It was a lovely morning at the Sony Pictures lot where the talent and crew of the “Green Hornet” gathered to chat about their upcoming release. In attendance was writer and star Seth Rogen, Jay Chou, Cameron Diaz, Christoph Waltz, Director Michel Gondry and Producer Neal Moritz.
The characters in the film seem to be very aware of the existence of comic book style, storytelling, cliques & tropes. Was that nature of storytelling important to you in your performances and in the making of the film?
MG: I think it’s important for you guys (Seth and Evan) that we acknowledge that we’re in this world.
SR: To some degree, we kind of wanted it to be a world; the kid is a comic book super hero fan obviously. To us, the simple thought was, who’s the kind of guy to become a super hero, probably somebody who reads comic books and is a comic books fan or is at least aware of them. But in the writing, we kind of wanted to subvert notions that are kind of in a lot of these comic type movies, in that you would find a lot of early origin stories of comic book characters and I think in order to play with those idea’s you have to be very aware of what they are in the first place and that they exist and to acknowledge them to some degree. So, to us we kind of wanted to dance on the line between being a comic book and commenting on a comic book movie.
So, then how much research did you do? Did you go all the way back to the radio serials and look at the T.V. series to get some ideas? And was there a certain point where you had to kind of tune it out to come up with your own thing?
SR: In the beginning phases of writing the script, we did a ton of research, just to sort of accumulate ideas. The way we write we just start by making lists, of ideas and thoughts and things we’d like to include in the movie. We tried to listen to almost all the radio serials, but they’re a little outdated I guess. I guess back then hearing footsteps for thirty seconds straight was really suspenseful and interesting. The creaking of the door opening was real cinema at that time. It’s a little hard to sit through hours of it, at this point, for me. But I’m very stupid. But yeah, we went back to the radio show, the serials and then the T.V. show and we really tried to include ideas from all these things like the zephyr’s in there and little just tips of the hat to previous incarnations of it. The whole notion of me being shot and having to conceal it was from an episode from the T.V. show and we just kind of updated it for the movie
Was part of the appeal of “Green Hornet” for you the fact that there isn’t a lot of mythology to it? Its name is recognized but there’s not a lot of stuff you have to factor in.
SR: Yeah, you know I would have no real interest in just doing a very literal interpretation of the pre-existing material. I see a lot of these comic book movies that come out now and you almost feel like anyone could pick up the first few editions of a comic book and bring it to a DP and say, ‘ I wanna shoot this.’ And then six months later you have the origin story of most super hero’s. That really didn’t interest us in any way. We really wanted to be able to inject our own sensibilities into it and our own sense of humor and at the same time, the things that we love about super heroes and comic books ourselves. So it was very appealing that there was a few kind of benchmark, iconic things that people knew about the green hornet: Kato, the car, the gas gun, the song, and Lenore. It was that kind of stuff that we knew we wanted to include but it was fun because we could kind of integrate them into the story however we wanted and reintroduce them in a way that’s organic to our characters and not the previous versions of things.
How have you guys responded to fan expectations?
NM: Obviously, there was a lot of negative speculation on what the movie was going to be and how the combination of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, who are known for kind of stoner bromance comedy’s, with Michel, who’s more indie kind of movies and me, who’s known for more straight ahead action, how could this combination come up with something that would be valuable? The thing that stuck with me more than anything through this kind of team of Seth, Michel and myself, even with all of the negative-ness that was at the beginning of this process going through, we all stuck together. So the first time we showed this movie to a real audience and to see their response was probably the most satisfying night of my film career. It didn’t make a difference what anybody had said in the past, when they saw the movie, they loved the movie. They loved the relationship between the two guys and that, to me, is really all that matters. What the real audience says when they see a movie in a dark auditorium. We’ve been lucky enough that through this movie and all the turmoil we’ve had, we really did stick together and ultimately made the movie that we wanted to make and luckily audiences are embracing it as much as we had hoped for.
MG: There was a moment in time, I could describe it exactly what you’re talking about. We were talking about the car and we were supposed to have some deal with a big company and it fell through and at some point we were all in the room and we decided the most surprising thing for us, we will just use the car from the sixties and we kind of had this high five moment with Seth and Evan because that’s what we wanted to do from the beginning. It was an awesome moment.
