If one constructed in their mind a picture of German-born director Marcus Nispel based solely on his filmography — which includes grisly reboots of the “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and “Friday the 13th” franchises, plus the R-rated “Pathfinder” — it could not possibly be more different from the reality of the man, who abhors shoes, probably owns no black clothes at all, and in person favors pastel cargo pants and billowing, open-necked cotton painter’s shirts. Looking more like a Venice Beach artist than a brooding purveyor of brutal horror and head-hacking action, Nispel has a gregarious personality seemingly at odds with his knack for wringing catharsis out of grim places. With his latest big screen effort, a reboot of “Conan the Barbarian,” Nispel again makes sure that genre fans get their money’s worth out of his movie’s R rating. ShockYa recently had a chance to chat one-on-one with the talkative filmmaker, about his childhood “Star Wars” bed sheets, his experience and difficulties with reimagining popular big screen properties, and why he would likely never direct a sequel to any of his works. The conversation is excerpted below:
ShockYa: Conan is a character that has been around a while, and gone through several different iterations. To what do you contribute his enduring popularity or pop cultural resonance?
Marcus Nispel: I think about that a great deal, because I gravitate toward certain characters and love revenge tales and remakes. To go back to my DNA with all of that stuff, and why I choose the sorts of things that I do, is [to look back to] when I grew up in Germany. That was a different time. Movies didn’t get translated right away. “Avatar” now you can see anywhere in the world on the same day. In the ’70s, a movie like “Star Wars” took half a year to make it to the screen in Germany, same with “Conan.” So in that time you have an idea of what’s coming at you, because you hear the John Williams score on AFN, you have the action figures. I had “Star Wars” bed sheets, and the “Mad Magazine” spoof to read. And you’re acting it out in a treehouse, or on the playgrounds. So when these movies came out, we were so charged up I can’t even tell you. So it’s a real fanboy who gets to act this out with a Super 8 camera from his dad or with the action figures in the sandbox. Then you see the movies and are either underwhelmed or overwhelmed, you’re never ambiguous about it. To me, that was my own kind of drama school, for better or for worse, and it makes me very much pick certain things. So what are those characters that we want to dress up as for Halloween, or that even serious filmmakers want to do over, again and again, to rekindle that 16-year-0ld inside of them? There’s no sequel or prequel to “Citizen Kane,” and there are no action figures to “Casablanca,” right? So what is it about certain archetypes that we like? In the case of “Conan,” it’s an epic. I’m at odds with epics. I typically don’t like them very much. I saw two or three, and they all started to look and sound the same to me. So I tried to get to the core of it. And the epic was created, basically, by Cecil B. Demille, who realized that there was a big demographic, in Bible-belt America, that wasn’t going to the movie houses, because they saw them as immoral places, with dancing girls and gunslingers. So he did “The Ten Commandments,” and suddenly people would come, [to see] these Christianity-informed movies. Mel Gibson famously rediscovered and revitalized that genre. “Conan” is the exact opposite of that. Conan doesn’t believe in God, he shoots first and asks questions later. He is misogynistic and all that good stuff (laughs) that an unapologetic guy is. Here we are in square rooms with styrofoam ceilings and computers, and we absorb bored or concocted knowledge from other people who created it on computers, and we share it with each other. That’s the world that we are in right now. …We live in a very sheltered world, and I think we want to break out of that, and these characters allow us to do that. Avi Lerner, who is a producer on this film, only really had one question for me. He said (affecting accent), “So Marcus, who is going to be the Conan?” I said, “I don’t know, he’s going to be hard to find.” Because I knew that I didn’t want it to be a body-building contest winner, or a big star, because people would know him. Show me one person you know alive today right now, an actor, that could do this job better than Jason (Momoa). Play fantasy casting. There’s no one. The way I described it to Avi was that I didn’t care too much about his look. There was an amalgamation between the games, comic books, paintings and the (John) Milius “Conan” (film) that would factor into it. Conan, as a character, in order to survive the screenplay and what he has to portray, has to be unapologetic and get away with it. He has to be the kind of guy that, were he in this room, if a girl walked in bringing us coffee, he could grab her ass and get away with it, [have] her laugh, and get laid at the end of the day most likely, whereas you and I would get slapped in the face. Sean Connery and Jack Nicholson can do it, and Jason Momoa can do it. There’s a great many formidable actors that can’t. If you don’t have that, you have nothing.
