In the Lost Lands director Paul W.S. Anderson and star & producer Milla Jovovich spoke about their new fantasy action movie based on a short story by George R.R. Martin. The Resident Evil creatives spoke about working with R.R. Martin and getting his approval, plus working with Dave Bautista. The movie is out in theaters starting today.
“Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson and based on George R.R. Martin’s short story, a queen sends the powerful and feared sorceress Gray Alys (Milla Jovovich) to the ghostly wilderness of the Lost Lands in search of a magical power, where the sorceress and her guide, the drifter Boyce (Dave Bautista), must outwit and outfight man and demon,” says the synopsis for In the Lost Lands.
Tyler Treese: Paul, George R.R. Martin said the film was a lot of fun and he enjoyed how dark and twisted it was. You even used some direct quotes from the short story and the emotional climax of the film, which I got a real kick out of. When you get such praise from a creator, especially one that doesn’t pull his punches like George does, that has to feel pretty special. Right?
Paul W.S. Anderson: I gotta tell you, you know, George was involved in the whole creative process. We showed him the scripts, but the most nervous I’ve ever been in my entire career was flying into Santa Fe to show George the finished movie.
We sat there, we watched the movie, it was very quiet, no one said anything, and I’m super stressed. The lights go up at the end, and George turns around, and he tells me he really loved it. I’m like, “Ah, amazing,” and then he was very, very complimentary. He really felt that we had captured his voice better than that anybody else had. And so he’s very, very happy with the adaptation.
Milla Jovovich: You wanted do something special for George. This is his first real film that’s gonna be in cinemas, so it was really important for us to create a unique landscape to kind of envelope the core story of in The Lost Lands. Which I think, you know, we tried our best to keep that core story alive while surrounding it with a very unique landscape that hasn’t really been seen before.
Milla, it’s interesting seeing you watch with Dave Bautista, because early on in your careers you were kind of seen as outsiders. People would just say that you’re a model trying to act. He got the same thing with being a wrestler that was trying to act, but over time, you both have shown such a care for the craft and have really overcome that. So how was it working with somebody that had that same stigma and somebody that overcame it?
Jovovich: You know, I think us people with stigmas […] normally… Probably most of us feel like outsiders and are not part of the popular crowd. I think we are very empathetic toward, or hopefully empathetic towards others.
I know Dave is one of the most empathetic people I’ve ever met. Seeing him, the happiness on his face when he met me, when he embraced me, when he was doing his makeup and tests and tattoo… all of that stuff. Like, he was just so joyful and inviting and welcomed collaboration and working and last minute script changes. He wasn’t like trying to build a wall between us and him.
Where you have, you know, a lot of kind of these oldie worldy movie star types that like, you know, “I am the center of my universe.” Like Dave was a part of the team. He’s a team player. Yeah, he was with the crew. Like, I consider us the crew. He didn’t treat himself any differently than anybody else. I mean, he was just made such a warm and welcoming environment and a place to feel like it was safe to make mistakes. It was safe to mess up. It was safe to take risks and be creative.
Thanks to Milla Jovovich and Paul W.S. Anderson for talking about George R.R. Martin’s In the Lost Lands.
