Comic-Con 2013: Stuart Beattie on I, Frankenstein

Stuart Beattie has had his hand in a lot of fanboy franchises. He wrote the first G.I. Joe movie, the first Pirates of the Caribbean and even a spec script for the Halo movie that still hasn’t gotten made. This year he’s at Comic-Con with I, Frankenstein, a modern day supernatural action movie starring Aaron Eckhart as Victor Frankenstein’s monster. It’s the second movie he directed, after Tomorrow, When the War Began. We sat down with Beattie to discuss I, Frankenstein, his franchise work and potential sequels.

 

CraveOnline: You’ve adapted everything from theme park rides to action figures. How does a comic book adaptation compare?

Stuart Beattie: I really only took the title and the concept from it. It was an unfinished graphic novel.

 

Is it still unpublished?

Yeah, and it’s a completely different story, different characters, all that kind of stuff. So it was really just a jumping off point. They brought me in and said, “We’ve got a great title and a great concept. The title is I, Frankenstein and the concept is Frankenstein’s monster is a modern day action hero.” I just thought that was really fucking cool.

You see these action movies and the first thing to get sacrificed in an action movie is character. I thought, look, here’s a character that is so great, deep, rich and complex that they can’t sacrifice it because then they can’t call it I, Frankenstein. So I was able to play that card a lot in the development and say, “Okay, well, we can’t call it Frankenstein anymore.” They’d say, “Okay, fine.” So it worked and what we’ve ended up with is a very character driven action film. It’s a very strong human story in the middle of all this fun crazy action.

 

Another thing action movies sacrifice these days is visual clarity. What is your plan for the aesthetic?

I bring the camera way back and I work my actors to the bone and make sure that they can pull off the stunts believably. The amount of work these guys did to look convincing in these fights, they were all absolutely committed and Aaron led the way. He raised the bar. Everyone had to just come up and meet him, so everyone worked really hard. My philosophy is get back and show it. When you’re doing this [shaking the camera] it’s really because the actors can’t do it. So I was like first and foremost, we’re having actors do it all. Every fight sequence you see, it’s our actors.

 

They’ve come up with all sorts of smart reasons why you’d shake the camera, but I don’t agree with them.

That’s the reason. We’re back, two cameras maybe at the most, but you let the action play out in front of them so you can see it.

 

Is Frankenstein still dealing with the existential crisis he was in Mary Shelley’s book?

Yup, yup. There’s no one like me, I’m alone. And especially because at the end of Mary Shelley’s book, the only person that could give him what he wanted is dead. So he thinks that whole dream of ever having anyone is gone. He’s never going to have anyone because no one can do what Victor Frankenstein did. He spends the next 200 years wandering the earth just basically waiting to die, but he’s not aging even. He doesn’t know why or for what reason he was created in a lab. No one can tell him why so he’s kind of doomed to this eternal existence of being alone and it’s kind of miserable and he gets pretty pissed off about it. Then he starts getting chased by these demons that want to understand how he was brought back to life, because if they can do that then they can use that power to destroy mankind.

 

Is making Frankenstein an action hero sort of like fast running zombies? Now being dead doesn’t mean you have to be this lumbering lunk?

Right, look, I mean, I really tried to come at it from a fresh perspective which was to say, “Okay, what if this is real?” Our film takes place in Mary Shelley’s world so everything in there is real. This all really happened. So what would that look like? What would that feel like? How would he move? How would he talk? How would he breathe? So I just started digging into the research of that.

It seems to me that you’d find a good looking corpse, one that was complete, not missing a leg or an arm or something because it would just fall off. Replace internal organs as you needed to but just take the corpse and then bring that to life. It would be a man-sized corpse. It wouldn’t be a giant. It wouldn’t elongate the limbs for any reason. There’s no reason to do that so it was just trying to make him feel real. This, to me, was how he felt real. No bolts in the neck. A lot of scarring but it’s more about the internal psychology of him.

