Creature designing has begun
The next two months will be productive ones for the Dylan Dog feature film Dead of Night. Director Kevin Munroe (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ’07) informs ShockTillYouDrop.com that final financing is closing in and that by the beginning of December prep gets underway for, fingers crossed, a January principal photography start in New Orleans this January.
Munroe came aboard the adaptation of Tiziano Sclavi’s popular Italian comic book character in April with Brandon Routh (Superman Returns) already attached to star as suave supernatural investigator. Joshua Oppenheimer and Thomas Dean Donnelly wrote the screenplay.
On the casting tip, The Hollywood Reporter says Sammo Hung is in talks to star. Munroe adds, “We’re coming up with a cast list and talking to a few actors. We’ve sent the script off to get feedback and gauge interest. The good thing is that Josh and Tom wrote such a good script, it just really attracts people, so I think within a month we’re going to start releasing names of who’s coming aboard.”
The director is relishing this time working with a creature makeup effects artist (who he’s keeping mum on right now) to visualize the myriad menaces Dylan Dog will face in his first adventure on the big screen. And Munroe is most certainly going to make this debut count. “We’ve got werewolves, zombies and vampires – and a few sub-categories of those,” he reveals. “His world is everything and the kitchen sink so with this one we don’t have anything quite as broad as, say, Hellboy II where you go to the [Troll Market] with different creatures, but here it’s a little bit more classic for the first movie and in the second [film] you go a bit deeper.”
Wait, a “second movie”? Is Dead of Night an origin story that sees the rise of Dylan Dog? “If this was the only Dylan Dog movie to ever hit the market, I’d be bummed but I’d be satisfied that it has a definitive beginning middle and end,” he clarifies. “It’s an origin story to the audience in the sense that it’s the first time you get to see him. What I was attracted to was that it’s an origin story without every showing him being recruited into this whole world. When we meet Dylan at the beginning of this movie, he’s at the lowest point of his life. He’s already left that life he had in the comic books. And the whole movie is about him getting back up on the horse. So, as an audience member you’re introduced to all of these things. You get to see how much of a bad-ass he is, not because he’s stepping through to prove it but because he’s done it before in another life. It’s a next step for him.”
Munroe is cognizant of the fact that the genre is riddled with various films about investigators prowling the world for things that go bump in the night, but he’s of the belief that it’s not about the party, but what you bring to it that counts. “It’s really cool because the curse and the blessing of Dylan Dog is that it’s all very familiar territory. I still maintain it’s presented in such a fresh way. In the same way you think you’ve seen every alien movie, and then Men in Black comes along and you realize you never looked at it from that film’s point of view. Dylan Dog does that well.”
Source: Ryan Rotten, Managing Editor
