Exclusive: Sci-Fi Horror Hybrid Alive in "Splice" - Natali / Splice, p.2

Details

Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Tuesday, 22 June 2010 01:53

Written by Brad Balfour

Q: Sounds pretty provocative.

VN: It was pretty provocative. But with Delphine, she was always coming in to the audition.

Q: And this was Paris?

VN: This is in Paris. We were specifically casting Dren in Paris because this is a France-Canada co-production, so it made sense to cast Dren there because she's a non-speaking role -- and of course it's not that hard to find beautiful women in Paris who don't have to speak  English. With Delphine, she was the very first person who came into the audition, so we happened to see her on the street, not knowing that she was going to be auditioning for us.

My producer, Steve Hoban, said to me, "Well that looks like a Dren," and that turned out to be her. She's very beautiful and a lovely person too. And very talented; she's written two novels, she's a musician as well as being an actor. She's a very interesting person. I had a very intelligent cast. I had a very bright group of people working with me.

Q: What did you do to research the science of it?

VN: I co-wrote Splice in quite close consultation with a geneticist. Then, when we went to make the film, we had several geneticists consulting with us. The amazing thing about those discussions was that whenever I would propose an idea I thought was ludicrous or beyond the realms of possibility they'd always say, "Oh, no, you can do that."

The truth is stranger than fiction, especially when you're talking about biotechnology. It's fucking weird. It just gets bizarre. So in the process of writing the script, I began to realize we should make the lab environments real. We should scale everything down to a human, real level.

Q: And you made it contemporary.

VN: Contemporary, exactly. There's no reason to set this in the future. There is some technology in the film that doesn't currently exist, but it seems entirely plausible.

Q: Do you ever worry about the film -- not just the cast -- being too smart?

VN: No. Is it that smart?

Q: Couldn't you have just made a story about scientists debating over this issue without adding in the creature? Why do you need the science fiction at all?

VN: It's interesting because there are aspects of the film that are quite pulpy, which I like. I'm a bit greedy as a filmmaker, or desperate, because I don't get to make movies very often and so when I do I throw in the kitchen sink, like I want everything.

Tonally, the film definitely goes in a number of different directions. There's quite a bit of comedy and outrageous behavior in it. And yet at the same time, some of the moral questions and I think the complexity of the relationships...[operate] at a fairly high level. I think maybe there could be some discontinuity between those two things, but no, I didn't worry about it being too smart. I just don't think about those things.

Honestly, in all of my films, for better or worse, I've really tried to do something a bit different, and I've paid the price. All of these films have been really hard to make, and a number of them have languished in obscurity. I've made my bed so I'll lie in it.

Q: At least you got to be buddies with director Guillermo del Toro, who served as your executive producer.

VN: Guillermo is truly a great impresario of the fantastic arts. I think he supported me -- he supported many other filmmakers and artists -- and I had met him at a film festival and he said, "I'd really like to produce a film for you," which was extraordinary to me because I'm a huge admirer of his, and I immediately thought of Splice, which was a script that had been gathering dust.

Q: That was your script?

VN: I co-wrote it, yes. It had been gathering dust on a shelf simply for the reasons stated, which are it's kind of a hard thing for a studio to digest, and yet it could never be a low-budgeted film because the creature effects were always going to have a certain price tag and on camera all the time. So it was just kind of a bad combination in terms of trying to raise money.

When Guillermo came on board, a lot of doors opened. His name legitimized me and the film, and kind of contextualized it in a way that made people think this could be commercial. It's been a very long and painful pregnancy and a difficult birth as well.

Believe me, the metaphors are easy to come up with on this film because it questions life-imitates-art in the making of this movie, but it really felt like a pregnancy.

I had this movie inside me for a long time, and intuitively I felt if I don't make this film someone else is going to do something very much like it. It was pregnant in the world, out there, just the real science seemed to be mimicking what we had written in the script, so I felt like this has got to be done. And it was.

In a way, the film has been imbued with this life force. And while at every step it's been challenging it's almost like it willed itself into existence; it sort of always found a way.

Q: Does a movie like this always get developed with the potential of a sequel?

VN: No. I know that the ending is open and it seems leading.

Q: It's almost like a classic science-fiction trope.

VN: No, it really does and I kind of resisted it a bit for that reason. But it's the right ending; I thought this is the right ending for our characters and it just seemed very appropriate. But truly, I swear to God, I did not write it with any intention of sequelizing the film. Although, having said that, now maybe there will be a sequel.

Q: You're also interested in making a film of the late British writer J.G. Ballard's futuristic novel High Rise, and you're working on William Gibson's Neuromancer. Which is coming first?

VN: High Rise is cheaper. It might be a little more dangerous commercially speaking, but I don't know. I've been working on High Rise for a long time, so it's at very advanced stage. I have a great producer, Jeremy Thomas [a longtime British filmmaker who has produced everyone from Nicholas Roeg to Bernardo Bertolucci].

Q: Given the films he's made, he's a guy who gets it.

VN: Exactly. He gets it and can make challenging films like High Rise. So I think High Rise is a distinct possibility. It's shocking to me, talking about technology out of control, but it's shocking to me how information travels now by the internet. I haven't officially signed onto Neuromancer literally, but it's all over the place.

Q: Does that make production companies more or less interested to see it done?

VN: I hope more interested. That's why I think maybe the internet technology is great. Certainly it helped Splice. Splice was languishing for a year after I finished it looking for distribution in North America, and it's really thanks to the internet via Sundance that the film created a buzz.

Q: How did Sundance help you?

VN: It saved the film. And truly our guardian angel was Joel Silver; he came in and swooped us away and has been nothing but supportive and protective of us.

For more by Brad Balfour: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brad-balfour

• < Prev
• Next >