David Goyer on Magneto, TV's Heroes, and Green Arrow!
Wizard Entertainment got exclusive Q&A time with David Goyer at Wizard World Chicago asking about his progress directing the X-men prequel "Magneto" as well as his other projects including his return to writing for DC comics, a Green Arrow film entitled "Supermax", and an episode of a "Heroes" spin-off series entitled "Heroes: Origins".
By Rickey Purdin
Writer, producer, director. Movies, TV and comics. David S. Goyer has done it all and he’s continuing to do it all, having no less than nine irons in the fire in Hollywood and elsewhere. It goes without saying he’s one of the busiest men in the industry, but he was gracious enough to check in with Wizard Universe to give us an update on some of his projects.
On “Magneto” (2009), the X-Men spinoff film he’s writing and directing about their greatest foe:
“We’re scouting and budgeting now. It’s the origins of the X-Men with Magneto and Charles Xavier. We’ve done some scouts and it mostly takes place in Europe and Argentina. We’re doing budgets and we’re sort of halfway crewed up, and so that’ll be the big question: whether we can bring it in for a price. But that’s all I can say.”
On co-writing “Jumper” (Feb. 15, 2008), starring Hayden Christensen (“Star Wars” Episodes II and III) and directed by Doug Liman (“The Bourne Identity”), about a teenager who discovers he can teleport:
“It’s based on one of the young adult books I’ve long been a fan of. My version diverged somewhat from [Steven Gould’s] book and then I actually left ‘Jumper’ to go do ‘The Invisible’ and then it’s diverged even more, but there’s still a lot of the original book in there.”
On writing and directing “The Invisible Man”:
“I’ll be doing that next year. It’s really funny. I was up in Northern California and doing some writing, and I had burned through all of the books I had brought up with me to read. They had this little lending library at the place I had stayed and there was this old tattered copy of H.G. Wells’ Invisible Man. I hadn’t read it since I was in junior high, so I read it again in like an hour. It’s a really small book and I thought, ‘Wow, this is better than I remembered it.’ I just then randomly had this idea for what would sort of be a direct sequel, which literally starts like a month after the original Invisible Man in Victorian England. I just spent about four hours typing out this idea and I had no idea if there was any project. So I had my agent inquire if Universal Studios was doing anything with it and it turned out they’ve been trying to develop an ‘Invisible Man’ thing for the last 10 years. They’re trying to redo some of their monster franchises like ‘The Creature From the Black Lagoon’ and ‘Wolfman’ and things like that. They just couldn’t figure it out, and everyone said—without giving away the whole concept—‘Wow, why didn’t we think about that?’ I went in and I pitched this whole thing to Universal and to [producer] Brian Grazer and they loved it. So we were off and running.”
On the possibility of working on an episode of “Heroes: Origins,” the six-episode spinoff to “Heroes” focusing on new characters set to air in May 2008:
“Yeah, they asked me about that. They called my agent. If I’m available, I’d love to do one. I think it would be fun, and I also like the idea that these origin episodes are self-contained and there’s the opportunity to sort of stylistically go off in different directions.”
On whether he’ll go back to writing comics since his last stint co-writing JSA with Geoff Johns from 1999-2003:
“Yes, next year. Geoff and I are doing something, but I can’t say what it is yet. It would be after Final Crisis. We have long hatched a plan. I don’t want to talk too much about it because it’s just far out, but we talked about it a couple of weeks ago and then I chatted with some powers that be. I had a little side chat at [Wizard World Chicago] right before we did the ‘Dark Knight’ panel, but yeah, I’ve long wanted to get back into it. It was just a question of finding the right time to do it and the right idea, and Geoff and I love working together. We just came up with something I think would be really cool and different.”
On “Super Max,” a project he’s producing and Justin Marks is writing about Green Arrow being wrongly imprisoned in a jail for supervillains:
“We haven’t even officially turned in a script for that yet. The idea is that they’re mostly sort of third-tier DC villains, but that was part of the fun, that they’re relatively obscure. But Icicle is in it from JSA—from my days on writing that. I mean, people will recognize most of them. What we did was present to DC a list of people we wanted, and then they went through it on a case-by-case basis and told us whether we could have them or not.”