James O'Baar Shares Insights; What to Expect from CROW Reboot

 

At Wizard World Tulsa Comic Con over the weekend from the plains of Tulsa, Oklahoma, amongst the stars of AMC's The Walking Dead and other icons of pop-culture, artist and writers James O'Barr spoke at his "Creating the Crow" Panel on Saturday night, before actually talking about the acclaimed comic, to share the chronicle of The Crow reboot, what fans should expect, and why he agreed to let Spanish director F. Javier Guiterrez take the helm. 

O'Baar remembers back in the early 2000s when the reboot idea came about and recounts getting together with the cast and crew of the Alex Proyas 1990s classic to 'boycott' the film:

"We got together and we did everything short of starting a petition to keep it from getting made and then it fell to the wayside then it would re-appear six months later with a new writer and a new actor- Jason Statham, frickin' Marky Mark, and Bradley Cooper - so after five years it was like well, it's Hollywood, they're just gonna piss away millions of dollars on something no one wants to see, and so everyone was so against I thought well it won't get made anyhow...and then Relativity Studio picked up the rights to it."

That's when O'Baar remembers  Guiterrez being brought on, saying he'd seen a few films from him and that he was a "very talented film maker".

 "Then out of the blue one week I got a call from him, from Spain, and he said- in his broken English- 'I want to come and talk to you about The Crow'- so I thought 'Perfect, i'll pick him up at the airport, lecture him for a fucking hour, then put him back on the plane', and I did, I said no one wants this, no one wants to see this, that movie is Brandon [Lee]'s legacy, every director that's been involved in a Crow sequel since the first one has never worked in America again, do you really want to commit career suicide with your first English speaking film?"

O'Barr said Guiterrez let him go on for about an hour before saying that he was right- the first movie was perfect- but he doesn't want to touch that, he wants to adapt the book.
"Okay," said O'Barr, "Now you have my interest."

The film, O'Baar said, is maybe 40% of the book. "It feels like the book, at heart it has all the right emotions in it; but it was a very low budget film," O'Barr then compared The Crow's relatively low shooting budget to "90 minutes of the Big Bang Theory".
"There's certain things they couldn't do," O'Baar said, "A lot of things had to be altered or removed."

O'Baar said he was very happy with the film and the late Brandon Lee's performance; but there was a lot of things he was sad didn't make it to the screen.

"I spent a few days with [Guiterrez] and we talked about a lot of things like our favorite films, what we would like to do with [The Crow] and then we went to Relativity and said 'Look, we want to do this together', and they were very open to it- so they approached this actor, Luke Evans, about playing Eric."

O'Barr then corrected himself about who picked Evans and why:

 

"Actually, it was [Guiterrez] and I who picked Luke- when [Guiterrez] first came to the U.S. he showed me all of the actors who had auditioned for the role, and I was a little suspect. I had his phone and here was [a picture of] the actor and here's the actor in the make-up and I was sliding through them, laughing hysterically, 'Oh look Bradley Cooper and a big clown face', some of them it wasn't what was so hilarious, you know, but I got to this one actor and he had this really intense look  and I went to the next shot where he did the make-up test and I thought 'this is the guy right here', I didn't even know who he was at the time, and I said 'This is the guy', and [Guiterrez] said 'I know, I absolutely agree , that's who I picked too, so we got to Relativity and it turns out that was Luke Evans, so they approached Evans and he flew to America to get my blessing before he would take the part, so that's another good sign right there."

O'Baar then praised Evans, saying he was just getting big in America with roles in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, Dracula: Untold, and Fast and the Furious 6. 

 With the director and star in place, O'Baar then told Relativity that he wasn't going to let them use his name to sell the film, and that if he was going to be attached to it he wanted what he had in the first film which was in on every decision regarding casting and "most importantly," control over the film's soundtrack. 

"It's set at such a very specific point in time and the music is so important to it," O'Baar said, "because it was important to me when I was writing it, and all those bands with the exception of the Cure were all friends of mine and fans of the book, so it wasn't so difficult to get them to do an original song."

Then O'Baar describe the film's tone:

"I have a lot of control over this. It's going to be closer to an art-house film than an action John Woo-styalized thing. Parts of it will be in black and white, parts will be in technicolor- the happy parts will be in technicolor- all the violent stuff will be shot on 1970's film stock so it'll be really gritty and grainy so it has that Taxi Driver look to it. I ived 35 years in Detroit. Violence is ugly and I want it to be ugly on screen. I don't want it to be heroic, and I do not want it to be stylized, so I'm actually excited about it."

O'Barr went on to say however that it's Hollywood so it could all fall apart; but at this point the studio has so much time and money invested into it that It would be "foolish" for them not to go forward with it.

O'Barr asked the crowd if "That sounds ok" to them, which received a very loud round of applause.

"I can't express how important it is that you realize this is not taking away anything from Brandon or Alex- that film is perfect as it is; but this is just a chance to explore all of the different themes, you can have talking trains and horses and all of the visual metaphors from my art that can actually be brought to the screen this time."

O'Baar ended, reciting his go to analogy of Bela Lugosi's Dracula and there's Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula- same source material; but they're two completely different films, and they're both valid."