I’m really not on the Scott Derrickson bandwagon, if there is such a thing. The man got a lot of props for his handling of THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE, but that movie didn’t connect with me, and I certainly am not looking forward to his take on THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL. (He did direct one of the 800 HELLRAISER sequels, so I guess it’s admirable that he’s managed to work his way up…) But my opinion don’t matter shite, because the man is embarking on another huge project, this one an adaptation of John Milton’s PARADISE LOST. Derrickson sat down with Sci-Fi Wire and spoke a little about the hellish tale.
“I liked the idea of a big-budget movie about the fall of Lucifer and the war in heaven. That’s interesting; no one’s done that before. But I didn’t think that a script could be done that would still be the true Milton, would feel like Milton. And the writer who did the screenplay, Stu Hazeldine, wrote one of the most brilliant scripts I’ve ever read. And when I read it, I think all of us were kind of blown away at what he had forged out in the screenplay form, and so if I can figure out how to properly visualize that script, it will be something.”
“Warner Brothers and Legendary have enough belief it in that they’re spending some real money on it. All of us are in agreement that, let’s spend this money, let me do some serious artwork and some serious pre-visualization, and then probably shoot some real material, and make sure that we can do this. Because if we did it, we would be trying to do something that was new and that hadn’t been done before, you know? Basically an epic battle movie with non-humans that can fly, and that’s really very exciting and interesting. But you only want to do that if you can do it well. And if I’m not good enough to do it, or technology isn’t up to date enough to do it, well, then it shouldn’t be done.”
Okay, I’m on board with the whole “non-humans that can fly” thing, although it occurs to me that, you know, BIRDS are non-humans that can fly too. But I get what he’s saying, this will be a battle between man and demon, and we can all get behind that. But is Derrickson the right man for the job? Remains to be seen. As skeptical as I am of DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, it isn’t fair to judge it based solely on commercials. C’mon, though. Really…
For the full Sci-Fi Wire interview – where the director mentions he’d like Mickey Rourke to play the Devil – click it HERE.
The earth stands still for Jennifer Connelly
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