At the red carpet for last night’s Spike TV Scream Awards we caught up with Saw (IV-VII) writer/The Collector writer/director Marcus Dunstan and spoke with him about a few of his upcoming projects, including The Outer Limits adaptation that was announced back in August. For those wondering whether the feature-film version of the iconic sci-fi/fantasy/horror TV series would be an anthology a la The Twilight Zone movie, Dunstan seemed to indicate it will actually be a single storyline – albeit one that will contain a virtual cluster-fuck of sci-fi elements.
“We just finished a draft on ‘The Outer Limits’“, said Dunstan. “[It’s] an iconic series that encapsulated all of science fiction. So when you’re making a movie of that, the challenge was, don’t limit it to one element of sci-fi. Somehow embrace the umbrella of it…that was the trick. It took years to come up with the story [emphasis mine] alone. It took another year to write it. So this thing has been tweaked and polished for so long, that it is rock solid.”
As for the sequel to his cult hit The Collector, scheduled to begin shooting this month, Dunstan said fans can expect a bigger budget and a different sensibility from the first film.
“We’re back with a budget that’s four times bigger than the first one“, he told us. “I’ve never seen such creative control handed over to a director before in my life. And I plan on honoring that by going for broke. I know [in] the first film we had a modest scale…this time, we’re telling something different…it’s a different movie, it’s a different beast. And if last time I was grabbing influences from more modern cinema, this time I’m reaching back about 30 years. But hopefully when you see the trailer you’ll know exactly the two movies I’m going for.”
I also asked the filmmaker whether Saw 3-D will truly be the last film in the franchise, or whether Lionsgate is just blowing smoke up our asses (Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter anyone? Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare?).
“They were very careful about calibrating how they were gonna announce that [it was the final movie]“, he said. “So they’ve underlined it with, “‘The final chapter. Yep, this is it. Seriously. Not kidding.’ Will we ever hear from the man John Kramer again? I’m sure. These things get re-booted and all that jazz, [but] this is the end of this storyline.”
So would he be up for writing another installment if the series did indeed continue on past the seventh entry?
“I gotta tell you, that franchise – started by James Wan and Leigh Wannell – is the only reason I’m here tonight“, he said. “They gave us a chance to tell a story and to scare people, which is something I’ve wanted to do since I was just a little kid. So my answer to that is: ‘Absolutely’. We’d be lucky for an invite to even try.”
Dunstan also announced that next summer he’ll be working on a new, highly inappropriate feature that will serve as the directorial debut of some dude named Vince Monday (sp?).
“I’m helping a first-time director, Vince Monday, do a directorial debut next summer called ‘Naked Fury’, which is an ode to Russ Meyer“, he said gleefully. “And it is so offensive! I don’t know anybody that will see it and not hate me.“