What makes this movie different from other vampire movies?
Producer Sam Raimi: “Well, I think it started with Ben Templesmith and Steve Niles’ great graphic book. The visuals that Templesmith provided for me were strikingly original and terrifying. I loved the original take on the vampires that he illustrated.
Also, just the sense of the use of the long shot. I don’t know if they’re called that in comic books, but the way he showed cold and ice in the frozen-over look of the environment was shockingly gripping in the visuals. But then our writer, Steve Niles, did a great job in that graphics book. I was very enamored of the two characters - the main characters, but also the vampires and the fact that he bothered to create a very rich mythology for them. I really liked learning about them. I was hungry to know more and basically, the situation they came up with, which should have come up with writers a hundred years ago, a hundred times every year, it’s obvious once a great writer comes up with something like that. But to take that and make it take place in Barrow, Alaska, maybe the northernmost American city, where night falls for such a long period of time and have vampires come to this place with characters I really care about, Eben and Stella. It’s cut off and it’s iced over, just the combination of all those things for me made it something I wanted to see in a picture.”
Why did you want to play this main character?
Josh Hartnett: “I read the graphic novel [at] the exact same time as I read the script, and I spoke to David on the phone not too long after that. And then really the biggest sale for me was the people involved. I went and saw Hard Candy. I’ve never really been – I think I’m gonna get shot for saying this, but I’ve never really read a lot of comic books…I’m sorry...but I flipped through this one and saw that the visuals were astounding. I thought with the combination of David and those original visuals, it was going to be a spectacular looking film.
I also thought there was room for a good character in there, and the script as written was great. It had all the elements of a really interesting, thoughtful film about what it would be like to be stuck in a situation where you have no escape and you’re being hunted. And the idea of being hunted not being able to just go out and kick some ass I thought was different from most of your average action films or suspense films or horror films. I thought it was just going to be kind of a nice, add a nice touch of maybe Treasure of the Sierra Madre or like Mutiny on the Bounty sort of thing. You’re in conflict the entire time and there’s no kind of logical way of getting out of it.
I just thought it would be a really cool film and then all the people involved, and then we got an amazing cast together. David pulled together an incredible cast with Ben [Foster] and Danny Huston and Melissa [George], and it just seemed like the right thing to do.
Also actually, the biggest thing, and I don’t even know if I told you this, David, but the thing that really turned me on to the project more than anything was David came up to Minnesota, where I’m from, and we sat at a bar, this bar/bowling alley, that I’ve been going to since I was a kid. We sat there we talked for about an hour and he had his little digital camera. He had a Leica digital camera - he was very proud of it - in a little metal case. He took a few pictures with it and he sent them to me via email. I didn’t recognize the place because he’d graded it in such a way and he fooled around with it and manipulated it to the point where the whole place - it was the middle of a bright sunny summer day and it looked haunted. And I was like, ‘This guy has got the right mentality for this film.’”
When you hand your comic book over to Hollywood, you’re putting it in somebody else’s hands. Some people take the approach where the comic and film are separate and don’t want anything to do with it. Some want to be really involved. What’s your process?
Steve Niles: Well for me, they gave me first shot at the screenplay, so I got to do that, and then it’s been great ever since. Every single person from Sam, David, the producers, everybody has kept me in the loop throughout the entire process. It’s been absolutely amazing. I felt really attached to it and pretty much since I met David I knew I was in good hands. I just trust him and they kept me updated the entire time, so it’s been pretty amazing.”
Ben Templesmith: “I was the complete opposite. Only in the way that I thought yes, you were correct, I would treat it as there was the film and there was the comic. I didn’t want to get my hopes up, so that they could be dashed if it turned out differently. But then I went to the set and saw what they were doing. David was so faithful to all the aspects that I thought made the comic what it was, that it is literally almost, within reason, the same thing. It is so faithfully done. The little details he’s done is extraordinary. He turned a somewhat skeptical, you know, like, ‘I’ll take that as something separate from what I’m doing,’ to ‘Wow, this is me on film.’”
Page 2: The Shooting Location, Vampires, and Recreating the Comic
