Interview: Scott Derrickson, co-writer/director, “Doctor Strange”

The Wrap interviews Scott Derrickson (The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Sinister) who co-wrote (with C. Robert Cargill and Jon Spaihts) and directed the latest Marvel movie Doctor Strange.

TheWrap: What was it like going from the horror genre to the super hero genre?

Scott Derrickson: My first instinctive answer is that it was nice to work on something more positive. And not have my headspace in something so dark for so long. But it was also weirdly similar because of the fantastical nature of the movie. In my horror movies, I was always trying to deal with real characters and real character drama played by good actors … Laura Linney, Ethan Hawke, Eric Bana, and Tom Wilkinson, people who don’t do horror normally. And watching characters, real characters, encounter the fantastical. So in this case I got actors of this caliber who are dealing with the fantastical, so that’s the crossover. It felt oddly similar, just not as dark.

How did you bring the wild and fantastical elements of the classical Steve Ditko comics to a grounded and real cinematic universe?

Some of them, like the dark dimension, that’s straight from the comics. That was really an attempt to capture the quality of that artwork. I think most of the time it was a desire to get my head into what the comics were, at the time, in the ’60s. It was so psychedelic, and so reaching for the surreal I think is the best way I can put it. In a free-flowing, fun kind of way. That’s what psychedelic art was, that’s what psychedelic music was. And so I was so immersed in that in my own mindset that I didn’t want to make something that was nostalgic. I wasn’t trying to reach back to the ’60s aesthetic. … I’ve got these incredible tools in visual affects. What can I do that’s the 2016 version of that?

Here’s one thing that makes me excited to see Doctor Strange:

Superhero movies are notorious for set pieces in which entire cities collapse around fighting heroes and villains. But “Doctor Strange” director Scott Derrickson wanted to go in the opposite direction.

“You can create screen stimulus in other ways,” said the director, whose past films include the horror movie “Sinister.” “But you just have to create. You have to be inventive… It’s about a different approach to screen stimulus and to giving people their money’s worth when they’re paying to see a big event movie.”

No more Manhattan destroyed sequences. Woot!

For the rest of the interview, go here.

Twitter: @scottderrickson.