Edge of Darkness will get a lot of attention for Mel Gibson’s return to acting after all his controversy. It’s also notable as a Martin Campbell film. The director of Goldeneye, Casino Royal, both Zorro movies and the original BBC series on which Edge of Darkness is based, will next tackle the big screen adaptation of Green Lantern. Campbell let us geek out with him in an exclusive interview.
Crave Online: Is there an art to tough guy talk?
Martin Campbell: I suppose there is. The script was written by Bill Monahan who, as you know, did The Departed. So he probably has a very firm grip of tough guy talk. I think some of the scenes with Mel dealing with, for example, the lawyer and so forth clearly is a lot of tough guy talk.
Crave Online: These characters are so grizzled and gravely, were audio levels ever a problem? Did you have to ADR some of that grizzled dialogue?
Martin Campbell: No, very little. Very little ADR.
Crave Online: Is there a certain BBC style, pace, rhythm you captured?
Martin Campbell: No, not really. The truth is the pace is, look: If you compare this to, say, Taken, which in the first four and a half minutes of the movie dispenses with all its emotional story. The rest of it is Liam Neeson with a gun dealing with these bad guys in Paris, shoots about 200 of them which is a terrific film, by the way. I actually thoroughly enjoyed it, not least of all because of Liam Neeson. He gives it a kind of credibility that perhaps it may not have had. Whereas this is a slower burn, it’s about loss, it’s about grief, it’s about a detective discovering things about his daughter he had no idea she was involved in. So there are other elements to it and an emotional core throughout the movie I hope. So getting back to your point about pace, I think that has to dictate its own pace rather than start off at
Crave Online: You’ve reinvented things before, but this is the first time reinventing your own work. How different is that?
Martin Campbell: To be honest, I didn’t even think of the series when I made the film really. I dismissed it, thought, “You know what? I’ve just got to treat this as a completely different movie.”
Crave Online: Did you have any Déjà vu moments where you felt like you’d been here before?
Martin Campbell: Only once and that’s one shot I do in the scene of the aftermath of the killing of his daughter and he’s sitting on the sofa. Whitehouse approaches and I do a shot where I’m on Whitehouse and I just jib down to Craven’s face. I did exactly that shot in the series. That’s the only time I kind of indulged.
Crave Online: Did you always cut after Danny Huston says, “What does it feel like?”
Martin Campbell: No, there’s a little bit after that which you’ll see in the DVD when they put in the extras. There’s a little bit of a scene where he comes around to Craven and Craven talks to him about the break-in. It felt superfluous. It was so much more powerful to come out on that. A powerful cut that is. It was my editor’s suggestion and Mel’s actually. We all sat there and said, “You know, there’s got to be a better out to this scene.” Of course he repeats that very line when he sits in the car with the gun pointed at Bennett.
Crave Online: But it also pays off because the first moment is so powerful.
Martin Campbell: Well, it’s also such a mad line. It’s such a crazy line.
Crave Online: It also occurred to me, there’s nothing wrong with a stunt double, is there? All this crap about actors doing their own stunts…
Martin Campbell: Sure. First of all, they don’t do it themselves. They may say it but they don’t.
Crave Online: Well, they probably don’t know a second unit came in. So they did all the action they know about.
Martin Campbell: Certainly when truth becomes the legend, print the legend kind of notion. I suppose some reason is that once you see a scene all put together, you do kind of allude to it was you that did it. Not least of all, insurance companies won’t let you go near it.
Crave Online: But it works better visually to cut in a professional stunt double.
Martin Campbell: Yeah, these doubles, stunt people know exactly how to sell it. They’ve watched the lead actor, the way they move, the way they do action, the way they walk. So clearly they can get a very good footprint on terms of their character.
