Were there clichés or genre conventions that you were looking to avoid in Riddick that you feel are overused in movies?
David Twohy: I have my own personal internal list of clichés and I have a pretty low threshold for clichés, so as soon as I think about writing them I won’t even finish the damn scene. I’ll say, “Stop! You’ve seen this too many times before. Do something else.” I guess some other writers and directors don’t have that threshold. I think they have a higher threshold for clichés (laughs). There are trappings of science fiction which I kind of embrace, but there also clichés which I run from.
Sometimes maybe one man’s trapping is another man’s cliché. We all have different filters in life, right? We all have different frames of references. If it’s too familiar and if it’s expected, if the audience knows what’s going to happen, then something’s wrong. You should almost always try to be a half a step ahead of the audience. There are exceptions to that; Alfred Hitchcock made an exception to that and said, “I’ll put a bomb under the table and all the audience will know that while these two guys have lunch on top of the table.” That’s dramatic irony and suspense. But for the most part, you want the characters to be ahead of you.
It’s interesting that you bring up Hitchcock because he had that idea of letting you there was a bomb under the table, but then you have directors like John Carpenter who want the bomb go off when you least expect it.
David Twohy: (laughs) Yeah!
Riddick’s dog in the movie is a wonderful character. Clearly it was done with CG effects, but did you and the actors have anything to work off of when it came to filming those scenes? I imagine the actors had to act with nothing there a lot of the time.
David Twohy: Early on I was going to try to avoid the cost of full CG jackals. I was going to try to bring in some kind of trained Doberman and then use its basic movements and build on top of that, but that proved burdensome in its own way. So I said, “Alright it’s going to be full CG.” We would bring on the set a grayscale mockup for two reasons; so that the digital effects guys could put it down in the existing lighting and see how the shadows fell, and also so the actors could get a size and scope of the dog that they were talking about. But then I also had some physical pieces built that were colored and furred, so if there’s a close up of Riddick just putting his hand on the dog’s neck and you see’s fingers go into the hairs, that would be a prosthetic piece. I’m never going to do animatronics again where you try to get the dog to blink at just the right time, forget about that.
The interesting thing about this movie as that it doesn’t necessarily require you to see the ones that came before it. Was it important to you in some ways that Riddick stands out from the previous entries? I think if this was someone’s first Riddick movie, it wouldn’t be a huge problem.
David Twohy: I think that’s true, but what we don’t have an answer to is how important is that. Is an 18-year-old guy or girl aware of Pitch Black or Chronicles of Riddick or are they not? Are they just going to see a Vin Diesel movie because they liked him in Fast & Furious? I think they will have a basic understanding of the franchise because those movies, even though it’s been nine years, it’s not nine years ago to a lot of the audience if they see Pitch Black on AMC or TMC or if they download it.
It’s like it just happened last month to them because they are not aware of when the movie came out and they are aware that the movie exists. I told the studio that there’s a broader audience for this movie then you guys may think, and a broader audience than there has been for any other movie only because there are two movies that continuously play on cable, the video game, the manga piece, etc. I just think there is an overall awareness of it and I think very few people will come into it just blind. I made that argument to the studio and they said, “Well it’s still been nine years since the last movie.” So looks like we’ll find out (laughs).
Now that Vin Diesel has played Riddick in three movies, some might say that he is more the authority on the character than you. Is it harder to write for a character after an actor has become so well known for playing that person?
David Twohy: I suppose it can be, but not in this case because now we’re partners and co-conspirators. He and I talked, I go off and write, and maybe I tweak the script once, that’s what I did. I wrote one spec script, we sold it in Berlin and got our international funds together, then before we went shooting he had some thoughts for me and I tweaked it, and that’s what we ended up shooting. So very little development, just shooting what we know, but we feel comfortable with and what we like. Even though Vin is a producer and a star, he still wants to be directed. We have a good shorthand together, and we are on the same page.
That concludes our interview but we’d like to thank David for taking the time to talk with us. Be sure to catch Riddick when it hits theatres on September 6th.