Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here.
This interview marks the third time I've interviewed Seth Rogen about THE GREEN HORNET, albeit at three very different times in its production. The first time was at Comic-Con 2008, when all that existed was a script from Rogen and Evan Goldberg and the most likely director candidate was Stephen Chow. The second time was a year later, at an unveiling ceremony of the Green Hornet's Black Beauty car. Michel Gondry had just signed on as director and was on hand with Seth and Evan to talk about their plans for the film. I was shocked at how much weight Rogen had dropped, even since I had seen him about four months early in Austin at a party after the premiere for OBSERVE AND REPORT.
The last time I talked to the three members of THE GREEN HORNET creative team was last July, also at Comic-Con. But this time, the movie was essentially done and it had just been announced that not only would it be released in 3D but the release date had been pushed to January 2011, and despite all of the naysayers who have worked themselves up into a frenzy that the delays spell doom for the quality of his movie, they couldn't be more wrong. The movie is a lot of fun, particularly because of the complicated relationship between Rogen's Britt Reid and Jay Chou's Kato. The action is both exciting and hilarious, and Christoph Waltz's villainous yet insecure Chudnofsky is a completely new take on the way a bad guy can be played.
Obviously at the time of this interview, I had yet to see the film; no one had. So my questioning was a little limited, but when is Rogen not fun to talk to. Anyway, enjoy Seth Rogen and groove with the movie, as well.
Capone: How's it going, sir?
Seth Rogen: Hey, good to see you again.
Capone: What’s going one? I believe this is like the third time I’ve talked to you about this movie, but the first time since it was made.
SR: [laughs] Yeah, exactly.
Capone: Yeah, I was just talking to Evan a little bit about this, but how much has the idea you guys came up with changed from where you originally started. That’s a loaded question, I know.
SR: Yeah. Honestly, the core idea has always been the same. There are scenes in the movie that have literally been there since the first draft that we wrote, the idea that it’s a movie about two guys who need to overcome their relationship and their dynamic in order to be superheroes was always what the movie was about, and aside from that, different things have changed. The characters have changed, the villain has changed, the incidental--the MacGuffin, as they say--has changed. But the core idea has always been the same, and that’s I think why we were able to keep going with it, even though it was on the brink of destruction so many times, because it had this core idea that everyone really liked and that we really had developed well and that was very easy to latch onto. That’s why anytime things were about to fall apart, we would go to say “Remember, it’s about these two guys trying to be superheroes,” and everyone was like “Oh yeah, I like that!”
Capone: Maybe it was just the ups and downs of this movie are better documented, because you guys are always out there…
SR: …promoting a lot of movies? [laughs]
Capone: Yes, but about this film in particular. Did you ever feel like the gods were conspiring against you to make sure this movie never happened?
SR: Yeah, there were moments where it just seemed ridiculous. It became expected almost. It was like, “What horribly fucked-up thing is going to happen next?” But at the same time, I think it’s a testament to the fact that we just liked it a lot, you know? We could have made a million other movies probably in the amount of time we have been working on this and we just really felt passionately about it and thought it would be potentially one of our favorite movies ever, and that’s always what we are trying to do, just make what we would love to go see in a movie theater, you know? That’s what always just kept us going.
Capone: I feel like the more that has been shown of this film--and obviously today will be the true test--the more people have gone, “Oh, that’s what they are doing and that looks pretty cool.” Have you been getting that sense that people have been asking, “What is this going to be?” and now that they are starting to see that most recent trailer, they get it.
SR: It’s going against everything in their being. They're starting to not hate us a little bit. [Laughs] You can tell they hate us. They don’t know what’s happening, it’s like a malfunction is occurring in their wiring, but yeah it’s true. And we always knew that would be the case. Honestly, I’m totally the type of person to think everything is going to suck until I start seeing stuff that tells me otherwise. So we always just knew that we would kind of have to just keep our heads down and make the movie and make it as good as possible and hope that when we were finally able to start showing it to people that they would see that we weren’t making a fucking piece of shit.
