BRIGHT
Will Smith was a cop. His partner was an Orc. When they got together it was a new Netflix film.
Will Smith gets an Orc partner in Netflix’s gritty cop drama fantasy Bright
Having spent much of his career telling tales of cops in Los Angeles via the likes of Training Day, SWAT and End Of Watch, Suicide Squad director David Ayer should be on familiar territory with new movie Bright. After all, it focuses on a pair of mismatched police officers (played by Will Smith and Joel Edgerton) plying their trade on the streets of the City of Angels. One thing sets this movie apart from all the rest, however – one of Bright’s lead duo is an Orc.
“My agent gave me the script and I was really fascinated by it,“Ayer tells Red Alert. “It’s funny because Max [Landis] wrote the script as kind of an homage to my movies and then put this amazing spin on it, the idea of combining these fantasy elements with just a hard-bitten LA street world. I came on board as a producer originally, and went through the process of starting to meet with directors. It was during that process where I realised I’m kind of the only guy that can really tackle this!
“I’d done Suicide Squad and really got a handle on how to execute the larger fantasy elements, the make-up and world building,” he continues, “and it kind of left me hungry for more. But at the same time I have these strong roots in the LA police genre, which is something that really speaks to me. Bright was just this crazy opportunity to do both things at the same time. I’d never seen it done this way before.”
CREATURES FEATURE
In the parallel world of Bright, the forces of good defeated a Dark Lord some 2,000 years ago. Ever since, humans have lived alongside fantasy (in our world) creatures like Elves, Fairies and the aforementioned Orcs – they dress like us and talk like us, though some of them come with added magical powers.
“The world in which the movie takes place in doesn’t know that it’s not normal,” explains Ayer, “and so the idea was always, you got Orcs, Elves, Fairies, you got magic, but you still have to pay your bills, you’ve still got to get up and go to work in the morning. The everyday details of life never change, and that’s what was so fun for me, to build a world where nobody knows any different.”
As for the history of a world that presents modern America through a Tolkien-esque prism, Ayer says, “Instead of a Messiah showing up 2000 years ago, there was an Antichrist. The consequences are writ large – there’s always this sort of fear that this guy could come back. But because magic almost destroyed the world, it’s very illegal – it’s like a weapon of mass destruction – so the government hunts it down and doesn’t want anybody playing with it. There’s sort of an underground that plays with magic. It’s really a forbidden fruit.”
Not all species are equal in Bright, however. Ayer explains that the “Elves basically run the
We combine fantasy with a hard-bitten LA street world