Writer/Directors Michael
Roesch and Peter Scheerer on ALONE IN THE DARK 2.
Before we talk about Alone in the Dark 2,
could we get a little background? How did you guys meet each
other? When did you become producing partners?
Michael: We know each other from school,
became friends and started to shoot our first short movie
when we were 12 years old.
Peter: Later we started to write scripts, and
to our own surprise we were able to sell them all. We were
really lucky with that.
Could you please give us a basic run down of
Alone in the Dark 2?
Peter: Edward Carnby, the main character in
the series, joins forces with a group of witch hunters, to
track down the dangerous witch Elisabeth Dexter.
Michael: We thought that it would be
interesting to have a real dangerous witch as the opponent
for our hero.
How did you approaching the new film? Will it
be a reboot like with HOUSE OF THE DEAD 2 or a direct follow
on?
Michael: It will be a complete reboot. The
producers and we agreed that it would be the best to start
completely from the beginning - with a new story, and new
characters.
Peter: Our idea was to tell a story more with
suspense then with big action sequences. One of the reasons
for this decision was also that we have a much smaller
budget.
I understand you wrote the first movie under
less than favorable circumstances. What was the
production like this time around?
Peter: There were two main problems: We had
only 8 weeks to write the script, what was too short. The
second problem was that one of the producers brought another
writer in, who wrote a complete different script. And then
they mixed both scripts together, what was just not working.
Michael: In the end there was not much left
from our script in the end. But this happens in Hollywood
very often. I think this is one of the main reasons why most
screenwriters want to direct their own movies sooner or
later.
Here a B MOVIE NEWS we’re shamelessly pro Uwe
Boll. What is he like to work with?
Michael: Uwe is one of the nicest and most
loyal persons you ever meet. He is a good friend.
Peter: Yes, he is a very nice person. And you
can learn a lot from him.
I have to say I’m very impressed with the
cast of this movie. It’s like a genre lovers dream. You have
Lance Henriksen, Bill Moseley, Ralf Moeller, Danny Trejo,
Michael Pare, and to a lesser extent Zack Ward, Natessia
Malthe and the delighful P.J. Soles. Have you got any
amusing or embarrassing stories you would like to share.
Michael: We were really happy to get this
great cast. Fortunately the agents and actors really liked
our script. But with so many genre stars, which all have a
very tight schedule, is was really hard to schedule the
shooting.
Peter: On one day Ralf Moeller came to LA
from a 12 hour flight from Europe, and we needed him to
shoot for another 10 hours, to get the schedule done.
As Uwe Boll’s name is attached to this film
there are going to be legions of “obese, virgin, wanna be
filmmaker, imdb registered, fan boys” who are going to hate
it for that reason without judging it on its own merits? How
do you prepare yourself for something like that?
Michael: We hope that the audience takes a
new look on the franchise, and sees that we restarted the
franchise.
Peter: We knew the critics can't get much
worse. But if you are making movies, you have to live with
that.
Video games movies have always had a stigma
attached to them. If it’s possible to talk in such board
terms what do you think the strength and weakness of
adapting video games are?
Peter: The strength is more from a marketing
standpoint, then from the creative side. Producers buy the
rights for video games as they know that they will get a lot
of attention. Video game based movies sell much more DVD´s
then non-video game movies with the same budget.
Michael: The weakness is for sure that the
storylines of the most video games are not usable for
movies. It seems easy, but in reality it is often very
difficult to make a game story work in a movie.
I understand you have another movie called
Brotherhood of Blood. Could you quickly give us the spiel
about that?
Michael: "Brotherhood of Blood" was our first
movie as directors, we shot it before "Alone in the Dark 2".
It is a vampire movie, Victoria Pratt, Sid Haig and Ken
Foree are the lead actors. We had a very low budget, but we
were really lucky as all the actors liked the script much,
so that we could get this great cast even with our very low
budget.
Peter: The movie will be released on October
14th in the US, on November 3rd in the UK, and in Australia
and New Zealand in June 2009. We were really lucky regarding
the US release. "Brotherhood of Blood" was one of the first
movie Sam Raimi picked up for his new label GHOST HOUSE
UNDERGROUND at Lionsgate. It was really an honor that Sam
Raimi liked our movie.
Previous to this you’ve made action films in
a horror setting; will Brotherhood of Blood be more of a
straight horror movie?
Peter: "Brotherhood of Blood" is more like an
horror-thriller.
Michael: We had a very low budget, so we knew
that we couldn´t do big action sequences.
Ok, I’ll give you one last chance to pimp out
your film. In one sentence why should we watch it?
Michael: Lance Henricksen, Bill Moseley and
Danny Trejo fight a badass witch. Don´t miss it!
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