Alternate Takes 08.08.09: David Twohy
Posted by Shawn S. Lealos on 08.08.2009
With the release of A Perfect Getaway, Shawn S. Lealos and Alternate Takes looks at the career of director David Twohy
Welcome to Week 63 of Alternate Takes. I am Shawn S. Lealos and you have entered my world.
I apologize for missing out on last week's column. I am still learning what it is like to have a newborn son and the fractured sleep it entails. Starting with this week's 3 R's (read it here) I am back on my normal schedule and will be slowly getting back into the review game as well, when time is made with the missus to watch Ash. My first review since his birth will be District 9 and you can look for that next weekend. I also have some catching up to do for the Music Zone, as I have some CDs sitting here waiting to be reviewed.
Onto the column...
This week there are three major releases, all as different from one another as you could expect. There is also a couple of small Indie releases including Cold Souls, starring Paul Giamatti and I Sell the Dead, starring Ron Perlman and Dominic Monaghan. The first major release is G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, a movie I had little hope could be good despite some great actors in it. Dennis Quaid, Channing Tatum and the awesome Joseph Gordon-Levitt tells me the acting is in place but the direction of Stephen Sommers and those outfits makes me still doubt it. However, Devin Faraci over at CHUD.COM said "If I was 10 years old, GI Joe would be one of the best movies I had ever seen. As a grown up it's one of the better summer movies; a delightfully light, fun and action-packed kick in the ass." My fears are not quite as great, so we'll see. The next movie is Julie & Julia, counterprogramming at its worst. OK, it is made for the ladies so I can give it that much. Finally, A Perfect Getaway looks like the perfect fun B-level thriller directed by David Twohy. Twohy directed the fabulous horror movie Below and the awesome Pitch Black, with that pedigree I have high hopes.
I was originally going to focus on cartoon adaptations and talk about awesome movies like - uhh - Masters of the Universe. Instead, let me tell you a little about the career of David Twohy.
THE FUGITIVE
Directed by Andrew Davis
Written by Jeb Stuart and David Twohy
Harrison Ford ... Dr. Richard Kimble
Tommy Lee Jones ... Samuel Gerard
Julianne Moore ... Dr. Anne Eastman
Joe Pantoliano ... Cosmo Renfro
Twohy got his start as a screenwriter, scripting such Oscar worthy films as Critters 2: The Main Course, Warlock and Terminal Velocity. With those masterpieces, it was only a matter of time before he hit it big. That moment came when he wrote the script for the Harrison Ford remake of the 1960s TV series The Fugitive. Unfortunately, his script was taken and rewritten by Jeb Stuart. "He superseded me - postseeded me throughout the process," Twohy remembers. "I took it up to a certain point, then when Andy Davis (the director) came on and then all of the things had to be reset or retooled for Chicago proper. Jeb was doing that." The movie, telling the story of a man wrongly accused of killing his wife, went on to be hugely successful. It opened strong ($23.7 million) and held the number one spot for six weeks. It eventually made $368.7 million worldwide, with a $44 million budget. It was also nominated for seven Academy Awards, winning one for Tommy Lee Jones' supporting role as the U.S. Marshall. Ironically, Best Screenplay was one nomination the movie did not receive. Twohy retains a fondness for the film that helped him step into the big time. "Tommy Lee Jones is so magnetic and great to watch," he said. "Harrison Ford is also not laid back or at arm's length with his role. It's great to watch him. You really have two great star turns there."
PITCH BLACK
Directed by David Twohy
Written by Jim Wheat, Ken Wheat and David Twohy
Vin Diesel ... Richard B. Riddick
Radha Mitchell ... Carolyn Fry
Cole Hauser ... William J. Johns
Keith David ... Abu ‘Imam" al-Walid
Twohy always wanted to be a director. He used the experience of working on a big studio picture to earn the right to direct his own film, the Charlie Sheen vehicle The Arrival. The movie, a sci-fi adventure where Sheen plays a radio astronomer who discovers evidence of intelligent alien life, was not a big hit but was enough to keep Twohy's career going in the right direction. The script is smart, or as Roger Ebert puts it "The movie is as smart as Mission Impossible is dumb." He followed that with the script for G.I. Jane (as well as Waterworld the year before The Arrival) and then disappeared for three years before returning with his breakout movie Pitch Black.
