Alex Proyas, director of Dark City, I,Robot and Knowing
© Josh Gordon
Mania Exclusive Interview: Director Alex Proyas
By: Rob VauxDate: Thursday, August 07, 2008
Alex Proyas first came to the attention of mainstream audiences by directing the 1994 adaptation of The Crow. Though initially overshadowed by the tragic death of Brandon Lee, its intense Gothic imagery and imaginative visual style helped raise it above the throwaway revenge fantasy it might otherwise have been. Proyas followed it with Dark City, a fascinating and unique science fiction film whose theatrical release was drowned in the wake of Titanic. It earned legions of fans on DVD, however, and a long-awaited director's cut of the film was released on July 29. Proyas has gone on to direct the Will Smith adaptation of I, Robot, a comedy about rock and roll called Garage Days, and, most recently, the sci-fi thriller Knowing, due for release in 2009. He talked about these and a number of other projects during press day at the San Diego Comic Con.
Question: What's the attraction of science fiction to you as a genre?
Alex Proyas: I started reading science fiction when I was a kid. It warped my brain and I haven't been the same since. I just wanted to make those sorts of movies. It's a very rich genre with so much potential. There's still so many things we can do with it: I think we've only scratched the surface. It had always been a marginalized genre and now it's very much in the mainstream. And it's interesting how we're living in a world where science fiction is increasingly relevant. It's become part of the background in a way. The guys who were writing it in the 1950s were real prophets, I think. So I'm there, at least until the studios decide it's gone out of fashion. I'm trying to make as many of them as I can before the western comes back or something else supplants it.
Q: You can probably divide science fiction films into two broad categories. There's the character-driven science fiction film and then there's the "big idea" science fiction film. You seem to be able to meld the two together very well. What's the secret to getting real characters into a big idea science fiction film and making it work?
AP: I don't know what the secret is, though thank you for saying that. It's certainly something I'm consciously trying to do. Science fiction, to me, is about ideas. I go back and re-read a lot of the books I read growing up as a kid, and I think, "well the characters aren't that great." The ideas are great, but the emotions aren't there, mostly because of poor characterization. What film does is generate emotion. Action and emotion. Ideally, you can meld them with the emphasis of literary science fiction on ideas and philosophies. But the medium is not perfect in that regard, and it's a constant challenge to blend those two conflicting elements and bring them together. I try very hard to bring them together in my movies, because as much as I would love to make a movie about a pure idea, the movies I really love are strongly about emotion and character.
Q: Can you walk us through the big idea in your new film, Knowing?
AP: The hook of the film is this guy, played by Nick Cage, who discovers a list of numbers put into a time capsule by a little girl in the 1950s. They appear to be a random set of numbers, but it turns out that they're accurate predictions of every major disaster of the last fifty years. And there's three yet to come. He's a scientist, a man of logic and pragmatism, and in his efforts to understand the logic behind this phenomenon, he gets sucked into this world where things defy rational explanation. The film has, for me, an intelligent approach to that conflict through his character. The major appeal is its philosophical theme of order vs. chaos. Cage's character is convinced that the universe functions on principles of chaos. He's lost his sense of meaning, and the document starts him on a journey back to meaning, and trying to find meaning in the structure of the universe. The trailer and the synopsis as such are really just the first act, the hook for getting us into this larger scenario, of which I can tell you very little just now.
Q: How did Cage get involved in the project?
AP: I basically just sent it to him. I've been trying to work with Nick for awhile. I think he's a hugely versatile guy and I thought he could do a good job with this. He didn't let me down. He's really just an everyday guy--a smart everyday guy. He's not an action hero in this movie. He gets thrown into these extremely tense sequences, but he doesn't jump off walls or anything like that. He's very much reacting the way a normal human being would. He made it extremely credible, which is vital for this kind of material.
Q: Let's talk about the director's cut of Dark City. What's different about it?
AP: There's about ten additional minutes of footage. A lot of it is dialogue, lines and embellishments which weren't directly connected to the narrative and had to be cut originally. They add to the richness of the setting and the complexity of the story. There's a lot of character stuff--mostly between Jennifer Connelly and William Hurt. It's a lot of nuanced stuff. There's no big, exciting new action scenes or anything like that. It's more about the atmosphere, the world, and the subtleties of the characters. It makes for a richer experience, for me anyways.
Q: There's always some question about what they mean by "director's cut." Is this the cut that you wish had gone out, or is it the cut that you went back to ten years later to assemble?
AP: It's the way I originally wanted it. It's not something that I've gone back and redesigned from the ground up. It's literally the version of the movie--with a few modest exceptions--that I wanted to release and wasn't able to release because of the testing process and things of that nature. Certain things were imposed upon me that I didn't agree with, but that I had to do at that time. These days, I can be a lot more hard-nosed and say "no way, dammit!" But in those days, if I had threatened to make it an Alan Smithee film, they wouldn't have cared. Now they might care a little bit more. So this is the version of the movie that I always wanted. A more subtle version.
Q: Did you have to fight to get it done? Ten years is a long time . . .
AP: Well I made one or two other films in the interim. [Laughs.] It was actually fun to do. It took so much time to do because the studio needed to see that there was enough of an audience base to buy the DVD. This was a fairly expensive director's cut. We remixed it, we retuned some visual effects, and things like that. They needed to know that it was going to have a healthy shelf life. But it was great fun, because I don't usually look at my movies after I've made them. I just pick faults with them if I watch them again, so I hadn't seen Dark City in ten years. Just seeing the director's cut again was great: it reminded me of the movie I started off making. I was really excited to be able to bring that to an audience.
Q: Your name has been attached to The Tripods. What's the status on that?
AP: Stuart Hazelton and I are writing it. We would have had a draft by now if it weren't for that pesky writer's strike. Then Knowing got green-lit, so I'm just getting back into it now. We've hashed it out to the point where it's sort of working. The draft isn't finished, but it's working. We've stayed very faithful to the first book, The White Mountains. And the expectation, as it always is, is that maybe we'll do all three . . .
Q: So you're not condensing the three books into one film?
AP: No, no. We're literally just doing The White Mountains. It's embellished a bit. We made Ozymandias more of a character: he doesn't just appear for a bit and then disappear. But the structure is very much intact, it's the quest of the White Mountains.
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