I’ve been working over at IMAX in Santa Monica the last few weeks, overseeing the conversion of RIDDICK into its giant-ass supersize-me format.  Hasn’t always been an easy task:  David Eggby and I shot the movie widescreen (2.40:1), yet the native aspect ratio of IMAX is much taller (1.90:1).  That’s no small difference to reconcile.

My solution was to adopt different aspect ratios within the same movie – something that was never done 10 years ago when film was still king.  But now that we use an entirely digital pipeline, we can vary the size of the image on the screen – on a shot-by-shot basis.  So that’s what I opted to do for the IMAX version.  (RIDDICK will have about 300 IMAX screens.)

And don’t confuse IMAX with 3D as some do.  They’re distinct things, and a movie can be one…can be the other…can be both.  So RIDDICK will be big – but not extra-dimensional.  I think straight IMAX yields a superior viewing experience and is here for good.  But 3D?  Not sure it’s so much more immersive than a screen 70 feet high.  That said…

The good folks at IMAX did run IRON MAN 3 for me in both large format and 3D.  And let me tell you, it was quite a spectacle.  So I’ll keep my mind open for awhile longer on the ultimate utility and fate of 3D.

RIDDICK is set for release in the US and Canada September 6.  Next post, I’ll try to include international release dates since some of you who live overseas have been asking.

Called up Harlan Ellison today for two reasons:  1)  I missed his cranky old voice and, 2) To make sure he was still alive.  We hadn’t spoken in a few years and, frankly, I was starting to worry.

For those of you who don’t know, Ellison is our greatest living writer of science fiction.  Okay, “speculative fiction,” since I think that’s what he prefers.  But in addition to Hugo-winning work like I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, The Glass Teat, and Deathbird Stories, Harlan wrote what is, hands down, the finest Star Trek script ever (City on the Edge of Forever), and two of the best Outer Limits episodes (Soldier and Demon with a Glass Hand – more on Demon below).

Mapwise, Harlan lives up in the hills of L.A overlooking The Valley and “too many fucking Republicans.”  Talentwise, he lives in the same house as Bradbury, Clarke, Asimov.  In that pantheon.

I was 15 impressionable years old when Harlan first made landfall in my life:  It was at some comic book convention, and “HE” was speaking from a dais so lofty it seemed to treble his true stature.  Harlan was waving around a gold watch for all the assembled to see, claiming it had cost five thousand dollars, and further claiming that he had paid for it by – get this – moving words around on paper.

And oh, how he moved those words around!

His stories were always provocative, typically shocking, sometimes downright assaultive.  “You can write like this?” I asked in punch-drunk wonder.  “You can actually put two fucking colons in the same fucking sentence?  While sprinkling in a lot of ‘fucks?’”   The answer seemed to be “You can do whatever you want.  It’s your story.  It’s your writing.”  Thousands of his pages I must’ve consumed in a fever-dream of reading and learning that probably, more than anything else, shaped the manner in which I write professionally to this day – so many years after that ostentatious watch-wagging show of his.

I still hope to make a movie of Demon with a Glass Hand.  Harlan and I worked on a script together, but that got stuck at Disney after their divorce with Miramax/Dimension.  It may take a suitcase full of cash and dynamite to break it loose from there but, trust me, it’d be worth it.  Demon was a story that stuck to the flypaper of my brain for about 30 years, and that’s surely a sign that it’s something special.  The Outer Limits episode is very much of its own time – meaning, it was made for two dollars and looks like it – but the big, haunting ideas are still there, waiting to be brought to the fore.  Wonderful world-ending ideas.  Jaw-dropping stuff.

Anyway, I learned in my phone call with Harlan that he’s slowing down these days, not writing anymore, not driving.  Too bad on that first count.  But while his voice will be missed…I recognize that some of it lives on in my own.

DT

Feels like I’m back in production! 

Been pulling 14-hour days trying to finish RIDDICK.  My typical day starts at 9am with intensive visual effects meetings, sweating out the details of our 900 VFX shots.  Then I jet across town to the mix stage, Soundelux, where I supervise the sound, balancing out the often-competing elements of music, sound fx, sound design, and dialog.  At night I hit the lab, Technicolor in Hollywood, staying until midnight to do “DI work” — color-correction of the movie.  This is where David Eggby and I have one last chance to get the images right, dropping in grads and power windows to finesse what we shot on set.  It’s a great tool, the Digital Intermediate.  Kind of like Photoshop for movies.  Gotta love it.  Gotta love the challenge of bringing it all home.

I see that my friend Karl Urban is going to host a screening of DREDD this week at Comic-Con. Just wanted to wish him well with that — and remind everyone what his eyes really look like.  Here he is reprising Vaako for us, no helmet in sight.  The actor over his shoulder, menacingly out of focus, is the great Andreas Apergis who plays “Krone” in the upcoming RIDDICK.

So our business here is done — principle photography, anyway.  It was a challenging schedule we had for this latest installment of RIDDICK – a scant 47 days – but we managed to get what we needed (and more), thanks to a skilled crew and a gifted and willing cast.  I’m packing up now to return to L.A. after five months here, but the memories of Montreal are already piling up in my head in a way that I know will haunt me, happily, for years to come.  

Above is a photo of me and some of Santana’s crew between takes on the set of RIDDICK. 

A lot of you already know how close we are to rolling camera on RIDDICK.  But most of you don’t know about an artist named Charles Ratteray who does storyboards for me, just utterly dope stuff like what you see here.  Well Charles wound up in the hospital this weekend with cardiac issues — way too young for that nonsense at just 36 years old — and this is big shout out to him, hoping he recovers quick and picks up that magical stylus soon.  You have a lot of fans in Montreal, Charles.

A lot of you already know how close we are to rolling camera on RIDDICK.  But most of you don’t know about an artist named Charles Ratteray who does storyboards for me, just utterly dope stuff like what you see here.  Well Charles wound up in the hospital this weekend with cardiac issues — way too young for that nonsense at just 36 years old — and this is big shout out to him, hoping he recovers quick and picks up that magical stylus soon.  You have a lot of fans in Montreal, Charles.

Word slipped out last week about “The Leonardo Job,” so here I am playing catch up to my own movie.

No, don’t confuse it with “The Italian Job” or “The Brazilian Job” or any other job in the heist genre.  This is a new original.  What’s it about, then?  Well, if there are 22 known DaVinci paintings in the world, this is a movie about stealing the 23^rd.  Which may well exist.  It’s called “The Battle of Anghiari,” and even though it was ordered destroyed in the early 1500s by the Medicis when they swept back into Florence and back into power, some think that the man charged with its destruction – Giorgio Vasari — so revered Leonardo that he concocted an elaborate scheme to save the giant painting instead.

With that tantalizing possibility as a backdrop, I’ve conjured up a pair a modern-day thieves who, independently, decide “The Lost Leonardo” isn’t lost and concoct an elaborate scheme to go after it.  Because hey, what better thing to steal than something of infinite value — yet something that no one really believes exists?

I expect to film in Florence and other venues in Italy.  I expect my agents, lawyers, and half the film world to be there whether invited or not.  That’s fine.  It’s just the lure of la dolce vita.

Thanks to Alcon for stepping in and stepping up.  Good guys over there.  They’ll finance and shepherd it along.  Warner Bros will distribute.