David Goyer

No, those had to be made by the art department.

That exists before the film and now; afterwards, we put the little “Blade” on it. We contacted them. I was surprised though. I went on eBay and then I also googled various vampire merchandise, and I found droves of it and I just gave a big list of it to my art department to see if we could get the rights to use some of it in the film. Some of it we got the rights for and some of it we didn’t. But we had to make the vampire dildos and I think they’ll all be in your gift bags.

Amazingly, we got the rights to use Count Chocula, which I was shocked.

One aspect of the first Blade that I liked more than the second Blade was that the second one became so underground and insular, that we barely had any humans in it. I thought some of the fun moments in the first Blade were the times where Blade interacted or it spilled over into the real world, so I thought let’s make the whole movie that. I do think that’s where we get a lot of the humor in this film.

I’m friends with Patton and a lot of the writers for “The Simpsons,” and I had them in one day to do a little comedy punch-up. I wish I would have filmed that session, because you had a bunch of writers for the Simpsons, Mike Reiss and Dana Gould, and some of the other guys started acting out the script as Blade, being very fey when he was doing it. Shockingly, only three jokes came out of that session. I expected more. The script was pretty funny already. More jokes came out of Ryan and me getting drunk a bunch of nights and embellishing the script later on.

There was some humor in the first Blade. Wesley had script approval, so we couldn’t have moved forward without him signing off on it. He was down on the joke and he was clearly playing the straight man in the film, but I think he does a good job of it.

No, amazingly. I didn’t think we’d get the “C” word past then, although they seem to use it all the time in Europe, particularly in England. But no they had no problem with that.

The film wasn’t nearly as gory or bloody as the second film.

It’s hard to figure out exactly. It wasn’t so much Ryan improvising as much as Ryan and I embellishing. What we would do was we would write half a dozen jokes for each scene, and we would just try all the various alternates.

Yeah, there is a blooper reel for this film, which we never had for the Blade films before. I don’t want to oversell it because it’s not the funniest thing you’ve ever seen in your life, but there are quite a few funny outtakes.

That’s my shout-out to the origins of Blade and my own love for comic books. I love the idea of Blade being a Marvel comic book, and then doing a series of movies, and then Blade holding a “Tomb of Dracula” comic. It’s such a weird Alan Moore/Grant Morrison moment that I just wanted to put it in.

No, I always wanted Hannibal. He was very loosely based on the character in the comics. Originally, I was going to use Frank Drake as well, but then I decided that I wanted to use a woman, and in my very early outlines, it was Rachel Van Helsing, but then I heard about the Van Helsing movie and I wanted to distance myself from that as much as possible.

I sort of have a list of actors I want to work with and Parker Posey has always been one of them. I’m a huge fan of the Christopher Guest films, which is why John Michael Higgins shows up in this film as well. I just went after her and she was game for it. The thing about Parker is that she’s a force of nature. We had so much fun shooting those two interrogation scenes, we could have filmed them forever. She loved it. You can be as nasty as you want to be with her. It was a real treat watching Ryan and Parker go back and forth, because they would lob things at each other and try to trip each other up. They’d both just run with it.

I’ve already gotten to work with John Leguizamo and Oliver Platt. John Michael Higgins and Parker Posey. I would love to work with Don Cheadle and Hank Azaria.

No. Guillermo and Norrington both said that I was ready for this. Guillermo had some doubts when we first started Blade II. I remember he was sort of a protégé of James Cameron and he was calling Cameron when we were embarking upon the first action set piece that Guillermo directed. Maybe it’s hubris, but if I’m too plagued with doubt then I shouldn’t be directing.

I haven’t talked to James in a couple of years. We totally lost touch.

It wasn’t from the outset. Fortunately, I’ve worked with at least four quite good directors, but if you work with enough crappy directors then you want to start to direct out of self-defense. You think, “Hell, I can screw up script. Why should I let somebody else do it?” There are definitely some real stinkers I’ve worked with and I think after that, you say “Screw it. I’m going to do it.”

Yeah, avid avid avid. I’m a voracious reader. You name it, I love it. Comic books like all the Marvel and DC stuff. Science fiction wise, I’m a giant Gene Wolf fan, although his stuff is sort of two-layered and complex to probably ever see an on-screen adaptation. I like Jack Vance quite a bit too.

I love casting against type and doing things you wouldn’t expect, because I think you get more interesting performances that way. Hollywood loves to pigeonhole people and there’s nothing an actor loves more than to do something different. I knew of Ryan obviously from various films and through acquaintances. I knew that he was very bright, very funny and very good with improv. I thought he would be a perfect foil. He is the polar opposite, onscreen and in real life, from Wesley. You couldn’t find two people who are more dissimilar. Really, both on screen and off, they were like oil and water. I just thought that would be great. With Ryan, it was more a question of whether he was committed enough to go through the training regimen. Ryan is one of those sickening guys that sheds pounds and pounds. He can’t put on weight to save his life, so he had to put on over 20 pounds of muscle for the film. It was really a question if we could credibly turn him into an action star. I think in the ‘80s, there were a lot of muscle men who were trying to act, but I’d much rather take an actor and train them and teach them how to fight. I think if we could take Van Wilder and turn him into what we did, that’s definitely the way to go.

I loved what he had done on Ghost Dog. I happened to see Kill Bill while I was shooting Blade, and I thought he did some great stuff in that. Coincidentally, his agents called me shortly after Kill Bill when I was already talking to my producers about using him. Unfortunately, he’s not here today because his cousin died. I just knew with the RZA, that I didn’t want him solely to do hip hop songs. I wanted him to work with our traditional classical composer. I think because of that, the soundtrack is the most cohesive of the three.

Yeah I’ve got full sleeves. My tattoo artist always leaves the part right by the wrists blank until you know for sure you’re not going to get any more tattoos ever again. It’s just a superstition. I haven’t done those yet because I haven’t decided for sure.

They’re vaguely Asian influenced. I’ll tell a funny story. The first tattoo I ever got, when I sold my first script, was a play on words from a poem I liked and it says “not drowning, but waving”, a Steve E. Smith poem. When I took off the bandage, the guy had misspelled “drowning” so it says “not drowing but waving” and so I went to the tattoo shop and I had showed him what happened and he said “I’m a tattoo artist. I can’t spell” I said, “But I’m a writer and I have a spelling error tattooed on my arm.” [laughs] They said they can laser off the last three letters and try again and then the head guy said “I’ll give you a free tattoo”. I kept it after all these years. They lamely put the little “N” above, but after a couple years, I just said, “You know what? Screw it. I’m going to keep it up” It just keeps me real and reminds me not to take myself too seriously.

Absolutely, because when you write a comic book, it’s like you’re writing a script but you’re also describing the storyboards at the same time. I ended up writing something like 45 issues of “JSA” so that gave me a lot of experience working with artists and graphically learning how to tell a story. How would a high angle work here or a low angle? Things like that. It helped me a lot.

I sold my comic collection en masse to the drummer from System of a Down. I have a lot of the stuff on the archives and things like that. I had 10,000 and they were taking up my entire garage.

That’s something I’m producing. It’s an adaptation of the Vertigo book. Jeff Vintar that adapted I, Robot is working on it right now. We’ve been pretty heavily involved with Brian K. Vaughan as well. I love it.

I think it would be cool if we got a woman to direct it.

I love those guys but their stuff is so self-reflexive that I don’t even know how they’re going to do Watchmen.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck