Director Vincenzo Natali discusses SPLICE - Fears Magazine, The best site for scifi, fanatasy, and Horror genre news and entertainment

Home

INTERVIEWS

ON THE COUCH WITH J.B. MACABRE

Director Vincenzo Natali discusses SPLICE

Written by Joseph B. Mauceri

Monday, 31 May 2010 20:00

View Comments

Director Vincenzo Natali presents luminary genetic engineers Clive (ADRIEN BRODY) and Elsa (SARAH POLLEY). The team’s specialty is in splicing DNA from different animals to create new hybrids. Puzzled by what is wrong from achieving their latest breakthrough they seek to utilize human DNA, but the pharmaceutical company that funds their research forbids it. Risking their careers, Clive and Elsa take their experimentation underground in order to push the boundaries of science.

Their surprising result is Dren, a strange and beautiful creature of unusual intelligence and unexpected physical developments. Her accelerated grows and is equally to her learning potential. As Clive warns Elsa, “You can’t let her out. Specimens need to be contained,” Dren threatens to become their worst nightmare.

Director and Screenwriet Vincenzo Natali came to international attention n 1997 with the sci-fi thriller “Cube,” which earned several Genie Award nominations for art direction, sound and score in Natali’s home country of Canada. “Cub” went on to become a cult favorite among viewers and critics alike.

His follow-up, “Cypher,” which starred Jeremy Northam, Lucy Liu and David Hewlett, was a tale about a man who assumes a new identity to pursue an espionage career, but instead finds himself immersed in a paranoid reality. Natali received worldwide acclaim for the 2003 sci-fi comedy “Nothing,” which he co-wrote and describes as a buddy comedy set in a void. Two years later, he directed “Getting Gilliam,” a documentary of Terry Gilliam’s production of the 2005 feature “Tideland.”

FEARS: It's interesting that cloning is so prevalent in our zeitgeist, but this isn’t actually a cloning story. What was the initial kernel of the idea that bloomed into SPLICE?

Vincenzo Natali: I started working with it sometime ago. It was really inspired by, of all things, a mouse. It was a very strange looking mouse. It had a human ear growing out of its back. It was an experiment called the Vacanti mouse that came out of MIT. While it wasn't actually a genetic experiment it certainly looked like one. It was such a shocking image that it looked to me like something crawled out of a Salvador Dali painting. I felt compelled to write the script. That’s where it began but the real science is in its nascence stages. I think they might have just cloned Dolly, but they hadn’t gone too far with it. In the time that it’s taken for me to actually make this movie the facts have caught up with my fiction, almost surpassed it. It’s incredible. At a certain point I really thought I was going to be behind the curve. In SPLICE were not talking about cloning in the strictest terms. It’s really a form of editing. The two scientists, Clive and Elsa, take components from different species and combine them together to create something totally new.

FEARS: I was impressed with the design of the creature, DREN. Who did you work with on the design and what were some of the elements you wanted to incorporate into that design?

Vincenzo Natali: I worked with a lot of great artists and technicians, beginning with a New York artist, Daniel Oullete, who is quite brilliant, and later on a few other people. DREN, being the creature, is really the child of many parents. All through the process, right into the post production process, we were tweaking the design of DREN. If I have a focus on a single component I would say the most important contribution came from Delphine Chan