Interview: Rupert Sanders on ‘The Crow’
When Rupert Sanders signed on to direct a new film adaptation of beloved graphic novel The Crow, he knew he wanted to create something unique—a “gothic goth movie” that incisively explored themes of love, loss, and grief. “There was just something about the mythology in the original that I just really liked; this idea of playing with the universal themes of love and loss and grief,” Sanders shares. “I think there was something very emotional about portraying that in a film, and it also had a kind of mythical fable as well.”
Sanders says he was deliberate in his approach to the source material, which originated as a graphic novel by James O’Barr. While the 1994 film has undeniably left its mark on pop culture, Sanders wanted to explore the story through a new lens. “I read the graphic novel once and then I put it away. I also kind of weirdly remember the film from 30 years ago and that was still in my head,” he recalls, stressing that while he did want to retain the essence of the original film adaptation, he also wanted to explore new themes as well. “Any adaptation has to be an origination. You can’t just adapt verbatim. Otherwise, what’s the point?”
One of the major departures in Sanders’ adaptation is the emphasis on the love story between Eric Draven and Shelly. “I wanted to see them fall in love. I wanted to be with them, exist with them, and fall in love with them,” Sanders explains. Exploring their relationship in its early stages (in real time instead of in flashbacks, as was the case in both the graphic novel and the 1994 film adaptation) makes Eric’s journey all the more poignant when Shelly is eventually taken from him. “He cries in the middle of action sequences. He doesn’t have a bloodlust. He’s not a nihilistic killer. He’s doing it to get her back. He hates what he’s having to do and what he’s becoming,” he says.
While some of the best scenes in the film involve Eric and Shelly getting to know each other after escaping from a correctional facility together, viewers will be surprised to learn that those scenes would have been cut from the film if test screening audiences would have had their say. “When we first screened the movie, people were like, ‘I wanted him to be The Crow in the second minute,’ and it’s like, ‘No,'” reveals Sanders. “I had to fight for that beginning of the movie a lot because I would have rather had more there and then just showed him becoming The Crow in the last few minutes and then go into the next adventure with him now as The Crow. But I think where we’re different as well from the original is that there’s a beautiful love story between those two, and if he’s going to go on this journey, which is taxing to him; no one wants to kill anyone. In the comic, he’s just avenging her flashback.”
Bill Skarsgård delivers a phenomenal performance as Eric Draven, capturing the physical intensity of the character while also bringing a more soulful, emotional side to him in the process. Sanders had previously connected with Skarsgård on another project that fell through (a planned film adaptation of Tim O’Brien‘s The Things They Carried) but felt they had found a “groove together” while they were developing that project, which led to his casting in The Crow. Sanders describes Skarsgård as “an amazing physical performer” with a duality of “tenderness and terror” that perfectly suits the role. “Bill played that in the performance well enough; it was almost like the tattoos and the muscularity were a warning of, ‘Keep away from me.’ Shelly describes him in the film as beautifully broken, and I think he was, and then she made him whole. And then that was taken from him and that was the emotional center of the movie.”
Skarsgård filmed The Crow back-to-back with another action-packed film, Boy Kills World, which hit theaters earlier this year. But he also tested for the role of Eric while he was filming Boy Kills World, reveals Sanders, who says Skarsgård would send him test footage from the set of the film to convince him he was right for the role. “He sent me a couple of pictures and he did a couple of little beats of just him where we were like, ‘How can we show each other that we’re right for this?'” says Sanders. “And so I pitched him the opera scene and said, ‘You come on stage and you tell the audience of the violence that you’re having to perpetrate, and how it breaks you,’ and then he did a little bit of an action sequence because he was working on Boy Kills World so he was in the stunt rooms anyway. He went in on a Sunday, did a bit of that and then he did this soliloquy where he was really broken and coming out on stage.”
The casting of FKA twigs as Shelly was also pivotal (“I wanted someone who was so magical that if the candle was snuffed out, we’d all feel the loss,” says Sanders) and the director vividly recalls their magical first day on set. “The first day of shooting was the lake scenes, and they were just smoking blunts together, swimming, kissing, and giggling. I was like, ‘Okay, this is good. They are in love.’ It was so believable.” This authentic connection between the leads was essential for Sanders, who wanted the audience to truly feel the depth of Eric and Shelly’s bond, an element of their relationship that has rarely been explored in previous iterations of the story.
The natural chemistry between the leads (who did not partake in any chemistry reads prior to filming, according to Sanders) was also heightened by the bond they formed off-screen as well. “I think Bill was, and I think Twigs will attest to this, very helpful in helping her because he’d had a lot of experience and Twigs was just so desperate to do something amazing,” shares Sanders. “She’s very ambitious and works at a very high level in all of the other sides of the visual arts she works in. I think she just really wanted to do well and I think Bill was there just to help her through this experience. They were really great together.”
While Sanders wanted to stay true to the emotional essence of the original story, he made it his mission to add his own modern spin to the material, exploring concepts of revenge and sacrifice all while questioning what the concept of unconditional love could look like in today’s day and age. “I think the idea to me of self-sacrifice was really important, which isn’t in the original. I feel that we’re very immersed in social media and in our own world and we become quite selfish,” he says. “The book is a Cure song; it has that kind of melancholy that’s really beautiful and connective.”
The Crow will be released exclusively in theaters tomorrow, August 23.
Ahmad W.
Aspiring critic and poster designer.