Writer-Director Vincenzo Natali Talks SPLICE
[photo: Steve Wilkie]
I had the chance to visit the set of Cube director Vincenzo Natali's latest effort, the scifi horror film Splice, recently and came away greatly impressed by what I saw. Starring Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley as geneticists dabbling with illegal animal-human experimentation the producers are still trying to keep a lid on most details but that didn't stop co-star Delphine Chanéac, producer Steve Hoban, and Natali himself from sitting to talk about their new creation. You'll find Chanéac's interview here, Hoban's here and my conversation with Natali continues below the break.
TB: This is obviously a really long gestating project for you. What is it that got it done now, what finally got things rolling? A lot of people are going to assume that it’s Guillermo [Del Toro] getting involved.
VN: That helped but it wasn’t any one thing. It was a confluence of a bunch of weird coincidences and events. Actually, I think the way the science itself has been evolving has something to do with it, the fact that when I started working on Splice they had only just cloned the sheep, Dolly, and cloning was sort of a dead subject at the time. And now the science has evolved so rapidly in such shocking ways that it’s on the tip of everybody’s tongue. People suddenly became interested in it.
TB: Well, you look at the topic now and you immediately think of the stem cell research bills and everything going on in the States and what a hot topic that’s become.
VN: Yeah. And in England they’ve legalized the creation of an animal-human hybrid.
TB: Really!?!
VN: Oh, yeah. It’ll only live for fourteen days and then they’ll destroy it.
TB: That raises just crazy moral … they’re creating something just to kill it.
VN: Well, like our character it’s for good reasons, for medical research. But yeah, it’s ninety nine percent human and one percent animal but they are creating it and will let it gestate for fourteen days and then destroy it. So, yeah, it’s out there and what’s funny and kind of pathetic is that they mapped the whole human genome in the time it took me to finish the script. Actually, they did it faster than the time it took me to write the script. So, yeah, it just seems like everything came together at the right time. When Steve Hoban became involved, that was a big reason, and Guillermo became involved independently of Steve and Gaumont got involved independently of both of them and all these various stars aligned. And the strike, frankly, is part of the reason this happened because I know for a fact that I wouldn’t be able to make this film with the cast that I have if it wasn’t for the strike, if the threat of the impending strike didn’t exist when we were casting the film. It’s a lot of serendipity.
TB: Looking back now do you think you would have been able to make the film you wanted nine years ago, when you started? Was it physically possible at the time for a budget that you could have actually gotten?
VN: Not the way we’re making it now, no. The creature would not have looked as good as what we’re doing now and it wouldn’t have been as shocking as it is now. And maybe, just maybe, I’m a better film maker now than I was nine years ago so maybe for that reason it’s better to do it now. I think these things happen for a reason. It sounds corny but it’s true.
TB: Without getting too much into the story – because I know you won’t – where does this fall on the scifi / horror line? Is it an even mix or does it lean more one way or the other?
VN: Yes. And it’s a family picture, all rolled into one. [laughs] it bends a few genres but fundamentally I see it as a horror film.
TB: I really believe that the best horror and scifi films are the ones that take realistic issues and then spin them out in plausible ways, that those are the ones that last.
VN: Right, right.
TB: Is it the genetics issues themselves that you’re interested in here or are you using them as an entry point into something else?
VN: Yeah, the genetics are obviously fundamental to the story and why I want to make the film but at the end of the day it’s really a story about family. It’s a story about having kids, about creating something and what you do with your creation and taking responsibility for what you create. So it’s contemporary on one level but hopefully a little bit timeless as well.
TB: You mentioned a little bit about the cast. Sarah has obviously done Dawn of the Dead but neither Sarah or Adrien really do genre film usually.
VN: Right. Yeah. You have to ask them about this, really, but I think they probably want to do genre movies. I think part of the reason they responded to this one is that they’re playing really interesting characters, it’s very character based and that was always the idea – to take a creature film but make it a relationship film. Their characters are really intriguing and complex characters. Especially, I think, Sarah’s character. I don’t think women get to play roles like this very often. She’s a very strong woman but she’s also really complicated and does some really terrible things and I think one of the great things about both Sarah and Adrien is that they don’t mind playing characters that do bad things. They have no problem with that. They don’t particularly care to be loved by the audience and, in fact, I think they’re more interested in playing characters that do things we might question morally. I suspect that’s why they wanted to become involved. And the creature was also intriguing to them. We had to show them the designs, I think that did a lot to convince them.
TB: Obviously your creature is going to have a lot of digital work done and I see you’ve got the guy from KNB here as well. What is your own preference for effects on the whole physical / digital debate?
VN: Whatever works. We’ve definitely taken the approach that, as much as possible, we try to start with something physical. It’s really a fusion of both and that’s, generally speaking, when I think that digital effects work the best – when you start with something that really exists and then it’s augmented. So, by and large, our creatures are being played by real people, by enhanced people.
TB: Shooting with that in mind, this is obviously on a much different scale than your earlier films, how are you finding that? Are you having to learn on the job?
