Aint it Cool News is back again with another inter­view, this time they talk to Peter Jack­son. Indeed it is a five part mam­moth — part 3 refers to the progress of the Halo Movie.

This inter­view cov­ers a num­ber of impor­tant top­ics that are on the minds of those fol­low­ing the film’s development.

Neill Blomkamp

First and fore­most Jack­son dis­cusses why Neill Blomkamp was cho­sen as direc­tor even though he has not pro­duced a fea­ture length movie until now. To para­phrase, Jack­son com­ments on Blomkamp’s bril­liant visual eye and sto­ry­telling abil­ity — as appar­ent in his short films.

- He is an absolute Halo fan (and is thus not in it for the cash or publicity)

- He can pro­vide a unique out-of-the-box approach as far away from cur­rent video game-movie adap­ta­tions as possible.

- He was cho­sen over many other appli­cant direc­tors because his visions and plans are excit­ing and entirely new and the poten­tial is great: Believe me, he’s doing some­thing that is very, very dif­fer­ent from what peo­ple are imag­in­ing, from what peo­ple have seen before. … It is orig­i­nal and new and has not been seen before on the screen. It’s not Rid­ley Scott, it’s not James Cameron, it’s not what we’ve seen before, but it’s some­thing new and fresh and it’s cool. (Jack­son states that Blomkamp has already spent 2 solid months work­ing with Weta on every aspect of design).

Script

Sec­ondly, the script. It is not cur­rently ready and at the moment Blomkamp is focus­ing on his vision of the Halo uni­verse. We are slowly tug­ging away at it, get­ting it there.

Since Gar­land’s draft two new scripts have been writ­ten. Jack­son states it is com­ing along nicely and although he, Fran and Philippa are not per­son­ally involved in the writ­ing they are keep­ing a close eye and strin­gently polic­ing its qual­ity. Film­ing will not start until the script is “really great”. The time needed to develop the Halo world, the props and the phys­i­cal real­i­sa­tion of the dream also allows time to per­fect the script. There will be Covenant, Warthogs, Ghosts and Scor­pi­ons and even the Pil­lar of Autumn.

PG-13?

This topic has not yet been dis­cussed, states Jack­son. Though he imag­ines the stu­dio will insist on PG-13 given the bud­get. He then goes on to dis­cuss the pos­si­bil­ity of a “hard R rat­ing DVD” and the grue­some hard­core flood designs — pul­sat­ing, throb­bing [and] ooz­ing.

The key quote is:
[They all say] “You can’t make a good film out of a game.” Well, that’s all crap. Good films just need good char­ac­ters, good sto­ry­line and a great direc­tor to bring it to life and make a film that you’ve never seen before.

This all sounds too per­fect. Our favorite video game is being brought to life in the best pos­si­ble man­ner — a rev­o­lu­tion­ary vision­ary (Blomkamp), crisp and unique visual effects (WETA) and a mas­ter at the helm (Jack­son). The foun­da­tions are set and the build­ing plans look hel­la­cious — let’s just hope the stu­dios don’t con­tract shoddy work­men — we dont want every­thing to fall down with the first tremor.

Thanks Giorgio_C | AICN

The full interview:

QUINT: Of the movies you’re pro­duc­ing that are not your own, you seem to be bring­ing in first time fea­ture direc­tors. Both with HALO and DAMBUSTERS. Is that just coincidence?

PETER JACKSON: It’s not delib­er­ate and cer­tainly for HALO it wasn’t delib­er­ate. I don’t think even for a show like HALO, which is a big bud­get pro­duc­tion, I don’t think there’s any prob­lem what­so­ever with a so-called first time direc­tor direct­ing it. At the end of the day, Neill (Blomkamp) is not a first time direc­tor. He’s a first time fea­ture film direc­tor, but he under­stands film and gram­mar as good as any­body. He’s done some won­der­ful short films and com­mer­cials. His visual eye is fan­tas­tic and his sto­ry­telling is great. The fact that it’s a fea­ture film just means that he gets to shoot for longer than he did in the short film. There really isn’t any­thing else that’s different.

