STARSHIP TROOPERS 2 SCRIPT
As part of MovieHole’s ongoing coverage of the ‘Starship Troopers 2’ production, Moviehole talks to screenwriter Ed Neumeier today about the script itself and what to expect in the sequel. ‘As Jon Davison mentions, the idea for the sequel was essentially that Phil Tippett should direct a movie. I have always had tremendous respect for Phil’s talent and felt a great personal debt to him for the extraordinary work he did on both RoboCop and Starship Troopers’, begins Neumeier.
‘The script for Starship 2 pretty much took its cues from what Phil wanted to do and what was possible given the limitations of the budget. Phil’s idea was that we should sort of reverse what had been done with the first two Alien movies. If Starship Troopers was a gung-ho bughunt adventure ala Aliens, then Starship 2 would be a more moody horror picture like Alien.
‘Personally, I’m always making fun of everything and trying for satire but don’t tell Phil. In this case, the joke may well be on me since we don’t have any money at all and everytime I propose something the producer, my old pal Jon Davison, just laughs at me.
‘In many ways, though, our micro budget (at least by comparison to the first one) has been an interesting creative exercise. Since you don’t have anything, you’ve gotta be very flexible and very inventive and ultimately this is both a freeing and inspiring experience. I often think of a scene in Vincent Minnelli’s The Bad and The Beautiful wherein Kirk Douglas and Barry Sullivan playing producer and director of B pictures accordingly are assigned ‘a little horror called – ‘The Doom of the Cat Men.” The problem: The Cat Men costumes are an embarrassment. Then Kirk the producer comes up with the fabulously creative and cost-effective idea of showing niether the bad costumes nor the Cat Men at all:
PRODUCER
And what scares the human race more than any other single thing? The dark!
‘Well, this has sort of become my approach to Starship 2. It’s basically gonna be… dark. In The Bad and The Beautiful, of course, ‘The Doom of the Cat Men’ becomes a tremendous hit. Kirk Douglas and Barry Sullivan go onto fame, fortune and A-list movies. I sense that Jon Davison is laughing at me as he reads this because as a producer he is much more realistic than I am and no doubt believes we’ll be lucky if we aren’t ridden out of town on a rail. What he doesn’t know, however, is that Phil and I have quietly agreed to give the producer all the credit for this wonderfully creative and cost-effective idea.’
Stay Tuned for more coverage of ‘Starship Troopers 2’ in the coming weeks.
Courtesy of MovieHole
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