CS Weekly Archive > From the Trenches > 5/01/09

Secondary Mutation:
Mutant Chronicles' Philip Eisner

BY DAVID MICHAEL WHARTON

Screenwriter Philip Eisner scripts the other mutant movie that's in theaters right now, the low-budget steampunk war movie Mutant Chronicles.

Philip Eisner found himself in an unusual position on the new film Mutant Chronicles. Ten years after writing an initial draft for the film, Eisner was brought back on the project to polish up the rewrites of the writers who came after him…and wound up doing almost a page-one rewrite not only of those changes, but of his own decade-old work. Eisner originally pitched for the film in the early '90s, when it was being developed as a big-budget science-fiction actioner by producer Edward R. Pressman. Based on a role-playing game, that initial iteration of Mutant Chronicles got as far as attaching director Stephen Norrington and going into development at Fox. It eventually fell apart, however, and Eisner went on to other things, never imagining he'd return to the Chronicles 10 years later.

Mutant Chronicles is set in a twisted alternate history where "steampunk" technology pervades and the world is divided between warring megacorporations. Their conflicts soon take a backseat when an ancient alien machine is unearthed during a battle, unleashing a plague of violent, unstoppable mutants. As those who can afford it abandon the planet for less dangerous climes, war-weary soldier Mitch Hunter (Thomas Jane) must lead a team assembled by warrior-priest Brother Samuel (Ron Perlman) into the depths of the Earth to destroy the infernal machine that is the source of the creatures.

Shot on a relatively small budget using extensive CGI, Mutant Chroncicles is now in limited release around the country and available from several on-demand cable and satellite services. Screenwriter Philip Eisner chatted with CS Weekly about returning to his own work with a decade more experience, and about working with less money but no shortage of imagination.

What was the state of things when you came back on the project the second time?
I read the script and I was honest. This is not to criticize the writers who came before me, but what happens a lot of times in a development process is that you get a lot of creep. Which is, "It needs to be this," then another producer comes on and says, "It needs to be like this." At this point, it was an elephant constructed by blind men. I got on the phone with [director Simon Hunter] and said, "What do you think?" It was a mutual thing, that we needed to go from the ground up. What's the budget, what's the story we want to tell? He was always very clear that this was a World War II mission movie—this was Guns of the Navarone, but with mutants. Simon and I outlined a film, first of all, that we wanted to make, but also that we could make.

You know, there's a 10-year interval between the first draft and the second, and I would say the characters and the set-up—the idea of the machine that makes mutants—that was in my original concept. The character of Samuel and his silent guardian, that's in the first draft. But for the most part, it was a page-one recreation.

When you were first pitching for the project, did you know anything about the role-playing game or did you just hear the concept and run with it?
Those original drafts were a lot closer to the world they had created. I grew up playing role-playing games, so the idea of adapting the game, it didn't throw me at all. I didn't really have a problem with the world. The things that became different, where things start shifting, a lot of that is budget and some of it is there's things and illustrations that look ridiculous in real life. In the game, everybody's got this big, powered armor with big shoulder pads. Simon didn't have a lot of money to get everything on screen. He's not going to be spending it on big shoulder pads. And thank God, because in illustration big shoulder pads look good, but on film they look ridiculous.

In RPGs you usually have a lot of detail worked out for the world in sourcebooks. Was that something you found helpful, or did you even pay much attention to that material?
The original script we did actually was quite faithful to the world. It was felt during the development process that, while fans of the game would appreciate it, it was such a high-fantasy concept, if you weren't familiar with the game, you wouldn't relate to the world. It doesn't even take place on Earth. It's pretty far out there. In that case, everybody's already living on the Moon, and the alien invasion happened on Venus, blah blah blah. Everyone liked the story but felt that the world was too crazy. Over the course of rewrites that I wasn't involved with, it wound up being set on Earth. When I was brought on, it wasn't discussed that, "Hey, could we move it back to Venus?" It takes place on Earth; that was just a given.

