Director Scott Stewart on Legion

Visual Effects guru Scott Stewart makes his feature directing debut with Legion. The actioner about the angel Gabriel defending humanity against God’s wrath is out in January. Then Stewart takes on Priest, an adaptation of the Tokyopop Manga. We joined Stewart for a roundtable at San Diego Comic Con after he’d just shown an extended trailer for Legion to a crowd of fans.

Q: How can you go wrong with angels and machine guns?

Scott Stewart: We were sort of saying it’s Highway to Heaven with machine guns. Minus Michael Landon of course.

Q: There aren’t a lot of good angel movies.

Scott Stewart: Yeah, people talked a lot about that and I just kept saying, “No, that’s not what we’re on to. It’s a very, very different thing.” I think it’s kind of reflected in the cast that decided they wanted to do the movie, that they felt like there was a lot of good, fun stuff for them to do that was a little different.

Q: Did you write it with them in mind?

Scott Stewart: No, I had written it originally for a different filmmaker years ago. It was for a different director and it was about to go and didn’t go for a variety of reasons and then came back to me to continue to work on. Then it was offered to me to direct and I just dove in. I just felt like I could make it my own. I just pushed and pushed and pushed and kept working on it. The crazy way things happen in Hollywood is I met Clint Culpepper at Sony Screen Gems and he just has a thing for them. He had done amazing things with Underworld and Resident Evil and all these other things. He just felt like this was something he really was interested in doing. He had been developing another movie that sort of had similar themes but wasn’t really working out. He just went, “This is it. This is the one. Angels with machine guns. We’re going to make this.” I sort of joke about that stuff. For me particularly, it’s a bunch of characters trapped in a truck stop diner. I wanted to make sure that it was a movie, when I was writing the script, that it was something that you would care about the characters. Violence means something in the movie. If people get hurt, it should matter. It’s not just ten little Indians. It’s not just let’s wait until they all get picked off. They’re hopefully not disposable and they all have a very strong, thematic reason for being in the story. They each face something that’s related to their own issues as characters.

Q: Do you expect an inevitable uproar from religious groups?

Scott Stewart: In a weird way, I think there are a lot of people, I was told, I couldn’t see the audience because the lights are in your face, but apparently a number of people that went up to ask questions had crucifixes on and were holding them and were asking questions that were related to some of the religious stuff. Personally, I think it’s not a religious movie. It deals with religious ideas because it’s part of a mythology that I thought was interesting. Whether you’re religious or not, I was raised Jewish but I saw The Exorcist as a kid. It terrified the living sh*t out of me, but I was raised with an upbringing that doesn’t believe in the devil and doesn’t believe in hell. So that movie should mean nothing to me but it does because it’s in us, whether we believe in it or not. So whether it’s in us or it’s in our parents, it’s kind of in our society. It’s kind of just different than other boogeymen that are in scary things. You look at Exorcism of Emily Rose, that movie was sort of controversial as well but people showed up to see it. They showed up to see it, it scares them and it doesn’t matter if you don’t believe any of it. It gets you in some kind of wizard hind brain level.

Q: Are you keeping the religious thing going with Priest?

Scott Stewart: Keepin’ the religious thing going. That one is totally different through. I mean, it’s based on the Tokyo Pop graphic novel, Korean manga. That’s a sci-fi western basically.

Q: Mixing up genres?

Scott Stewart: Oh yeah. Like I said, it’s part Searchers, part Blade Runner.

Q: Were you prepping that while still finishing Legion?

Scott Stewart: It’s very challenging. I don’t sleep very much, these fantastic rings under my eyes. Yeah, it’s been hard. We finish Legion in the fall and it comes out in January, Jan. 22 in the U.S. Priest we start[ed] shooting August 24.

Q: You start shooting before you finish your first one?

Scott Stewart: It’s a high class problem.

Q: Are the priest vampires emo or real hardcore vampires?

Scott Stewart: I think you guys are going to be excited. I think you guys are going to be into it. It’s kind of more of a war movie than it is in some respects a horror movie.

Q: Did you always plan to move into directing?

Scott Stewart: Yeah. For me that was kind of just always what I wanted to do. I came to it in a sort of circuitous route. I was principally a writer but I was also a computer baby and knew a lot about computer graphics. I went to NYU film school for writing but found myself working at ILM as a visual effects artist. I did that for four years, from Forrest Gump to Phantom Menace and then started my own company that was doing those kinds of things. We worked on a bunch of movies but I principally focused on writing and directing and producing, sort of the mini-George Lucas model. It’s like, want to make movies that have visual effects in them? Well, we know how to do that so let’s have a company that does that. The company’s not around anymore but most of us are all scattered and some of us are working on Priest.

Q: Where do you draw inspiration visually?

Scott Stewart: Everything under the sun. Gregory Crutzen the photographer was a big reference for me. Francis Bacon’s paintings which I know was a reference for Adrian Lynne when he did Jacob’s Ladder. I just wanted to take that to the next level in terms of the way that stuff looks. And then really the movie influence is Close Encounters of the Third Kind. That’s a huge influence and is kind of my desert island [pick]. It’s like the perfect movie. It’s a great character story, it’s a great family drama, there’s some funny stuff in it. It’s scary, it’s got the best visual effects you’d ever seen. They’re still great. Spielberg’s a god.

Q: Is there a particular scene you’re proud of?

Scott Stewart: Well, I think a standout it seems for people that have seen parts of the movie is a character named Gladys, a little old lady. I don't know if you’ve seen the trailer. Gladys is kind of fun and I think people were really interested in her when they read the script. I remember when Dennis Quaid came in and I just couldn’t believe I was sitting there with Dennis Quaid and that he wanted to play the character of the owner of the diner, Lucas Black’s father in the film. It was so great to see somebody like him because he plays a real character in the movie. He’s not playing a sort of classic Dennis Quaid character that a lot of us associate him with. He’s so underrated and so funny and brought such a warmth to it. He came in and he said, “That Gladys scene, man. I just want to be in it because I love that scene.” It seemed to come out pretty well so I think that’s sort of a standout. The other one is Kevin Durand and Paul Bettany as the archangels Gabriel and Michael fighting. One’s got machine guns and the other’s got angel weaponry. That was fun. That was really fun and they did just about every single stunt themselves. It was really great, really hard on them.

Q: Is there lots of wirework?

Scott Stewart: Yeah, particularly Kevin because he actually has wings and flies in the movie and is caught in a contained space. We’ll see if it’s a fair fight between the guy with the angel weapon and the guy with the machine gun. One guy’s got wings and one guy doesn’t, but our wings are ferocious. They do all sorts of cool stuff. This is not like Nora Ephron’s Michael. We’re not light and feathery. Our wings are sharp as blades. They’ll cut you in half if they hit you.

Q: Was it hard to come up with that design?

Scott Stewart: I wrote it into the script and I just really love this idea. There’s almost a Highlander-ish element to this too. It’s just these ageless warriors. I just like this idea of depicting angels as an incredible mercenary soldier, so we talked a lot about soldiers. We talked a lot about the performance is about being a general, coming in, here’s what’s happening. I don’t care if you believe me. This is the job I have to do and I’m going to take care of business. Paul just embodied that.