Obsessed With Film

Posted by Will Reynolds

Joe Carnahan is awesome.

Not only is he a frequent blogger and giver-awayer of free scripts, he also makes films that are half-way decent!

To further hammer home his awesomeness he’s answered 12 burning questions from IESB.net.

Head on over to the site to read the full interview. Meanwhile, here’s a few parts that might interest OWF readers:

On giving away the Killing Pablo script on his site:

“Putting something like the Killing Pablo screenplay on my blog doesn’t bother me in the least. I think more demystification is what this business needs. Everybody’s worried about ’seeing the strings’ and I think that’s a bunch of bullshit. I’m as big a movie fan as the next guy and I get geeked at behind the scenes stuff like that. I got to talk Blade Runner with Ridley Scott in France once and I was always struck by his completely matter-of-fact way in discussing it. He’s an artist, not a lockbox. By sharing our craft or how we think and work, it doesn’t cheapen the effect, if anything, I feel like it enhances the experience.” [Note from Will: Joe is the anti-Abrams!]

On dropping out of M:I-3:

“I would rather create my own franchise. I’ve always thought what Larry and Andy Wachowski did with The Matrix was the way to play it. Build your own world. It’s so much more exciting than swimming in somebody else’s wake. Not that I don’t love some of those franchises but the idea of doing it myself is so much more alluring. I think the last Bourne film is the best of the series and if you’re going to do something like Mission Impossible and you’re not doing it at that level, then what’s the point?”

On Common as Green Lantern:

“This question was such a surprise to me, that I literally called Common after I read it and he said he was indeed in the running and it looked good. I couldn’t be happier for him.”

On him doing a comic book film (which I think is a great idea, and he should bring in his brother to write it):

“I think the only one knocking around now that I would love to take a shot at would be Captain America because I think that story, if contemporized, could kick ass.”

source - iesb

categories - Movie News

Further Reading

• Zak Penn re-writing The Dirty Dozen remake

• Guy Ritchie

• Did Tarantino force Guy Ritchie’s hand into SHERLOCK HOLMES?

• Guy Ritchie will be putting together THE DIRTY DOZEN

• Guy Ritchie follows Matthew Vaughn to a comic book property?

1 Comment »

1. I would LOVE to see a Captain America movie! I can’t tell you how jazzed I get about the potential that movie has. ONLY Batman Begins has dared to live up to what MY “ideal” pre-conceived adaptation of a beloved character would be (equal parts Batman:Year One and Crime Story) so since I’m only batting 1 for 50 that department, it’s extremely unlikely cap would live up to my expectations. But that said…
   I would stand in line for a month to see ANY comic book movie written/directed by Joe Carnahan –six months if it’s Captain America!
   If I may, allow me to tell you the kind of Cap movie I’d love to see: It starts in the 1940’s. Steve Rogers, a marine in the 2nd Raider Battallion, a graduate of Annapolis and the War College, is recommended by his superior (Maj. James Roosevelt, the exectuive officer of the 2RB, who is also the president’s son), for a secret government “training program.” To wit, Rogers becomes the only survivor of a failed attempt to create a batch of super-soldiers, the plan having been ruined during a surprise attack by the guy who would become the Red Skull later in the story –the sabotage-ambush would be aided and abetted by a traitor in the US military, a Deutsch/American Bund type whose undermining Cap would also have to contend with.
   We follow Cap throughout the war years as he fights the Red Skull and his SS henchmen, who are all the products of a reverse-engineered Nazi super-soldier program. By the end of the story Cap manages to kill all of the Nazi-ubermensch and seeemingly the Skull as well. Of course in the process he winds up put in hibernation (frozen in the artic simply wouldn’t be plausible) for the next sixty years. This establishes him in a pseudo-historical figure and –intelligently, one would hope– presses all the buttons that movies like The Rocketeer and Sky Captain failed to press. Best of all, it uses the comic-book cannon as ammunition to power the plot and narrative.

   And it flows so seamlessly into a sequel. Because as we all know in the 1940’s Cap was frozen in ice just before the war ended and was found/revived in the present-day, in this case 2008. It’s the classic formula for shaking up the series for the follow-up, something that helps the series avoid stagnation but at the same time helps it remain true to itself. But here’s the best part. The greatest soldier in the world is forced to become a hero all over again, and re-evaluate what it means to be an American for that matter.
   I’m actually more enthused about this turn of events, than the original itself. But of course it only works if the original movie is a period-piece.
   Imagine it. A world completely unlike anything Steve Rogers knew. Both the Nazi’s and the Soviet Union, are both gone. The goverment of all white males is now largely a thing of the past, the military is integrated (by next year a woman may well be president of the U.S.) and technology now rules the world instead of crude machinery.
   Can you imagine a WW2 legend like Captain America in today’s world? Porn, drug, the intenet all things he could never have imagined. Can you see him trying to some to grips with being in the middle of the greatest conflict in history one moment, and then the next day being in a world where that war, and everyone in it are now history? He’s supposed to embody the spirit of America, but he finds himself in a new country where everyone seems to know what it means to be an American except him.
   See him standing in front of the WW2 monument in Washington, and just be totally lost. He’d see these elderly men, only a few years from death themselves, and he would know that these were the guys he’d fought beside in, what for him, was only yesterday.
   The ONLY person he remembers who would stil be alive in 2008 would be Bucky, his teenage sidekick, except that fourteen year-old boy would be an 84 year-old man, with grandkids the same age as Cap.
   Naturally he’d have to die so somewhere in there so that Cap is suitably crushed as his last tie to his former life is cut. What does he do with himself now? The US government see him as a wonderful fool to drap govenment political agendas in the trappings of virtue and the last “good” war. Cap simply wants to fight for his country. How can he fight for a country he doesn’t understand, and a government more interested in political power than national security?
   Sound ambitious, and maybe a bit out of the ordinary for a superhero flick? Maybe, but it’s exactly what I would love to see for a CA franchise. Captain America is just the kind of platform where you can be daring enough to imply that not every front in the current War on Terror is like World War 2. You don’t have to get on a soapbox, but Captain America has always been against soldiers being used for politcal purposes, and given how unpopular the Iraq war has finally proven to become I think it’s okay to point at it and say, “War and political agendas don’t mix.” Who says comics can’t challenge things that matter?
   Now THAT’S a story that remains true to the comic-book cannon, treats the audience with respect and gives you an engaging and engrossing movie franchise.

   And for the third chapter in the Captain America Trilogy? Hell, why does it even HAVE to be a trilogy? A duet would be fine by me.
   But if Joe Carnahan chose to helm a Captain America movie I’d see it no matter what he chose to do with it, though I hope making it a movie that takes itself seriously, and chooses to actually say something, is the way they would go.

   Comment by JaySmack | November 1, 2007

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