Kristine
Posts: 3061
Joined: Sep. 2006
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Past the popcorn, Kevin interviewed by Greg Wright. They just don't understand! | Quote | Q: So with your first screenwriting experience, After…, I’d like to get at some of the things there that perhaps reviewers didn’t understand.
KM: Sure.
Q:I had a chance to talk with Cunningham [who also directed After…] during the press tour for The Seeker, and I totally spaced about the fact that I could have talked to him about After…, which had just come out on DVD. But in talking to David, it sounded like he just feels like he’s been through the wringer with his last two projects.
KM: Well, I don’t want to speak for David, but The Seeker did get pretty unfavorable reviews, and the boxoffice was not what everyone had hoped. And that’s never a fun thing to go through. And in terms of After…, we released on DVD. Our hope initially was for a theatrical release, but we were thankful to at least get distribution; and as to the reviews, After… is the kind of movie that challenges you, for sure. And I think a lot of people just weren’t up for the challenge.
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Wow! Condescend much?
| Quote | Q: One site in particular, Plume Noir, had some fairly nasty things to say [about Kevin's film After...]:
| Quote | | The film takes elements such as guilt, kidnapping, pedophilia, pregnancy, extreme sports, Stalin, torture chambers, atomic radiation, ghosts, and techno, mixes them and throws them in your face like some cheap drink. I really don’t know what went through the screenwriter’s mind, but I suspect he may have taken some acid while exploring some dark underground in Lichtenstein. |
KM: Yeah. It’s interesting. You know, it’s funny, because I’ve written some pretty harsh reviews in my life. I’ll tell you something; I really laid into a writer at DC Comics for some issues of Green Lantern, and I ended up getting an email from him because his uncle had seen my review. And that didn’t feel very good. I should have known better at the time, but I think that I was sort of so frustrated at the state of the comic book industry as a whole that I unloaded on him, where I was really unloading on, to me, a bigger issue. I apologized. So when a guy like that writes something like [the review at Plume Noir], I hear somebody just trying to sound clever. I’m pretty easy to access on the Internet, and he could have very easily contacted me and asked if I had done acid before writing the film and I would have very gladly given him the answer (which is “no”). The other point is that After… is a good case in point of how a good idea at the beginning—a good high concept—sometimes, by the time it reaches the screen, isn’t quite how you thought it would be. When David and I initially got together on After…, it had nothing to do with suicide. My pitch to David was, “Let’s do Point Break in the world of urban exploration.” That’s where we started. So when you see what we ended up with, you may be surprised. But that’s because you can’t see the dozens of drafts we wrote along the way. I could write a book on how we got there. I’m proud of what we achieved with After…, but the final product is definitely a lot different from what I originally envisioned. Not in terms of quality, just the overall tone of the film. It’s a lot darker. |
Yeah, I wish I could have seen the drafts of Expelled, too. In fact, I wish PZ could have seen the film. But it was pretty funny to Mark Mathis's face when Dawkins stood up in the audience afterward. I don't know how to top that when Dawkins comes back next March. Maybe we'll all take in a movie at the MOA? I hear the night-vision goggles have been put away.
| Quote | Q: It’s incredibly difficult to make even a mediocre film.
KM: I think it’s incredibly difficult to make a movie, period, because you have so many different opinions in the mix. Getting money is probably the most difficult part. So I always go back to that line from Young Guns, Billy the Kid saying, “There’s many a slip between the cup and the lip.” To me, that describes the whole process. So any time you get a good movie, you know, it’s just short of a miracle.
Q: Yes, it’s a real triumph.
KM: It is. And then, like you say, I think people are pretty vicious toward people who end up making a bad movie. But it’s often just a combination of small errors or things going wrong, as opposed to just one person.
Q: And even when you’re not happy with what you ended up with [May I ask why you're even on this subject if everything's going so well?], the principles involved in backing the film financially dictate that you have to get some kind of return on investment. So you’ve got pressure there to get distribution for a film that its makers might not even be all that proud of.
KM: Oh, definitely. Because that’s what it comes down to, right? This is a business, after all. It’s for making money. And that said, you know, it’s funny. After…, for me, is a movie that gets better and better. I’ve seen the final cut now five times, and I think it’s a movie that gets better with repeated viewings, to tell you the truth; and I’m not sure why that is. And I’m not sure if that’s just true for me, the screenwriter, or what. As I said earlier, After… is the kind of film that challenges the viewer in many ways—visually and structurally. Some people enjoy that kind of challenge, but most people just want to watch something that affirms what they already believe. So when you make a film like After…, you’re already playing to a limited audience. But that’s fine with me, because even though After… may give some people headaches and drive other people crazy, there are other people who simply love the film and respect the chances David took with the material. All you can do as a writer and filmmaker is be true to your vision. How people respond to it is out of your control. |
I love my film. It gets better every time I watch it. But you should have seen the dailies! People can't handle my work. My reviewers don't understand. They weren't up to the challenge. Yeah, it's all about money - even if I didn't make much. My films did well, even if people didn't go to them. You don't have control over how people react!
Flipping bizarre interview, I must say.
Well, Greg Wright didn't like Expelled.
| Quote | | When it comes to its subject matter, though, Expelled fumbles the ball quite a bit. In the interests of entertainment and of simplifying its argument, it never bothers to tell us much about I.D., its tenets, its history, or its connections to Creationism. It oversimplifies the “opposition,” too, conflating activist atheists with practicing scientists who object on purely scientific grounds, and failing to distinguish between “Darwin,” “social Darwinism,” and “Darwinian evolution” as merely one branch of evolutionary biology. It also conveniently ignores voices in the debate who represent something of a middle ground. |
Kevin, you really need to get your "friends" on message!
| Quote | | Ben Stein's motion picture documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, hardly set any attendance records in that nothing blew up and everyone remained fully clothed (admittedly the prospect of a naked Ben Stein is a horrifying thought). |
And that's from a sympathizer!
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Which came first: the shimmy, or the hip?
AtBC Poet Laureate
"I happen to think that this prerequisite criterion of empirical evidence is itself not empirical." - Clive
"Damn you. This means a trip to the library. Again." -- fnxtr
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, about random variables, he'd know that regression analysis can be used for prediction and hypothesis testing, but geez, we all know that only Nazi-commie-atheists who want to kill babies believe in randomness! 
Yeah, well, the best economists that I've encountered don't have a problem with evolution for some strange Enlightenment reason. And as for Stein saying that experts aren't always smart, I note that despite his being 99.99% wrong on the economy for the past two years he doesn't include himself in his list of dumb people.
