BLADE 2 INTERVIEWS

AVI ARAD

(EXECUTIVE PRODUCER)

Q: What was the first indication that there would be a sequel to Blade?

A: Opening weekend [laughs]. I think the movie did better than anybody anticipated. It was obviously before this genre became a safe haven. The movie did very well. More importantly, in order to kick in a sequel, you need to have an international success, and the movie did very well overseas. Then the DVD was one of the first real break-out DVDs. You put it all together and you say, “Does that have franchise potential? Yep.” You go in and do a sequel.

Q: Was there a difficult gestation period for this film?

A: When you take a story you can tell for a long, long time, it’s really not difficult. The challenge was, “Okay, we told this story, we created a world, we established the rules and we know that he’s a pretty tough cookie. How do we give him a mission that is much, much tougher than the mission we gave him before?” David Goyer wrote a great script that came up with a very smart idea. Once that was done, it wasn’t very complicated. It raises the stakes and puts Blade into an interesting position, and that gives all of us a new opportity.

And then, putting on a new director that has in many ways a different orientation than Steve Norriginton did. Guillermo del Toro is really more into the horror genre, so in essence we would be able to make a very different movie. The danger in sequels is that you feel you don’t want to be a television show where every week you’re in the same police station just the case changes, you want to have a visual difference from one movie to the other. You want to be able to extend the world and not just stay in the same one. Guillermo obviously brings his own vision and sensibility to it, and hence we have different movie.

I think that Norrington and Guillermo are stylisitically very different. I think Norrington is very contemporary, slick, really more in the real world in some ways, but Blade 2 has really sharp vision. Guillermo’s main interest is the horror part of it, he’s more of a horror filmmaker, so he takes Blade into the world of vampires that was established in movie one, but doesn’t have to explain as much and therefore this movie, on the horror end, is higher.

To order Retrovision or Vampires & Slaye