Blade

DAVID GOYER : "Blade was a character who had always intrigued me as a kid. And originally I think they were conceiving of making a much smaller movie, 6 or 7 million dollars or possibly 10 million dollar black exploitation film but I pitched something almost Wagnerian in scope."

Six years and forty million dollars later, Goyer got his movie. With Wesley Snipes in the title role, Blade is a slick, brooding action film that injects new blood into a genre that's been growing increasingly anemic.

DAVID GOYER: "I was kind of sick of these gothic sort of romantic vampires that had been done to death in the Anne Rice books and I really wanted to do something much more post modern. So to that degree I approached it from a much more science based angle and I tried to figure out why do vampires need blood. Well they have a version of hemolytic anemia so they need to constantly replenish their red blood cells. And the only way they can do that is by feeding on other people every few hours to replenish those red blood cells."

And the only thing to stop these bloodsuckers is the lethal Blade whose mother was bit by a vampire just before she gave birth to him. As a result he has all the strengths of a vampire and none of their weaknesses. But the price he pays for his half breed status is that hell never fit into either the human or the vampire world. Unlike the recent Spawn , which opted to bring its tortured comic book hero to the screen as a PG-13 summer flick, Blade takes a decidedly adult approach to its subject matter.

DAVID GOYER: "Blade himself is not a particularly nice guy and I really argued early on for an R rating and fortunately Stan Lee agreed that it should get an R rating and the first cut of the film was actually an NC 17. Its a very brutal film."

By being true to Blade's dark soul, Goyer hopes the film will be Marvel Comics first big screen success. In the past, Marvel's Spider-Man and X-Men have taken a back seat to DC Comics Batman and Superman franchises. But Goyer finds the Marvel heroes, most of whom were created by Stan Lee, to be more interesting because theyre so tormented.

DAVID GOYER: "That was the revolution that Stan Lee did, he was the first one to create with Spider-man , Super heroes who doubted themselves, who were tormented who were unhappy."

STAN LEE : "Well I'm a rather tormented soul myself so it's very easy for me to write those characters. But seriously I always felt that comic book characters were very one dimensional, cardboard figures, people or heroes who would say a crime is being committed, I better go catch the criminal and there'd be a fight and that's all. In our books we try to take fantastic events, and hope the reader will suspend their disbelief that this event could really happen but if the event or the character did exist, how would people react to it in a real world. I think its important that the person reading the book have something to think about and not just look at mindless pages of running around. People need something to identify with."

DAVID GOYER : "Blade truly in the pantheon of Marvel characters, I think has to be the most self loathing of the bunch. And by proxy, the only way to deal with this is to kill vampires. He says that every time he kills one of those monsters he gets back a little piece of his soul back."

And the vampire he wants to kill most is a nasty piece of work named Deacon Frost. Frost, played with punk flippancy by Stephen Dorff, is the one who bit Blade's mother. So in a sense, this white, ever-youthful man is Blade's vampire father. But Blade has no interest in such blood ties.

Blade : "Frost, you're nothing to me but another dead vampire."

DAVID GOYER : "The lead vampire Deacon Frost, he's sort of this neo fascist, neo Nietzschian philosophy throughout the whole , I cribbed a lot of Nietzsche for Deacon Frost and he believes Blade is a race traitor and he calls Blade, and there's an irony since Blade is black, he calls Blade an Uncle Tom. Not because he's betraying the black people but because vampires don't see color but because he's betraying his vampire blood, he's siding with the humans, the gutter race."

Frost : "It's a shame you know, when I think of what you've become, what you should've become. I guess I don't blame you, I mean with everything that's happened it's the human side of you that made you weak. You should've listened to our blood."
Blade : "Say what you want, you'll be dead by dawn."

Snipes and Dorff square off well. The buff, leather clad Snipes, with his martial arts training, is physically more imposing than Dorff but Dorff conveys a wicked sense of evil that makes him a worthy nemesis. Director Stephen Norrington takes his cue from Goyer's script and turns this vampire film into an entertaining action film with a Hong Kong flair for kicking butt. The film also succeeds because the filmmakers pay attention to the details of their vampire world. Goyer, who created another nether world in Dark City , likes the challenge of such fantasy films.

