Joel Silver (producer) w/ interesting insight

Here's the whole interview: LINK

No real point to the post other than it was cool to see someone in Hollywood being so open. Some quotes I found interesting.


This is one reason we probably don't see as many unique movies as we should.

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When I made "The Matrix" nobody wanted the script. I bought it out of my discretionary fund, it was like a $150,000-dollar purchase, and those three movies returned $3 billion dollars to Warner Bros. That's experimental. You take a movie where people read the script and say, "I don't even know what this movie's about." When we had the first preview of that movie, Bob Daly [former CEO of Warner Bros.], who's a very sweet man, smart man, said, "Those agents who are robots, how are they built?" I kept saying, "Bob they're not robots, they're programs." He goes, "Yeah yeah, but they're robots!" I say, "No no, they're not robots, they're in a computer system. You don't understand.
He said, "Nobody will understand that!" I said, "Why don't you ask that at the focus group at the end?" So he had somebody say, "Do you think those agent guys are robots?" Somebody said, "No, they're programs!" Bob said, "I don't understand." It's hard to explain.

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I personally love Watchmen, both the graphic novel and movie. I'm glad we didn't get this movie.

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CS: Speaking of ones that got away, as a die-hard Terry Gilliam fan I have to know if there's anything juicy you can tell me about his conception of "Watchmen"?
Silver: It was a MUCH much better movie.

CS: Than the one Zack Snyder made...
Silver: Oh God. I mean, Zack came at it the right way but was too much of a slave to the material.

CS: Agreed.
Silver: I was trying to get it BACK from the studio at that point, because I ended up with both "V For Vendetta" and "Watchmen" and I kinda lost "Watchmen." I was happy with the way "V" came out, but we took a lot of liberties. That's one of the reasons Alan Moore was so unpleasant to deal with. The version of "Watchmen" that Zack made, they really felt the notion. They went to Comic-Con, they announced it, they showed things, the audience lost their minds but it wasn't enough to get a movie that would have that success. What Terry had done, and it was a Sam Hamm script--who had written a script that everybody loved for the first "Batman"--and then he brought in a guy who'd worked for him to do work on it [Charles McKeown, co-writer of "Brazil"]. What he did was he told the story as-is, but instead of the whole notion of the intergalactic thing which was too hard and too silly, what he did was he maintained that the existence of Doctor Manhattan had changed the whole balance of the world economy, the world political structure. He felt that THAT character really altered the way reality had been. He had the Ozymandias character convince, essentially, the Doctor Manhattan character to go back and stop himself from being created, so there never would be a Doctor Manhattan character. He was the only character with real supernatural powers, he went back and prevented himself from being turned into Doctor Manhattan, and in the vortex that was created after that occurred these characters from "Watchmen" only became characters in a comic book.

CS: That's fascinating. Very META.
Silver: Oh yeah. So the three characters, I think it was Rorschach and Nite Owl and Silk Spectre, they're all of the sudden in Times Square and there's a kid reading a comic book. They become like the people in Times Square dressing up like characters as opposed to really BEING those characters. There's a kid reading the comic book and he's like, "Hey, you're just like in my comic book." It was very smart, it was very articulate, and it really gave a very satisfying resolution to the story, but it just didn't happen. Lost to time.

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Accusing Tarantino of stealing from him.

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CS: Oh yeah. And that's a project you spent a great deal of time bringing to the screen…
Silver: Eleven years.

CS: Eleven years. Are there any other great white whales you haven't caught yet?
Silver: Oh sure. Oh God yeah. I tried for years to get "Sgt. Rock" made. A story that came out… I never was a Quentin Tarantino fan, I'm not a Quentin Tarantino fan, I don't love what he does. I think his pastiche and parody is not what I think is cool, but a lot of people love what he does. I liked the last one, "Django." But I sent him "Sgt. Rock" and never heard back and then heard years later that he'd actually read it and made cast lists and wanted to make the movie, then said, "Why do I want to make that? I'll just make my own." That evolved into "Inglourious Basterds." I tried for years to make "Rock," I couldn't get that off the ground.

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This quote isn't all that surprising considering his take on Watchmen.

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Silver: We changed a lot of "V." There were things in "V" that I missed. I don't know if you were a "V" fan?

CS: Honestly, I read the graphic novel and love Alan Moore, but that is one of his more unwieldy books. The movie streamlined it in a way that made it more powerful, and timely.
Silver: The character of the Five Fingers and the Eye and the Ear was really intriguing stuff, because he is a very smart guy. We stripped all that out because we couldn't keep it all going. It's a really good movie.

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