Shedding new light on the Vin Diesel sci-fi classic for its 20th anniver-scary.
As low-budget sci-fi horror Pitch Black celebrates its 20th anniversary with a 4K Blu-ray release, director David Twohy reminisces with Total Film about a tumultuous shoot, casting clashes and why he thought he was going to get fired.
"It’s pretty interesting how, 20 years later, you look at a movie, and your eyes go to the same fucking problems that you were grappling with 20 years before,” roars David Twohy, writer and director of 2000’s sleeper sci-fi hit and franchise-spawner, Pitch Black. “It all comes flooding back: the problems you had on the set, and getting that footage, and the problems you had in the editing room, and how you never got something right.”
Twohy has been overseeing the colourcorrection process on a new 4K restoration by Arrow Films for a 4K UHD Blu-ray release. As someone who doesn’t watch a lot of old movies, Twohy was eventually “able to sort of distance myself enough to say, ‘Hey, as a whole, that’s a pretty good movie for something that had the standard expectations of a sci-fi horror movie.’ But, nonetheless, I’m right back in that space of 20 years ago, saying, ‘I never fucking got that shot right. Why didn’t I? Goddamnit! Can I fix it now?’”
When Pitch Black opened at the dawn of this millennium, the movie industry was in a very different place. CG visual effects were becoming more accessible, and The Blair Witch Project redefined indie marketing. Studio tentpoles didn’t dominate with the same ubiquity they do now, and Pitch Black – or Nightfall, as its screenplay, written by Ken and Jim Wheat, was known – wasn’t exactly a property with a lot of expectation riding on it.
Production company Interscope Communications needed someone to punch up
their genre script, and excavate its potential. “Basically, they played this game,” recalls Twohy, speaking to Total Film via a Zoom video call in June. “‘If you rewrite this script, and if it’s good enough that somebody wants to make it, you can direct it.’ That’s the game they played early on, several times, with me and other young filmmakers.” Twohy (best known at that time for scripting The Fugitive) wrote several drafts, changed the title, created the Riddick character and revamped the ensemble around him, landing the gig (“it was a pretty much wholesale rewrite of the existing script”).
Twohy’s intention was to set up archetypal characters and then flip them. “I wanted to reverse the audience’s expectation, and that would then elevate the characters, and then hopefully it would elevate the movie up and beyond its science-fiction and horror stature.” There’s Johns (Cole Hauser), the square-jawed cop who turns out to be a morphine addict; Fry (Radha Mitchell), a docking pilot who almost makes a terribly costly decision during the crash landing; and of course Richard B. Riddick (Vin Diesel), the transported mercenary/ murderer who will ultimately turn out to be the movie’s saviour. “All those reversals of expectations are something I had in mind from the beginning,” says Twohy, “just to fuck with the audience’s head, if nothing else.”
The biggest influence on the script was Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages Of Fear, with its unpredictable characters transporting explosive nitroglycerine across unstable mountain roads. Twohy shares an extract of the blurb that was at the front of the script, which made clear that the vicious alien creatures on Pitch Black’s desert planet would not be in the foreground. Instead, they’d be a rarely glimpsed catalyst applying pressure to the human characters. The blurb ends: “The focus of the finished film will not be on what the creatures do, but what the creatures do to reveal the inner nature of the characters. For Pitch Black is, at its heart, a story of humanity and courage – and lack of the same.”
IN LIKE VIN
Pitch Black would, of course, go on to make a star of Vin Diesel. The gravellarynxed beefcake was largely unknown then (Pitch Black opened a year before the Fast & Furious franchise began, and Diesel’s appearance in Saving Private Ryan was brief), and was not at the top of the pile when it came to casting what would become one of his signature, franchise-spawning roles, the shavenheaded Furyan whose surgically modified eyes allow him to see in the dark. His night-vision comes in handy when the planet the ship crash-lands on has one of its rare total eclipses: with three suns, it only gets dark every 22 years or so, and its subterranean inhabitants come out to play.
For his significance, Riddick was cast late in the day. Twohy was in pre-production in Oz when his phone rang. “I got a call from Los Angeles from the guys at Interscope,” he recalls. “And they’re saying, ‘So, we think the ideal choice for Riddick is Steven Seagal.’ And I said, ‘I cannot disagree more!’” Twohy chuckles at the memory. He was able to fight back on that decision, but the problem still remained. “It was a success, but then, suddenly, ‘Oh, fuck. Who are we going to cast?’”
