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Nic [Cage] is more than just a fantastic actor. He will get your movie made. The first thing that we did is that we went to producers and there were a lot of great producers.
I think that's coming just like anything else. I don't think that it's just going to be 3-D. I think that 2-D is going to be around forever. I think that we'll go back and forth.
We really did it write it for the story but once you get into production, once you start doing this process certain things will jump out at you. Some shots will be more 3-D than others.
It's a road movie [Valentine]. I mean, yes. We film it here and it takes place from basically Colorado to Louisiana. That's the road trip. So we're all over the place. We go through bits of Texas and bits of Oklahoma.
Nic is definitely a car guy because Nic and [William] Fichtner and Billy, these guys go on and on about the cars. So we had no choice but to do our research and get everything right because they were going to nail us if we didn't.
'Scissorman' is terrifying. The studio at the time didn't want Scissorman because they were afraid that he'd look silly to which my response was, 'Well, then why did buy this because that's what the game is.' But I lost that battle.
I mean, 3-D adds a whole level of 'oh my goodness' to the movie in good ways and bad ways that you have to deal with. We've overcome any obstacle that we've ever had because we have a great 3-D crew, Max and the guys at Paradise 3-D.
We played more rock music when we were writing the script. 'Renegade'. All of the Styx songs. All of the old '70's and '80's music, that's the stuff that's pounding in the background while we were doing this stuff. It's a part of those movies.
There is a shortage of hard R. It was the story and the character. He's never played a character like this and so that was the thing that really won him over. The story itself, on the surface - Patrick and I love actors almost in a geeky kind of way.
I mean if you look at the Charger and you compare it to other cars, the way the lines work, the tires, in 3-D it's gorgeous. One thing that we found was that the reflective surface was weird. It does funny things in 3-D. So you have to deal with that.
I've done some stuff with Thomas Jane and Tim Bradstreet in the comic world and it was interesting to me how close to a screenplay a comic can be. Certainly a four issue comic can be a four act structured screenplay and so I would totally be for that.
I would've never done a 1970's road movie. It just wouldn't have occurred to me. So when he started talking about it he brought up all these movies and he'll do that with you guys and you'll feel the Goosebumps as you start realizing the story that he wanted to tell.
As long as we work within the budget and are responsible, which by the way it's amazing how many people aren't but we are. We've worked within the budget. We've worked within the time and we're making the movie that we want. That's the reward and I couldn't be happier.
I think longer that you sit on a screenplay the longer you sit. I'm a firm believer that you can write the magic out of a movie, out of a screenplay. I'm not saying that the first draft is always the best draft but a lot of times the magic is in the first couple of drafts. T
It's modern day. It is modern day. Some of the cars are older but it is absolutely modern day. There are modern cars in it, modern people, modern clothes, modern talk. We wrote 'Valentine' to sort of pay tribute to all the old slasher movies that we grew up with and I think that we did that.
I love the 3-D. I'm not one of those guys who's scared to death of it and think that it's going to take over everything. I love the fact that you have the immersive 3-D and the voyeuristic 3-D and then you have the in your face gimmicky 3-D and we're going to do both. I think there's a place for both.
Just like in any other movie, too, we've had car troubles. We've had issues with weather. We've had issues with you name it. You can't predict this tough but as long as you go at it with the mindset that it doesn't matter what happens, we'll just figure out a way around it - that's the reason that I'm here.
That's where the inspiration was and so the more that you rewrite and the more you rewrite and the more the numbnuts are coming in to give you notes then the more problems you run into and the more it suddenly doesn't seem like the movie, the story, the characters changed, watered down and we don't have that with this.
I put in all the dirty words. It works really well. The thing that we found with 'Drive Angry,' more than anything else is that we wrote the movie that we wanted to see. I've done that before. I've wanted to see 'Jason X'. It did not become the movie that I thought it would be. That happens. It's happened with every movie I've ever done.
