"It's crazy," added Natali. "It's not entering the world quietly; it’s coming out kicking and screaming. It's great. And to Warner Brother’s credit, and Joel Silver who’s really the man who brought it to their attention and is making this all happen, they have embraced everything that's crazy and subversive about this film."
And Splice is definitely not your typical disposable summer product. The R-rated sci-fi thriller about geneticists who combine human DNA with DNA from animals to create a strange, new creature takes a lot of risks. And fortunately for Natali, Warner Bros didn't force him to make many changes in preparation of its wide release on June 4th, 2010. "I did shoot one shot," revealed Natali, "But it was something I wanted to do anyway. And I cut the film down a bit."
And by a bit, Natali means just two minutes and 11 seconds were cut from the film. "It was all cosmetic things. It just made the film a little bit cleaner and easier to follow, but it in no way affected the basic content," said Natali.
Exclusive Interview with Vincenzo Natali:
You worked on the film for 10 years. How close is this to what you started out with? I imagine it probably changed a lot.Vincenzo Natali: "Right. It went through variations. You know, it’s funny I have this process, a very roundabout way of writing scripts where I start at one point and then I go through a whole series of permutations, and then I always seem to end up where I started but with a slightly more refined version or a hopefully significantly more refined version. So the essence of Splice actually remained remarkably close to where it started. But I think it needed to go through this exploratory process because the essential concept is so loaded. It’s just there's so many things that are kind of inherent dealing with the sort of subject matter that I really needed to figure out what exactly it was about."
You did a lot of research over the years into the technology and bioengineering shown in the film. I'm sure that changed and evolved over the 10 years as well.
Vincenzo Natali: "Oh yes."
Did you have to change your story to reflect the advancements in the research?
Vincenzo Natali: "I have to say that the technology started to catch up with our fiction, so I didn’t really have to change anything. It just came to pass. I just read today that the world’s first fully artificial organism has been made by Craig Venter. It’s a bacteria that's completely synthetic."
How does that make you feel that the subject matter of your film, the creation of an artificial organism, is coming to pass?
Vincenzo Natali: "Right. I think it was in the air anyway, I don't think I was terribly prescient. I mean, I don't think I was suggesting anything that hadn’t already been suggested by other people at the time, but there's no question when I started on this it wasn't part of the popular consciousness. And since then it really has kind of, the science has developed to such an extent that everyone knows what it’s about. And, yes, it’s wild. I mean it’s really amazing. There are a lot of things that were sort of science fiction when I was a kid that have now come to pass."
You can walk away from this movie believing that the writer is against these scientific advancements.
Vincenzo Natali: "Oh sure, right."
How do you balance that - not justify it, but balance it?
Vincenzo Natali: "Well at the end of the day it is a horror film so it was always going to be a cautionary tale of some kind. So maybe my personal feelings diverge a little bit from what you might take from the movie, but at the end of the day I think the film still does walk [a fine line]. It is somewhat a grey issue. It’s a complex issue and hopefully the film recognizes that, in that what Clive and Elsa are doing is for all intents and purposes very well intentioned and has tremendous benefits for humanity. And in fact when we started shooting the film they realized the creation of animal-human hybrids in the UK for exactly the same purpose - to help cure the same genetic diseases that Clive and Elsa are hoping to cure. So it really is a real science, or it’s very similar to real science, and the intentions are noble and worthy. It’s just the way Clive and Elsa do it that's highly questionable."
"They do their experiments in a very clandestine way and they kind of jump into it with both feet, without really contemplating what potential ramifications could be. And then they themselves, the characters, are not fully evolved people. They're very childlike in a way and maybe childish in the way they approach their work, so they suffer the consequences."
Especially Elsa. She's so flawed and her background is so painful. How did you come up with the character? Do you know somebody like Elsa? She's such a realistic female character.
Vincenzo Natali: [Laughing] "I might have dated Elsa once or twice. Well I loved Elsa...I loved both of the characters, Clive and Elsa, I have tremendous affection for them and tremendous sympathy and admiration for them. I think in Elsa’s case... Incidentally, both of them do terrible things to themselves. I mean, you know, very horrible questionable things, but again I think they're sort of victims of their own success in that they’ve created an environment for themselves which is totally hermetic and they're sort of out of touch with what's outside the walls of their lab. And as they create this creature, they develop a real paternal connection with it and so the boundaries of what's right and wrong get a little bit fuzzy in that context, because they're so cut off."
"I think they really slip into this unfortunate situation, and they certainly don't mean to do the bad things that they do, Elsa particularly. Elsa, having had a very unhappy relationship with her own mother, sort of invariably finds herself reenacting that relationship, except this time she's in the mother role. Of course I think that's very common with people who come from a certain background."
Not to give away any spoilers, but is the ending what you had planned all along? Is there an alternate ending out there?
Vincenzo Natali: "No, that was always the ending. In every version, what happens to her is what happens, yes. It seemed inevitable because of Elsa’s whole background. Again, without giving anything away, it seems like the correct way to finish her story. I mean the end of her story is of course the beginning of another story, I'm sure."
The CG effects were terrific. What you were able to do with your budget...it's so realistic and creepy.
Vincenzo Natali: "Oh, thank you. Yes, we had really fantastic artists working on this film."
