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Q: What’s the major difference between making a TV program, and a major motion picture, aside from the budget?
WELLS: Interestingly enough, we use virtually all the same tools. Television is shot on 35mm, we use all the same kind of equipment, lenses, steadicam, lighting. It’s really the pace. In the television we’re in production on say, ER, from usually the third week in July until the last of April between anywhere from 172 days to 182 days. We kind of look at it as one big shoot. But a big day on a film that doesn’t involve wire work, doesn’t involve a stunt, that’s a 4-page day. That’s a huge day. On a 3-page day you’re like, “I don’t know if we can make it.” We average between 8.5 pages to 12.5 pages a day on television. So I think the real challenge in television is for the actors, because there’s no such thing as lighting time. Everything is pretty much already lit. So we rehearse it and we shoot it. You don’t even get back to the trailer before we’re really to roll again. In film acting, actors comes to the set having vaguely looked at the pages, knowing that they have an hour and a half of lighting and makeup and stuff to eventually learn the lines. So it’s a real shock when we bring film actors into television.
Q: Lorenzo, you just produced Four Brothers. How would you compare working on that film with working on Doom?
DI BONAVENTURA: Futuristic, sci-fi films have a different set of challenges than a present-day action picture. We shot Four Brothers all in snow, so that was quite an experience. But I think the attention to details are different. This is where you say, ‘How far in the future are you? What is it, exactly, does it look like?’ You don’t have to do that at all when you’re making a present day film. I that is probably the hardest part about doing a film like this. The worst thing is when you try to make to it look futuristic, like, ‘Oh, god look at the ridiculous outfits they’re wearing,’ you know? So how do you make it look like it’s real? We spent a lot of time on that with costuming and how the actors spoke. I mean, is there new grammar that’s going on? So we tried to make Doom feel as present-day as possible and yet make it realistic that you’ve taken a leap.
Q: How concerned were you about toning down the violence from the video game for the film?
WELLS: Yeah, we had a lot of pressure. Not from Universal thankfully, but by several other studios who wanted to make it first. They are insisted we make a PG-13 film. But for anybody who had ever played the game or who knew about the game would think that you had made a movie that was just gonna suck. You couldn’t possibly do Doom and have it be a PG-13 film, and so we pushed the R rating. I mean, you couldn’t… we didn’t overdo it. We didn’t have trouble when we went to the MPAA. But we were making a hard-edged sci-fi action picture that we knew would have a hard-R.
Q: How would you answer to those who say that
DI BONAVENTURA: There are two answers to that. One is that
Q: Wesley, when you wrote this script, did you watch all the games, or…?
STRICK: I never played. I don’t play. But I do have two teenage boys at home who play Doom. They love the game. They pressured me into taking the job. They wouldn’t have heard otherwise. They sat me down and showed me the game. They offered me the chance to play the game, but I didn’t want to play it front of them and embarrass myself. They’re pretty expert at it. They ran me through the game and showed me everything that they thought was important. And of course Dave Callaham, who wrote the first draft of the script, is an avid gamer and I think he poured all of the video game enthusiasm into the script. It’s quite evident, upon reading it that he knows what he’s talking about. But I didn’t really have to… It was cool for me because having come in after him I didn’t have to deal so much with the game. It was more like, ‘OK, we’ve got that. He’s covered all the bases. Now how to we take it to the next level? How do we make the relationships a little deeper, a little more resonant? Tell the story with a little more focus and momentum?’ I think Dave had a lot of great ideas, but they needed some shaping.
Q: Did you always know that The Rock’s character was going to turn bad?
STRICK: Yeah. That was there from the get-go.
Q: Wesley, what’s going on with this project you have with David Cronenberg?
STRICK: It’s still in development.
Q: What it about? I understand it has something to do with Dead Ringers?
STRICK: Yeah, it’s a series about Twin Gynecologists. We’re just working on the pilot episode, so there’s not much to say yet. Working with Cronenberg is great, though. Back to Doom!
