Akiva Goldsman talks 'Lobo' Among Other Things

Akiva Goldsman is a well respected screenwriter in Hollywood. He won an “Adapted Screenplay” Oscar for A BEAUTIFUL MIND at the 2002 Academy Awards. That was the follow up to BATMAN AND ROBIN. That’s right, the guy who wrote the BATMAN AND ROBIN screenplay has an Oscar…

Since his Oscar however he has done CINDERELLA MAN and I AM LEGEND, both of which I liked. Well now he’s dipping his foot back into our waters my dorky friends. A career that started with movies like BATMAN FOREVER and LOST IN SPACE is now going back to the Sci-Fi comic well after success elsewhere. Obviously I AM LEGEND is a movie directed at a lot of us, but that was just the beginning.

Since then he’s been busy. He produced and had a cameo in HANCOCK, as well as a cameo in STAR TREK. He is producing THE LOSERS, JONAH HEX, LOBO, and the upcoming FF reboot. He is also talking about one of my personal favorites, SWAMP THING.

Here is some of what he had to say to the LA TIMES:

On BATMAN & ROBIN:
"What got lost in ‘Batman & Robin’ is the emotions aren’t real, the worst thing to do with a serious comic book is to make it a cartoon. I’m still answering for that movie with some
people."

Personally I will never forgive him for BATMAN & ROBIN, but President of production at Marvel Studios Kevin Feige did bring up a good point a few months back: , "BATMAN AND ROBIN was more than a mere failure. That may be the most important comic-book movie ever made. It was so bad that it demanded a new way of doing things. It created the opportunity to do ‘X-Men’ and ‘Spider-Man,’ adaptations that respected the source material and adaptations that were not campy."

On JONAH HEX: "He’s a character that has been described as having one foot on Earth and one foot beyond the grave, that he speaks to the dead . . . at the same time he is very much [like Sergio Leone’s] ‘The Man With No Name.’ "

On LOBO: "There’s something hyperbolic and authentic about a Guy Ritchie movie. His best movie are deeply, deeply stylized yet they are all grounded; there’s a grit of stylization, which sounds like an oxymoron but it makes perfect sense when you’ve seen his films.We’ve never seen Guy’s sensibility married to a project with such a large special effects budget. We’ve got the character design pretty much done, and the test will get us moving forward to the next step"

On SWAMP THING: "We want a film with real Southern, dark horror overtones, a little bit like a classic Universal horror film"

In regards to Swamp Thing, Goldsman also said will be closer in tone to the character as presented in Alan Moore’s eerie, metaphysical horror comics than the rubber-suit bog creature from the 1982 Wes Craven B-movie. That is good news.

So there you have it, not much info on the FF reboot, but the DC stuff was all mentioned.  What do you think of Goldsman?