Pitch Black is, if nothing else, the movie that made Vin Diesel a star. But the movie is so much more than just a star making turn for one man. The movie follows a prisoner (Diesel), who has modified his eyes to see in the dark, to a planet about to go pitch black. He must use his special gift to save a group of people from monsters that come out when the sun goes down. The movie is shot in a way where when things go black, they really go black and we can only see either Diesel's perspective or from light sources the group finds. It makes the effort to create a giant bug movie on a miniscule budget possible and is one of the best horror movies to come out in a long time. Pitch Black may have made Vin Diesel a household name, but it made David Twohy a name to be reckoned with.
BELOW
Directed by David Twohy
Written by Lucas Sussman, Darren Aronofsky and David Twohy
Matt Davis ... Odell
Bruce Greenwood ... Brice
Olivia Williams ... Claire
Holt McCallany ... Loomis
Scott Foley ... Coors
Zach Galifianakis ... Weird Wally
Jason Flemyng ... Stumbo
Twohy immediately wanted to do a sequel to Pitch Black, following Diesel's character even further but couldn't get anyone to bite. "I had written a treatment for a sequel shortly after we had done Pitch Black, [but] it didn't do great at the box office," Twohy remembers. "They looked at [the treatment] and said ‘it feels a little too rich for our blood, and we don't want to do that.'" Instead, he directed the horror movie Below, interestingly enough co-written by producer Darren Aronofsky (The Wrestler). Aronofsky was originally supposed to direct the film but passed on it to instead direct Requiem for a Dream. That allowed Twohy to step up to the plate and direct a film more atmospheric then even Pitch Black.
The film takes place on a World War II submarine that picks up survivors from an attack on a British hospital ship, including one woman (Olivia Williams). It is a superstition that a woman on a submarine is bad luck and sure enough strange things start to happen. They must avoid an enemy German submarine that is trying to destroy them while getting to the bottom of the mystery of what is haunting their sub. The cast is superb with Bruce Greenwood as the captain, Holt McCallany (Alien 3) as his Lieutenant, Jason Flemyng (The Red Violin), and Zach Galifianakis in one of his earliest roles as Weird Wally. The movie is a great horror film in the vein of Alien, a haunted house story on a ship. I cannot recommend this movie enough.
THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK
Directed by David Twohy
Written by David Twohy
Vin Diesel ... Riddick
Colm Feore ... Lord Marshal
Thandie Newton ... Dame Vaako
Judi Dench ... Aereon
Karl Urban ... Vaako
This movie has gotten a lot of shit from both fans of Pitch Black and regular film fans with nothing invested either way. The discontent is unfair as the movie is quite an accomplishment as an epic science fiction fantasy. It seemed like Twohy would never get to revisit his franchise until DVD sales made Pitch Black a hit. "Suddenly Universal woke up to the fact that people were still talking about it and it's doing really good business in the DVD marketplace," Twohy said. "'Maybe there's something here. By the way, didn't you write a treatment a long time ago? Can we see that again?' And then suddenly, the expense that was a big expense back then wasn't such a big expense at all."
He was asked by the studio not to rely on people having knowledge of Pitch Black and to make Chronicles as a standalone vehicle, a challenge in and of itself. Another challenge when the time came to make the sequel was the diminishing returns of Vin Diesel. This was not the same man who made a name with The Fast and the Furious. Recent flops included A Man Apart and Knockaround Guys and studios couldn't bank on his name anymore. The final hurdle was Miramax had no idea how to market Below and half-assed the release for the movie, leading it to be considered a financial failure.
"They calculate all of those things," Twohy explained, "they calculate the budget against that, how well my last film did, which wasn't very good, how well Vin's last film did, which wasn't very good, so they come up with a price. ‘Here's what you guys are worth to us. Do you want to make it?' and we go, ‘Uh, okay."
Despite the movie's perceived critical failures, Twohy has preached a continuing of the saga during his promotion of A Perfect Getaway. He has kept in continued contact with Diesel about reviving the story and making the next installment more like the smaller Pitch Black than the sprawling Chronicles. "The hallmark of a good movie, and I think Pitch Black is a good movie, is that even if you took the creatures out of the picture, you'd still have some pretty interesting character dynamics going on within that group," Twohy said, "and it's almost like you can tell the same story without the creature or substitute some other external pressure on the group, because there were internal pressures as well that were interesting."
That sounds to me like what he is attempting to do with his new film, placing a group of characters in a desolate place and putting them through hell without the monsters and ghosts he has used in the past. However, his next movie may end up being another supernatural film called Crying Havoc. Ridley Scott is set to produce and Twohy says it will tell the story of an FBI agent tracking a spy only to find out the spy is more demon than human. He said his visual ideals for the film is comparable to Constantine which is great news to me. Regardless of what his next project is, Twohy has built a solid career behind the camera and I look forward to whatever he decides to do next.
