Video:Paul Bettany Interview - Priest, 2010 Comic Con

Transcript:Paul Bettany Interview - Priest, 2010 Comic Con

Rebecca Murray from About.com Hollywood Movies at the 2010 San Diego Comic Con.

Paul Bettany - Priest

Tell me about this film and reuniting with Scott Stewart.

Paul Bettany: "Reuniting with Scott was great. Clint Culpepper, who is the head of the studio, saw the rough cut of Legion and said, 'Here's the script and here's three times the money to make it, and I'd like you and Paul to go and do it,' and that was kind of great. Suddenly you were capable... You know, Scott has really pulled something epic off. That was a really exciting thought for me."

How does this benefit from being in 3-D?

Paul Bettany: "Haven't seen it yet so I don't know. [...]It hasn't been finished yet. They've got a year in post for the 3-D. As I understand it, esthetically it really lent itself to 3-D and also the things that are leaping are visual effects anyway. So they will be 100% 3-D and then the plate shots, which is what we'd already shot anyway, are done in post. But you know we shot it as a wide screen format on film, on beautiful old-fashioned film that I love."

People might say it's cashing in on the vampire craze but this is a Western, it's sci-fi...how would you describe it?

Paul Bettany: "I don't know how I would describe but what I will say is that when I read it, when I first heard about it I was really excited to work with Scott and I really wanted to work with Clint again, but I was kind of really disappointed that it was a vampire film. And then I opened the script... Because there's a slew of vampire films. But when once I read it, even before seeing any of the visuals, when you read it I realized pretty immediately that it was something that if you were going to place it near Twilight or you were going to place it near Star Wars, you'd place it near Star Wars and not... It feels, I think, very different."

And your vampires are very different in this, right? They're not the vampires we've been seeing recently.

Paul Bettany: "They're feral, wild animals that are naked and need to feed. They're animals. I mean Karl [Urban], it might be a bit confusing because you see Karl, but Karl is an aberration. He is a mixture between the two creatures. Human beings and vampires in our world have always co-existed and been at war, but we have always - as far as anybody in that world knows there have always been vampires."

This is a couple of action movies that you've done now. Is this something you want to do more of or do you have that out of your system now?

Paul Bettany: "No, I'd like to do both. I mean, you also have to understand we live in a time where people don't make many dramas, you know, and a boy's got to work. But I really do, I really do love it. I love the sort of physical discipline of it. I enjoy that very much."

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