Foxx and JGL get ready to Netflix and super-pill.
PROJECT POWER I Jamie Foxx and Joseph Gordon-Levitt star in a street-level superpower story.
Project Power directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman have a question for Teasers: “Would you take the pill?” The pill in question is ‘Power’ - a wonder drug that temporarily bestows a remarkable ‘ability’ found in the animal kingdom: the near-indestructible skin of a tardigrade, for example, or the supersonic punch of a pistol shrimp (look it up). The catch? There’s no way to know what power you’ll get, and the results can be deadly.
“Could someone burst into flames and survive? How would it scientifically be possible so that it doesn’t look like the Human Torch?” asks Schulman of an early scene where a character flames on, with scorching consequences. “Somewhere in the animal kingdom there is an answer for that, and it’s potentially in your evolutionary DNA.”
For Joost and Schulman (Catfish, Nerve), grounding the science of superpowers in the natural world was “a reason to pursue [this] movie, because there was a new way to do it”. Set in New Orleans, where a shady organisation has flooded the streets with Power, tonally it occupies the middle ground between the serious stylings of Nolan’s Batman movies and the MCU’s heartfelt humour.
And rather than following a singular (super) hero, it’s a story told from three perspectives, namely: Jamie Foxx’s Jackson – a former military man searching for his missing daughter; Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Frank Schaeffer – a cop who breaks ranks and uses Power to level the playing field with the city’s superpowered crims; and Dominique Fishback’s Robin – a young rapper who peddles Power to fund her mother’s medical bills.
“It was definitely a narrative challenge,” explains Joost of juggling a diverse-ensemble superpower story. “In the past, the two male leads would have been front and centre. One of the things we really loved was Robin, and how fleshed out and unique she was.”
Joost, Schulman and screenwriter Mattson Tomlin, who wrote Project Power on spec in 2017, clearly hit it off, as they’re now working on an adaptation of classic videogame Mega Man. But before that, Tomlin has another big comic-book movie in production – The Batman, which he co-wrote with director Matt Reeves.
“We found a common love of and exhaustion with the superhero genre,” says Schulman. “That’s what he’d already started to do with Power, I think that’s what he’s doing with the new Batman, and that’s what we’re trying to do even more so in Mega Man, which is to make it even more grounded and based in reality.” JF
ETA | 14 AUGUST / PROJECT POWER STREAMS ON NETFLIX FROM NEXT MONTH.
‘COULD SOMEONE BURST INTO FLAMES AND SURVIVE?’ ARIEL SCHULMAN