Video:David Goyer Interview - The Unborn at Comic Con 2008
with Rebecca MurrayWriter/director David Goyer (writer, 'The Dark Knight' - director, 'The Invisible') takes another journey into the creepy world of the supernatural with 'The Unborn' starring Odette Yustman, Meagan Good Cam Gigandet, Idris Elba and Gary Oldman.
Transcript:David Goyer Interview - The Unborn at Comic Con 2008
Rebecca Murray from About.com Hollywood Movies at the 2008 San Diego Comic Con.
The Unborn Writer/Director David Goyer
David Goyer: "My bar in horror is really high. I don't think in the last couple decades there have been that many really good truly scary horror films. Session 9 is one of them. The Mothman Prophesies is one and the original Ring. I thought Emily Rose was really good and scary. These are also movies that are also intelligent, and I think that's what makes them scary. I think it's easy to shock people. It's easy to do gore. And I'm not… Look, I enjoy a good gory film as much as anyone, but I think it's much harder to genuinely disturb someone and scare them. And that's why there aren't that many of them made."
Your mind seems to go to these weird places. Where did this story come from?
David Goyer: "You know, this story comes from I had a lot of… It's funny, I did a movie with Alex Proyas aways back called Dark City and it turned out that a lot of the images from Dark City came from these recurring nightmares that Alex and I shared in common. And it was really interesting to work that way, to sort of put these images on the screen that had come from your subconscious. And so I kind of did the same thing. I went back to the well and you know I had a series of just nightmares that I had as a kid. I started scribbling down things that I remembered, and that was the genesis of this film. And I think that's also what makes it scarier because there's things in the movie that you don't really understand. You don't know where they come from. You might have seen it – there's like a dog with a mask in the footage we showed. I don't know. That's just like a weird, disturbing image to me, like a dog with a human face is weird to me."
There's a lot more stories like this that are still to come?
David Goyer: "Yeah."
There's a well out there you could tap into?
David Goyer: "I had such a good time on this one I'm actually going to do another one next year, another original."
How collaborative are you with your actors? Do you let them play around?
David Goyer: "Yeah. My deal when I'm working with the actors is, I put a lot of time into the script and I say… Well, a) I always want to hear their ideas. If I think it's good, fine, we'll incorporate it. And if I feel like we get what we scripted, then I'm happy to try something completely different and see where it takes us, and improvise. There's a little bit of improvisation in this film."