Quote from: Alienseseses on Sep 24, 2008, 02:08:35 AM
Questions, of course:
1. You've said earlier that AVP's will continue to be made as long as they make money. Do you believe that the studio has decided to shift to Predator from AVP?
2. You also said you didn't like the story of AVP-R. If a different script writer came along, do you think the Strause Brothers can make a good AVP?
No idea what the studios think -- they follow the money, generally. Since there have been four A's and only two AvP's, they might think that franchise has more life left in it. I would have thought so, but the most recent one didn't help.
An old joke in Hollywood is the T-shirt: "But I really want to
direct."
Colin and Greg Strause came out of visual EFX and they have done good work there. AvP:R was their first big directing project. It shows.
In Hollywood, if you write a couple hit movies, you will usually be offered a promotion; and that also happens to guys behind the camera, or doing stunt coordinating, art direction, or EFX, and actors, too. The promotion is to director. You get to run the show.
Not everybody can direct -- it is a different skill than writing or acting. Some make the transition better than others. Clint Eastwood is a better director than actor. Stephen King directed a movie early on, based on one of his stories, and he also wrote the script for it, Maximum Overdrive. As a director, he's a good writer. It wasn't a great movie.
It is possible that the Strause bros. will sharpen their skills. You would expect a third or fourth movie to be better than the first, assuming they are learning and applying what they know as they go. But the story in AvP:R wasn't there, and a good director has to have a good sense of story. They have to be able to read a script and visualize how it will look on-screen.
You can start with a good script and ruin it -- lot of hands touch it, and any of them can screw it up. Bad acting, directing, post-producting work, sound, editing, music, one rotten apple can spoil the barrel. You can also start with a so-so script, and if everybody else connected to the movie is brilliant, you can make it look better than it is -- but that's the harder route. Take a great script and mess around with it, it can still be good.
I haven't seen the script for AvP: R, so I dunno how much the bros. mucked around with it once it was turned it. I know that an ironclad rule in LaLaLand is that you can put kids in peril, but you don't kill then in messy ways onscreen. Remember the scene in Batman when Two-Face threatens Jim Gordon's kid? If he had killed that boy, the audience would have stormed the projection booth and lynched the guy running the projectorl
How long was it before we got the kid chestburster in AvP:R? Five minutes?
Stupid. I was done right there.
The movie was full of stuff like that. The bros. wanted it to Look Cool and they wanted it to be Over the Top. It did look cool in a couple spots, and it was over the top -- too far -- even hardcore fans I know said "Ick!"
How gross can we make it? is not the question you want to be asking yourself here. How do I make the audience care about these people? is.
If the bros. can address that question and get it? They can make a good movie. But they have to take off their fanboy hats and put on the storyteller caps.