Interviews
[San Diego Comic-Con ’12] [Video] ‘Elysium’ Blows Lid Off Con, Sony Panel Recap, Interviews!
On Friday the 13th Sony Pictures took to Hall H to share three upcoming titles with San Diego Comic-Con attendees – one of which blew the roof off the place.
Stars Matt Damon (pictured) and Jodie Foster joined director Neill Blomkamp and producer Simon Kinberg on stage to share the insanely gory first footage from Elysium. Inside you’ll find Evan Dickson’s report from the panel alongside video interviews with all four attendees!
The panel also focused on two other genre titles, the forthcoming Len Wiseman-directed Total Recall (in theaters August 3) and Rian Johnson’s insane time travel thriller Looper (September 28), starring Bruce Willis, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Emily Blunt.
Dickson recaps the footage and panel presentation inside.
TOTAL RECALL
Next up Len Wiseman took the stage to introduce Total Recall. Colin Farrell, Kate Beckinsale, Jessica Biel and Brian Cranston accompanied him shortly thereafter and they pretty much immediately launched into an extended 6 minute trailer for the film.
Now, I’ve been extremely hard on the early trailers for the film. I think it looks like a completely neutered version of the original, with all of the satire and edgy violence removed. The footage I saw was actually something of an improvement. I was a little impressed with the scope of what Wiseman is trying to pull off and admired some shots and some of the action. That’s really what this chunk of footage featured more than the existing trailers. Action. I actually caught myself thinking that I might even like this movie on some level, and I might like it a lot more if it didn’t have the Total Recall title and story. There was some cool stuff that looked like it could have been thrilling in a different setting. But for every new beat, there was a callback to the original. The three-breasted woman is there – though I’m not sure where she got the extra breast from if there’s no Mars mutants in the movie. It also looks like, due to the PG13 rating, she will only be seen from the cleavage up. There’s also a callback to the “3 days” customs bit from the original, but it only served to remind me that this was a remake and diminished whatever enthusiasm I had for the footage,
All in all – Total Recall looks like it could be a slick and entertaining ride. But it also looks like something of an empty cash grab. Devoid of anything new to say.
LOOPER and ELYSIUM
The emptiness of Total Recall as a sci-fi film was easily illustrated by the next two panels on the docket. While there isn’t much in that way of horror as far as Looper is concerned, it does look like a truly original take on time travel. Thoughtful, action packed and full of rich character work – this is the kind of sci-fi film many of us have been dying for since Inception.
Something that definitely falls under the categories of “bloody” and “disgusting” is Elysium. Director Neill Blomkamp was brought onstage to introduce the footage – which had never been seen before. We were warned that it had very rough pre-viz level effects but – except for a few glaring examples regarding space travel – a lot of the effects work seemed finished.
The footage established Earth in the year 2154. A barren, global ghetto marred by disease, overpopulation and crushing poverty. The rich people built their own planet-like space station – Elysium – years ago and there they exist in utter opulence and luxury. Free of disease and free of worry.
Damon’s character is an ex-con who gets radiation poisoning at work and knows he will die in 5 days if he doesn’t do something about it. He knows that the only way he can be cured will be to somehow get into the heavily guarded Elysium. In order to get there, he agrees to complete a mission that involves stealing the memory of a character played by the great William Fichtner. Getting geared up for this mission means a nasty piece of bone-saw surgery into Damon’s skull (apparently without pain killers) where a highly intrusive device is implanted that will enable him to download Fichtner’s brain.
Along for the ride is an almost unrecognizable Sharlto Copley (the “hero” from District 9), who looks sort of like a homeless ninja. He literally has throwing stars that make people explode in a gory, gooey and messy fashion. We only got a few glimpses of Jodie Foster’s character, a severe but mysterious looking woman that didn’t appear to be too far off from something that Tilda Swinton might play.
All in all, the movie looks super violent, not unlike early Paul Verhoeven stuff like RoboCop and the original Total Recall. It also has some nice commentary about the haves and the have-nots – sort of an uber-extrapolation of the 99% vs the 1% concept. Matt Damon, Jodie Foster and producer Simon Kinberg came out for the panel where they basically sang the praises of Blomkamp and declared that they would have done the film script unseen because of District 9 alone. Oh, and Jodie Foster declared that her favorite movie of all time is Team America: World Police. Not a bad choice!
VIDEO INTERVIEWS WITH THE CAST AND CREW OF ELYSIUM
Interviews
‘Rubberhead’ Director Nick Taylor on FX Maverick Steve Johnson, Practical Effects, and Seven-Year Journey
Horror journalist, producer, and podcast host Nick Taylor moves into the director’s seat for his feature debut with illuminating documentary Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson.
