Q: Did your work on Silver Surfer: Requiem comic bring about the offer to write the Silver Surfer movie?

A: It was one of those weird synchronicities. Whether or not it ever gets made I don't know because they were kind of disappointed in how Fantastic Four 2 did. And given how this will be a subset of FF2 in terms of the marketing strategy, I think there is hesitation there about putting it forward. The script is pretty good, I like it, but whether or not it goes into production, I have no idea.

Q: Does this pick up where Silver Surfer left off in Fantastic Four 2?

Q: When do you mean when you say,"We see Galactus"? 

Q: In the script I come up with some ways to visualize him that are true to the original, but take it one step further using the current CGI technology that we have. So we would have seen him as a character on numerous occasions in the second movie, not inconsistent with the first distant shot of him in that that's just a way of concealing who and what he really is. Believe me, he would be not at all silly looking. 

Q: You were the writer on Marvel's recent Spider-Man event One More Day, in which Spider-man makes a deal with Mephisto (the devil) to save his Aunt's life by negating his marriage to Mary Jane. It was rumored you had some big disagreements about this story line with Marvel Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada. 

A: Often times when you care a lot about something, you can disagree strenuously. Personally, I was perfectly happy keeping them married; I didn't think Mephisto should be used in that fashion, and I didn't like the idea of erasing everyone's memory. Whenever you bring magic into a story you have to be really rigorous about the rest of it. And a lot of logical questions to my mind were not being addressed. Having said that, it's a complicated universe and it is Joe's purview. Yes, we disagreed strenuously, and some of it leaked out. I take responsibility for that, but the reality is that Joe I consider to be a friend, and anyone who wants to say a bad word about Joe has to go through me first.

Q: You also wrote a screenplay for the popular zombie book World War Z.

Q: I am a huge zombie fan. I have probably seen the George Romero movies 100 times each, without exaggeration. And when Paramount and Plan B got the rights to the project, they brought me in. It was a hard book to adapt because it's got no main character, no narrative structure to it. And how do we market it, because it's a political thriller zombie movie, and those two seem to be inconsistent.

Q: How did you make it a political thriller zombie movie?

A: Well, it's really sort of an investigation -- as the book is accomplished after the fact, the main character is a person working with the UN after the zombie wars, going around to see what went wrong, what was not known and who didn't connect the dots. In a way it's looking at the Katrina situation, it's not that far away from the Iraq Study Group Report, and everyone wants to cooperate to find out what went wrong.

Q: I hear you were asked to adapt E.E. Smith's classic SciFi series Lensman.

A:  I went nuts because I'm a huge Lensman fan. I essentially start in a matter of a couple weeks. And it's going to be huge --  we're going to look at this as something with the effects level of the Star Wars movies, and the seriousness of Blade Runner. And it's going to be hopefully three movies. The first one will be more or less self-contained, but will open up the ending for the possible sequels, and it's pretty exciting. I think they're probably looking for the first one in 2010.

Q: You seem insanely busy.

A: You don't know the half of it. About a month and a half ago I got a call from the Wachowski Brothers. I met with them and they had a draft for this movie called Ninja Assassin, which wasn't at all where they wanted it to be. And they said, "We need a whole new script, and we go to camera in six weeks." So I went home and put on a pot of coffee, and I wrote essentially a whole new script in 53 hours. When a friend calls you and says they're in trouble, you do what you have to.

Which scene from Patriot Games is the most classic?  The Confrontation, The Ultimatum, or The Truth? AMCtv.com visitors voted for their favorites and the results are in. The Truth scene with James Earl Jones' Admiral Greer asking Jack Ryan to "tell me one thing in life that is absolutely for certain" won with 49% of the votes. The Confrontation scene captured 28% of the vote, followed closely by The Ultimatum scene with 22% of the votes.

This weekend, while the Sex and the City women are laughing all the way to the bank, on the other side of the multiplex, things are much, much darker for the men. For them, there is only horror, anguish, confusion and despair. It comes courtesy of The Strangers, which begins with a man (Scott Speedman) and a woman (Liv Tyler) driving to a house in the middle of nowhere. They're both in fancy party clothes, but she's crying and he's looking like he wants to cry, only he's a manly man and so must settle for clenching his jaw, manfully.

