Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here.
Writer Evan Goldberg is one of easiest guys to talk to, period. So much so, that I sometimes forget to interview him when I'm doing so. As the co-writer (with Seth Rogen) of such works as SUPERBAD, PINEAPPLE EXPRESS, a great episode of "The Simpsons," and THE GREEN HORNET (as well as the co-writer with Jay Baruchel on the minor league hockey movie GOON), Goldberg seems to have his finger on the pulse of reinventing certain genre films for the modern era, whether it be a coming-of-age film, a stoner comedy, a sports story, or a superhero movie.
Evan and I sat down at Comic-Con this past July to chat about THE GREEN HORNET and its many changes and production adventures. Here's Evan Goldberg…
Capone: We met at this time last year.
Evan Goldberg: Yep.
Capone: In front of a car, if I remember correctly. I was not aware that I was talking to you today, so I’m slightly unprepared. If it's okay, I’m just going to ask you questions I would ask Christoph [Waltz], I think,
EG: Go for it!
Capone: Of course, when I saw you last year, they hadn’t shot anything and they hadn’t cast certain people. Did you guys have to make any adjustments in the screenplay once things finally started coming together?
EG: Oh yeah.
Capone: Tell me about some of the bigger alterations.
EG: The question you are asking is way too large. We have changed the complete plot numerous times and shifted entire things, like there was a different bad guy at one juncture, then there was another bad guy, then there was a version where Britt and Kato always knew each other, and they didn’t know each other. There was a version where Kato was from China. We did a version where Kato is from Santa Monica and was like a punk, which we had to remove, because we were like “Maybe we should just make him American, and this whole process might be a bit easier.” [laughs]
Capone: That might have solved a lot of problems.
EG: Yeah, but we didn’t. Whatever you are imagining, it happened. We went through every version fathomable.
Capone: Michel [Gondry] was still relatively new to the project a year ago, so did he have any things to offer you in terms of story ideas?
EG: Oh, yeah. Well a lot of people don’t know that the first job that he ever got when he first came to Hollywood was THE GREEN HORNET like 12 or 13 years ago.
Capone: Really? I didn’t know that.
EG: There is a script, too. It’s in my apartment. It is crazy.
Capone: Written by…?
EG: Written by Michel and someone else…[Edward Neumeier]. God who was it? It was the writer of ROBOCOP. He wrote it with somebody else.
Capone: I’ll ask him.
EG: I can’t remember, but it was wild, and he definitely took some stuff from it and brought it over.
Capone: Nice. When you wrote it, were you envisioning this as a 3D project?
EG: We were. Seth and I have been obsessed with 3D forever, especially me, and when he went to film it was either OBSERVE AND REPORT or ZACK AND MIRI MAKE A PORNO, I had more free time, so I went to Real D and I went to Pace and I met up with my friend Nick Theodorakis, who is a very knowledgeable individual in 3D and worked on a lot of these 3D films, and he took me to conventions, and we studied 3D and I learned everything about it. Seth and I had been pushing for this this movie to be 3D since well before we even wrote it. We've always wanted it to be 3D. We could not possibly be happier that it’s 3D now, and the one thing that we really wanted was to shoot in 3D, and it’s a lucky accident that that didn’t happen, because this conversion process is turning out to work better for us.
Capone: Really?
EG: Just because of all sorts of technical things, like flares from the camera, when light hits the camera, there’s a flare. You don’t get that on 3D cameras, because you have two lenses and it’s got two points, and we’ve got all of these flares and we are animating them out into 3D and pulling them out with 3D conversions. So you are going to see someone kick someone and then a shiny glimmer of light’s going to come at me. That kind of shit is really cool, and we were just lucky. We didn’t know we were getting into that.
Capone: And it seems like pushing the release date to January that you are actually giving the post-conversion people time to get it right.
EG: We don’t want to pull a "you know what." [I believe he's referring to CLASH OF THE TITANS.]
[Both Laugh]
Capone: Well, there are more than one of those…
EG: Yeah. Well they're all rushing it, first of all.
Capone: That’s the thing, they're doing it in three months or something.
EG: We're doing it in six months or something, and it’s still a bitch in six months. The thought of doing it in three months is insanity to me, because it just limits you with everything else, like you are locked into these dates, but it’s also kind of nice, because it keeps you on track. We all know that August 5th we’ve got to have some shit done. But yeah, we also did everything practically that we could. With a movie this scope, there’s a lot of CG and stuff, but it’s not like AVATAR or THE LAST AIRBENDER or like a SPIDER MAN movie, where like half the movie is CG people. We CG in a rocket; we CG in a gas pellet. But Seth, the car, the main characters, Jay, Christoph, when they're fighting there are no computer versions of them at any juncture. I’m pretty certain we never have CG people in the movie. We tried to keep it practical, and so for the 3D, you are not seeing a dragon… Actually the dragon movie was unbelievable in 3D. HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON was one of my favorites.
Capone: I agree, I loved it. Animated movies I have no problems with the 3D.
EG: Animated movies, no one has a problem with; people think they have a problem with the non-animated movies, but have you seen an actually non-animated 3D movie? Can you say AVATAR is not animated? I can't.
Capone: No, I definitely think it is, and when it got nominated for best film, I remember thinking it should be nominated for best animated film, as well. Ninety-five percent percent of that movie is animated.
EG: Yeah, that’s an animated film. It’s like the SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS movie, like a lot of it took place on earth, but I would call that an animated movie. I never saw THE FINAL DESTINATION or MY BLOODY VALENTINE.
Capone: I was actually just talking to the director of MY BLOODY VALENTINE just minutes ago, because he has this awesome 3D movie with Nicolas Cage, DRIVE ANGRY, that’s coming out next year, shot in 3D. MY BLOODY VALENTINE is awesome, because there’s nothing subtle about the 3D. You got a lot of people talking about “Oh, we aren’t going to throw things at you.” These guys are throwing body parts and gore and axes at you.
EG: I can’t watch that gory shit. I can’t do it. That movie looked cool, but I can’t do gore.
Capone: It’s so good.
EG: We're going to do this movie, JAY AND SETH VS. THE APOCALYPSE, and it's going to have some gore stuff in it.
Capone: I was going to ask if that was still happening.
EG: Oh yeah, we're doing that.
Capone: Is that the next film for you and Seth?
EG: There might be some other stuff in-between that going down, because we're still writing that. We really want to nail it. We don’t want to fuck this up, because we have waht we think is an amazing concept. So we are writing it. That’s the hardest part, but we also want to get the actors signed on before we write it, so we can write it for the actors.
Capone: Okay, cool man. It was good to see you again.
EG: Cool, dude. Hopefully, we'll talk about the next one.
Capone: Thanks a lot.
EG: I’m at this table all day.
-- Capone capone@aintitcool.com
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