Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Indy Is Dead (Long Die George Lucas)

George Lucas is such an asshole. In an interview with CHUD, Frank Darabont, who was writing a draft of a script for the 4th Indiana Jones film, says:

"I worked for over a year on that; I worked very close with Steven Spielberg. He was ecstatic with the result and was ready to shoot it two years ago. He was very, very happy with the script and said it was the best draft of anything since Raiders of the Lost Ark. That’s really high praise and gave me a real sense of accomplishment, especially when you love the material you’re working on as much as I love the Indiana Jones films.

And then you have George Lucas read it and say, ‘Yeah, I don’t think so, I don’t like it.’ And then he resets it to zero when Spielberg is ready to shoot it that coming year, [which] is a real kick to the nuts. You can only waste so much time and so many years of your life on experiences like that, you can only get so emotionally invested and have the rug pulled out from under you before you say enough of that."

I mean, I'm not even sure a fourth Indy film is that great an idea in the first place, but it pisses me off anyway, because I really like Frank Darabont, I'm drowning in saliva over his work on the adaptation of Stephen King's story The Mist. Darabont spoke some about that adaptation at CHUD, as well:

CHUD: And very different from any of the other movies you’ve directed – it’s much more of a standard horror film than any of your other movies.

Darabont: Absolutely. But thankfully there’s a core, that wonderful array of Stephen King characters, which is his strength. There’s a lot of meat there for the actors and the director.

I’ve always thought of it as Stephen King’s Lord of the Flies, because it’s less about the monsters – which are important, certainly. If you’re going to do a horror movie you might as well have some really cool monsters – but it’s more about the disintegration of civilization in that supermarket, how everything breaks down for those people in there. From that standpoint it’s a fascinating story to tell.

Also, via this interview, he talks about his next project, which'll probably be a new adaptation of the Ray Bradbury classic Fahrenheit 451:

CHUD: Fahrenheit 451 almost doesn’t need to be modernized – except that maybe the whole idea of books as the source of information is becoming outdated.

Darabont: The thing about all this technology is that there isn’t any of it that can’t be monitored and controlled. When people say that books will no longer be relevant in the future, that’s ludicrous to me because it’s the only place you’ll be able to hide anything. Will you be able to hide it in your computer? If things keep going the way they are, all of that will be analyzed, scanned and controlled. You’re not going to be able to use this technology to hide things. So where do you hide things? In the pages of the book. And as Bradbury’s great, poetic point is, the ultimate hiding place is in the human mind. To me that’s about as timeless and relevant as any statement you can make.

Okay, honestly? I think I'm falling in love with Frank Darabont. I mean, I've yet been able to sit through The Green Mile from start to finish, but Shawshank is a great film, and the things he's working on now are so my cuppa tea.
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1 comment:

Reel Fanatic said...

I didn't know this about the great Frank Darabont ... Lucas is a serious prick!