Paul Anderson, director of the just-released sci-fi outing “Event Horizon,” knew the film had tremendous potential the second he read the script.
“The concept was to take a classic haunted-house story like `The Shining’ and put a twist on it,” Anderson, a chipper 32-year-old British subject, says by telephone from a Los Angeles hotel.
“In `Event Horizon,’ the twist is that rather than have the Overlook Hotel, we have a giant, labyrinthine spaceship called Event Horizon orbiting Neptune.
“That raises the stakes, because no matter how isolated the Overlook was, one could still get away from it at the end. Event Horizon is out there, deep in space.
“We show you how hard it is to get to, which tells you it’s even harder to get away from.”
The film, set in 2046, depicts what befalls a rescue team that reaches Event Horizon, which turned up after disappearing mysteriously seven years earlier. The rescue team consists of team leader Laurence Fishburne, Event Horizon designer Sam Neill, emergency technicians Kathleen Quinlan and Richard T. Jones, and navigator Joely Richardson, among others.
“I’m a huge science-fiction fan, but so often you see a sci-fi movie and say, `Fantastic FX, but the acting, ugh,’ ” says Anderson, who last directed “Mortal Kombat” (1995), a hit based on the popular arcade game of the same name.
“I always realized we had a good story, that we’d have kick-(butt) effects, but I really wanted to combine that with some amazing acting.
“So it was very important to go after people who were, first and foremost, great actors. And we were lucky enough to get Laurence, Sam and Joely.
“It makes everything else more believable to an audience.”
Those who see “Horizon” might be shocked to learn Anderson brought it to the screen for $50 million, a pittance in this age of $100 million megamovies.
For Anderson, who made “Mortal Kombat” for $25 million and his first feature, “Shopping,” for $3 million, $50 million was plenty.
“It was a very good budget for what we were doing,” he says. “The movie looks spectacular, with vast sets, big set-pieces and a fantastic score by Michael Kamen.
“It achieves everything this kind of movie needs to achieve. To my mind, it looks a hell of a lot more expensive than several movies this year that cost two to three times as much.
“I’m really pleased with it. If it works, and I think it does, people will be taken to this other world and, while they’re there, they’ll be terrified and jumping in their seats.”
So, who’s Paul Anderson and how did he get so far so fast?
It all started with an epiphany he experienced–at age 7–while sitting in a British movie theater watching an old John Wayne movie.
Anderson discovered that the Duke was no cowboy, but an actor playing a character. And when the credits rolled, Anderson realized it took hundreds of people to craft a movie.
“Pretty much right after that filmmaking was all I wanted to do,” he says.
The would-be director attended college in England, studied film, launched a film cooperative, directed low-budget documentaries, then helmed “Speed,” a controversial British TV drama about teenage car thieves, which won him some notoriety.
That led to “Shopping,” a drama about juvenile delinquents, and then “Mortal Kombat” and, now, “Event Horizon.”
With “Horizon” in theaters, Anderson has begun preproduction on “Soldier,” which will star Kurt Russell.
“It’s `Unforgiven’ in space, which is appropriate because David Peoples wrote it just after he wrote `Unforgiven,’ ” says Anderson, who splits his time between Los Angeles and London. “I’m very excited about getting started.
“With `Event Horizon’ we took a ghost story and set it in the near future. With `Soldier’ we’ll take a classic Western narrative structure and set that in the near future.
“This is what I love to do. I love to take science fiction and graft these other genres onto it. It’s great to make dark, adult, intelligent stories on which I can spend a lot of money and have great special effects.
“Hopefully, audiences will love what I do, too.”
