The Creature From the Black Lagoon

Breck Eisner spoke about his next film in an interview with ShockTilYouDrop (this was back in May!). The film in question is the remake of the classic 1954 film "Creature From the Black Lagoon."

"We scouted the movie last year but got shut down when the writers strike happened," Eisner explains to ShockTilYoudrop. "We had a crew in the Amazon where we're going to shoot all of the exteriors. We're shooting in Manaus, Brazil and on the Amazon in Peru. I want it to be authentic. I'm a big fan of Werner Herzog and Fitzcarraldo. Herzog got that authenticity. He shot in Manaus. So, we scouted for a month. There's this place called the Forest of Mirrors, because there are so many lagoons on a thousand mile green carpet river, and we found the lagoon we're going to shoot in."

The new Creature will take place in a contemporary setting, and, will feature a mixture of CG and practical FX. "The Creature has been designed, we've spent six months designing him." Eisner says Spectral Motion has built a maquette based on an appearance created by Mark "Crash" McCreery ("Jurassic Park," "Pirates of the Caribbean"). "We went top shelf on it. It's very faithful to the original, but updated."

Eisner was asked how the tone of the film would be. Would it be filled with action or will it be more of a horror film?

"We debated tone a thousand times. For me tone is the most interesting thing a filmmaker has and so the Creature is a creature, it's not a monster. That's my number one thing about the movie. We're not going to turn him into a monster. He's still going to be empathetic, he's still going to be deadly, he's still going to have a misguided means of expressing his interests in a woman, but it's uniquely the Creature. It's empathy for a deadly creature and tone plays a big part of that." Still, Eisner knows full well Universal is aiming for summer movie fare so, "it will deliver of action and excitement, but I want it to be scary. The Creature was scary when it first came out in '54 - it's not scary today - but that's what updating means to me, updating the tone of the original."

Latino Review got to sit down with the writer of the screenplay, Gary Ross, for the new film and got to talk more about the tone of it.

You're working Creature From The Black Lagoon?

Ross: Ya, I'm producing. And I wrote a script.

And how's that going?

Ross: It's going great. We're actually moving forward.

What's the tone of the film going to be?

Ross: it's not campy. It's not like the original, it's not, my Dad wrote the original, so it's not a reference to what the original is. We take it sort of seriously. We found some scientific under pinnings for it, which my Dad actually felt in the original. In fact, he based it on a lung fish that was found around that time. So a lot of that was his. And kind of the conflict between science and uh...

Will the tone be a throwback to some of the older...?

Ross: Actually, no. We're going to treat it with a certain amount of dignity. We're not approaching this a in a retro campy kind of way. it's set in present day. There are reasonable scientific under pinnings. It should really be an interesting journey into the jungle both for the characters and for the audience.

Do you think there should be a "Creature From the Black Lagoon" remake? If so, what would you like the tone of the new "Creature From the Black Lagoon" to be like?