We cer­tainly didn’t set out with HALO to find a first time film­maker Academy-Awards to do HALO. We wanted some­body on HALO that would have 3 qual­i­ties. One, a very impor­tant one, is that they wanted to do it really badly. They had to be absolute HALO fans. That was impor­tant because there are a lot of peo­ple who would be happy to do HALO for the pay­check, there’s a lot of peo­ple who would be happy to do it for the pub­lic­ity they’re going to get from it and the kick it’ll give to their career and all that and all of that sort of stuff. There’s lots of rea­sons to do HALO that would be attrac­tive if you’re not a HALO fan, but we didn’t want any of those peo­ple, we wanted some­body who was a real HALO fan.

Sec­ondly, and this is sort of just as impor­tant, we wanted some­body who was going to bring a unique vision to it. It’s so easy to shut your eyes and imag­ine a really bad ver­sion of HALO. That comes to you in a fright­enly sim­ple, quick way. You think, “Oh, my God! This could be so ter­ri­ble!” I guess it’s because so many other video game movies have been ter­ri­ble and so much other sci-fi in that type of genre has been terrible.

It’s like Fan­tasy was before LORD OF THE RINGS. Every­body was say­ing, “These films aren’t any good.” In a sense, everybody’s say­ing “You can’t make a good film out of a game.” Well, that’s all crap. Good films just need good char­ac­ters, good sto­ry­line and a great direc­tor to bring it to life and make a film that you’ve never seen before. That’s what it needs. It doesn’t mat­ter a damn whether it’s based on a game, a book or a piece of chew­ing gum, you know? That’s irrel­e­vant. It’s what actu­ally ends up on the screen that’s important.

So, we wanted a direc­tor who we would get excited about their ver­sion of HALO. We wanted some­body that would make us say, “God, I’d love to see what this per­son would do with this story, with this mate­r­ial.” We con­sid­ered a lot of direc­tors. A lot of direc­tors came to us. I mean, believe me… we waited for months and months and months. We eschewed a cou­ple of peo­ple which didn’t work out. We’ve had lots and lots of peo­ple approach­ing us, obvi­ously agents and peo­ple say­ing “So and so client would love to do it.”

At all times they were peo­ple that we thought, “Well… their ver­sion of HALO doesn’t really excite me all that much. I could imag­ine what it’d be like and it doesn’t really (excite me).” But then when Neill came along and we saw what he’d done and we’d spo­ken to him… believe me, he’s doing some­thing that is very, very dif­fer­ent from what peo­ple are imag­in­ing, from what peo­ple have seen before. Some of the visu­als… He’s been work­ing with Weta pretty much full time for, I guess it’d be about 2 months now, turn­ing out lots and lots of art every day. And maque­ttes, pro­duc­tion design, color art has been com­ing out of there. I’ve got fold­ers and fold­ers of it at home here. It’s fan­tas­tic stuff. I mean, I look through it and I get excited about the film.

We’re still devel­op­ing a script and we’ve still got work to go on the script and that’s under­way, but while that’s hap­pen­ing Neill is just pro­duc­ing his vision of this world. It is orig­i­nal and new and has not been seen before on the screen. It’s not Rid­ley Scott, it’s not James Cameron, it’s not what we’ve seen before, but it’s some­thing new and fresh and it’s cool. That was impor­tant to us. Some­one who was going to not go the cliched way, but go in the direc­tion that they had an orig­i­nal vision for and Neill has got that in spades. We’re feel­ing really, really good.

QUINT: Let’s talk a lit­tle bit about the script for HALO. Alex Garland’s Microsoft draft wasn’t very strong and I know after I read it I was wor­ried, as a fan of HALO.

