Michael Davis’ insanely innovative action flick Shoot ‘Em Up doesn’t open for another month, but already there’s talk of a potential sequel to the movie starring Clive Owen as a gunman forced to defend a helpless baby from a mob of assassins.
When ComingSoon.net spoke to Davis and the film’s three producers Don Murphy, Susan Montford and Rick Benattar–collectively known as Angry Films–at the junket for the movie, they told us a bit about what provisions have been made to keep Clive Owen’s enigmatic gunman going after the upcoming film. (Spoiler Warning: one could possibly determine the potential fate of one of the characters by reading on.)
“Well, Michael’s already written a script and it’s even wilder,” Montford told us. “It could also be a stand-alone piece as well. He’s been very clever. He’s written a brilliant script and it could be adapted to be a sequel or it could stand alone.”
“You say that SPOILER can’t come back,” Murphy added when asked about one of the characters returning, “but the discussions between the three of us, Michael and Clive, that this film is very much in the tradition of Sergio Leone, and if you watch that trilogy, they’re not really sequels. The same characters come back and the same actors come back, and then they have another story, so there’s no reason we can’t have all three of these people back in a different story and still call it ‘Shoot ‘Em Up 2.'”
“In the script we’ve read, there’s no baby,” Murphy answered when questioned about whether Owen’s gunman could possibly end up in a similar situation.
“Well, no, that’s a misstatement,” Davis corrected later when we asked about that script and his own thoughts about turning it into a sequel. “There is not a sequel planned yet. I’ve written another crazy wild funny action script that could be ‘Shoot ‘Em Up’ if I made a few alterations. You’re not going to see me be the guy that genre hops because my favorite genre is the action movie. The greatest goal for me would be to continue on as a writer/director that people identify your signature and doing a ‘Shoot ‘Em Up’ sequel to me would just be validation to me that ‘Hey, I created something that people want to see.'”
In the meantime, Angry Films is keeping busy with movies being made by Montford and Benattar, which sound just as interesting as Shoot ‘Em Up. “We’re editing a film that Susan wrote and directed called ‘While She Was Out’ with Kim Basinger,” Murphy said, giving us the rundown. “It’s an intense thriller where Kim’s stuck in the woods with a toolbox and it’s four bad guys with guns trying to kill her, so she’s gotta fight back and kill them. Rick has put together a project that we hope to do pre-strike, which is called ‘Faces of Death,’ loosely inspired by those old videotapes from the ’80s. It’s a film that now asks the question, ‘Who watches these films?’ so it becomes very meta. You have the people from those old movies, and in the old days, those films were shocking. Now you just can go online and see someone being beheaded by Al Qaeda, so what’s horrifying in the New World? It’s a very smart horror film that J.T. Petty, whose done a couple low budget films like ‘Soft for Digging’ and a mock documentary called ‘S&man’ which really blew our minds, is going to direct.” The latter is being made by Rogue Pictures, and Montford told us she wants to finish editing her version of the movie before they look for a studio to release While She Was Out. Executive produced by Guillermo del Toro and produced independently, Montford added that the movie was “very violent.”
Murphy also told us about a comic-based project that Angry Films is developing and hoping to get a director on soon, that being their movie based on Grant Morrison’s mini-series WE3. “He wrote the comic and the script and it’s the most insane mash-up in the history of movies if we pull it off. It’s ‘The Incredible Journey’ meets ‘Terminator.’ Basically, the animals have been experimented on by the government and they’re put into these combat suits, and then they escape and want to go home, and the government’s like, ‘They’re heavily armed. Get them!’ It’s very cool.”
“We do films that we like to see,” Murphy explained. “We tend to think that you gotta cut through the clutter, so you gotta do something that people haven’t seen before. ‘Terminator animals’ or a horror film about people that watch horror films or Kim Basinger fighting for her life, these are all things that you haven’t seen before.”
“The first thing for us is ‘Are these movies we would want to see?'” Bennatar chimed in. “We feel like we’re still movie fans; we’re still the kids that go see movies. These are things that we want to go see, and we think that’s what makes us successful.”
Shoot ‘Em Up opens nationwide on Friday, September 7. Look for our interview with director Michael Davis later this week and interviews with his stars, Clive Owen and Paul Giamatti, in the coming month.
