Captain Kronos and Quatermass return?
Hammer Films’ Simon Oakes spoke to the press recently about a myriad of subjects, from its remake Let Me In to The Resident to some of the classic Hammer titles that are slated for a remake.
Touching briefly on The Resident, a thriller with Hilary Swank and Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Oakes offered this about Christopher Lee’s participation in the film:
“It’s a cameo. When we were looking at the cast list, I was saying, we’ve got to get Christopher to be in the first Hammer picture in 37 years or whatever” he says. “35 years or something like that. He’s called August, and it’s a small part, but it’s not stunt casting. It’s a proper part. He plays Max’s [Jeffrey Dean Morgan] grandfather, he lives in the building in the apartment with him, and it’s great…actually I don’t want to give it away, but the reveal when you first see him is fantastic. People are going to go crazy, particularly in England. He got knighted actually, when he was on set. He was knighted, and it was announced to the English press eight hours beforehand, and he was in the states. So he was asleep, then when he woke up he had champagne and chocolates and he was like, whatâs going on here? Are they trying to pay me less? And we all knew, because we were eight hours ahead… and it was fantastic.”
As for the “remakes.” Oakes says his leaps are sealed about a new take on Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde. But a new Quatermass film is in the cards as is a Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter (which, if you look closely, greatly inspired Blade).
Oakes says Hammer is “Repurposing them. Doing a new Quatermass movie. Doing a new Kronos movie. Not remaking the same film with its log line the same, but saying, what would the Kronos movie of 2011 look like? Or Quatermass of 2012. Maybe some of these characters should live in television as well. Particularly Quatermass, which I’m thinking about at the moment. What I love about Quatermass is that he was a government scientist and science is cool. Everyone is into science. So what would he be doing now? In the original Quatermass that Nigel Kneale and Val Guest created, he was sort of like a classic character like a Bourne or a Bond, who have two masters if you like, both of which are trying to f**k with his head. One, are his masters, which in the case of Bond is the CIA, or MI6 in Bond’s case. And in the same token, the enemy – they’re f**king with him, and they end up being this person who was sort of alone and that’s what Quatermass was always like. He was always prescient. He was always ahead of his time. A lot of Tom Neil’s Kneale’s work was about the damaging of the environment. And he used the alien thing as a sort of metaphor for saying what we are doing to our planet. It’s quite interesting I mean, I met him shortly before he died and I’m friendly with his widow and it’s amazing. So thereâs a lot of rich material in there that we can rethink, but the issues that he would be dealing with in 1957 compared to what they would be today, thatâs the thing. That’s where we have to use our imagination.”
Source: Shock Till You Drop
