Writer and star reclaim a sense of Dredd

Sitting in a suite on the 28th floor of the Trump Hotel during this month’s TIFF, writer Alex Garland and star Karl Urban can’t ignore how different it is from the setting their film Dredd 3D.

Their film is set in Peach Tree Towers, a 200-storey slum. Their current surroundings are considerably nicer.

Dredd 3D is a grim and gritty reboot of the famed British comics character that wipes the slate clean from the cartoonish, forgettable Sylvester Stallone film from 1995. Both Garland, the writer whose credits include The Beach and 28 Days Later, and Urban said they were fans of the original work and that they didn’t bother watching the original, as they wanted to keep much closer to the comic’s vision.

One of the keys to that was the decision that Urban wouldn’t ever take the famous character’s helmet off, something that some actors might bristle at.

“No, I didn’t. That’s the character, I knew it was going to be a challenge,” says Urban.

“You had the opposite of qualms; he said he wouldn’t do it,” says Garland.

“That’s true. We had a meeting in L.A. where I basically said that. I think they wanted a little bit of reas- surance that we didn’t get halfway through and I started demanding scenes with the helmet off.” In some ways, it’s a simple action movie, eschewing telling the main character’s origin story, instead showing a day in the life of Dredd as he takes out rookie judge Anderson (Olivia Thirlby) on the beat. That beat is set in Mega-City One, the remaining sprawling North American city, that Garland said should almost be considered a character. “I felt that part of the challenge with Mega-City One is to not make it feel like another world, but to make it feel like an extension of our world, that within the huge cities that most of us live, you can find the problems that Mega-City One has writ large,” he says. It’s another genre role for Urban, who previously had appeared in the Lord of the Rings, and is set to reprise his role as Leonard “Bones” McCoy in the oncoming Star Trek into Darkness. Urban isn’t afraid of being typecast as a genre star. “No, no fear of that whatsoever. Perhaps it’s because I don’t really plan or strategize my career like some Hollywood actors; I simply respond to the material that’s in front of me,” he says. “I’ve done a bunch of films that aren’t science fiction or fantasy films, so I don’t feel particularly cornered.”