Barrow’s sheriff takes on the vamps!
San Diego Comic-Con is only a few days away and one of the big movies that’s going to be featured there is the Sam Raimi produced 30 Days of Night, based on the horror comic by Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith about an Alaskan town attacked by bloodthirsty vampires just as they hit the “dark season.” The movie stars Josh Hartnett as the town’s sheriff Eben Olemaun, and when Harnett was in New York to do interviews for the Rod Lurie boxing drama Resurrecting the Champ, ComingSoon.net’s ShockTillYouDrop.com had a chance to ask him a couple questions about his first foray into the horror genre with this vampire flick.
We first asked the most obvious question, which was why he wanted to do the movie, considering that except for his small part in Frank Miller’s Sin City, he had not really done any genre films. “Well, because it’s a vampire movie, and I just think that vampire movies are incredible,” he told us. “I’ve always been kind of fascinated with it, and I read the comic book and loved it. It’s not like it’s just all running and screaming. It’s actually quite a difficult character piece. It’s all about trying to find your way into a headspace where you can actually sacrifice yourself or someone you love. It was a good dramatic movie actually when it comes down to it, ’cause there were just so many scenes of people sitting in a room, huddled and starting to lose it because they’ve been hiding for so long. It’s good. I liked it a lot, and I had a great time.”
Hartnett said that having seen David Slade’s previous movie Hard Candy also played a part in his decision to do the movie, and he talked a bit about the set they built down in New Zealand for the movie. “Actually, we basically had the entire town. Because of the conversion rate and because people there are still interested in working on films even if they’re not getting paid a ton of money, they made this entire town look completely real so we can shoot from all angles. It was a town that they built on a field, and then we also went to this snow park down in Wanaka that was in the middle of summer here but winter there, and shot a lot of the outdoor stuff.”
We were also interested to know how the movie was going to look compared to the very distinctive art style of the comic book, to which he replied, “There’s a little bit of difference because it’s really hard to replicate Ben Templesmith’s art which has this Ralph Steadman sort of look. There’s something about it that’s so grotesque and exaggerated and oddly beautiful that you can’t replicate, but there are certain elements of it.”
Hartnett didn’t think his character would appear in a sequel if it ever happened, partially for reasons that might be obvious to those who’ve read the comic book, although if you’ve read its sequel “Dark Days,” you might think otherwise. Maybe he just didn’t want to spoil the fun for those experiencing the story for the first time when seeing the movie, but one can expect we’ll find out a lot more about a possible sequel in our coverage of the movie from Comic-Con where the movie has a presentation on Saturday afternoon.
30 Days of Night opens on October 19, but before that Hartnett appears in Rod Lurie’s Resurrecting the Champ, which opens on August 24. ComingSoon.net will have a full interview with Hartnett about that film closer to release.
Source: Edward Douglas