Q: How many pages was your screenplay?
STRICK: The script was about 128 pages.
Q: But there is not a lot of dialogue.
STRICK: No, but you have to describe the action. But no, it’s not a dialogue heavy movie, certainly. It’s action. You’ve got people running for their lives. They’re shooting. They’re shouting orders and they’re panicking. All that takes up pages. [laughs]
Q: You’ve got this first-person shooter sequence that goes on for three minutes. Can you explain how that was handled, logistically?
WELLS: Yeah, our visual effects supervisor, Jon Farhat, actually shot that unit. The first two-thirds of it, all the way up to you get to the Pinky demon has some CG, but it’s actually all one big Steadicam shot. And it was rehearsed for three or four days before we starting shooting it because I was very much a part of the rehearsals. All the stuntmen had to work, and all the activity and the gun and everything… I mean, it took almost three weeks to get it right. They were there for a very long time. And then a number of things got added in. in CGI. But for the most part it’s all there in a whole Steadicam shot. All the way through the foldout of the floor, you know where the Baron comes down and there’s all that wirework, so… yeah. It was in the script and it was great. Dave Callaham wrote that part and it was longer in the script. It was big. And there was a tremendous part over the time on the storyboards and the conversations and how it would actually work. The rigging of it…
Q: I would think the music as well was a big factor, how it picked up tempo right there at that spot.
WELLS: Clint Mansell did a great job on that.
DI BONAVENTURA: Yeah, he’s a great composer.
STRICK: When I first read that in the original script, by the way, I thought it was just genius because it’s like, almost a post-modern way of going, ‘Yeah. It’s a video game. We’re not, like, pretending otherwise.’ But at the same time it takes on this whole new kind of energy on the big screen. I think it’s great.
Q: What was the reason behind the change from the first director [Enda McCallion] to having Andrzej Bartkowiak take over?
DI BONAVENTURA: He made the decision to leave the production. He had a bunch of things going on in his life. It was just too calamitous for him at that moment. There were tragedies that occurred and things that took him away. So Andrzej came in at that point, and Andrzej had his work cut out for him. The truth is, he came onto a very touch shoot, a very short shoot, all within a number of days. If you look at all the big movies, they normally have 100 days to shoot, and we had 73. He had a very short time to prep it, but that’s one of the reasons that we chose Andrzej is because he has this sort of infinite, infectious energy and focus, so we needed who say, ‘Oh, my god!’ We had the opposite. He was like, ‘Great! What are going to do today?’ He had a lot of fun with it. He was boy with it, you know? Be a kid.
Q: How involved are you in the marketing of this film, knowing that it has a built-in audience already?
WELLS: Right from the beginning we were trying to make something that, for the people who knew about the game, would be interested in it and feel like we lived up to their expectations. The game itself is very visual, and has a reputation of being something very scary. Doom has always been a game you play at night. You turn the lights off and you play from like, 11 at night till 4 0’clock in the morning. [laughs] It’s a scary game. It’s scary to play it. But we wanted to make sure that, if you didn’t know the game or had only heard of it, that it could actually still deliver as a suspenseful science fiction action picture. That was a very conscious decision on our parts from the very beginning.
Q: So will there be some midnight movie screenings prepared?
WELLS: [laughs] I’m sure there will be some midnight screenings! I had a blast making this movie. From all the CGI work, to getting to work with the Stan Winston guys, the wore work… it was just fun. I mean, you know, we’re all kind of kids, really. It’s a stupid business to go into. It’s sort of insane. Making movies is stilly.
Q: Why?
Well, for example, we shot for almost three and a half weeks in the sewer sequence. It was built in this old powerhouse section of the studio. And so there’s water dripping in, there are guys wandering around in these, like, 7-foot tall rubber suits and, um, there are people with things hanging off their heads, and you stand in the middle of it and you’re wet and you just start laughing because it’s the most fun you’ve ever had. It’s just the most fun you’ve ever had. You’re thinking, ‘I should be miserable. I’m sopping wet.’ It was like being in a sauna. And then these guys in big rubber suits are talking to you at lunch, they take the Baron head off and they’re eating a sandwich. And you’re just like, ‘People actually pay me to do this. This is fun.’ It’s a really silly to do this.
