Hey folks, Harry here with now an exclusive from David Goyer about his great many projects he's involved in. I met Goyer out at San Diego con where we talked briefly about two of the below projects including specifically... one that he was quite excited about... ZIGZAG, which will be his feature directing debut... it has nothing to do with horror or comic books... instead it's a personal project that Goyer is looking forward to doing in the midst of all the 4 color translations... And when I say he was EXCITED, I mean it... he really lit up when discussing it. Not too many writers make the transition to Director for some reason... Here's hoping Goyer can do it. As for the rest of these projects... BLADE 2 and GHOST RIDER... they may very well both be claimed victims (in terms of delays not complete cancelations) by the SAG or WGA strikes that the entire industry knows will be coming in March.... and from the advance hype... these strikes could last a very very long time and cripple the production end of Hollywood.... But enough serious doom and gloom... here's David Goyer and the world of film he's involved in....
Harry,
Just a few things to add to Norrington's notes on GR. We've had a number of meetings and ended up coming up with a story that surprised us both. We always thought this character had a uniquely cinematic potential -- but if we can pull off what we've been mulling over, the film should be damn interesting. Our major points of reference for the story are Unforgiven, Vani shing Point, Badlands, and the Road Warrior. The GR in question will be Johnny Blaze, with some elements of the new version thrown in. Fortunately, the previous draft I did for Savoy about 6 years ago will be abandoned. (Let's just say that that script was written under less than optimum circumstances. I remember one executive asking why a woman riding behind Ghost Rider wasn't burned by his hellfire. I replied that hellfire generally burned cold. We got into a huge argument about comicbook logic and I pointed out that he should be willing to accept a certain level of suspension of disbelief given that the lead character had a flaming skull for a head! But that line of reasoning didn't go over too well with the powers that be and I was subsequently fired from the project.)
In any event, what goes around, comes around. In the new set of circumstances, Norrington and I were essentially given license to come up with a kind of 'dream take' without any interference from a studio.
The film I will be directing is called ZigZag, based on a book by Landon Napoleon (great name, huh?). It's an inner-city coming of age story about a strange kid who lives with his abusive father. It's dark, but also quite funny and a real departure for me. I wanted to do something that showed Hollywood I could handle a dramatic piece set firmly in the real world -- something performance-based. I guess the closest film to it would be Fresh, o r even Midnight Cowboy (in an odd way). Wesley Snipes is going to play the boy's father. We are in the midst of closing deals with John Leguizamo and Anna Paquin to play two of the other major roles. It's going to be made for a fairly low budget (3 million dollar range) and I should be shooting it in January, then roll immediately into executive producing capacity on Blade 2, which is scheduled to begin filming in Mid-February (in order to narrowly avoid the impending SAG strike).
Blade 2 is definitely heating up -- budget wrangling right now. But next week, I fly to Madrid to do one last pass of the script with Guilllermo before pre-production begins. Hopefully, by mid-September. Mignola and Bradstreet and possibly even Richard Corben will be on as conceptual designers. What else? I have high hopes for the project and it's a total love-fest between myself and El Gordo. Somewhere in between, Ghostrider will happen -- though I don't think they'll pull off the film before the strike. Norrington seems to think it's possible, but as the film has not even been written yet, you do the math.
David Goyer