It chronicles the wild life and career of SFX maverick Steve Johnson, based on the multi-volume book series Rubberhead: Sex, Drugs and Special FX, and those familiar likely already know Rubberhead isn’t your standard horror documentary.
Johnson is responsible for so many memorable movie monsters, having worked on Fright Night, Poltergeist II, An American Werewolf in London, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Night of the Demons, to name a few. He’s also extremely candid in ways that feel atypical in this industry, open about his failures as much as his successes.
“It was a natural progression for sure,” Nick Taylor tells Bloody Disgusting of his transition into filmmaking ahead of Rubberhead‘s world premiere next week at the Fantasia Film Festival on July 23. “I think with my podcast, I got adept at interviewing people and pulling creative lessons out of them, which was the point of my podcast. I wanted this movie to be sort of a creativity pill for artists where if they’re starting a project or feel creatively stuck, they could watch this movie and be inspired and get actual practical creative lessons.”
Taylor’s background in PR and marketing also organically led him down this path.
He charts the course from book promo to documentary director: “But also Bloody Disgusting had a lot to do with this movie because in the very beginning when I first met Steve, I was helping him promote his book and I said, ‘Hey, I got a marketing background and a journalism background. Let me help you promote this book. I’ll just pitch stories from your life to the media, and we’ll see what happens.’ And John Squires wrote an article about Steve making Slimer under the influence of tons and tons of cocaine, and that went fairly viral.”
“For a week, it was story time with Steve,” Taylor continues. “He would tell me a story from his life, and every story was about a major movie, a major director, lots of drugs and alcohol and insanity. I would write them up, and I think John published about three or four of them. So huge shout out to John Squires because that was really great. So yeah, there were definitely a lot of outgrowths of my journalism background that definitely contributed to this movie.”
Rubberhead condenses the multi-book series into a cohesive feature film with a breezy runtime, sparking the obvious question as to how Taylor approached condensing Johnson’s life down to an under 2-hour documentary film.
“That was one of the more difficult parts of all of this, because we had enough for a series or an epically long six-hour fan documentary,” he answers. “But from day one, I did not want to make a fan documentary. I love them. They’re a lot of fun, but I did want the movie to stand on its own two feet as a character-driven portrait of an artist and a time period and a technology, that being practical effects. I did want to be objective. I didn’t want to make this too long. I wanted to make it re-watchable. So I think we just really had to focus on what the narratives were that we wanted to tell. So there were some basically almost cliché archetypical mythic narratives present in Steve’s life. We could have made this way longer, but we wanted to keep it short. But luckily that’s why you have special features.”
Johnson quickly proves to be an engaging subject thanks to his self-effacing wit and frank self-reflections; expect no shortage of stories about how drugs factored into the height of his career or the failures it wrought.
That rare quality was an asset for Rubberhead, Taylor confirms. “He does not shy away from anything about the drugs, the addiction, the bridges burned, the mistakes made, the lessons learned. He just is honest about all of it. He’s had a lot of time for reflection, and he’s done a lot of reflection, so he doesn’t shy away from any of it, which is huge because it’s very refreshing. I don’t think a lot of people are that way, at least in this industry from what I can see. So I think it was hugely beneficial. We wanted to lean into that, and we wanted to make this sort of a gonzo Hunter S. Thompson sort of wild tale through Steve’s overall life.“
Condensing his life into this doc was a slow and steady process for Taylor, too. “It’s been almost seven years. It’s been a labor of love. We’ve been as indie as it gets. We would shoot what we could when we could, and then we would edit when we could. Then after a while it all came together.”
In a way, making Rubberhead brings Taylor’s horror fandom full circle. It turns out that the very film that sparked his interest in the genre and practical effects also comes with an amusing Steve Johnson anecdote.
Taylor explains, “My gateway for sure was Beetlejuice. I saw that at a very young age; I think I was four or five. I felt somebody had shown me, my soul. I get a little emotional thinking about it. There was something about that movie that felt so strange and unusual, but also felt so familiar. It was spooky, but it was fun, and it was lighthearted, and it had humor, but it also had this macabre celebration to it that I just really got into as a kid. I felt somebody had shown me my own soul. And funny story, Steve got fired from Beetlejuice because Tim Burton gave him his hand-drawn designs and Steve’s like, ‘Oh my God, these look like kids did them. This is not what you want. I know what you want. I’m going to redesign these for you.’ And Tim Burton was like, ‘Yeah, no, you’re not.’ So yeah, funny story.”
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