For over 15 years, a remake of “The Crow” has been in development with countless directors and stars cycling in and out. A new spin on the stylistically influential comic book movie from 1994 that is mostly remembered for the tragic on-set death of star Brandon Lee would fall apart just as quickly it would generate heat or a star to coalesce in some way. At various points in time actors like Bradley Cooper, Jason Momoa and Luke Evans were attached to prior iterations of the project. All of them went away.
But now, a new version of “The Crow” finally opens wide courtesy of Lionsgate Friday, with Bill Skarsgård as the doomed title character and pop star FKA Twigs as Shelly, his equally doomed fiancée. The story follows these doomed lovers who are murdered, only for Skarsgård’s character to get a chance at revenge by sacrificing himself, traversing the lands of the living and the dead.
And who actualized this new version of “The Crow?” Rupert Sanders, the British director behind “Snow White and the Huntsman,” “Ghost in the Shell” and the pilot episode of Apple TV+’s acclaimed series “Foundation.”
“I don’t know why it was so hard,” Sanders told TheWrap. “I think I had to cross over to the dark side and give an ounce of my blood to go on this journey.”
Sanders said that he went into the process “naively and blindly,” adding that he “never read anything that had been done before” but knew there were several attempts.
“I think people think you get this lovely red carpet and some Hollywood-type just opens the curtain and there’s all these titles, and you just go, Oh, do that please. And they just usher you out to the set and everything’s happening,” Sanders said. “It’s a f–king battle. It’s a real struggle.”
That struggle was evident in the way the production was mounted. “We’re a scrappy independent movie. We’re not a Hollywood movie. We were crewed in London, shot in Prague, mainly, we did all our post-production in London,” Sanders said. He explained that the dark nature of the material meant that “people probably weren’t willing to spend loads of money on it,” reflecting that earlier filmmakers maybe got stuck imagining that, since it was a known IP, they would “make this a Marvel movie.”
“That would have been a danger. I think the beauty of the way we did it is, it’s very similar to how the original was made. It was made piecing stuff together and using what you can and being clever and not shooting for days and days and trying to be a bit grittier and more grounded,” Sanders said. “And because we did that way, I think we could make a bit more of a grown-up movie, a movie that I think on repeat watching will stay with people more.”
Sanders looked at a wide array of movies for inspiration for “The Crow” – Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s classic “A Matter of Life and Death;” Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Stalker” (which is very much felt by this kind of spiritual waystation the Crow finds himself in); cinéma du look classics like Jean-Jacques Beineix’s “Diva” and Luc Besson’s “Subway;” and Adrian Lyne’s elliptical “Jacob’s Ladder.” He also listened to the music of Gary Newman and Joy Division. Not exactly the touchstones filmmakers are looking to for a typical comic book movie. (The source material stems from the comics series created by James O’Barr in 1989.) Still, “These are the things that turned me on in this world,” Sanders said.
The sheer velocity of putting the project together helped get it made, too. Sanders remembers that he got a call from producers that “hang on, we haven’t got all the money yet.” But he was on a plane to Prague with Skarsgård. He remembers telling them, “I’m going, Bill’s ready.” He even got a later call, urging him to pause. Sanders responded, “I’m on the sound stage.”
“There’s no green light that magically appears. You just have got to keep pushing,” he said.
The director didn’t revisit the original film, but instead let its lingering effects inspire him. “There was something about it – the supernatural crossing between worlds that really excited me,” Sanders said. “And this gothic love story at the heart of it. Those were the two things that really got me to sink my teeth into it.” Sanders also appreciated the movie’s themes of loss and grief, inspired, in part, by O’Barr’s fiancée getting killed by a drunk driver before they were able to wed. “I think that’s what makes it very universal,” Sanders said. He aimed to make “The Crow” like “an Edgar Allan Poe story for the 21st century.”
This new “Crow,” it should be noted, is a very different movie. Many things from the original – the constant rain, the stylized miniature city, the Halloween setting – have been jettisoned. Countless movies have ripped off Alex Proyas’ film since 1994, including several sequels of varying quality. Why should the new movie do that too?
Plus, there were some things that Sanders wanted to update from the original, in particular when it comes to the character (or lack thereof) of Shelly.
“She’s very much a silhouette in the ’90s movie, and I wanted the female elements of the movie to be very present, because if we don’t fall in love with her and we don’t see how in love with her he is, we don’t really want to go on that journey with him,” Sanders said. That journey now includes the ability to return her to the living, a kind of devil’s bargain that the Crow strikes in the in-between, “Stalker”-inspired world. “I wanted to make something that had more of a emotional engine, and that actually the real difference is that he can get her back,” Sanders said. “I think that’s a very distinct difference.”
But just like the original, this new “Crow” is visually ravishing, with Sanders conjuring images and set pieces that wouldn’t be out of place in a $200 million studio movie. Sanders said that shooting in Prague certainly helped, as he was able to mine its “17th and 18th century grandeur.” He had shot in Prague before on commercials for Apple and Nike and knew “that I could get more for my money there.”
“That’s the only way we really were able to do it for the price point,” Sanders said. He cited his experience on commercials with helping him create “big spectacles with very quick turnaround, without having all of the toys.” The production used very little green screen, choosing to shoot in real locations (like building different apartments within existing apartments). He remembers having a small rain tower that they would put in the foreground and “hoped that that would be enough.” A severed head was reused for two different shots. “We did it the Roger Corman way,” Sanders said. There are still huge sequences, like an impressively edited fight sequence at the opera with the Crow dispatching many heavily armed goons.
This ethos was carried over from the original film and the work of producer Ed Pressman, who has produced everything from Brian De Palma’s “Sisters” and “Phantom of the Paradise” to Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street” to Kathryn Bigelow’s “Blue Steel” and David Gordon Green’s “Undertow” — all independent productions that found their much wider audience. Pressman returned for this version of “The Crow.”
“It sits up there with some of those bigger scale movies, because I think that we knew we had to compete on the commerciality but we also knew that we were going to be R-rated, and we were going to be a bit druggy and a bit violent and a bit out there and a bit emotional. And those things you don’t really find in the other [comic book films]. It has some of the spectacle, but a bit more of the emotion,” Sanders said.
“The Crow” flies into theaters on Friday.
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