NM: We were very lucky that we were able to convince the studio to down millions of dollars in a car promotion to ultimately do what was best for the movie and I think the fact that we didn’t try to manufacture some new, exotic, cool looking car as the black beauty and stayed with something that was tested, tried and true and we just ultimately thought was sexy and beautiful and stayed with that car. And I think it’s really a hallmark of the movie. We don’t have character with super hero powers; our super hero in the movie is the car.
Seth, could you talk about how much comedy you were going to bring to this without letting it slip into that parody sort of thing?
SR: It’s a hard role to articulate, like as soon as this happens, you’ve crossed the line. We just sort of had to generally be aware that the comedy should come from the characters and it should all feel real and it shouldn’t feel like we’re being funny just for the sake of being funny but it should kind of feel like something that would maybe actually happen with these people. We really tried to approach the structure of the story in a somewhat traditional action movie sense and it was just sort of how the characters related to one another that we hoped the humor would come from. I remember with the car, we were like Inspector Gadget’s car is too far, that was our benchmark. So little things like that, we would come up with mostly arbitrarily and we would break those rules constantly but it was just fun to say more than anything.
NM: I think during the editing process one of the biggest challenge was how much action and how much comedy, we kept going back and forth-
SR: Yeah, editing was more where we could figure out it out. You would find sometimes a joke in the wrong place would make an otherwise dangerous scene feel completely not dangerous. But at times, it can just be the wrong joke and it needs to be more situation-based joke than a comedy writer-y joke, ya know? The editing is where we were really able to kind of play with a lot of that.
MG: I grew up watching Starsky and Hutch, so I grew up with a lot of buddy movies and I was used to these kinds of stories where the humor blends with the action. From the beginning we all knew we didn’t want to do a spoof, it was not our purpose to mock the genre. We took it very seriously.
Michel, I think we can certainly tell what the Michel Gondry touches are, was there a lot of negotiation about how many elements of these you could have or were there many more you would’ve liked to get in the film?
MG: It has to reflect myself jumping on board a project like that. It was easy because I remember I had designed the sequence and I wanted to show it visually and I made a sketch and I remember showing my girlfriend and saying ‘ they will never go for it.’ It’s more important for me to be able to identify with the hero and with a guy like Seth, playing the main character and the dynamic between Jay and Seth on set. That’s different from what you see in general in comic book movies. So, that’s why I decided to do it.
And Jay, you’re relatively new to the U.S. cinema, what was your first thought after your Skype audition?
JC: Very excited and a little bit nervous because I couldn’t speak English. So I trained in English for one month.
SR: It’s amazing.
NM: When we decided Jay should be Kato, we knew we needed more days to shoot the movie. So, we did a little trick and went to the studio and said ‘We know you want Jay and we want to cast Jay but you have to give us extra shooting days.’ Which we didn’t need for Jay, we needed for us.
SR: It was for me. It was for my English more than anything.
And how was the experience for you? Any mishaps on set?
JC: I didn’t get hurt because I’m Kato.
NM: I think Jay is adding the black beauty to his collection.
SR: I don’t think I can, it’s a lot to insure, in L.A.
JC: I like when we fight like brothers, like kids. I didn’t fight in my childhood because I was an only child. And driving the car, like a man. Shooting bad guys, everybody wants to be a hero, so I liked fighting bad guys.
Could you tell us about casting Christoph. And Christoph can you tell us your experience on the film?
SR: We wanted the villain to be just a character more than anything and we wanted him to be sympathetic and our fixation wasn’t how to make this guy scary. We wanted more than anything to intellectually understand why someone would be so fascinated with killing another person basically. So that’s really how we approached it and we wanted it to be funny and when we saw Christoph’s previous work it had elements of danger but at the same time entertaining and very funny parts. That’s really why we thought he’d be a good guy to do it.
NM: I think when Seth, Evan & Michel first started talking about the role, the idea of a villain going through a mid-life crisis was really strong and new and something we hadn’t seen before. When we had our initial conversations with Christoph that was the thing he gravitated to the most.