What was it about the project that initially appealed to you when you were pitching that first draft 10 years ago?
I really loved the Inquisition. It's interesting, because this of course predates Dick Cheney and waterboarding, but I was fascinated by the idea of an organization that, in its methods, is completely evil, and yet is facing an enemy that is so absolute. The Brotherhood as it finally shows up in the film is not so bloodthirsty, but that was an element that was always in the background. These are not just monks that pray for peace. These are monks who have been preparing for the return of demons for millennia. They will pray for the souls of the damned even as they carve them up into small bits, because that's what they have to do. I think that's an interesting juxtaposition to make.

How have the characters changed between your two versions of the script?
Mitch and Samuel have always been very consistent. The person of faith and the person without faith, and the person without faith turning out to be the one who's destined to save us. And [Samuel's bodyguard] Severian (Anna Walton) didn't change, but of course Severian didn't speak [laughs]. I think that Duval (Devon Aoki) changed a lot, and part of that was through the casting process. At one point, there was a backstory romance between her and Mitch, and when we did the most recent version of the draft, that got lost. We looked at the mission and what we'd structured, and as much as we would have liked to have that element in the script, this thing moves so fast that it was just false. It's not a romantic movie. They're on a mission, they don't have a lot of time, and even with backstory, how many things are we going to get into? When we were getting into it, it just felt forced.

What was it like to return to your work with 10 years more experience and perspective?
Actually, it was a ball! First of all, it is always fun when you've got a director involved, because it changes the dynamic. A lot of times when you're developing a film and you're dealing with producers and executives—this is not a negative to anybody—there's a tremendous amount of "what if?" The fact that I've got Simon, the fact that we have a specific star in Tom Jane, we know who we're writing for. I can write a sequence, call him up on the phone and ask, "Does this sound good to you, or am I wasting my time?" I know that I'm writing something that the director wants to shoot. Also, because we know what our budget is, knowing that you're writing something that you can shoot. In the development process, and this is just kind of the nature of things, there's a tremendous amount of second-guessing because there isn't a director or there isn't a star. So you're writing things and then the executives are going, "I like it, but I don't know if they'll like it." In this case, it's like, "Okay, let's ask them."

How does your process change when you are working with a director and a star?
There was a tremendous amount of discussion beforehand with Simon, and I would usually send him chunks. He'd offer very small tweaks, and most of his tweaks were regarding how they were going to do something, where the way I had described something, it would be difficult to shoot it that way, so could I shift it a different way. It was very important in something like this to make sure that the script conformed to how he was going to shoot it, simply because he'd be shooting the actors and then you've got a year of post. You're really looking for the script to provide that map for everybody. You're going to have footage where, even though you've got the actors' performances, that footage isn't going to be finished for a year, much less edited. So it's really important that the descriptions in the script held up, because otherwise Simon is going to wind up hand-illustrating every single frame himself.

With the film being such an odd hybrid of genres and such a complicated world, was there any difficulty making all the elements of the world work and still service character and plot in an organic way?
I remember in an earlier cut of the film there was a concern that nobody understood the world. A lot of exposition ended up being added to the script to explain the world, and it slowed the film down. I don't think it was as much fun. This most recent cut, we cut almost all of that exposition out and the world isn't really explained, and it's wonderful. Does the audience understand the world? No, but because of that, you wind up paying more attention to the characters. Because of the type of movie it is, a very fast-paced action movie, these tiny moments, most of which don't even have dialogue, these tiny moments that Tom Jane has, that Ron Perlman has…the moment where Severian is looking at the monastery and leaving. It's human moments like that that make an audience invest in a character, but a lot of those moments end up getting cut because we had to make room for the voice telling us what's going on. It's so much better when we don't know what's going on and we're just looking at a character experiencing something. It's funny, because Mutant Chronicles is not something that you would necessarily hold up and say, "Here's a character film." But at the same time, it doesn't matter what movie you're making, if you don't invest [the audience] with these characters, all you have is sturm und drang. And lord knows we've got a lot of that, but on top of that, you actually care.



David Michael Wharton is managing editor of CS Weekly and a contributing editor of Creative Screenwriting. He's planning to found a more environmentally friendly SF subgenre: windpunk.



Mutant Chronicles courtesy Magnolia Pictures

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