What happens to a guy whose first image is his father staring at him in horror, like “What have I done?” Then before he knows it he’s being thrown off a bridge wrapped in chains. To have all those memories be so vivid. When we’re born as babies we don’t remember our first few years but he remembers every single moment because he was born as an adult. So you think about what that does to a guy and how that just messes him up. Then of course you’ve got a whole history of 200 years of mankind treating him as a monster basically. So he hates mankind. He’s got no love at all for mankind and then finds himself caught up in this war between gargoyles and demons and finds himself holding basically the fate of mankind in his hand. Which side does he choose?

 

But it is an action movie. How agile is Frankenstein?

Oh, he’s absolutely agile. He’s fast, he’s strong, he’s tough. Like Mary Shelley’s book, he’s immune to weather, immune to cold, immune to heat but the guy can move. He’s spent 200 years on the run from these demons basically. The gargoyles have given him these weapons. In order to kill a demon, you need a sacramental weapon so they’ve given him these sticks and he learns how to use these sticks pretty well so there’s a lot of Kali stick fighting in the film.

 

Can he die again, or is he immortal?

He can die again. Cut off his head, he’s dead.

 

Well, that’s hard to do. What if he’s shot or stabbed?

Shot or stabbed would depend where he’s shot or stabbed. He doesn’t have magic healing.

 

What about in the heart?

Right, if you shoot the heart, yeah, he’d be dead. If you did anything that would kill you or I, he’d be dead. It’s just harder to do. He’s just tougher than the average bear and the heart keeps on ticking. He’s just not edging.

 

Do you have a lot more production resources to work with on I, Frankenstein than Tomorrow When the War Began?

Yeah, yeah. Look, I had a lot on Tomorrow which was great but Frankenstein is double that budget. Still the same amount of time to shoot it though, so in a way I didn’t have any more time but a lot of really good people with a lot of great ideas. It’s just a matter of harnessing all those people and telling them what the vision is and letting them do their thing, harnessing it all and having it come out in one coherent beast.

 

When we talked for G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, your idea was to only have four action scenes but make those four scenes more intense. They changed that, didn’t they?

Yeah, yeah. Look, I didn’t direct it. No, I love Steve [Sommers] and I’m proud of that film.

 

Did they split up your four scenes, or add scenes you hadn’t even written?

It was more in the editing, more in the splitting up of it.

 

You’ve had a lot of series that went on without you. Pirates, G.I. Joe and even 30 Days of Night. Is I, Frankenstein one you would stay with?

Oh, absolutely, yeah. I would’ve stayed with all of them if they’d let me. Especially this though. This has got such a great character. There’s so much more yet to explore with him. I’d love to. I’d love to keep going, telling stories.

 

Have you ever pitched a Pirates of the Caribbean sequel? They keep making them.

They do. No, because Ted [Elliott] and Terry [Rossio] have been writing those pretty strongly. I think they’ve only just gone to a new writer for this last one that they’re doing but I was busy at the time. I don’t know if they even asked.

 

Talk to Jerry Bruckheimer about 6.

Look, my end goal is to write and direct 6. Start the franchise and finish the franchise. That’d be cool.

 

Well, don’t stop.

Oh, well, at a certain point.

 

They just did Fast and Furious 6 and they’re doing 7.

That’s true, that’s true.

 

Have you finished Tomorrow When the War Began 2?

No, no. That all fell apart unfortunately.

 

It’s not going to happen at all?

No, no. I had the outlines written for 2 and 3 actually. I really, really wanted to do them but the company that made them kind of fell apart. They made a film after ours that they lost an insane amount of money on.

 

But that happens. Don’t rights get sold?

Yeah, but the cast is now five years older. I’d want to do it with them and I wouldn’t want to do it without them. So as far as I know it’s not happening. It’s certainly not going to happen with me. 

William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.

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