They get to the house and despite the candles, rose petals, champagne, crackling fire and a bubble bath... Tyler is still crying. It's like every man's nightmare: You've done all the right things and she's still not happy? So Speedman says he'll give her the bedroom and he'll sleep on the couch, and this is totally not making any sense to me: Bubble bath + candlelight + champagne + romance = sex. At this point in the movie, my palms were clammy and a cold sweat was trickling down my back. Did someone change the rules?

Depressed and despondent, Speedman sits at the table and pulls out a five gallon tub of ice cream and starts eating it with a spoon. This is obviously a horror movie about men turning into women. And not just any women -- women from early 1990s romantic comedies, the kind of movies that use shots of women eating ice cream as shorthand for, "She's feeling sad right now." But then, as if to clear everything up: A flashback. Except this is the kind of flashback that directors who think they're too good to need flashbacks use, where they end the scene right before you actually see what happened: Speedman says to Tyler, "I remember the first time I saw you," and he's turning a velvet box that wedding rings come in over and over in his hands. Only Tyler looks really upset and suddenly... the flashback is over.

Later, some other stuff happens -- like some kids come to their house and try to kill them -- and it took me until the movie was almost over to realize that this is supposed to be the scary part. The kids wear creepy masks and play mind games with Tyler and Speedman; mostly it amounts to treading water while we wait for the credits. The first time you see a spooky mask face, it's scary. The twentieth time you see a spooky mask face, it's 20 times less scary.

This flick is a lesser version of the 2006 French horror movie Them (Ils), despite the fact that the producers and director of The Strangers are claiming as hard as they can that it's an original project. Unfortunately for them, Them is much scarier, and much better made, delivering a real story with characters who stand a chance of escaping. The Strangers, on the other hand, doesn't have much to offer beyond some creepy stuff at the beginning that's repeated over and over again. You know from the start that its characters stand about as much chance of surviving as Scott Speedman stands of getting some nookie from Liv Tyler.

Sure, you know him from the tabloids and the multiplex, but heartthrob activist and ex-Friend-friend Brad Pitt can pull off action and accents, ensembles and epics -- and he's been racking up producer credits as well. Take our Ultimate Fan Quiz to show how much you know about the once and future Sexiest Man Alive. Be the first person to correctly answer all 15 questions in our Ultimate Fan Quiz and you'll win a copy of A River Runs Through It.

The quiz runs from Friday May 30 to Friday June 6 at midnight, and the winner will be announced shortly afterward. (Make sure we have a relevant email address in your profile so we can contact you about your prize.)

If you win, maybe he'll adopt YOU!

1. Which Pitt film included a statement attesting to the safety of the fish that appeared in it?

2. What film was Pitt shooting when he met Angelina Jolie?

3. In the past, Pitt has been engaged to two other co-stars. Who are they and in what films did each of them appear with him?

5. What injury does Richard's wife, Susan, sustain in Babel?

6. In Troy, what gesture does Achilles make toward Briseis during both their first and last encounters?

7. Pitt has one Academy Award nomination to his credit. For which film?

8. What two Jim Harrison novellas round out the trilogy that includes Legends of the Fall?

9. In which film does Pitt's character smoke a pipe fashioned from a common pantry item?

10. What was Frank Harris' main mission in Cool World?

11. For what franchise did Pitt dress as a giant chicken before finding success as an actor?

12. Which Pitt film was first criticized and then effusively praised by the author from whose work it was adapted?

13. How many times has he been named People Magazine's "Sexiest Man Alive"?

14. With which director has Pitt made the most films?

15. What 1995 film is widely believed to have been inspired by its director's work with Pitt?

Need help? Tune into Troy. For a full schedule of the movie on AMC, click here. ]]> tag:blogs.amctv.com,2008:/future-of-classic//10.9579 2008-05-30T04:00:06Z 2008-05-29T21:15:36Z