what we would do is… the fight choreographer would come up with ideas, and videotape them with stunt people. And we’d develop a system where I would, on a rehearsal stage, shoot the fight scenes north, south, east and west, which just meant set up the videocamera in all four different directions, show me what you propose, and then my DP and I would look at the videotapes, criticize…, and then use that to help us guide how we’re going to shoot it. Then what we would do is… basically, with every fight, we would shoot two wide masters. Because (Gabriel Beristain) and I used a shitload of cameras. We never shot with less than four, even with dramatic scenes, and all the action we shot with seven, or eight, or nine cameras. What I mean by “master” is that we would shoot the fight scene from this side (indicating his left hand) with seven or eight cameras, and just everything but the kitchen sink, and then we would shoot from that side (indicating right hand) with seven or eight cameras. And then he and I would look at playback for like an hour, and then decide, “Okay, now, let’s bring in the Technocrane for *this* moment. Now, let’s go in for *this* insert.” And then if it were ashings, we did most of the ashings with motion control. But motion control is so time consuming that we literally brought in five motion control rigs and crews, and we’d shoot with five motion control crews at the same time. So, we could get the ashings from five different angles in motion control. It was crazy. So, we would do that, and leave and move on, and then second unit would do cleanup. Their cleanup involved wire-pulls, because wire-pulls are so time consuming. And by “wire-pull” I mean if somebody punches somebody and they fly back twenty feet. Usually, second unit would clean up the wire-pull, and then they would clean up any inserts that we needed. So, we would make a list as we went along. “Okay, the sword goes into his side. Second unit will do that.”
How many days did you have to shoot this stuff?
We shot eighty-seven days main unit, and forty-one days second unit. And second unit was usually running along a day or two behind us. At one point we had four different stages going, so we would schedule it so that we would rotate over to this stage, and second unit would come behind us and clean it up. And I would bop back and forth.
This was all in Vancouver?
This was all in Vancouver.
Did Avi or Feige say anything to you about crossing the street with the BATMAN movie? Did you get shit for that?
Yeah, they did. Originally, they wanted me to do NICK FURY at Dreamworks, and, then, the whole BATMAN thing happened. I called Avi, and I said, “Listen, they’ve offered me BATMAN. Ever since I was a little kid, I told my mom that I want to go to Hollywood and make a BATMAN movie. I’ve got to do it.” And Avi said, “No, you have to do it.”
So, they were okay with it?
They were totally okay with it.
When you cast Ryan Reynolds, he wasn’t completely bulked up. I know he’s a pretty tall guy—
He’s six-two.
Were you just going on a leap of faith that he’d end up having this kind of presence that would equal Wesley’s?
I trust my judgment in casting. I knew he could pull off the humor. He came in and did an audition. He was really funny. Then, we had a long talk. We went out for a couple of beers, and we talked, because he’s a spaz. Physically, a spaz. And he’ll tell you the same thing. His first rehearsal with the choreographers was kind of a disaster because he’s a spaz. But he learned, and he was super committed. And I said, “As long as you’re really committed, and willing to do it.” And before I pulled the trigger on it, I had to meet with the trainers, and say, “What do you think. Do you think you can turn him into a superhero? Do you think his body can take it? Do you think he’s got the mindset to do this G.I. Joe training?” And they said, “Yeah, he totally does.” I should’ve shown you his fight scene with Triple H. He fights Triple H in the movie, and he’s fucking amazing. I mean, like, *really* amazing. It’s not just a little mamby-pamby fight; it goes on for, like, five minutes. He’s really good in it.
Click Here To Goto Part Two of Beaks' trip!