VN: I just forget everything between films. It’s been so long. It’s so hard for me to get movies made that it’s been a really long time since I did one and I just forget. It’s been five years.
TB: I guess the last thing was the Gilliam doc and then for a narrative film before that, was it Nothing?
VN: For a feature, yeah. I did a five minute short, too. But I just forget. In terms of scale, though, it doesn’t feel any different from my other films because so much of our budget is going to the creature. And the movie itself is quite intimate; there are only five speaking parts in the whole film and not a lot of locations so it’s actually a scale that I’m accustomed to working on. So that’s not daunting in any way at all. If anything it’s just challenging to get things into the time that we have. And that’s always the case, trying to pound a round peg into a square hole, the larger budget doesn’t feel luxurious at all.
TB: Just out of curiosity, talking about trying to make a creature film that’s also a family film, have you seen The Host? The Korean film?
VN: Yes! It’s wonderful! Yeah, yeah. I think any great horror film, on some level, is tapping into some aspect of the human condition. It has to.
TB: If it’s not it’s just about shock and once the adrenaline wears off everyone forgets about it.
VN: Exactly … I’m not opposed to the shock films at all, but to me the great ones operate on the level of scaring you but also on this other, deeper level. That’s what separates the men from the boys.
TB: Which would you consider the classics, which ones are you looking at?
VN: In the creature arena I think Alien, the original Alien, is pretty much as good as it gets. In the more supernatural vein, I think The Shining is also a great film. In the more slasher type zone, Halloween. There are more films than I could toss out there, really, but those are the obvious ones.
TB: I would’ve thought with Carpenter you’d be more of a Thing guy.
VN: I am a Thing guy, actually. I’m more of a Thing guy, The Thing is definitely my favorite. And Big Trouble In Little China. I love that film.
TB: Now, I know you’re not going to be able to go into this in any great detail but I’m curious about the process you went through while you were constructing the creature, what you were looking at. It’s an animal-human hybrid, were there certain animals you were looking at? Were there certain effects you were going for?
VN: Well, our over riding philosophy with the creature is ‘less is more’. So, where many horror films make creatures that are very additive in their design – in other words they’ll take the human form and they’ll put stuff on top of it – we’re subtractive. We’re pulling things away. We think that people are very sensitive to the way that humans are supposed to look and so if you make a little change it’s more shocking than a big one. And so that’s generally how we’ve approached it and as much as possible we’ve tried to take actual human actors and digitally augment them rather than creating fully CG characters. Our hybrid’s a hybrid – it’s part digital, part physical; part performer, part prosthetic. It’s a bunch of things.
TB: I think there are only a couple ways you can use a creature in a film. Either it’s something totally alien and other or else it’s used to reflect people back on themselves. Are you picking one direction over the other?
VN: Oh, it’s definitely a reflection, I would say. Our creature is very visible in the movie. This movie isn’t like Alien, for instance, which very cleverly keeps the creature hidden most of the time. Our creature is as much a character as anyone else in the film. This is closer to E.T. or The Fly or Frankenstein, for that matter, in that the creature is a character that we relate to and empathize with, perhaps even more than the humans in the film. So it’s not only a reflection of us, it’s the emotional core of the movie.
TB: Is there a reason for making the creature female?
VN: Um …. [pauses and laughs] …
TB: Apparently not one that you’re going to tell me.
VN: [laughs more] I really don’t want to talk about that for reasons that you can probably discern. Yeah. Let me just say that that’s a part of the film that’s better commented on after people have seen the movie. I’ll leave it at that. Yes, there is a reason.
TB: Okay, the basic practical thing because people are going to want to know: do you have distribution yet and when can we expect to see it?
VN: Yeah, we’re all set. I can’t disclose anything yet because details are still being negotiated but the idea is a 2009 release, early 2009.
TB: This doesn’t have anything to do with Splice but I’ll kick myself if I don’t ask. The Gilliam documentary and working with Terry Gilliam …
VN: Yeah.
TB: How was that for you? As a film maker, to be in such a different role on set and have so much access to someone like Gilliam, does that change how you work going forward? Did you find yourself learning stuff?
VN: Yeah, oh yeah. It was like going to film school. I mean, if you’re doing a making-of you’re basically always in the way. It’s a humbling job because you’re basically getting in the way of everyone else making the movie but for me it was a huge learning curve. It was amazing, it was like going to film school and studying a master. At first when it was proposed to me I thought I shouldn’t do it because I should be working on my own stuff, having been unemployed for three years, but he’s in my top five film makers and I thought I’d never, ever get the chance to do this again. And as much as I thought the Lost In La Mancha documentary was fascinating in that it was a record of a disaster I didn’t think it really showed his method at all. It could’ve ultimately been about anybody and I wanted to make something that was really specifically about him. And then I discovered that they had made that documentary on 12 Monkeys. It was basically the same thing but it was cool. I don’t know if it’s a great documentary but I tried to keep it very intimate. I think that’s where I had a leg up in that I had real access to him and I had made some films so I had some insight into the process and that’s all I tried to do, just to get inside his head. And it’s an interesting head with an interesting brain.
