When you do a studio picture, all the paperwork and legal stuff is already taken care of!
Theres so much diversity of opinion out there, so ultimately you have to listen to it, put it aside, and make what you want to make.
To come up short when you reach too far is not such a bad thing rather than not to reach at all, right?
In all my science fiction movies, I try to blend the familiar with the futuristic so as not to be too off putting to the audience. There is always something familiar they can grab onto.
After I script the movie, I have to storyboard it out, I have to budget it, and I have to understand if I can afford all those visual effects or not.
There are trappings of science fiction which I kind of embrace, but there are also cliches which I run from.
Sometimes, if you leave yourself open, an actor can bring nice nuances to a character.
You hear people say that there's too much CG in movies today, but CG is what allows me to take a green-painted wall in a studio and make it disappear, and then put 100 miles of landscape in. CG, in the right hands, can be a marvelous tool.
While you're making the film and working with the actors, if you want to have a little room to breathe and experiment and play, it grows, and you want that to happen. It's not enough to just shoot the script. You've gotta come up with new inspiration, as you shoot it. There's gotta be room for that and time for that, so it grows.
Damn, my first cut that I showed to distributors was probably about two hours and 20 minutes, even though my contract said two hours. So, I had to lose 20 minutes. It's incredible that it just keeps happening.
Strangely, I always have a lot of cut scenes. I keep writing shorter and shorter scripts, thinking that this time, I'll get all my scenes in.
Had we had all the money in the world to spend and we were doing another studio movie, we probably would have jumped quickly into the Necromonger universe and done an Orpheus Descending movie there. We didn't have that kind of resource. So, we said, this time, "If not that, this time, then what is it? What does this new movie look like?" Quickly, just in talking about it very simply with Vin [Diesel] in his kitchen, we decided on a survival, left-for-dead story, where Riddick could, as a character, reclaim the animal side.
If I know what my finale is when I'm writing a screenplay, then I don't always have to chart out every scene before that. I can adequately find my way. I'm experienced enough to do that.
We got together and realized that Universal made it clear that they were out of the Riddick business. They didn't want to spend that kind of money anymore. So, it was going to be an independent movie.
I guess you don't make any franchise movies unless the fans are there.
I don't want to have so much humor [in films] that it undermines the jeopardy, but enough to sometime relieve tension.
