An excerpt from a fascinating interview with Alex Garland - which I hadnt read before today - regarding Dredd, sequels (which he always thought unlikely) and what television can bring to Dredd, and vice versa. Q: Did you always have Karl Urban in mind to play Judge Dredd? When I was a boy of 10 or 11, I would have said Clint Eastwood. Dredd was substantially influenced by Dirty Harry, quite clearly in that terse, no bullshit mode he exists in. A: We met a few people for Dredd and Karl was just right in lots of ways. He looked right – I was very keen to avoid Dredd being a big steroid machine. I didn’t want him to look like he spent a lot of time in the gym. I wanted him to look like he was a fighter. Dredd generally, especially in the early drawings which is when I came across the comic, is lean. He looks like a boxer, he’s a fighter, and Karl had the perfect physique for that. But also, he understood the character long before ever meeting us or reading the script. When he turned up to the meeting he had his comics with him and he got it all. He said everything right, and we left that meeting feeling very certain about him. Q: In sequels, where would you like to see Dredd’s character go? A: I want to be clear: this is an 18-rated film and an R-rated film in America… the level of money it has to generate to justify a sequel is really quite unlikely. Just look historically at box office figures, it’s an extremely tall order. But, in the fantasy, sitting on a sofa staring at the ceiling, the next story would be about going into Dredd’s past in the terms laid out by the comic, which is exactly what I’d adhere to, so it’s also related to the origins of the City. The City and Dredd are completely bound up in each other. It’s an interesting story about how you get into this fascist state with this guy as your hero. There are these terrorists in the comic, these pro-democracy terrorists, which takes this anti-hero thing to a brilliant level. If the pro-democracy terrorists are like Hamas and blowing up pizza restaurants and doing things that you shouldn’t sympathise with, but they’re the democrats, so they are kind of the good guys, it creates an interesting tension. There are some brilliant subversive figures in the comic like Chopper. So, it would be that world, that strange position Dredd finds himself in for a sequel. And in the third one, I think you’d go really off the wall. If we ever got that far you can go nuts and then you bring in these guys, the Dark Judges and maybe this other guy who’s like Caligula, psycho, schizophrenic, and you could then move up through the ranks to this really intense ending. But it’s such a fantasy, I really ought to underscore that. People are kind of superstitious about talking about things in advance. I’m not. I’ve got a story in mind that starts and ends with Chopper – he’s a catalyst and a coda. But the caveat is that this is basically a fantasy by some middle-aged Dredd fan who happened to be part of a team who made a movie. Seriously, look at the box office for 18/R-rated sci-fi – it’s like a car wreck… who knows? Q: Could you see Dredd on TV because there’s lots of big-budget high-quality TV at the moment? A: Something is happening, particularly in American TV over the last 10 years, that I think is absolutely electrifying. The dramas that are played out, the freedom within those dramas, and the way people watch them. All sorts of rules that have existed in cinema for a long time, they’re absolutely shattering that. They’re putting it on there, the people are responding, and the quality of everything is very high. When I watch Game of Thrones, I think about Dredd. It’s not just Game of Thrones… Game of Thrones is fantastic, I cannot stop watching it. But also, you could say The Wire… by the way, we ripped off The Wire in some respects, but there’s all sorts of TV shows that show what you can do. But just to be clear: I’ve thought about that a lot but I haven’t discussed it with a distributor or financier. It’s total fantasy stuff. But do I think it would work? I think it would be amazing, incredible. There are these big stories in Dredd that you cannot tell over two hours, you need 12 hours to do it properly. That glacier thing of a character slowly changing, imagine that played out over 24 hours. It’d be fantastic.
Posted on: Sun, 20 Apr 2014 18:36:40 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015