Martin Campbell Discusses Edge of Darkness, Green Lantern, and James Bond
Posted 01.21.10 by Ryan
When Martin Campbell completes his work on Green Lantern, the movie could be the start of the director's third franchise, having directed two Zorro movies and two James Bond movies (Casino Royale and Goldeneye). Campbell told Crave Online that Green Lantern has franchise potential, considering the movie will be an origin story.
Well, first of all, it's the origin story so I think people, certainly Green Lantern fans, know what that's about. It's Hal Jordan. As you know, there's probably been five Green Lanterns. So it pretty much sticks to the origin story. It sets up Oa, the planet where the Green Lantern calls his base. It sets up Hal's training on Oa and becoming a Green Lantern. Fear clearly is the enemy. So it's got all of those.
Having reinvented James Bond twice, Campbell knows how to set up a character in a way that creates future movies. For Campbell, again, it's all about an origin story.
Casino Royale
of course was an opportunity to go back to the tone of the books which they never were in the original movies. They never have been. Even the [Sean] Connery movies are not in the same tone as the book. Again, I was lucky enough to have an origin story. Bond really doesn't become Bond until the last frame of the movie. He's a f***ed up guy. He's a guy who smokes too much. He doesn't smoke in the movie but in the books he certainly smokes too much, he drinks too much, he abhors a certain kind of violence when it's very messy and ugly. It's something he hates. He finally shoots someone in the forehead with a bullet, but the bathroom scene is very distasteful and ugly and clumsy and messy. So there are elements to Bond, and of course a great relationship with the girl which allowed you the one meaningful relationship in his life apart from On Her Majesty's Secret Service where he marries the girl. So that was a really great opportunity to get into the tone of the books and make him a much darker, more f***ed
up character which was way more interesting in my opinion.
Campbell's latest movie, Edge of Darkness, is not a franchise starting movie, per se, but it is something that Campbell has visited before in the form of a BBC mini-series of the same name that he directed in 1985. Campbell says the thriller is punctuated by "tough guy talk" but it's pace will be dictated by the emotions that Mel Gibson's character faces as he investigates the murder of his daughter.
The truth is the pace is, look: If you compare this to, say, Taken, which in the first four and a half minutes of the movie dispenses with all its emotional story. The rest of it is Liam Neeson with a gun dealing with these bad guys in Paris, shoots about 200 of them which is a terrific film, by the way. Whereas this is a slower burn, it's about loss, it's about grief, it's about a detective discovering things about his daughter he had no idea she was involved in. So there are other elements to it and
an emotional core throughout the movie I hope.
Edge of Darkness opens January 29, while Green Lantern opens June 17, 2011.