Dining With Developers, Vol. 2: Haden Blackman, Part 2
4/17/2009 5:16 PM | 10 Comments | Page 1 of 9
Scott Jones
Status: Coffee makes me feel 4-percent sexier.
Read Part 1.
Victor Lucas: Is George as lucid and fired-up as he's always been?
Haden Blackman: The characters that he's created, yes; and the timeline that he's created, yes. For sure. I don't know how involved he is beyond that. I mean, there are big things that he has to approve.
Lucas: The Force Unleashed would make an amazing movie. It was better than the last three films. And now we would like to see this as a movie.
This garment is technically known as a Wizard's Sleeve.
This is where I don't talk. You know, we could have gone and told another Kyle Katarn story. And we actually explored going back to the Knights of the Old Republic, and setting something there. And we looked at doing futuristic stuff, setting the game a thousand years after the death of Luke Skywalker or whatever, and we actually had some superhero elements to it. But one of the reasons we decided to set it in this particular time period is because we were told, "Hey, you guys are continuing the saga, George isn't working on any more movies, there's an animated series that tells some stories too; but your job is to find new ways to tell Star Wars stories." And we're a key part of that.
Lucas: I want to see the
The Force Unleashed movie.
Blackman: I would too. As would Sam Witwer, I would think.
Lucas: Speaking of Sam, his performance is not voicework; it's a true performance. He's acting through the whole thing. I would guess
The Force Unleashed is what he's most famous for.
Blackman: Obviously he's worked on "Battlestar Galactica" and "Smallville," but I'll tell you the reason why we cast him. I got his reel, and he was in an episode of "CSI" or one of the crime shows where he was being interrogated, and he actually cried on camera. He's kind of a tough guy, not that we were planning to make the Apprentice cry, but he showed a range of emotion. We thought, Well, we have to at least audition the guy.
He came in and did this scene where he's building a lightsaber with his mind. And he's concentrating, and he was doing this really weird stuff where he was twitching and furrowing his brow, and shifting around like he was really uncomfortable. We asked him why. He said that he'd given a lot of thought to the character. "I just figured that doing this exercise, and trying to find inner peace with this character, who has no real concept of inner peace, that he'd be visibly struggling." And I was like: He's our guy. Right there. That's him. He knew that character better than we knew that character in some ways.
Adam Kahn: On IMDB, they've got a listing for
The Force Unleashed. They don't know how to deal with performance in a videogame, and the listing said, "Secret Apprentice: Sam Witwer V." Using the "V" to indicate that it's voice-over. So I had to go all up the chain at IMDB for Sam and Nathalie and Adrienne and Cully. I had to go all the way up and say, Look, it wasn't voice! This was performance. And, finally, if you look, there are no more Vs for those guys next to their names.
