DIRECTING  BLADE 2

GUILLERMO DEL TORO

by Edward Gross

Q: What was the genesis of your involvement?

A: I knew David Goyer socially through a couple of mutual friends. I told him how much I liked both Dark City and the first Blade, which I really enjoyed the hell out of . I thought it was a fun movie, very innovative in some aspects and it brought the vampire mythology to the urban environment, and so forth. Then when he wrote the sequel, he sent me the sequel and said, “What about you doing this one?” At first I didn’t like the idea of doing a sequel to anything, because I like to create my own stuff and, if possible, write it. But I gave him some of my reaction to the material, some of my notes an so forth. I told him, “These are things I would do different,” and he came back to me a second time with a new draft that addressed a lot of those things. The whole time I was always very intrigued by the premise of the whole thing, which was that there is a new race of vampires that feeds on humans AND vampires as well. The very phrase “a new race of vampires” was, visually, irresistible to me. I needed to create these. I gave him notes a second time, “I still think I would do this and that, and maybe this is not where you want to take this material.” And a third time he came back with the screenplay with THOSE changes. David and Peter Frankfurt, the producer, really wanted me to do the film. I finally read it and I said, “Look, I think that my visual take on the movie would be very different from the visuals of the first one, although I would preserve some of the style to preserve continuity, but if you want me to pitch it to New Line and Wesley Snipes, I will.” One of the things I pitched was that this should be more scary, but equally fun to the first one. The other thing I pitched is that we should take this one to another realm that was more comic book and much more exotic in a way than the first one, which was in an urban landscape. Both the approaches went very well, and then I described the Reapers, which are the new race of vampires, and how I visualize them. That’s what I think did it.

Q: Was there any element of the Reapers that intrigued you the most?

A: Yes, the thing that intrigued me the most was that I am fed up with vampires being tortured Victorian heroes. I just don’t like the whole concept. I think vampirism is essentially sucking someone else’s blood, which can be dealt with as an addiction or in so many other ways which are interesting. I just wanted vampires to be scary again. The concept of being drained of your blood by something to be scary again, as opposed to a romantic interlude. With that Victorian era, where the Westernization of the vampire myth occurs in the 19th century, the scariest part of this was that they would rob you of your life and turn you into something not human. It was a very fine line trying to make the main Reaper a sympathetic and tragic character, but still biologically a new kind of thing that would be hungry for blood and would be a scary thing to face. I think that most people imagine vampires in a romantic way, and most women fantasize about being drained by Angel or Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt, but nobody is going to fantasize about being drained by these creatures.

I wanted to get away from that, even on the biological point of view. Getting away from the bite just being a bite of two little fangs. This was something that comes to us since Bela Lugosi, and I think the first Blade dealt with it in a much more brutal way which I felt was biting off a piece of flesh and drinking. But these guys are not messy, they’re very efficient, they’re as efficient as a leech. They have a very special apparatus on their mouth.

Q: Looking at the original Blade, what did you want to maintain from the first one and what direction did you want to take it, directorially?

A: The one thing that I loved on the first one was the relationship between Whistler and Blade. I thought that was great. They had a kind of father and son kind of relationship that was definitely multi-racial, but also great in the sense that there was a genuine love between the two characters. I thought that one of the things I liked about Blade 2 was the beginning of it with Blade searching for Whistler after he shot himself and then turned into a vampire. See the whole thing is Whistler shoots himself while he’s still a human. When he shot himself, the bullet went through him and he became a vampire with a huge hole. In the course of the three years which is the gap between the first movie and the sequel, he healed and was kept by vampires as bait to have Blade travel around the world.

Q: Two of the things I read about Blade and Whistler sounded like a real attempt at dealing with character.

A: I would not say that this is “Blade in the House.” By no stretch of the imagination is this a character-driven drama, but I think the interplay between the characters is really interesting. I think that we have a very nice instrument of character in having Blade join sort of the Dirty Dozen of vampires. His hatred for that entire universe and their hatred for him, is a really good engine to have in the movie. And it’s a lot of fun. That was the other thing that I wanted to preserve from the first one: it was a hell of a lot of fun. I didn’t want to make this one somber or unsettling enough that it was not fun. I wanted the movie to preserve the edge of the first one, but also to preserve the fun of the first one. The first one was balls to the wall, this one crushes them.

Our test screening was just fantastic. It was a fantastic ride with the audience. But we found that we actually were a little too nonstop. We needed to put back some of the story that I had taken out during the editing so that we would have a couple of valleys in the middle of peaks. It was kind of a ride and now it has more of the characters back. But it’s so much fun. I really think the movie has a beautiful pacing and a beautiful flow to it.

Q: Die Hard, to me, was that kind of ride.

A: I think every movie needs a little rest now and then. What we tried to do was give different sorts of fun. Goyer and I talked about having fun with the characters and fun with the action, but never stop having fun. In a movie like this, you should never feel like you’re doing homework. I’m just so happy with this one.

Q: How challenging is it to go to a big budget when you’re used to such smaller-scale films?