Q: Can you talk about some of the horror elements in the movie, and what you’re hoping will scare people?
Strict: I was scared. I’m a great audience for this type of movie. I jumped. I think it’s all pretty horrifying.
Q: What about those who haven’t played the game? Who are some of the scary characters they can look for?
DI BONAVENTURA: We’ve got Hell Knight, that’s his name in the game, actually. And we made a decision early on that we were going to use the demons from early on from the game and embrace that fact because even if you’re nongamer and you see that demon, that is a horrifying creature. And if you’re a gamer, you get to see that demon better-rendered because we have a little bit more money to spend and our process allows to make them more realistic. They get to have the extra benefit of going, ‘Oh, wow. That’s an even cooler version of Hell Knight.’ Whereas if you haven’t played the game, you’re going, ‘What is that horrific looking thing?!’ [laughs] ‘Whoa!’
Q: What about the Arch Vile?
DI BONAVENTURA: No, he didn’t make it into the movie. We just couldn’t figure out how to render him. There were some of them, because of the resolution of the game, they didn’t work when we tried to recreate them for the big screen. But I would say that the most frightening thing about this film is that it’s claustrophobic. You’re inside a very small space with things that want to hurt you. It’s dark, it’s wet, it’s loud. The lights are flicking, and every sound you hear is a sound you don’t want to have happening to you. And that’s really why the game itself was so attractive. That’s basically the experience of playing the game. We thought, ‘That is a movie going experience. How do we take the feeling of it, the mood of it, and translate it into a film?’
Q: Are you thinking about a sequel right way, or are you waiting for another installment of the game?
DI BONAVENTURA: We all think it’s sort of bad luck to talk about sequels and to tell you the truth, we made a lot of conscious decisions that were sort of anti-sequel, if you will. We do destroy Sarge, even when you think he is a logical character to keep alive. I think more than anything, we believe that the audience will tell us whether it’s worth another movie or not. It’s not up to us. So we’ll wait for the audience to tell us. We haven’t spent any time thinking about what a sequel would be. We know that along the way, we had a lot of ideas that wouldn’t fit into this movie so… we know we could have a very satisfying, full experience.
Q: Will you show Doom the movie to your children?
WELLS: No. My children are small.
STRICK: My kids are going to be on opening night. They’re 17 and 18. I wrote Cape Fear 11 or 12 years ago, and they didn’t see that for many years. All their friends had seen it by then, but I still haven’t shown it to my younger son. I’m still sensitive to it. Not yet, not yet.
WELLS: Look, we’re not trying to slip under the radar for a PG-13 film. We are saying this is an R-rated film. It’s titled Doom, you know? It’s not a tricky title that will make you ask, ‘Should I take my kids to see this movie?’ [laughs] It’s an R-rated film called Doom. At some point, parents do have to take responsibility for their own children. Theater owners have tried very hard to take the ratings seriously. They’ve tried to keep people from slipping between theater screening rooms for that reason. My children, four and eight years old, will not be seeing Doom, period. I didn’t even want them to see the dailies when I was working at home. It is meant to be an adult experience. Or at least 16 or 17 years old, if the parents decide.
Q: Why so much fuss over sex, and not violence?
DI BONAVENTURA: I don’t know. That is not the case Internationally. It’s only here in
Q: Is The Rock as intimidating in real life as he appears onscreen?
WELLS: Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed working with somebody more. He is a complete pleasure. He’s professional, smart, and funny. Drop-down funny, I mean belly-laugh funny.
DI BONAVENTURA: He’s a big guy. But he’s one of those guys with a personality.
WELLS: You wanna hang with him. You don’t want to play rugby with him, but you wanna hang with him and have a meal with him.
Staci Layne Wilson reporting