Movies
TV: ‘Walking Dead’ Creator Robert Kirkman Talks TV Adaptation
Last month is was finally announced that the brilliant Frank Darabont (“The Shawshank Redemption,” “The Mist”) would be sinking his teeth into “The Walking Dead,” Robert Kirkman’s long-running comic book series about life after the zombie invasion. It was revealed that Kirkman’s tale would unfold on television thanks to AMC. Immediately some concern flared up that there wouldn’t be any gore, but Kirkman believes otherwise. Check out a recent interview with him from MTV.
“When I heard that Darabont was interested in doing it a long, long time ago, I was just ecstatic. For me, “The Walking Dead” is not necessarily a horror thing. It’s not all about the shocks. It’s about characters and all of that dramatic nonsense. And Darabont does that better than anybody,” Kirkman tells MTV. “I’m excited that there is a television show, and I’m excited that Darabont is involved–and one of the big reasons for that is that I trust him. I don’t need to look over his shoulder.” He continues, “Frank understands the material 100 percent. It’s always been shocking to me, doing Hollywood meetings over the years, just how easy it is for someone to come in to the meeting and say something like, “We want the zombies to have super powers.” Knowing that, I’m really excited about it, because from my discussions with Frank, he likes the right things about “Walking Dead.””
Answering many questions from rabid fans, Kirkman reveals that he’d like Drabont to bring his own elements to the story. “I’ve told Frank flat-out that I do not want him to follow the comic to the detriment of the show. I encourage him to veer off if he has something that will work really well on TV that wouldn’t work in a comic. I don’t want people who enjoy the comic to be watching the TV show and going, “Oh, this is leading to that one thing I already know about from the comic.”
More importantly is the blood and guts of the series, which Kirman feels will still have an impact in the TV series. “I had no concerns about that whatsoever, because one of the concerns I have about zombie fiction is when they rely too much on the shocking gore aspects. That’s not really the point of “Walking Dead,” so to a certain extant, I think it will work better at AMC–because it forces people not to rely on that stuff.”
Click the link below for the entire interview.
Barbarian director Zach Cregger is sending Austin Abrams on a nonstop survival roller coaster in Resident Evil, and a fresh image from Empire introduces just one of many monstrous encounters ahead.
Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil opens in theaters and IMAX September 18 from Sony.
Austin Abrams (Weapons) stars as Bryan, a medical courier who unwittingly finds himself in a non-stop race for survival as one fateful, horrifying night collapses around him in chaos.
In the fresh image, Abrams’ character appears trapped with an infected passenger.
“The concept here is that we’re following an idiot,” Cregger tells Empire. “Not that he’s stupid, but he’s not your typical game character, with no combat skills whatsoever and completely inept at survival. Bryan is very much an everyman who happens to be burdened with this kind of sacred mission that’s going to take him into the heart of everything. It’s kind of like Frodo going into Mordor.”
Zach Cherry (“Severance”), Kali Reis (“True Detective: Night Country”), Paul Walter Hauser (“Black Bird”), and Johnno Wilson (“Twisted Metal”) round out the cast.
Cregger directs from a script he co-wrote with Shay Hatten (John Wick: Chapters 3 & 4).
“It feels like one gigantic sequence,” he said of the film’s structure. “Things pop off about five minutes in, and it basically stays like that until the end. What I love about the games is that you move from set-piece to set-piece. Every location has a unique challenge. So again, I’m borrowing from the games directly in that rhythm, where you’re just running through a gauntlet.”
What’s noteworthy about this particular image, though, is that Cregger previously warned that there would be very few actual zombies in his film. Instead, expect a revolving door of T-virus mutants: “This movie doesn’t utilize zombies that much. It’s much more focused on the weird creature stuff than the zombies. There’s really only two scenes, maybe three, where there’s proper zombie stuff going on. And two of those three are in the trailer.”
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