Director Vincenzo Natali thinks his new movie, “Splice,” charts the next logical step in the evolutionary cycle.
“Our nature is to change our environment. It’s only a matter of time before we start changing ourselves,” Natali tells WWTW at the recent Starfest ‘10 convention.
“Splice,” hitting theaters June 4, follows a pair of romantically involved scientists (Adrien Brody, Sarah Polley) who create a new life form by fusing human and animal DNA.
Their creation starts out innocently enough, but soon its “parents” realize they’ve unleashed something they may not be able to control.
And Natali credits a pioneering mouse as the inspiration for his film.
“It appeared to have a human ear on its back,“ says Natali who co-wrote “Splice.” “It was a very shocking image which instantly made me feel there was a story to be told about where genetic engineering is going.”
He wrote the first draft of “Splice” back in 1998, shortly after the release of his well regarded debut “Cube.”
The story “had some transgressive, dangerous things in it. Which, of course, were the reasons I wanted to make the movie, but they were frightening to mainstream studios,” he says.
The project finally got a boost following a chat he had with director Guillermo del Toro, who offered to produce one of his upcoming projects. Natali felt it was time to introduce “Splice” to the world.
The notion of human-animal hybrids has existed in our culture for thousands of years, he says, across all civilizations.
“Here we are today on the cusp of being able to manifest that,” he says.
And while he didn’t want his film to take so long from screenplay to the cinema, he says the technology “caught up to my fiction in shocking ways,” he says. “I’m almost behind the curve.”
Tomorrow: Natali recalls his earliest film influences and shares why he thinks we’re in for a resurgence of quality science fiction films.
(Photo: Vincenzo Natali, the director and co-writer of the new sci-fi feature “Splice.”)
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