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 23rd. 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.
One landscape with me, one self-portrait, both taken on a scout somewhere in the hinterlands of Canada.
The hurdles seem to be dropping. The final turn is being rounded. The finish line (actually a starting line) seems closer than ever.
Of course, there are no guarantees in this mad endeavor called “filmmaking,” a pursuit that is a pricey shotgun marriage between business and art. But we’ve reached a critical mass of enthusiasm and resource needed to launch a movie. If we go now, we can make it now. If we don’t, we may never. And trust me, we’re all keenly aware of that.
Yeah, I had some good face-time with Vin in NYC. We talked at length about where we go from here – about how to travel to all the places in the RIDDICK universe that needed travelling to – and we think we know have the Master Map. We’ll keep it tucked tightly in our breast pocket for now, but it’s enough to say that, if we can pull it all off, you’ll have spent a good 15 years with us.
But Vin will be the driving force behind this next movie; I’m merely the writer-director. Am I being facetious? Kinda. But kinda not, too: It’s Vin and the concessions he chooses to make that will allow this movie to go forward. And his love of the character, of course. So if you, too, have a soft spot for this hardened criminal, you might want to weigh in over at that giant-ass Facebook page he’s got. Me? I’m still part of the Facebook Resistance.
I do get your emails of encouragement from seemingly all corners of the world. (Last week, Lithuania was heard from. I had to use Google Maps.) I can’t always respond, but I do read just about everything that comes in. And I’m always quietly startled by the reach my films have – by how raw imagination alloyed with damn hard work can result in a product that travels the globe and excites the phosphors of so many screens as it excites the imaginations of so many who watch.
Above is a piece of art I did for Vin to help him see some of the visuals I carry around in my head night and day. Titled “Fifth Horseman,” it’s a tableau from the next movie.
DT
So anyone who knows me (or knows my films) knows I’m interested in astronomy. So when Dr. Garik Israelian, a noted astrophysicist, contacted me and asked if I would join his annual Starmus festival that fuses astronomy, music, and art, I could scarcely turn him down, could I? Didn’t hurt that the festival would be held in the Canary Islands, either. So that’ll happen June 22-25 of this year — but I’ll first be at the SETI Institute in Palo Alto on Tuesday, March 29, for a press conference to promote the festival.
What’s most cool are the people I’ll be hanging with. Richard Dawkins will be a headliner in June, he “Darwin’s pitbull” and author of the mind-fucking book “Selfish Gene.” Jill Tarter and Frank Drake will also attend, two founding giants of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) community. Drake is the guy who, in 1974, sent the “Arecibo message” into deep space, controversially so, which conceivably could have alerted another race to our presence on this small blue orb. Legendary Queen guitarist Brian May will be at the festival. And while you may think May was invited just to do some cool riffs on his axe, think again: May is now an astrophysicist himself and a university chancellor in England. Quite a career change.
No shortage of music, though: Tangerine Dream will give a live concert, and composer Graeme Revell (who did the scores for PITCH BLACK and CHRONICLES) will present an original piece of music as well.
With any luck, I’ll make a pilgrimage to their $179 million Great Canary Telescope – and get a little hang time with some really big stars.
So what’s my interest in all this? Well, if I hadn’t been a filmmaker, I’d probably be an astrophysicist today. (If I could’ve dealt with all the math, anyway.) That urge lead to my 1996 movie THE ARRIVAL, which features (brace yourself) Charlie Sheen as a radio astronomer who picks up an errant message from space and concludes that Earth has already been colonized by an extra-solar race. The movie is good pulpy fun, and some of you still write me about it. There was even a retrospective showing of THE ARRIVAL last month in Nashville. It did so-so at the box office, maybe because the not dissimilar INDEPENDENCE DAY came out a few weeks later and just swamped us at the box office. Will Smith will do that to you.
Oh, and a warning: Avoid ARRIVAL II. I didn’t write it, didn’t direct it, didn’t see the finished film. But I heard it seriously sucks. This was a case of the studio trying to milk a few more dollars out of a title that made a little coin and got some good reviews. They did it over my dead body.
Yes, it’s been awhile since I updated here, and yes, I’ve been slow about returning emails. But there’s a reason for that: The last six months saw the death of my mother, this after my father passed about three years ago. And I found out it’s just different when the second parent dies – it’s the abrupt end of a generation, it’s the winding down of an estate, it’s the clearing out of a house with decades of things both memorable and useless. And all that sorting – sorting of objects and emotions – just takes a little time. And priority.
One of the things I realized had to be addressed were all the old 35mm transparencies and 8mm film my dad had taken over the years. (He shot his movies on a Zeiss Movikon 8, a horizontal format movie camera. Pretty cool for the day. Space-agey. Actually, still cool.)
I made it my task to collect, collate, digitize, and Photoshop all the old stills and then digitize and edit the 8mm films as well. No small task, that. But my big-ass mistake was peeking at my grandfather’s genealogy files, stored in a variety of basements for the last 70 years or so. He was a beast about his genealogy, active for decades, and in his files I found another 1500 family photos – including daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes – that just cried for attention. Much was wasting away, photos stuck to each other in boxes. So I decided to rescue it all, stopping the degradation by bringing everything into the digital age.
It’s a bitch of a job. But the time was right.
Anyway, with that largely done, now it feels right to get back to work. Hopefully I’ll be in a position to tell everyone soon what the next movie is.
DT