A: There are a few things that are very important. One of them, of course, is the pacing of your stamina. For example, Cronos was 40 days of shooting, Devil’s Backbone was 50. Mimic was 70. This movie was 115. The pacing of yourself to remain creative, remain excited, to remain fresh every morning when you’re working six days a week and on the seventh you edit, which was the pace of this movie. Essentially you need to leave an almost monastic life. I was the only one in the entire crew who did not go to dinner, did not socialize, did not have any afterlife after the shoot. I would finish my shoot, go see dailies, do the storyboards for the next day, go to sleep, wake up and shoot. That was my day for an entire period of almost a year since prep. That was one aspect. The second one was very important one, which New Line was great enough to agree to, which was to try to shoot everything and not use second unit. So this movie is a very large movie but it’s all shot first unit. It’s very unusual in this size movie, but the things that I disliked the most about Mimic were second unit. I think it was a lack of control and the fact that it is viewed in Hollywood as being more cost efficient, but from what I’ve experienced it is far less cost efficient, because you end up reshooting a lot of it two or three times to get it right. So in the movie, one of the things New Line gave me as a great welcome gift, was to let me shoot the whole thing like that. So if there’s an insert of a finger pressing a button, that’s first unit. If there’s an exterior where people are walking and we’re establishing, that’s first unit. As a result, the movie feels more compact, and you manage to keep the same control you would have on a smaller movie.

Q: Does having bigger action and bigger effects get to be overwhelming?

A: Never. I think the exercise is exactly the same. A set is a set is a set. It doesn’t matter if you’re commanding 50 or 100 people. The only thing that it requires is more discipline and to have clearer thinking. That is, at least for me, not a problem and I actually enjoy the big movies as much as I enjoy the smaller ones.

Q: In your mind, does the way it’s greeted mean more to you because of budget?

A: Absolutely. Completely. The other movies, including Mimic, which was the biggest budget I had done, which was $30 million, were far more esoteric, if you will. This one, one of the things I disciplined myself with was to follow the screenplay as written by Goyer, and execute that story that we sort of put together early on and not try to make it Guillermo Del Toro’s Blade, but to make it really Blade 2 as a fun ride that people who saw the first one would enjoy, and therefore the greeting of this is less directorially driven. I don’t think this is going to be greeted as a personal statement about eternity and life after death as Cronos was. This is essentially a great popcorn movie.

Q: Glen Morgan and Jim Wong, who directed Jet Li’s The One, were forced to do things they really didn’t want to do. They found that the bigger the budget got, the less control they had over the product.

A: Not me, baby. Not this one. On Mimic, for sure. My experience on this one was great, but I really, really can tell you that second to Devil’s Backbone, this is the best shooting experience that I’ve had. I enjoyed Wesley, I enjoyed New Line a lot, and my experience on this one…we were all doing the same movie. It is also because on Mimic I was trying to make a personal movie out of a giant big bug movie, and on this one I was just trying to have fun. There were no discrepancies. I was not trying to make Blade into a Byronian hero. I was trying to have Blade be Blade and have his universe be his universe. Just tweak it a little bit to be more oriented towards the gothic stuff that I like.

When you’re dealing with bigger budgets, you also have to deal with more clarity on what you want and why you want it. And early enough on if you feel it’s the wrong project, no matter how early or late the stages, don’t do it. That’s the thing I learned and what I enjoyed on this one. I made sure early on that we were all on the same page: Wesley, the studio and I. And we were. If I had an inkling early on that it wasn’t right, I wouldn’t have done it.

Q: Was Mimic a film where you had a feeling you weren’t all on the same page?

A: Absolutely. I think the studio wanted to do Aliens and I wanted to do Mimic, and I feel that both the studio and I went through turmoil unnecessarily. Because it came out not being Aliens and not being Mimic. I jokingly say that we made ALIEN 3 1/2. There’s an Alien quality to it, but only in the last third, which is where I completely don’t have control of the movie. The first two thirds are really what Mimic was, and the last third is really Alien 3 1/2.

Q: How does a situation like that happen?

A: I would say it’s not like a tidal wave, it’s more like humidity. It’s gradual and pervasive. If it was a tidal wave, you would deal with it. You would swim faster or run away or dive right into it. But it doesn’t happen like that. It’s much more gradual and strange. I think that is why going into a project there are no heroes and villains. Everybody is trying to make a great movie, but sometimes they’re trying to do two different great movies. That is when there is a problem, and one of the two parts is going to lose or both are going to lose. In the case of Mimic, I really feel for what I went through, but I also feel for the studio not getting the movie they wanted. It was not successful as a personal movie, and it was not successful as a popcorn movie. That’s a double tragedy.

On Blade we were doing the same movie and the movie that I did was exactly the movie that I wanted to do. And I think the studio and Wesley feel the same way. We see the movie and we’re happy we made it.

Q: Ron Perlman mentioned that Cronos and Blade 2, the idea of exploring vampires on film is putting you in your element.

A: I am fascinated by the several ways you can read the same phenomenon. It can be a sexual, erotic thing. It can be a purely addictive element into it. There is a political element in it. There is also the more basic, more fun element of the monster. There are so many takes you can have on that myth that are fascinating. In the case of Blade, one of the nice things was that it allowed me to make the regular vampires more human and have Blade have more of an understanding of them by creating a super vampire, so to speak. At the same time, I tried to keep that main Reaper an interesting victim of its own thirst. All of this within its comic book parameters. Once again, this is not Sense and Sensibility.