Prepare to hear a whole lot more about an unlikely, haunting movie called Splice – a gloriously disturbing, hypnotically unsettling art film that somehow managed to land Warner Bros. as distributor.
Directed by Vincenzo Natali (Cube), the movie remains so committed to a singular unsettling vision that it’s hard to believe audiences will actually have the chance to immerse themselves in such pure sci-fi in the middle of the summer tentpoles. Starring Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley as two scientists who push their genetic experiments beyond the breaking point, and in the process create a hybrid infant – part human, part animal – that they come to raise as their own, Splice is an ethical mine field, about the responsibilities scientists owe to their creations, and how far you can push the moral threshold before it snaps in a rupture of emotional and physical agony. (More at Techland: The lost Empire Strikes Back script)
It’s a trippy, trippy movie – where scientific thrills meet supernatural chills – and we had the chance to put five good questions to Natali about just how the hell he navigated the recession and the big-studio gauntlet to get his inimitable vision on the summer big screen.
I see here in the press notes that you say you had to keep rethinking the movie in the midst of production because the science kept accelerating faster than you could write the movie. You’d think up something crazy, and then scientists would manage to do it.
It really was amazing how quickly the science evolved, but it wasn’t a question of rethinking the movie. The ideas in the script I came up with as complete fantasy, and what started happening was that they started approaching the realm of reality as we kept hearing these headlines of new breakthroughs. But Splice is more about the larger implications of all this. This movie really steps into some very gray moral terrain and our protagonists are well-intentioned, and in some ways heroic, but the creature as well is very innocent and possibly a couple steps up the evolutionary ladder. What I was more interested in is the way that this should all work out but it doesn’t. What happens when you start crossing these lines? What’s accenptable or not acceptable with this kind of science? It’s obviously a very sensitive subject matter for a whole host of reasons. but this is something we’re all going to have to face unquestionably down the road. We might as well start thinking about it now.
That’s what’s so interesting here – it’s definitely more of a psychological terror. I’m interested in how you negotiated that fine line, because there are so many moments where you could have pushed this into the realm of a monster terror film. But you really hold yourself back, and I think people are going to be surprised in how restrained you are, forcing us to think a whole lot more than just jump in our seats.
I really didn’t have to push this stuff much to arrive at places far more strange and shocking than I had originally expected. Pretty much from the beginning, I was a fan of monster films, and of course Frankenstein, and was always very aware of where these stories usually go. About halfway through the movie, the monster escapes and does horrible things in a populated area. So I really toyed with that idea, and to me, that’s when our story starts to become interesting. Hopefully it’s a little bit different from other creature movies, as it pertains to creators and their creation. In this story, we start to discover a surprising amount of humanity in the creature, and instead it’s the humans that start to demonstrated some pretty monstrous qualities. It’s almost like a hostage thriller where this creature becomes hostage to her very existence. I’m not above cheap shocks, but in this instance it doesn’t seem appropriate. It’s the kind of horror that gets under your skin that you can’t watsh off. That’s a slightly different beast. (More at Techland: The five most underrated sci-fi masterpieces of all time)
Do you think viewers are going to be surprised though, at how much you veer away from that expected monster path?
Well I personally believe that all the fantasy genres have been mistreated over the years. As somebody who makes this their specialty, I can tell you that we’re operating in a very conservative environment. There are certain paradigms that are hard to break away from, but I’ve made this my life’s work, to mutate those genres. So for Splice, the hardest thing was writing the script and containing it, not letting it go down all those familiar extremes. Which is hard with such a loaded subject. But if I hadn’t done that, and neutered it into just another horror film, people would have turned against it. You look at Sarah Polley, and the reason she became enamored with the project was that there’s always a hint of where this story may ultimately be going, but she never thought I’d actually go there. And by pushing the envelope, you remain true to your premise.
Do you think that makes it harder to market a film like this, when you don’t follow the standard path?
Oh yeah, Warner Bros. has clearly faced a very tough challenge in marketing the because they wanted to pay homage to everything unusual about the movie while still releasing it in the environment of the summer season.They wanted to hit people hard. All I know is that I really believe in this kind of thing, and I think it’s been proven with movies like District 9 and Avatar, that if you’re committed audiences will respond. Guillermo Del Toro told me once that filmmakers always look ahead, and studios always look backwards. They want to repeat successes, while we think of breaking new ground. So hopefully at the end of the day we both manage to make a connection and make this work. When you look at Warner Bros. picking it up in the first place, you see the perverted psychology of Hollywood. The very things that would have frightened a studio to give this a green light is what attracted them to the strength of this story. So there’s definitely two sides to the coin.
When you talk about filmmakers breaking new ground – are we talking about that eye-opening inter-species sex scene you conjure in Splice? You really take it up a notch. Certainly further than I thought you would.
Well, yeah, I’ve always felt – other than just being a pervert – that if you spend enough time in a basement thinking of these concepts you’re eventually going to come to sex. I mean, it’s the prime directive of any species, to create more. And in some ways this is a coming-of-age story that’s just going to go there at some point. When you start looking at a world where you can genetically create absolutely anything, you’re inevitably going to run into the issue of falling in love, and I think that’s an issue you can approach without the genetic makeup side of Frankenstein. You can look at that in a mature way, and really grapple the implications.
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