It's funny, if you go back and look at all those old movies a lot of times they didn't have the budget for music. Each scene here was written to a different time, whether that be 'Breakfast in America' or just different soundtracks that we had for different parts of the movie. I'm interested to see how it all plays once it's all put together.
The graphic novel? I love comics and so, yes. I don't think we talked about that. We weren't influenced necessarily by graphic novels but we certainly, once the screenplay was done, we talked about the idea that you could continue, you could tell back story, you could do things in sort of a graphic novel world just because we kind of like that world.
The reason that I'm here is that Patrick and I are partners and when crazy stuff comes our way we'll sit down and brainstorm and think around it just like we do when we're thinking about a scene. So, while the masters might not understand my being here, or at least they didn't at first, but they do now because we really are a partnership. If he's on set I'm on set.
This as hard an R as we wrote in the beginning. It was fast. It was fast mainly because of De Luca. We came in with De Luca. Nic I think had a deal with Millennium and so we ended up with Millennium quickly and they said, 'Go make the movie that you want to make. Basically, here are the ground rules; stay within the budget, stay within the time and go make your movie.'
I think it's just as viable a way of telling a story as anything else but for right now we like playing around with the new ways to do 3-D because I think it's only going to get better. I think that eventually we'll come home, we'll sit in our living room and there will be a little hologram that'll pop up and you'll watch these 3-D movies but you'll be able to walk around it.
In a way it was a modern story but it played to all those 1980 slasher movies. We did the same thing with this. Patrick wanted to do a 1970's road movie and if you'll see, this is a modern story but it's got so much 1970's in your face feel to it. So that was the point, to take that stuff that we loved growing up and sort of do it for today. I think we accomplished it. We'll see.
The actors come in and they make characters their own and so Patrick and I have never been the kind to think that our script is the bible. We want to make sure that the story is told, that you stick to the story but if you have to make changes to the character then that's fine. A lot of times there are some funny one-liners, funny things that happen that are out of the ordinary. I like it.
We write for actors and even down to the smallest character in the film, they all have their moment. You take that and you put it in a story that's in your face and there's tons of hardcore R action, nudity and you name it, but at the same time there really is a story there. It's got heart and at the end of the movie people will feel it. So I hope they'll their friends and want to see more.
There are moments, moments of fun but it's never necessarily a wink/wink. It's just interesting and odd and crazy things happen inside the world just like a crazy thing happened inside our world. So we don't shy away from that stuff. We take semi-ordinary characters, even though they have their own skill sets, we take those guys and we drop them into extraordinary situations and watch how the get out of them.
It's a weird partnership. For me and Patrick, if you've met him, we're not very much alike. But we bring such different tools to the table. He doesn't think like me. I don't think like him. He thinks like an editor. He thinks like a director. He thinks completely outside of the box when it comes to writing and so because of that he leads me down roads that I would've never gone down. And he sucks at grammar. So together we're perfect.
It's not like we were forced to do something we didn't want to do. I mean, when you see that scene you'll realize that we're really lucky that the weather came at us because now it has a lot more meaning that wasn't automatically there. There's some sort of undertones that wouldn't have existed had we shot it outside. So we got lucky on that and what we try to do is take whatever obstacles come our way and make them work in our favor.
So we have that, where there are moments where it's just Nic Cage and Amber Heard and you're in the car with them and it's not stuff flying at your face but you're literally sitting in the backseat. You're sitting there and it's just sort of interesting. At the same time we're going to throw cars and guns and bullets and frogs and naked people at your face because it's fun and that's the roller coaster. We do write some things for 3-D.
It really has been a blessing because you can go and look at our other movies we've done in a studio system. We didn't get to make the movie that we wanted to make. We made the movie that someone else wanted us to make. That can be a little disheartening, a lot disheartening. While there have been struggles, it doesn't matter which table you're at because you're going to have obstacles, but I kind of like being able to make the movie that you want to make.