[Both Laugh]
Capone: To put it bluntly.
SR: No one wants to make one of those.
Capone: Of course not, but no one thinks they are.
SR: It’s almost like people thought we wanted to. [laughs]
Capone: No one steps into making a film thinking it's going to be shit; it just happens. I’m curious about the 3D aspect, because even just in the first day of panels today it has run the gamut in terms of the reaction to "Shot in 3D" vs. post conversion. I’ve been pretty vocal about it to the point where conversion houses are emailing me going “No, it can actually be done right if you give it enough fucking time!”
SR: It can!
Capone: And you guys seem to have enough time with this delayed release date.
SR: I think it’s like anything. There are people who would argue that a car chase sucks unless you shoot it practically, and on a blue screen it’s not a real car chase. I think to critique the procedural aspects of how a movie is made is kind of like chasing your tail in a circle, you know? To blindly say that one procedure is a failure and another procedure is a success is crazy to me, because I think like any other visual effect, it’s in the hands of the people who wield it, you know? I think that we have a lot of time. It can be done well. We don’t want to make a movie that looks bad. The studio didn’t want us to do it, honestly.
Capone: Yeah, that’s what Evan and Michel said, that you guys actually went to the studio and said, “We want to do this,” which I didn’t realize.
SR: Yeah, it’s something that we had to convince them to let us do and it’s something that we always wanted to do from the get go. I mean the very first visual conversations that we all had about the movie were 3D ones, and me and Evan just didn’t know that we didn’t have the power to do it in 3D. We told Michel “Oh yeah, we are probably going to shoot this in 3D” and then the studio was like “No, you're not.”
[Both Laugh]
Capone: “Wait, what?”
SR: “What?” But as we were shooting it--and you'll see, for example, in the fight scene we're going to show today, there’s a part where Kato runs over some cars and they dimensional-ize into this long corridor of cars to kind of give the impression that he gains momentum over it. That was 100 percent designed for 3D. When we filmed it, we literally had more than one set of cars there, because we knew we would want to give the impression that Kato was running over a long corridor of cars, and so that’s a perfect example of when we filmed it, we wanted it to be in 3D and we filmed it hoping that the studio would like it enough to give us way more fucking money, basically. [laughs]
Capone: They must have liked what they saw in 2D enough to say Okay to the conversion.
SR: Exactly, and I think when we started showing them stuff, and they saw how passionate we were about it and how much we creatively believed in it and when we had our 3D supervisors and our stereographers explaining to them that the way we shot it was very conducive to a good 3D conversion, that it’s not a lot of handheld shots, that we don’t have a very quick cutting style in the movie, we take a slower pace with it, we linger on wider shots, it’s anamorphic. I think those are some of the reasons we were able to do it, and we are going to try to exploit the way that we shot it in 35mm anamorphic and try to make that as beautiful as we possibly can in 3D, which I think is going to be awesome.
Capone: That’s cool. All right. I’m excited to see you are making a movie [TAKE THIS WALTZ] with Sarah Polley.
SR: I’m making that right now.
Capone: I love her.
SR: She's awesome.
Capone: I interviewed her for her last film [AWAY FROM HER], and she’s so smart it’s intimidating.
SR: Yeah, she’s really awesome. I’ve been up in Toronto for the last three weeks. It’s been great. It’s really fun.
Capone: And she’s so nice, too.
SR: Really nice. It’s kind of a depressing movie, though.
Capone: That’s what I've heard, so you get to tap into some of that again.
SR: It’s nice just making a little movie with people talking.
Capone: And, of course, I’m excited to see PAUL, too.
SR: Oh yeah, I’m excited to see the stuff they show.
Capone: Exactly. Okay, take it easy man. Thanks.
SR: You too. See you soon.
-- Capone capone@aintitcool.com
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