CATCHING UP WITH YU
It’s peculiar how Ronny Yu’s made a name for himself in the States. He landed on the scene with Bride of Chucky and resurrected more than just the titular doll, he rescued Universal’s drowning franchise with the help of Don Mancini’s bizarro script. Yu’s follow-up, Formula 51, fizzled despite toplining Sam Jackson and Robert Carlyle (Ravenous). Yet success quickly found Yu again, however, when he held hands with two other horror icons, Freddy and Jason, and stormed the box office for eighty plus million in domestic ticket sales. So what’s to be learned? Possibly that Yu should stick to horror…perhaps. Is that what he plans to do from here on out? Creature Corner correspondent, Axl, hooked the director with her wicked charm at the Brussels International Festival of Fantastic Film and grilled him with a few questions.
With a new Chucky installment in production, we were curious to know if Yu had ever been offered Seed of Chucky. ‘Yes, but I turned it down,’ Yu told the Corner. ‘It was immediately after Bride, they said would you like to do a sequel, I said no. I didn’t think the script was good enough at the time.’ A script is exactly what he’s currently waiting on for the Freddy vs. Jason sequel that may, and that’s a big ‘may,’ introduce Bruce Campbell’s Ash (of the Evil Dead series) to the melee. ‘That’s something that the studio came up with, they asked me and all the fans wanted me to do it as well, so I said yes, show me the script! I would definitely do it. They’re still working on the script, I haven’t seen anything. I hope they won’t work on it for 10 years.’
His enthusiasm for a sequel is evident, but Yu brings up an obvious point: How long New Line will toil in the scripting process is unknown factor at the moment. So what’ll Yu do in the meantime? He says he’s got a number of projects simmering in the cauldron, namely a unique thriller (another New Line project) we’ve reported about here on the Corner. ‘It’s called ‘Snakes on a Plane.’ The second they told me the storyline I said I want to do this movie. It’s about a plane on the way from Honolulu to Los Angeles, and when they’re halfway [into their flight], 500 poisonous snakes get released, and the first one to get killed is the pilot. As the audience I say, how the hell can they get out of the situation? I’d like to see it! So I said I want to do that. Hopefully we’ll start shooting soon.’ In the wake of Freddy and Jason’s box office slaughter last summer, Yu also committed himself to a live-action adaptation of Hiroyuki Kitakubo’s anime Blood: The Last Vampire. He tells us that project is still lurking in his future. ‘Then there’s a Chinese movie about a serial killer. Ive never seen a Chinese movie about a serial killer! It’s set in the early thirties, a traditional Chinese setting, big houses, conspiracies…’
Courtesy of Creature Corner
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