Interview: John Brancato and Michael Ferris

WGA.org has a nice interview with the screenwriting team of John D. Brancato and Michael Ferris:

John D. Brancato and Michael Ferris, the writing team responsible for the jauntily apocalyptic Terminator: Rise of the Machines, were tapped to pen this new chapter — one designed not only to continue the saga but also launch an entirely new trilogy.

Accomplished sci-fi action scribes, the two are a smart, endearingly nerdy and very funny team that is clearly past the no-look phase. Their humor is surprising until you learn where they met, on The Harvard Lampoon. Though they didn’t have any designs on writing scripts together, they eventually began writing separately and showing each other their work. As Brancato recalls, “We both thought, Well, this guy’s pretty good, he just needs a collaborator.”

They found success in the action thriller genre with 1991’s The Game. Since then they’ve penned a stream of action sci-fi films, including Primeval and The Net.

Here are a few excerpts:

When did the befuddlement go away and when did you know it was going to work? What was element that broke this new story for you?

John D. Brancato: I think we needed a whole new way in — a whole new franchise character and a whole different approach to telling the story. We wanted to take a character from our world, the present day, and deposit him in this post-apocalyptic nightmare. We wanted him waking up to this and not knowing where he is — if he’s alive or in hell — and then reveal the world through his eyes.

That’s really what enables this story to unfold — that we have this character that starts out on death row, about to receive a lethal injection and then wakes up in a new world 20 years later and tries to make heads or tales of it.

Michael Ferris: From there the fun thing to think about is what is Skynet’s ultimate agenda? Beyond just wanting to destroy man, what is this sentient computer network ultimately after? That’s something that really wasn’t addressed in any of the first three movies.

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Now that this is finished do you feel like you got this new rebirth started the way you wanted to?

John D. Brancato: I think this is a much more original film. It’s no longer a slave to the first two films in the franchise the way the third one sort of had to be. This one enabled us to reinvent.

Michael Ferris: I’m actually pretty proud of both films. They each served different purposes. The third one pushes a lot of buttons from the first two, and it plays a little lighter in tone, despite the apocalyptic finale.

This one is much more relentless. The tone is that of a kick-ass war movie, you know, a Blackhawk Down or something like that. It’s a lot grimmer. It’s a whole new feel for the franchise.

Terminator took in $13M Thursday night and is expected to bring $70M over the Memorial Day weekend. I’ll take the over on that — how about $76M?

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