DAVID GOYER : "I believe when youre creating a fantasy world which is what I do most of the time you have to create a world thats consistently logical within itself. You can create new rules but you have to be consistent. That's what I had to do with the vampires."

Blade : "You better wake up, the world you live in is just a sugar coated topping, there is another world underneath, the real world. You wanna survive it you better learn to pull the trigger."
Doctor : "I'm coming with you its the only way Ill stay alive long enough to find a cure."
Blade : "There is no cure."

DAVID GOYER : "Another thing that I decided to do was vampirism itself is a progressive virus and so when you get bitten by a vampire progressively the vampire virus takes you over so ultimately you are not human any more but you are not dead."

Goyer's script also suggests that vampires have always lived among us and that over the centuries have established a ruling hierarchy that's more powerful than the mafia.

DAVID GOYER : "They really are one of the grand seats of power and there's a clash that happens early on in the film between the old guard whos led by Udo Kier who plays overlord Dragonetti and the new guard lead by Deacon Frost who feels that they should be the rulers of the earth."

Frost : "We should be ruling the humans not making treaties with them. These people are our food, not our allies."
Dragonetti : "You're outta line Frost."
Frost : "Am I or am I just the first to say out loud what you've all been thinking."
Dragonetti : "We have existed this way for thousands of years, who are you to challenge our ways, you're not even a pureblood."
Frost : "Like it matters."

Purists may object to Goyer's revisionist approach to the vampire genre but Blade's innovations just attest to our continued fascination with the whole vampire mythology. Stan Lee says that vampires continue to fascinate us because they are somewhat believable.

STAN LEE: :In other words, the whole concept isn't all that far-fetched because they are supposed to be people who look normal. They turn into vampires and even then they just grow teeth and still look pretty normal. If you want to let your imagination go crazy, you could let yourself believe in them. The other thing is I have been told, and I must admit that I don't understand this, I have been told by many women that there is something romantic about a guy biting their throat and drawing blood."

Actor Udo Kier, who plays one of the elder vampires says the appeal lies in the aristocratic nature of the vampire.

UDO KIER : "I think the reason why people like vampires, first of all at the beginning there were always aristocrats living on top of the hill and the rumors were always down at the inn saying that there's this Count Dracul living on top of the hill. There really was a Count Dracul who was very powerful and rich and when the people down the hill didn't greet him with proper respect, he had nails put in their heads. So it started with real horror and then of course at an inn with people drinking their red or white wine, they have fantasies and about what the count is doing and at night they have visions of the vampire coming down and taking their blood. And talking about women, on the first film, Dracula , I got so many letters from women, like school teachers who saw the film twenty times, and its amazing people really do like vampires."

For actress Arly Joyer, who plays Deacons main squeeze, it's the immortality thats attractive.

ARLY JOYER : "I actually think also that it's a thing about human beings and immortality. I think we are so drawn to that because deep down we have a hard time dealing with death and the vampire thing is about living forever and its something that is very attractive to us. And it's something weve been drawn to for that reason. And also they are very attractive and they don't get old."

DAVID GOYER: "I would agree with the fear of death, the fact that vampires are immortal and do not age. But I also think the myth endures because vampires really represent the id. Everyone has these base dark urges which we try to suppress because of society. Vampires, though, just don't care. Every dark urge they have-- they prey on people, they feed on people-- they just satisfy. So I think there's a certain amount of wish fulfillment in acting out these base urges."

STAN LEE: "About immortality. That's interesting because if somebody said to me youre about to die but listen you could live forever or even for another hour if youd bite somebodys neck and drink someones blood. Id have a very hard time saying no."

Ultimately, the studio had a hard time saying no to Goyer's vision for Blade . And Goyer has no pretenses about the kind of film he wanted to make.

DAVID GOYER : "I read a review on the Internet by someone who had sneaked into a test screening, that said every once in a while you just wanna see a movie that just about kicking ass, Blade is that movie. I thought that's the best review I can possibly get."