The Big Picture Interview: Director Paul W.S. Anderson

I had the chance to jump on the line with Paul W.S. Anderson the other day to talk about Death Race, which is now out on DVD. As you'll soon learn, even though the film wasn't a massive hit in the U.S., Anderson probably won't need to take a second job anytime soon.Anderson told me, among other things, that he had been trying to make a new version of Death Race since his first film opened in America almost 15 years ago, and that he appealed to Tom Cruise's love of cars to get his help producing the film. The director and I began by setting the record straight on whether or not Death Race is really a remake of the Roger Corman production, Death Race 2000.Big Picture: This isn't, I guess, technically a remake.Paul Anderson: No, I've never referred to the film as a remake. I've always used two other terms, a re-imagining or a prequel. I love Roger Corman's original movie and I think what that movie does, it does so well, with the satirical comedy and everything. I would never actually want to remake that movie because I don't know what I could do to make it better. So what did you take from the first film, either thematically or physically, that you needed for Death Race?There were certain concepts within it that I became obsessed about. I became obsessed about these cars that were built as much to kill as they were to race. In Roger's movie, even though the drivers hated each other, they never smashed the cars into each other. And the reason for that Roger could only afford to build one of each car and if they ever crashed, there'd be no movie. And some of the cars had machine guns mounted on them but they never fired. And the reason for that is because the machine guns were built out of wood. The other thing that I became fascinated about was that in Roger's movie the Death Race was the national sport in America. And I always wondered how that happened. How did something like that supplant baseball and basketball? What was the genesis of the Death Race?When I watched it with the audience, and you set up the near future where the story takes place with the scroll about how the economy fell apart and all that, and I remember the audience got a little listless. They either groaned or laughed at how accurate your prediction was. When I was writing that, I thought it was slightly more futuristic than it ended up being. The future caught up with us. (Laughs) Death Race made whatever it made here, $35 million or something, and then it made about another $50 million in other countries around the world. Now that it's coming to DVD, can you put your producer hat on and tell me how important DVD sales are in general to a film's overall economics and how much you may or may not need the sales for Death Race?I think for the kind of movies I make, DVD is always very important. When you think of what a DVD retails for and what a Blu-Ray retails for, you're talking about two to three to four times as much as a movie ticket. And the movies I make - Resident Evil, Alien vs. Predator, Mortal Kombat - these are titles that do incredibly well on DVD. So whenever I go into making a movie with a studio, they're always figuring on fairly high ancillary sales for a film. And in many ways, that number is just as important or more important than the theatrical number. Event Horizon, for example, is a movie of mine that, you know, it washed its face at the box office. It did OK. It wasn't a huge hit by any means, and was a disappointment for me in terms of what its opening weekend was, but over the long term, that movie has sold so many DVDs that it's very high up in Paramount's list of their of top-selling titles. They've done special editions of it, two-DVD sets of it, in Europe they do amazing packaging of it. I can't think of a movie I've made where the domestic box office was bigger than the international. If you look at the last Resident Evil movie, it did $50 million domestic, another $100 million international. And then on top that, you're adding in DVD and Blu-Ray, and that's at least - at least - another $150, $200 million into the pot, especially if you add in pay-per-view and things like that. By the time you add all that up, it's a third of a billion dollars worth of revenue.

Comments

[d0od]

nice interview! i do actually love a lot of anderson's movies: AVP, Mortal Kombat and event horizon. i guess being a european he's more well thought of over here as his films do really well.

[Will]

I can't believe you didn't bring up the Steven King top ten honors!

[Get The Big Picture]

We got cut short. He's a bit of a talker. I wanted to mention that and then get into some of the other stuff he reportedly has in the works.

[chris karcher]

Hey paul, i have a movie i need your help making, it wont take much money but it will make millions cause there is no other movie out there like this im writing. its one of a kind, i already searched for months for movies like mine. none. i need your help, if your willing to help me i would love to pay you 60% of the cash because you did most of the work for me:D unles you want 70 % :D but please contact me at MMChrisvendoazza@aol.com or 512-525-5821 thanks for your time bye :D