On a mission to just cast ‘the best available person’, Twohy ended up seeing Diesel for a reading. “I wasn’t terribly impressed,” he says, “if only because while he looked the part… you know, cold readings in a room are not really his truth. He’s a guy who really wants to inhabit a role, and not just read a role. So I was on the edge. And then Ted Field, our executive producer, who was also head of Interscope, finally said, ‘OK. I know we were wrong about Steven Seagal, but I think we’re right about Vin Diesel.’” Twohy laughs again at the memory. “And then I agreed, because certainly he looked the part, and, certainly, he really loved the role of Riddick. And so I was hoping that passion would translate into something good and dear to him.” Back at that stage, Cole Hauser even read for Riddick. “He’s a good actor, he could pull it off,” says Twohy. “But Vin just carried the day.”
Though the film was conceived and shot as a three-hander with Riddick, Johns and Fry, “in the editing room and in the preview process, it became apparent that the guy that the audience was really interested in most was Riddick,” says Twohy. Overwhelmingly, test-screening
‘When you’re a newish director, you start thinking: “Are they going to fire me?”’ DAVID TWOHY
audiences singled out Riddick as their favourite character.
So in the editing suite, Riddick was teased out to the fore. “That’s why we now start with a VO from Riddick,” explains Twohy. “We frontloaded Vin, and started doing things from his perspective. In retrospect, it was probably the right thing to do, even though it felt a little odd at the time.”
JUST DESSERTS
But perhaps the biggest challenges that faced the film occurred during filming in the desert plains of South Australia. The outback was chosen “because we wanted a dry, arid, open look with no telephone poles, no power lines, no jets going overhead – none of that stuff that would deter you from creating the image of an alien world.” A couple of days before shooting began, it started raining. “Trucks were getting stuck in the mud. I remember walking from the trailers to the set, and your boots would just get more and more mud on them, until you were like six inches deep. Those were the conditions we started filming in
– trying to make it look like a dry, arid world. It was a nightmare.”
The conditions meant that Twohy fell one week behind in his shooting schedule early on. “When you’re a newish director, you start thinking: ‘Are they going to fire me?’ So we got off to the worst possible start. We were one week behind, two weeks into the shoot. And at that point, all hope of making great cinema on a daily basis had sort of taken a backseat to the idea of catching up,” he laughs. “That’s how we started out. Those were the physical challenges of an environment that was not just hostile to the characters, but hostile to the filmmakers as well.”
He was able to regain some ground once the location work was completed and the shoot moved to the more predictable environs of the soundstage. “Once you’re in that controlled situation, the idea of making great cinema sort of rears its head again.”
One of the wins from the soundstage work was the opening crash sequence: a set-piece that still feels breathless and immersive today. “There’s a reason why Hitchcock loved being on the stage instead of being out in the wild,” says Twohy. “It’s because he could fucking control everything. So I felt pretty surehanded there. And I executed it just like I wrote it, and just like I boarded it. And it turned out really well, I must say.” Opting to save the VFX budget by sticking with Fry’s POV (rather than going for a more typical wide shot of the Hunter Gratzner ploughing through the sandy surface), paid dividends. “I think that was the way to go, especially on a limited budget, but also for the effectiveness of the crash.”
READY TO LAUNCH
For all of the production problems, Pitch Black proved itself a sleeper hit, grossing $53m against a $23m budget. It primed Diesel for stardom, and spawned sequels The Chronicles Of Riddick (an overly ambitious box-office flop) and Riddick (which returned to grittier territory). Riddick also spun off into videogames, shorts and an animated film. Perhaps not remarkable today when expanded universes are de rigueur, but a sign of the resourcefulness of the franchise, and the indefatigable nature of Riddick himself.
When we speak, Twohy’s been working on the screenplay for the mooted fourth movie. “Vin and I have already agreed on a story,” he explains. “We do a treatment first. We get together. We talk about it. We massage it. And we say, ‘That’s the story.’ And then I go off and write a screenplay. And we’ll see what goes from here.”
And, if Twohy could send a message back 20 years to his past self, what kind of illuminating advice would he offer? “I would probably say, ‘Don’t worry so much about getting fired for falling behind schedule, because you’re not going to get fired!’” he laughs. “So that would open you up to being more creative, and to take more chances than I did in the first, say, three or four weeks of filming. So future me could say, ‘Don’t worry about it. Stick with it. Get the footage you will need to make a good movie once you’re in the editing room.’” Well, hindsight is always 20/20.
PITCH BLACK IS AVAILABLE ON 4K ULTRA HD AND BLU-RAY ON 17 AUGUST.