ShockYa: Genre moviemaking especially isn’t overly precious. It’s a collaborative process. What were the nature of the changes you made to the script with (writer) Sean (Hood)? Did you want to up the brutality to stand out in contrast to Conan’s character arc?
MN: It all came back to the character, actually. In many ways, doing remakes for people who really care is actually much harder than making shit up on the spot. It’s easy for me to make up stuff on the spot; I have 150 stories I want to tell that I could pitch to you right now. To do something that fits into the consciousness of many is hard. I explain it this way: When I was a kid they sold these chip-away kits, where a hardened resin [figure] was enclosed in plaster-of-paris, whether that was Michelangelo’s David or a baseball player. And you would get a rubber mallet and a plastic screwdriver and you would get to chip away and reveal the sculpture almost like you made it. That would be a remake, with one big exception. That sculpture doesn’t exist, and a hardened resin has been made in a collective consciousness of thousands and thousands of people that have played the videogames, read books and what not. They all see it somehow slightly different, and so you have to find this amalgamation, and make it right for now, for the times. So that’s the best analogy. You’re that guy that has to describe that. It’s not coming out of my head, so I’m not going to talk to you about some single directorial vision, but [instead tapping] into something that we already all made up our minds about. Look at the stuff that bloggers and writers have already written about the movie. I’m actually reading that stuff, for validation or to learn, right? They made that movie (in their heads) before they saw it — of what it should be, and what it probably is not. So you juggle that, in many ways.
ShockYa: We’ve seen Michael Bay stick around for the “Transformers” franchise, and direct three pictures there. You have made films coming from other source material. But would you be interested in sticking around and telling other Hyborian stories, if it were a franchise?
MN: No, for the very same reason that they in a way are an amalgamation of stuff that has already been done, I’m actually very happy to liberally slave over franchise movies and materials and then just walk away from them. I wouldn’t be interested. What (writers Thomas Dean) Donnelly and (Joshua) Oppenheimer did very well in the first draft that I read [is] nail what I consider to be 10 or 12 iconic set pieces from the “Conan” franchise. (Frank) Frazetta, who is my fascination — I’m a painter by trade and background, before I started directing — made me want to go to art school, and people think he painted hundreds of Conan paintings but he actually only did a handful. And that is exactly what you see recycled within the Robert E. Howard mythos, but also the comic books and the videogames — it’s the human sacrifice, it’s Conan bludgeoning a pile of curmudgeons, it’s Conan drinking with hookers or whatever. These are those iconic things. So I wouldn’t know where else to go; that is the DNA of Conan, and we have that in the movie. I bet they could find ways (to extend it in a franchise), but it’s not for me. (laughs) It’s too arduous.
ShockYa: Is there a project you’re attached to next definitively? Is “Backmask” actually that movie?
MN: Possibly and hopefully. “Backmask” I’m very excited about because it’s the opposite of the movies I’ve done in the past, and not just because it’s original (material). It’s actually very liberating not to be the dog of many masters as you are on something like this — not just because you have 12 producers, but a rabid fan base that is very outspoken about what it should be. Nobody has any clue about what “Backmask” is or what it will be, and that is great. I can work on that, and it’s like dropping an anvil of responsibilities. I can just run. I remember on “Friday the 13th” they felt very emboldened by a test screening that tested as high as “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” somewhere in the 90-plus approval scale. I like testing for these movies, [because] you live by the fanboys and you die by the fanboys. It’s not supposed to be a movie for everyone, “Conan.” I had a female journalist ask me about the female politics and the violence and what not, and I said, “Honey, you got off easy. Wait for the director’s cut.”
Written by: Brent Simon
