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DAMON LINDELOF TALKS CANDIDLY ABOUT PROMETHEUS, FASSBENDER & MORE

In a really interesting interview with the Wall Street Journal’s ‘Speak Easy’ blog, Damon Lindelof spoke candidly about Prometheus criticism, the viral marketing campaign, Michael Fassbender’s part in that component, and yes, Michael’s supposedly ‘flubbed’ “36 Hours” line in the film. Below are some highlights.

What about the “David 8” commercial with Michael Fassbender?

There had just been a new slew of iPad commercials. I thought, “If there are commercials for iPads, there should be commercials for robots.” And I pitched a couple of ideas. [Michael Ellenberg] brought it to this guy Johnny Hardstaff, a young renegade director, and pitched him the “David 8” idea and he ran with it. Fassbender was incredible and so game for it. I felt like, if there was going to be a breakout character in the movie it was going to be David.

So when he signed up for this, I’m sure he was unaware he was going to have to do this extra content. Did the studio pay him extra to do this—or pay you extra to write this stuff?

I can only answer for myself and presume they didn’t pay Michael anything additional. I looked at it this way: Part of my job, what I get paid for, is promoting the movie and the Writer’s Guild is probably going to get mad at me for saying this, but that’s just the way I looked at it. Since I pitched it, I wanted to do it and Fox said yes, they were putting money out there to make this thing. I looked at it as a couple of extra scenes I was doing for “Prometheus” that would be on a small screen. I do think that in the future my agent will probably negotiate bumps for additional content that are not going to be on the screen. But you have to look at it as a freebie when you are trying to do something new and cool.

There was also a lot of debate about a line in which David the android says that the crew has been asleep for “2 years, 4 months, 18 days, 36 hours, 15 minutes.” People didn’t understand why he wouldn’t have just said “2 years, 4 months, 19 days, 12 hours, 15 minutes.”

The “36 hours” line has been burning a hole in my side because I wasn’t there on the day they shot it. I don’t know if it was an ad-lib by Michael or an idea by Ridley, that wasn’t the line that we wrote. So when people contact me and say “Explain this. Is it a glitch in David?” I have to say “I can’t take responsibility for this.” So, I do think in terms of fair play with the audience, Twitter is a medium for me to say “I can’t come out now and bullshit you.” God forbid somebody pulls the script one day and sees that line is not even in the script. So I have to be honest.

Go HERE to read more

Aug

2012

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