CW: I have nothing to do with comics; I know nothing about comics. I’m aware of the importance of comics but they’re not within my world. Not because I’m above it but because microsurgery is not within my world either. So, is that a deficit or is that an advantage? When I do Shakespeare, I don’t question the world that was created there. All of these are characters and inventions.
Did you base or get inspiration for your character on anyone in particular?
CW: This isn’t based on anything. I think that’s very important. You don’t take little pieces of acting by numbers and put them together in some pre-fabbed ken doll situation. It’s based actorial and authorial. I learned my lines and I show up on time. There’s no mystery behind it. I just do what is necessary. Now what’s necessary? That might be an interesting question.
Cameron, What was it like working and beating up these guys?
CD: It was awesome working with them, it was so much fun. I didn’t realize it was such a huge action movie because I came in the first week of shooting and the last week of shooting and all of my bits, there was no action. So I went away and made another movie-
SR: With a lot of action-
CD: Yeah (laughs) with a lot of action and I came back and when I saw what they did I was like, wait a sec, how did this happen? Why did I not know this? Before we started I took the black beauty for a spin and I should’ve put two and two together I guess.
The beating up was a lot of fun; we actually had a lot of fun with that scene because clearly, I can beat up both of them in real life. So, we kind of had to gauge how capable Lenore was and whether or not she had any moves and we kind of thought well, she knows self-defense a little bit-
SR: And she’s good with an umbrella.
CD: And she’s good with an umbrella. We just had fun with that. I got to beat them over the head with an umbrella for nearly half a day.
SR: Yeah, you whacked us pretty good, quite a few times. I think we broke a few umbrellas.
CD: But it was for the greater good. They took it like men.
SR: Like whiney men.
Seth, the green hornet in the TV series always got the girl? Was it purposeful not to have Cameron wind up with anyone?
SR: We wanted to play off of these notions and these movies and someone always ends up with the girl. It was our instinct that Kato should end up with the girl and Cameron actually had the amazing idea that nobody should end up with the girl, which was really funny and I think it serves the friendship between me and Jay more because it was actually a really funny joke that we would all talk about, that we think there’s this huge competition going on and there’s literally no competition. Neither of us have a chance at all. She doesn’t even know that we like her really and to us this became this funny play off of the traditional kind of love triangle that you might find in one of these movies.
CD: And it relieved the story of having to wrap up that story line which is usually what kills the end of the movie.
SR: Oh yeah, if in the third act we would’ve had to have some romantic moment, it just would’ve been killer.
CD: And it just takes away them having to choose between the romance or taking care of the villain. It just relieved the whole movie of that burden, which I think we really fall into a lot, especially with movies like this. It just felt really outdated. She is actually an integral part of how they accomplish what they accomplish, of course, unbeknownst to her, but nonetheless that’s the purpose of her in the story rather than just being arm candy and having to wrap that is up is so boring.
SR: That’s a really simple way of putting it, cause often when I watch these super hero movies as soon as the romantic story starts, I wanna kill myself. So we thought it would be best to minimize that as much as possible.
CW: I suggested at one point that I end up with the girl.
CD: That’s actually a really good idea-
SR: That, she wouldn’t have fought so hard.
Neal and Seth, could you comment on the scoring of James Franco, it looks like you just had a blast.
CD: Seth had something he could use against James and so he used it.
SR: Me and James were married briefly in Antigua a few years ago and I promised to keep it under wraps. Naw, sometimes you just ask someone to do something and they just say yes and it really works out as easily as you could hope. And that’s one of those situations, he just liked the scene and was excited to work with Christoph and we promised we could do it in a short amount of time and he came and it was great.
NM: It turned out to be a great way to kick-off the movie with the two of them, we were really happy that James agreed to do it.
When you guys (Seth and Evan) were writing were there bits that you saved, thinking you’re going to do “Green Hornet 2”?
SR: No, we aren’t the kind of writers to save ideas. If it’s remotely good, we shove it in there. Nor are we confident enough to assume there’ll be a sequel.
– Katie Crocker
