"Blade Trinity" Writer-Director David Goyer is in Australia to promote the film. He caught up with Clint Morris to talk about it, as well as have a bit of a chinwag about his writing duties on "Batman Begins", his plans for "The Flash" (which he kindly asked Clint not to reveal until today, when the news hit the trades that he would indeed be doing it) and why he thinks The Rock is all wrong for "Thor".
I’d first like to thank you for two things. The first, "Zig-Zag". That was such a frickin great movie.
Thanks. I’d love to do more stuff like that; obviously the studios aren’t lining up to have me do that. It’s a slow burn; it kinda catches you off guard by the end. I love that movie, I’m definitely going to go back and do some other independent films – at some point.
Sam Jones III was great, wasn’t he?
He’s amazing. Totally under-utilised.
Why did he leave "Smallville"?
His character didn’t have enough to do on the show. He wasn’t happy – he wanted to be let go.
Would you think about using Sam for something in the future?
Yeah. He was actually going to play one the little skate-punk vampires in Blade Trinity but Smallville completely fucked us. He was scheduled to do it, but literally the day before, they changed the schedule on us. I’ll use him again in something, it’s just a question of finding out what. (at this point, Goyer clicks his fingers. He’s thought of a part for Sam. Off the record, he fills me in). I just thought of what I could use him in, probably my next project.
Talking of forthcoming projects, you’re directing "The Flash"?
Yep, they’re going to announce the Flash tomorrow (in the trades), which is Friday. They look after Batman, Warner Bros, and they came to me and said ‘You did a great job on Batman, the next big one we want to get up and running is The Flash or Green Lantern – are you interested?’. I said I would love to do The Flash. I think there’s a lot of cinematic possibilities that nobodies ever done. I’m interested in really pushing it, and dealing with relativity, so near the end of the story he’s going to be like arriving before he left, and all sorts of weird and cute little stuff.
Is it going to be a light film in terms of tone?
It’s going to be a lot lighter than Batman or Blade. We’re going to use Wally West. It’ll be more like Spider-Man in tone.
Who’s the star?
There’s nobody yet, I’m just writing it, but I would love to have Ryan [Reynolds] play Wally West.
The second thing I need to thank you for is writing a great Batman movie. The script is great!
Thanks! Now that the teasers are coming out, people are start to realise this is different (from the previous Batman movies). Wait till the big proper trailer hits in three months or so, because we’ve just been teasing up till now. Before I even started writing, I sat down with Chris and we said how cool it would be to have the first couple of teasers fool audiences into not knowing they were watching a Batman teaser until later on – which is what Chris has ended up doing. I think that’s so cool.
Batman doesn’t actually appear in the movie until half way through, right?
In costume? Yeah. I don’t think Superman appeared in costume until about forty five minutes into the first movie, same with Spider-Man. I loved the second Spider-Man movie, more so than the first, but my favourite stuff in the first film is the first forty-five minutes, before he puts on the suit. Tobey Maguire is just so great. My argument with Warner Bros was that if we can have people invest in Bruce Wayne, as a character, they won’t care, but when he does put on the suit – they will care more. That’s what our purpose was. We didn’t want to just be marking time. Remember that photograph of JFK junior at the burial of JFK? Saluting? We were thinking of Bruce Wayne as a young kid. Bruce Wayne was the loneliest boy in the world because he lost both his parents and he’s the heir of this multi-billion dollar fortune, and he’s got all these people surrounding him, he’s almost like a prisoner of Wayne Manor. His childhood was spent terribly, terribly lonely. So much of his life has been filled with fear too – fear of failure, ultimately fearing to live up to his father, because his father was sort of an impossible guy to live up to. He has all these fears about letting his father down in terms of Wayne Industries, and what we’ve tried to do in the new Batman movies is tie the Waynes into the history of Gotham, and his father tries to instil in him a sense of stewardship for Gotham, a sort of responsibility.
