Director Talks Up Splice's Horror Pedigree
Posted 01.19.10 by reelz
Splice is a Frankenstein's monster tale updated for the 21st century. But instead of sewing together body parts stolen out of graveyards, it's all about genetic engineering, with attractive young scientists (Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley) splicing together human and animal DNA in a squeaky clean lab. In the end, things go no better for them than for their Victorian progenitor.
In an interview with Shock Till You Drop, director Vincenzo Natali, talks about the creepy, real life experiment that got him thinking about making the movie:
It was originally inspired long ago by a real scientific experiment where in a mouse was created that, by all appearances, had a human ear on it's back. It wasn't actually a human ear. The cartilage was artificially made underneath the mouse's skin, but the notion was you could grow organic materials on this mouse that could later be grafted onto human beings. It was such a strange image, a shocking image, like something out of a Salvador Dali painting. It reinvigorated my interest in genetic engineering....
Natali then goes on to explain a bit more about what he wanted to do with the story:
The underlying notion of my movie is to find humanity in the monster, and the monster in the humans. I cast Sarah and Adrien because even though their characters do despicable and questionable things over the course of story, you never lose sympathy for them. Because they're so appealing and so human. We can always relate to them even when we're seeing their darker side. It's an exploration are all of those things. On one hand their motivated by the pure science of creating Dren — they're working for a pharmaceutical company — but there are personal reasons. I needed actors of their caliber to pull that off.
Although the movie is still in the process of securing a U.S. distributor, the director will get a chance to show off his baby at Sundance on January 22. Helping to stir up buzz for the screening is the fact that the producer of the movie, or as Natali puts it, the "godfather," is Guillermo del Toro.
Shock also has a clip from the movie in which the proud scientists introduce a couple of their offspring, named Fred and Ginger, to one another. As is often the case, the kids are perhaps not quite as cute as the parents think they are. Yikes, watch it with those tongues ... or whatever those are.