Big Vin Diesel fan here I’m afraid. I can’t help it. Arnie, Stallone, Rock, Willis, they are all great fun and I love watching them on screen, actually if it wasn’t for Arnie and Stallone I’d say the connection was bald, muscles and black and white, kind of how I’m described! Anyway, back to the point of the post!
Diesel is in soft pre-production, a term that probably means pre-pre-production, for Hannibal, a project he has been trying to get going for some time. It appears he got a budget returned from a studio quoting something like $217million…perhaps they were actually thinking of dropping Elephants by helicopter onto the top of the Alps? Diesel is having none of it. From Moviehole:
“I’m going to direct it as a multilingual film,” he admits, the decision having been made “after I got a budget back from a studio that said it would cost $217 million over the line. So I said, huh. I know I’m not the smartest guy in the world but $217m, doesn’t that mean that this film will never get made? There’s no way in the world that this film will be made at $217m, and I am already committed to this character, channelling this guy. So I’ll go into soft pre-production, and think about sequences, and think about ways to shoot sequences that would have the same story about it but cost a lot less. So I went into soft pre-production and I got the budget down to $50 million.”
Pretty sensible guy, sounds like he’s taking his soft pre-production pretty seriously and looking to the long term. It’s also quite refreshing to hear this kind of talk from a big screen blockbuster kind of guy. Rob Cohen waxed lyrical about him and his talents during the XXX DVD, and I think this might just start to come out through this project.
