Scott Stewart, whose other project
Legion is coming out this Friday, talked to AintItCool.com about the much awaited comic book adaptation of
Priest; which was slated for this August. When asked where he was at with the film:
"We wrapped PRIEST right before Thanksgiving. We're working on the director's cut right now; the visual f/x facilities are gearing up. It's a very different movie from LEGION. Whereas LEGION has a lot of fun and tries to not take itself too seriously, PRIEST is a more somber movie. It's much more like THE SEARCHERS."
The filmmaker also let us in on his vision for the movie:
"It's really a war movie. It takes place in a western setting, and it's a retro-futuristic world, but it's a war movie. Actually, it's kind of an after-the-war movie.
"It's mashing up a bunch of stuff, but when you start to look at John Ford's THE SEARCHERS, and you start to say, Okay, what if vampires were the Comanche? They're the others; they're the ones that we war against. And I took a very contemporary sensibility to that: it's not so clear who the enemy is. I play around with that, and with the idea of a war that goes on forever, and then you come back from the war. You thought you were going to come back a hero, but society has moved on from you and cast you off. You've become something that people are afraid of, people they won't sit next to on the bus. Those are the Priests. And suddenly it becomes more like FIRST BLOOD. That's just really interesting stuff to me.
I don't know that I had anything interesting to say about the vampire genre, but when I read [PRIEST] and the vampires became that for us - they're feral, they're not human, they don't speak English, they have their own culture - then all that stuff starts to become interesting."
Scott went on to say that the movie will have an unexpected opening sequence:
"There will be a 2-D-animated prologue to the film, and I will announce shortly who's doing that; it's very exciting... the idea of R-rated 2-D animation to show us the war between man and vampire throughout history, and how that leads us up to the beginning of our movie. I'm really excited about that. It's really exciting to show people animation like that that, which they don't normally get to see in a big movie."