How long did it take you to write "Batman Begins"?
I had six or seven weeks. What happened was, Chris called me and I was already in pre-production on Blade, and he said ‘Can you do this film’?, I had been waiting all my life for this call, but I said ‘I can’t, I don’t have time’. So anyway I told him I have seven weeks until I have to be on the set of Blade, and that I had enough time to do like a draft and a half. ‘After the seven weeks, I’ll hand it over to you’ I said to him.
Where do you see the "Blade" franchise going on from here?
Overseas [Blade Trinity] it's doing the best of the three. In the states, it’s doing about as well as the first one and not as well as the second one. The thing that’s hard though is that the first two films didn’t open up against anything – we opened up against a movie [Oceans Eleven] that had the biggest ad campaign ever. Literally, they spent more money on Ocean’s Twelve then they did in the history of film. Over the five years, we did $25 million, I think it’s unrealistic to think we were going to do more than that up against Oceans Twelve. They're [New Line] happy with it, but they’re really happy with how well it’s doing overseas. It bet Oceans Twelve in Britain; it looks like it’ll even do double what the second one did there. In all the countries its opened up overseas so far, its opened up ahead of Blade 2. In terms of the future of the franchise, I mean, it’s getting harder and harder to get Wesley [Snipes] to do these movies.
Why though? He needs them. The crap he’s doing – "Unstoppable" and so on?
I don’t know. I think you can track Wesley’s investment in the Blade movies by how much he wears his sunglasses in the films. I’m being serious, someone should go and look at the three movies and see how much he wears his sunglasses. The first Blade he only wears his sunglasses about half the time, the second one he wears his sunglasses a lot, third one there’s only two scenes where he doesn’t wear his sunglasses. It’s a shame. We got in huge arguments on this movie about whether or not he’d wear sunglasses. One of my favourite scenes in the movie is where he’s being interrogated in the police station – by John Michael Higgins – and he hasn’t got his glasses on. We remember what a good actor is. But when hes got his sunglasses on, I don’t think you’re as connected to him. He wanted to wear sunglasses in the interrogation scene. I told him ‘Police aren’t going to let you wear sunglasses in the Interrogation’. I won that argument, but he just refused to take his sunglasses off, and Guillermo [del Toro] had a number of similar arguments with him on the second film. It’s unfortunate because he’s a really great actor.
Snipes didn’t do it for me at all in this one. I felt that whenever Biel and Reynolds weren’t on the screen – the movie dipped
Reynolds is going to be a giant movie star; this is going to be the movie that’s going to be his breakout movie. This is the one where everyone’s going to sit up and take notice. You can just sort of see it happening on screen. Here’s the thing – I don’t think Wesley seems that present to me in the second film either. In the first one, he seems very present, but he just doesn’t seem really there in the last two. I don’t know whether it’s just harder to do it again but I think it’s more evident in this film because there are other people he’s playing against. In contrast, what he’s doing doesn’t seem to pop anymore. In the second film he didn’t really have anyone in the movie with him, but he did have a couple of scenes with Ron Perlman, and they were the best scenes in the movie. The other people in that movie, were just ciphers and they weren’t competing with him for any of that screen presence, but Ryan all but steals the movie from under him [in this one]. It’s not that he’s trying to do it, he’s just running circles around him.
Can I get an update on Thor?
It’s something I’ve been talking about doing with Marvel and Avi [Arad]. That was always a personal favourite of mine in that world.And I’ve been talking about doing it, but nothing’s been set in stone just yet.
I can’t think of who would make a good Thor. The Rock, perhaps?
Oh I wouldn’t do The Rock. Here’s my point: Ryan put on twenty to twenty-two pounds for this movie, I’m not saying Thor will be Ryan Reynolds, but he’s [Ryan] a big guy in it – he’s massive, I’d rather take an actor [Like Reynolds] and pack on the muscle and have him be Thor, rather than have someone that comes out of wrestling.