Vin Diesel risked his house for Riddick.
As noted, Riddick was not bankrolled by a studio. Diesel mentioned finding starting funds at a European film market, but apparently that wasn't quite enough. Said Diesel:
"It was one thing to be a producer on Fast and Furious. But for this movie, I was the producer of something where, if it didn't work, I lost my house. Everything i had in my life was leveraged to make this movie... The skin in the game was real."
David Twohy owns his movies.
You know how sometimes in interviews, directors will go on at length about how the movie evolved and changed during the process until the end result surprised even them? Not Twohy. Said the writer/director:
As a responsible filmmaker, I have to imagine the whole movie. I have to script the movie, board it out, budget it -- so yeah, it looks like the movie I imagined. Sure, some things are a bit better than I expected, and some things are not as good, but no, I wasn't surprised at all by how it turned out. I can't be surprised, or else I'm not doing my job.
Don't fight Vin Diesel in a movie... unless you are a professional wrestler.
After duking it out with Dwayne Johnson in Fast and Furious 6, Diesel gets physical with former wrestling pro Dave Bautista this time around. And according to Diesel, these are the only types of guys he feels comfortable fighting:
I used to do fight sequences, and I started to get self conscious about doing them because, invariably, the other person would get hurt. You never want anyone to get hurt on a film set, let alone for you to be responsible for that. So the great thing about working with these guys that have spent their lives choreographing fights for wrestling is, that's what they do. That's their specialty, their specialty is selling explosive hits without really making contact or doing too much damage.
Riddick may have come sooner if it weren't for Diesel's child.
Said Diesel:
Now that I have kids, it's a little bit trickier to watch Riddick. Initially we were going to try to make it before Fast 5, then i learned we were expecting a child. It wouldn't have been fair to child or the fans to go to that dark place while welcoming life into world. And it is a dark place to go. It's rewarding to do the movie, but playing the character is sometimes a lot more difficult than other ones. There's so much preparation involved to get into character.
About that preparation...
Said Diesel:
For where Riddick is in this movie, for his state of mind, I went to the woods for four months to prepare by basically being a recluse.
Katee Sachoff's prep was just as extensive
Said the Battlestar Galactica actress:
I told Vin that I wanted to put weight on to play this character, some muscle weight, and some fat so that I could stand up next to these guys. And he told me 'You own this character, so do what you want to do. But really do it...'
When I got to Montreal to shoot, he was like, 'Whoa. You really did it.' My arms were massive -- just huge.
She went onto say:
I saw that I was shooting a gun at one point, and I said, 'maybe this character is a sniper.' David said, 'If you want to be a sniper, you can be a sniper, but from now on you're married to that gun...
I realized that I should be able to grab ammo, use that gun and do anything I needed to to do without ever taking my eye off what I'm aiming at. It took me about a week to learn to take the gun apart, put it together, get ammo and load it, all while keeping my eye in the scope.
If Riddick does well, there may be follow-ups -- but not too many.
Said Twohy:
I'd like to bring back the Necromongers, yeah. We've been talking about maybe doing two more movies and just that. We want to do a closed-end franchise rather than a franchise that keeps spitting them out just to spit them out.
Vin Diesel begs to differ with Steven Spielberg on the future of movies.
When asked about his reaction to Steven Spielberg's bleak prediction that the film industry and big-budget moviemaking would soon implode, Diesel grinned.
Not on my watch.
After pausing for laughter, he continued:
At the risk of sounding naive, I don't see that happening in the near future. But Hollywood is changing... studios are more receptive to the audience because of social media... the thought of listening to an audience was unheard of five years ago. If you look at history, movies are that thing where you go and buy a ticket, and you never get to talk to the person who made it -- to the creator producer or the person. You buy the ticket, shut up, sit down, and you can never comment about it.