PETER JACKSON: Since Alex’s draft, there have been another two that have been writ­ten. Pretty much page one revi­sions to get to where we are today. It’s get­ting much bet­ter along now and there are cer­tainly a lot of things in it now that are work­ing well. There are things that aren’t work­ing well in it yet, but Fran, Philippa and I are not writ­ing the script, but, in a sense, one of the things we’re con­tribut­ing with our involve­ment in the project is being the police, the script cops! So, noth­ing is going to end up on the screen that doesn’t get our stamp of approval. We’re going to be pretty tough with the script. We’re not going to spare people’s feelings.

We’re not writ­ing it and we’re try­ing to be as con­struc­tive as we can and we’re try­ing to give crit­i­cism and sug­gest ways in which we think things should be improved. That process is going along okay and we’re get­ting there. The movie, as far as I’m con­cerned, as far as my involve­ment is con­cerned, is not going to go in front of the cam­eras until we have a really great script.

In the mean­time Neill’s fully occu­pied design­ing every­thing that needs to be designed. The whole world has to be designed and the whole world has to be built. There’s noth­ing that’s going to be hired out of a prop store, you know? And like LORD OF THE RINGS and KONG, it’s one of those great (posi­tions). We have time to work on the script because all the work that has to hap­pen… we know what’s going to be in the movie. We know that there’s going to be the Covenant, we know that there’s going to be Warthogs and there’s going to be Ghosts (QUINT NOTE: Covenant ships, not spooks for you HALO vir­gins) and Scor­pion (Tanks)‘s and there’s going to be the Pil­lar of Autumn. We know a huge amount.

We obvi­ously know a lot of the world of HALO that the story’s going to take part in. So, there’s a lot of very pro­duc­tive work that’s under­way at the moment while the script takes what­ever (amount of time). As far as I’m con­cerned it should take as long as it needs to take until it’s a good script. We are slowly tug­ging away at it, get­ting it there.

QUINT: Now, there’s no rea­son on Earth shouldn’t eas­ily and faith­fully be adapted into a PG-13 movie. How­ever, do you antic­i­pate there being a harder cut con­sid­er­ing how grue­some the Flood aspect of the story is?

PETER JACKSON: That’s inter­est­ing… It’s some­thing, I must admit, that’s not a con­ver­sa­tion I’ve had with any­body yet. It’s a con­ver­sa­tion that I’m sure will hap­pen. Look, the real­ity of the bud­get is that I would imag­ine the stu­dio are going to be pretty insis­tent on a PG-13, which, as you say, is cer­tainly not an impos­si­ble thing pull off. The con­cept of a hard R rat­ing for DVD is kind of fun because that does ulti­mately deliver a film that the hard­core fans would enjoy and that’s cer­tainly some­thing we should dis­cuss. But hon­estly it’s a con­ver­sa­tion that hasn’t actu­ally hap­pened yet.

But the designs for The Flood that I’ve been see­ing are incred­i­bly hard­core, I have to say. The won­der­ful thing of using the world of CG now and that real, Love­craft­ian kind of twisted… That stuff lends itself to com­puter gen­er­ated effects so well, the organic, pul­sat­ing, throb­bing, ooz­ing kind of effect looks great. I had a bit of fun with that on KONG with those sort of bug things and those insects and wormy things that kill Andy Serkis. I can see that tying all that CG tech­nol­ogy to some Love­craft­ian hor­ror is going to be awesome.

But yeah. Look, I think it’s a great idea. I think it’s some­thing we should def­i­nitely talk about. I mean, those con­ver­sa­tions haven’t hap­pened yet since we haven’t really got a script that we think is the script we’re going to make yet, so I guess once we have a script the ques­tion of rat­ing will come up. I think as long as the stu­dio gets a PG-13 to release the­atri­cally, I’d imag­ine they’d actu­ally be sup­port­ive and cer­tainly we can talk to them about sup­port­ing the idea of (a harder cut for DVD). I think Neill would be into it.