June 2008 - Seth Rogen's one very busy guy. On the set of the Warner Bros Pictures comedy Observe and Report (the working title), Rogen told the online journalists gathered that having such a full schedule is an interesting experience for him. "It's been very good lately. It's busy. I was just going through my schedule for the next few months. It's weird. Assuming Green Hornet gets made, which it looks like it might, the next year and a half of my life is basically planned out for me already. So it's a little strange being a guy who normally doesn't know what he's doing tomorrow to have that work, but it's a good feeling."
Rogen's gearing up for The Green Hornet with Columbia Pictures setting a June 25, 2010 release date. According to Rogen, the budget will most likely be between $70-100 million.
Although he's known for R-rated comedies, with The Green Hornet he's aiming for a PG-13. He wrote the screenplay for Drillbit Taylor, which was also a PG-13 movie, so he's familiar with the territory. But it's still easier for him to work in an R-rated environment. "That's an action movie. You can do anything violence-wise, so it actually does not affect it in any way shape or form that it's PG-13," explained Rogen. "…It's definitely, when trying to write something that's really relatable and kind of about people going through things that everybody goes through, in my head it's easier to do that in an R rated movie just because people say f*ck in real life."
One actor rumored to be in the running to play Kato in the big screen version of The Green Hornet is Stephen Chow. "He's someone, you know, until you get an official greenlight, the studio won't spend any money. It's hard to get an actor without any money, but he is someone that yeah, we would love to have him," said Rogen. "The version of the script that ultimately we've written is a very intense action movie but the relationship between the Green Hornet and Kato, a lot of comedy comes from that. At first, actually, we weren't even sure going in whether or not we could be more of a Jet Li type of guy who maybe isn't the funniest guy in the world but is physically very impressive, or whether it would be more of a Stephen Chow type guy who can do martial arts but also clearly has a sense of humor on him. In the version that we've made, it seems like a Stephen Chow type guy would be more suitable for the role."
Rogen added, "But yeah, again, until they officially greenlight it, it's hard to make any of those decisions. We have been meeting directors and stuff though, even though we haven't green lit it. Me and Evan [Goldberg] just kind of took it upon ourselves to begin the conversations with people. I'm really excited. It seems like it really might happen."
The action would be shared between Kato and Rogen's character, Brit Reid, and the film would deal with Kato and Brit working out their relationship. "I would say in a way it's your quintessential story about a hero and his sidekick," offered Rogen. "That's what really initially drew us to it is we always thought that was kind of a funny dynamic and a funny relationship. No movies really did that except Batman and Robin. No movies did that well. So it's something that for years, me and Evan had actually kind of been toying with this notion of a movie that really explores the hero/sidekick relationship and what is a hero without a sidekick? What is a sidekick without a hero? It's actually a dynamic that applies to many real life situations, a lot of working dynamics, a lot of boss and their underlings. That's what really initially drew us to it because the one thing people say when you say The Green Hornet is Bruce Lee, Kato. He's the only sidekick who's way more known than he is."
For Rogen and his co-writer Goldberg, writing the action sequences is not all that difficult. "The movies that I grew up on were not comedies for the most part I would say. They were, but my mother's favorite movies were Die Hard and Total Recall. Under Siege I remember seeing in the movie theater when I was way too young to see it. I remember seeing Lethal Weapon 2 in the movie theater. So those are my favorite types of movies, really. So it's not hard at all to write action. It's really fun for us to just, we try to be innovative with it. I see every single action movie that comes out so we're constantly thinking what do we like, what do we not like, what have we just never seen before? Our goal is to always make it just, Pineapple [Express] obviously had budgetary restraints, but with Green Hornet it's really our goal to show people action that they've never quite seen before."
