How ‘ Venom’ came to life
Director Ruben Fleischer looked to buddy comedy films and 80s horror movies to build a roadmap for the anti-hero flick
In an edit bay on the Sony Pictures lot, Ruben Fleischer looked outwardly calm but was clearly feeling some heat. At 43, the director was just weeks away from the release of the biggest film of his career: the dark comic-book movie Venom, which Sony is banking on to launch a series of interconnected films that will expand on the world of the studio’s marquee comic-book star, Spider-Man.
“Every time, you’re nervous,” said Fleischer, who directed Zombieland, 30 Minutes or Less and Gangster Squad. “But this is the most predominant film genre so you’re under a bigger magnifying glass. That’s a new experience for me.”
Building a cinematic universe is not for the faint of heart. Venom, out now in the UAE, stars Tom Hardy as Eddie Brock, a journalist whose body becomes host to a bloodthirsty alien life form known as a symbiote, transforming him into the shape-shifting Venom.
In the comics, Venom was originally introduced as a foe for Spider-Man before evolving into a kind of vigilante anti-hero. (Topher Grace played the character in 2007’s Spider-Man 3.) But Venom wipes the slate clean with a wholly different origin story. A hybrid of man-monster, Venom falls
into a grey zone between do-gooder and villain, with Brock’s urge to defend the innocent counterpoised with the symbiote’s penchant for biting off heads.
Beyond that basic description, plot details about Venom — co-starring Michelle Williams and Riz Ahmed — have been kept under wraps. “It’s a big-stakes action movie, so the goal probably involves saving something,” Fleischer said coyly.
Earlier superhero films like The Dark Knight trilogy, Deadpool and Logan have pushed the genre’s outer boundaries into grittier, more adult territory. But Fleischer says his touchstones for Venom were more along the lines of early 1980s horror films
such as An American Werewolf in London and buddy comedies like 48 Hrs and Midnight Run.
“The symbiote bonds early on with Eddie and it’s kind of like The Odd Couple, but instead of sharing an apartment, they share a body,” Fleischer explained. “The fun of the movie is the dynamic between them, with Eddie trying to rein in this basically unbridled id and find a balance with him. That theme of duality and trying to control your id — I think that’s what Tom and I responded to in terms of why this character is unique and special.”
Hardy — who made an earlier foray into the comic-book realm as the villain Bane in 2012’s The Dark
Knight Rises — performed the dialogue of both Brock and the symbiote, with the alien’s lines, modulated to sound more sinister, fed back into his ear on the set during scenes.
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RUBEN FLEISCHER | Director
“I think Tom is going to surprise a lot of people with his performance in this movie,” Fleischer said. “It’s just a little different than we’re used to seeing him. There’s no mask in front of his face. He’s not playing a period. He’s just playing a contemporary guy. I think it’s just a little more of Tom than people have seen in a little bit.”
In a landscape saturated with comic-book movies, Fleischer is hoping that Venom — a bouillabaisse of action, horror and comedy, with a level of violence that the director says will be “pushed to the hilt” — will stand apart. In its marketing campaign, Sony plays up
the film’s against-the-grain quality with the tagline, “The world has enough superheroes.”
“I feel like the casting, the aesthetic and the character himself all combine to make something that just feels different,” he said.
“Tonally, it doesn’t remind you of other movies. It doesn’t feel like we just tried to do what everyone else is doing... The DC universe is so aggressively dark and the Marvel universe has become so light. It was kind of exciting to craft something that just felt a little bit more real.”
But beyond delivering a top-calibre film to the box office gods, Fleischer does have one more modest wish.
“My hope is that it’s going to be a big Halloween costume this year for kids,” he said. “A Venom Halloween mask is such a winner. ”
“My hope is that [Venom] is going to be a big Halloween costume this year for kids.”