Platinum Studios (PDOS)

[Raggedy Man]

This is not new, but I wanted to post this section on "Unique". Ill highlight it for you. Sounds like the movie is in pre-developmental stage, well as of this date.

David Goyer
04-26-2007


GEEKMONTHLY.COM EXCLUSIVE

After tackling some of the biggest comic book-based franchises of the past decade, including The Crow, Blade and Batman, David Goyer does a little cinematic downsizing this weekend with The Invisible, a remake of a Swedish film with Justin Chatwin as Nick, a high school student who’s murdered—and then finds himself locked in a strange afterlife relationship with his killer Annie (Margarita Levieva).

“The whole movie functions as a metaphor and it’s a little different from a lot of the other stuff I’m known for but it’s more in the vein of a teen melodrama with supernatural elements,” Goyer says. “The original movie had certain twists and turns but you could never tell which way it was going—at one point I was thinking okay, it’s Ghost, but then suddenly it’s not and there’s something you didn’t see coming. The ending, we don’t do the cop-out Hollywood ending—a lot of times when American filmmakers do remakes of these European movies they’ll tack on a Hollywood ending. We didn’t do that—we created a more realistic ending.”

Goyer says the movie’s release was delayed somewhat by concerns over its MPAA rating. “We got into a somewhat protracted negotiation with the MPAA over the rating. Because it involves teens and teen-on-teen violence and potentially teen suicide, it’s very touchy which I really understand. Ultimately I didn’t have to bastardize it at all but it took a while. The other thing that the movie does that I like that’s very European is it changes protagonists—it starts out as Nick’s movie and winds up being Annie’s movie, and it happens very subtly over the course of the film. But because of that shifting focus they thought it would be good to have a female point of view on the script so we had a woman named Christine Roum come in and work on the script. At that point we had multiple studios that wanted to make the movie but Disney was willing to make it at the budget I wanted and it wasn’t cast contingent so I could cast it the way I wanted to. It’s a risky movie—we didn’t make it for a ton of movie but it’s not a super cheap movie either. Audiences really like it and they’re surprised in the direction it goes in—it’s not a traditional high-concept film and that’s what I liked about it.”

The Invisible is Goyer’s third time at bat as a director (he did the low budget ZigZag in 2002 and Blade: Trinity in 2004). “Blade was a super trial by fire but at the end of that process—I don’t’ think the final product was what anyone intended but we were all proud of what we were able to salvage from that movie, and for me I came out of that completely fearless. What was great about doing The Invisible was that like it or not, everything in the movie was the way I wanted it—everything went off on time, there was no discord on the set and it was just a perfect movie-making experience.”

The Invisible’s high school setting is a far cry from Gotham or even Blade’s stylized urban environs—so is Goyer happier doing a more realistic film? “This still has supernatural elements,” he points out about The Invisible. “But in a perfect world I’d like to do a small movie then a big movie then a small movie. I’d love to do stuff that’s not genre but my next three movies are probably going to be straight down the line genre.” That said, Goyer’s upcoming projects look heavily freighted with effects and design work. “In terms of what’s next obviously Dark Knight is shooting, I wrote the movie Jumper which Doug Lyman is starting, and I have another movie at Disney called Unique that is loosely based on a Platinum Studios graphic novel that’s a science fiction thriller—we’re doing a lot of R&D now in terms of visual effects because it’s a parallel worlds story and there are a lot of groundbreaking effects—it’s about people who have the ability to step through into these other parallel worlds and they’re ‘unique’ because they don’t have a doppelganger there, they’re ‘unique.’ We’re going to have to develop visual effects that have never been done before so we’re moving into a kind of pre-predesign phase with some effects supervisors and conceptual artists and we’re doing some motion tests. We want it to be groundbreaking. Then I have a horror film I wrote on spec that I have independent financing for—I realized I’d never done an outright R-rated horror film before and this is a good one—it’s not a slasher film but that’s all I’ll say.”

For Goyer, it all began with comics—still his biggest inspiration and the sandbox he loves to play in. “The First comic book I ever read was Incredible Hulk 161—I really got into the Hulk at first and then I started reading the other Marvel stuff. I was into the big characters, Thor and stuff like that. Then I was in for the first big issue of X-Men when that became big, I had letters to the editor in Captain America and Swamp Thing and I wanted to be a comic book writer or artist and I got waylaid into wanting to be a homicide detective in high school. I started DC stuff later—the guy that ran the comic book store where I lived got me onto some of the DC comics like Teen Titans, which was the first DC comic I saw that was done like a Marvel book. From that point I went into back issues and The Dark Knight, Neal Adams and everything. It’s funny that I hated Jack Kirby at first because he was too stylized—Kirby and Gene Colan. My gods were George Perez, Neal Adams, John Byrne, people who were more realistic. Even when Watchmen first came out I didn’t love Dave Gibbons artwork—I always liked Frank Miller, I don’t know why because he’s very stylized. And I love Dave Gibbons’ stuff now but I just liked the writing in Watchmen originally, and gradually my eye became more discerning. One of my biggest regrets that’s comic book related is Jack Kirby had done a series of Marvel posters of Captain America and Doctor Doom and other characters and they were really big, and Kirby’s daughter was selling some of his original artwork at this gallery and they were selling the original Captain America poster art which was about 4’ x 3’ for $8000, and I didn’t buy it and a few years later they were selling the same piece of artwork for I kid you not, $100,000!”
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