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Blade 2director Guillermo del Toro isn't your typical Hollywood director. Although thevampire action sequel is his second American-made film, the director first cameto prominence with his highly regarded Mexican film Cronos. Comics2Filmrecently chatted with Del Toro about Blade 2 and the experience ofmaking movies in Hollywood.
When approachedabout doing Blade 2, Del Toro wasn't sure if he was the right manfor the job. "They sent the screenplay a couple of time and I had somequalms about being involved in a sequel," the director told C2F."But every objection I had was viewed as an advantage by them. Every singletime I said something like that they said, 'That's fine! That's why we wantyou!'
"They knewI was going to do visually my type movie for this one. I wanted to bring more ofthe horror element into it and make the action different from the firstone," Del Toro said.
Del Toro wasimpressed that writer and producer David Goyer was open to reshaping the movietowards the director's vision. "The third time I got the screenplay I madesome comments about some of the parts and some of the structure of thescreenplay," Del Toro commented. "And the next time it came back itcame back with those changes. So when I read it the last time I found itabsolutely irresistible now. It had been sort of already shift a little bittowards what I wanted to do with it."
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Suchcollaboration is a bit different from the director's experiences outside ofHollywood. "I think that the process of making a movie in Spain and Mexicois completely director-driven and the story is essentially something thatusually you write yourself, as a director," Del Toro told us. "Moviesas big as Blade are mostly star-driven, which means that [WesleySnipes], being star and producer, is ultimately the driving force behind themovie even on top, for me, to the studio. The studio is financing it but Wesleyis basically Blade himself.
"So youhave to be more open to listening, to being a collaborator."
Thiscollaboration yielded an action-horror movie that will appeal to fans of thefirst one while still being distinct. "The continuity and the back bone ofboth is essentially that you have David Goyer and Wesley Snipes bringingelements that they know of the Blade universe better than anyone," thedirector said. "I think that those two really hold the key to the Bladeuniverse. They are the two true creators of this whole thing."
"I thinkthat [Blade director Stephen Norrington] and I bring ourcraftsmanship and our vision and our desire to do something stylisticallydifferent than a normal action movie. I think Steve did a wonderful job ofmaking it a really high-polished, much more expensive looking movie than thebudget would have let you guess. He also made it fresh and very, verymuscular."
So what'sdifferent about Blade 2? "This one is a little crazier andfar more removed from reality," Del Toro told us. "I think that themain thing is that we amped-up the horror without losing any of the actionquotient. But even the action, the style of the action is more comic book andmuch more Japanese anime then the first one."
We asked DelToro how he gave the live-action movie an anime influence.
"The firstthing we did in order to achieve that is to find a way to make some of thestunts and the camera work around them a little freer without resorting tothings like wire work. I wanted to find something visually that will make itfresh and innovative and fast pace without cutting," the directorexplained.
"Weinvented something that we call L-Cam which is basically a way to weave two orthree shots together and make them look like a single shot. So the cameraremains really active but you are not cutting, you are moving around a lot morefreely. We call it L-Cam because it is a liberated camera."
Such dynamiccamera work mimics the artwork of the comics that provide the source material."If you went into this movie and freeze framed key frames of it they shouldexactly look like a Mike Mignola comic," Del Toro said. "That was thewhole point of liberating the camera to be able to be in places where a regularcamera operator would never get you in time to witness a piece of the action.
"Aside fromthe L-Cam we created some visual cues, sparks, back-lighting, blurring,different shutter speeds, stuff like that that create little idiosyncraticthings that make it closer to a comic book. It's very, very time consuming, butit was one of the things I wanted to do with the movie is make it truly,visually a comic book movie."
Del Toro'sdevotion to his comic book vision, along with the compressed production scheduleof Blade 2 made for for a physically demanding shoot."Everyone else besides me was working six days a week. I was working sevendays a week. On Sundays I edited," Del Toro said. Part of the extra burdencame from the director's refusal to use second unit shots in the movie."That was very demanding because then I had to do the work of two units ina big movie by myself and my DP. I became a Shaolin monk."
In spite ofthis, Del Toro enjoyed the project. "I must say spiritually it wasone of the best times I've ever had in my life. Even my worst shoots, some ofwhich have really been terrible, I've always had a very happy set. I like tolisten. I like to try to apply what is best for the movie I don't have anyproblem is a good idea doesn't come from me," Del Toro told us. "Ithink that the director is more or less, not a dictator, if you want to use ananalogy, is an ambassador for the movie."
On of the peopleproviding good ideas was actor Luke Goss, who plays Nomak, the villain of themovie. "I loved Luke's ideas for the character. I think he made thecharacter, for me, far more moving and far deeper than what was on thepage," Del Toro said. "We went at it to make a villain that was notjust dark. That was a guy that that had contrast and nobility and was himself avictim."
And helping inthe action department was Hong Kong star and director Donnie Yen. "I wantedto have input from someone that I admired in terms of the martial artssequences. I wanted Donnie to be the martial arts coordinator in the movie. Iproposed it to Wesley who is a huge Donnie Yen fan. He went bananas about it.
"What Iwanted for Donnie was to take care of a couple of precise sequences in the moviethat were going to be a little more martial arts than in the first one. Alittle more Hong Kong but, again, without wires," Del Toro said.
While bringingmore horror to the movie, Del Toro also realized that well-crafted actionsequences are also part of the fun of Blade. "Every actionsequence in the movie is built like a little mini-movie itself. It has adifferent pacing and different tone than the other fights in the movie,"the director told us. "We wanted to have a little bit of variation so wehad a dramatic progress from one fight to the other until the last one wasreally the most emotionally involved, much more grueling fight. So we startedwith a lighter, much more acrobatic style in the movie, that was Donnie, and weend up full-on with Jeff Ward and Wesley choreographing the last fight intoalmost like a bare-knuckle, fist-fighting, kind of street, violent fight at theend."
The directoralso enthused about Snipes' ability to carry the action. "It's really greatto see him fight, just as a martial arts fan," Del Toro said, also notingthat he was amazed by the level of stunt work Snipes did, in addition to thefight sequences. "He knows his style and I think he takes his style to anew level in this movie than the first one. He's more fluid. He's leaner than inthe first one. He lost weight and gained muscle mass and he adapted his fightingstyle to this new configuration and his."
The directortold us that he's very happy with the way Blade 2 has gone thusfar. And of course, there is already talk of the third film. "I would loveto be involved in that one if the premise we're proposing is accepted. Whatwe're proposing is to take the whole mythology of Blade one step further andmake it an apocalyptic vision: What happens if the vampires win?
"That wouldbe really attractive to me. Otherwise I don't want to do another semi-urbanmovie with martial arts and all that."
Blade 2 opensthis Friday at theaters all across the U.S.
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