After his bad experience making 2019’s Hellboy reboot, director Neil Marshall has spent the past few years jumping between low-budget passion projects – but there’s one he’s now confirmed he won’t be able to get off the ground.
“I think the Dog Soldiers sequel is now dead in the water”, he told Zavvi. “My producer and myself have been trying for six years to smooth out the legal rights issues stopping us from making one, and the parties on the other side just seem unwilling – it unfortunately looks like they’re not getting smoothed out.
Second Sight
“I don’t know why we can’t work it out, but we’re trying to work around them. We’re toying with the idea of making an alternate werewolf project instead…”
Thanks to that 2001 directorial debut and 2005’s The Descent – which the filmmaker also teased will likely be getting a 4K reissue for its 20th anniversary next year – Marshall is regarded as one of Britain’s leading horror directors. His latest effort, Duchess, is a pretty notable departure; a Guy Ritchie-esque comic-thriller set in the underground diamond trade.
“I’ve always been a big fan of British gangster films, but it didn’t occur to me until someone pointed it out that this is the first movie I’ve made set in something resembling the real world – that’s the biggest departure for me!
“I don’t think of it as a gangster movie though; it has gangs and criminals, and all these larger-than-life characters, but it’s really driven by the action. That’s the one thing that binds all my work together, and it’s really the juice here.”
Marshall’s partner Charlotte Kirk has once again co-written the screenplay in addition to starring in the lead role as Scarlett, the working-class antihero who rises through the ranks in this gritty underworld. The pair were having sushi together when they pondered the idea of making a “female Scarface”, and Marshall is upfront about their initial ideas being too cliched to work.
“We were living in L.A. at the time we started developing it, so the first draft was set within the world of Mexican cartels. We’d both seen that countless times before, and we knew we needed to do something different.
Vertigo Releasing
“I got interested in the world of diamond smuggling and the diamond trade in general and found it more fascinating the more research I put into it. Our plan from there was to set the film in South Africa, as I’d worked there before and wanted to go back and make stuff there, but it evolved again; it was a continuous evolution into making a truly fresh, international story.”
It does also remain a rarity for a woman to be taking centre stage in such a typically masculine genre.
“I’ve got a track record for that kind of thing”, Marshall laughed. “I really like having strong female characters, and at the time we conceived it, there was nothing like this out there.
Vertigo Releasing
“In the five years since, we’ve had TV shows and other things on Netflix which have followed women in the gangster world, but it was pretty unique when we first came up with it, and we stuck to our guns with that concept even as the story transformed.”
Hellboy was Marshall’s first directorial effort after nine years working on TV shows including Game Of Thrones, Hannibal and Westworld, and the studio interference he faced on that comic-book adaptation has been a driving factor in getting smaller, more personal projects made since then. Duchess is his third effort in the five years since, and he’s already wrapped his follow-up, one of several upcoming projects he teased to us.
“It’s a homage to giallo films, with all the tropes of them, but the origins came from my desire to make a 90’s-style erotic thriller. I’ve always loved the likes of Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct, and I felt there was room in the market for a modern film like that – it was a lot of fun to make.
Vertigo Releasing
“There are certain genres I’m not going to dip my toes into, but if it involves action, bloodshed and interesting worldbuilding, it’s going to be to my interests! Working on TV a lot recently has given me more of a taste to jump between genres more than I did before, and the films I’ve made since Hellboy have been a response to an experience where I sacrificed creative control for the sake of a big budget.
“Now, I want to own my own mistakes. If people don’t like what I’m making now, that’s fine, I’d rather that happened than be blamed for a movie that was out of my hands, which makes no sense to me as an artist.”
There are countless more passion projects coming soon from the director too.
Vertigo Releasing
“My big dream is a project I have that’s got the same vibe as Raiders of the Lost Ark, which I hope I’ll be able to make one day. I think my next film is also Spielbergian in influence, but more along the lines of Close Encounters, mixed with the Amblin movies of the 1980s like The Goonies and Gremlins, but set in Cornwall during World War Two.
“That idea has been knocking around for 12 years – I wrote a treatment for it back then, but only got round to writing the script this year, and I’m really happy with the way it’s gone. The problem is that, when I pitch it, people expect it to be Saving Private Ryan meets Independence Day, which it isn’t at all.
“It’s more contained than that, full of interesting characters and a lot of humour. And of course, a lot of scary stuff in it…”
Duchess is released in UK cinemas from Friday, 9th August, and on demand from Monday, 12th August.
