This was going to be a massive film for me. offices, and they announced they were pulling the plug for economic reasons and other reasons. I worked on it for a year and a half, and one day, a day before shooting, Tim and I and the producer Jon Peters, walked into Warner Bros. Gilroy: So in the ’90s, a million years ago, I spent a year and a half working on Superman Lives, the most epic debacle of all time.
#MAN OF STEEL AND VELVET WRITTEN YEAR MOVIE#
Speaking of movie studio hoopla, you’ve said Velvet Buzzsaw was also inspired by your work on Superman Lives, the Tim Burton superhero movie that never happened. Automatic branded IP exists in the library. But that’s that studios, right? They own the rights to a film and it’s a known name, so it’s branded to some degree and they’re going to milk the name. If somebody tried to make Citizen Kane, Orson may claw his way out of the ground and then destroy the footage and the camera. I thought of Orson Welles, too, because remaking Citizen Kane feels exceptionally egregious and totally plausible.
#MAN OF STEEL AND VELVET WRITTEN YEAR FULL#
Perhaps an artist who didn’t get their full due, was overlooked or maybe has some violent feeling towards I don’t know why Orson Welles comes to mind a little bit, somebody who, after Citizen Kane, when Hearst attempted to destroy him, kept going and clawing his way through and making great work and always working on the fringes, but looking at the center of it and commenting on it I think Orson Welles might be the closest I could come to.
Gilroy: Dease, in the film, is somebody who died who never wanted his work to get out, but I don’t know if there’s an equivalent to that. Is there any figure in the film world that you would compare to Dease, the mysterious artist at the center of everything (who’s murdering people from beyond the grave)?
That became a prime mover for how we were going to approach it. Pop art takes modern icons and images and then mashes them together to challenge tradition, and that’s sort of how I saw it. I decided early on that if this film was a piece of art, it would be pop art. Gilroy: Yes, and that’s the satirical part of it. Were you able to funnel your own artistic experiences into that setting? But the genesis of the idea was being in a contemporary art museum towards closing and really sensing and feeling the power of this art in a disturbing, powerful way. And I went to the basement, and there was a video installation, and I just started thinking, ‘Wow, the contemporary art world would be a really interesting place to set a thriller.’ Then, with the understanding I had of the contemporary art world, and through the research and certain themes that I wanted to bring up, it all started to coalesce. What was it about that space?ĭan Gilroy: I went up with some family members towards closing, it was in the winter, this big empty space, all this rather disturbing art. Polygon: Your wife and Velvet Buzzsaw star Rene Russo said at Sundance that a trip to Dia:Beacon art museum in upstate New York inspired this movie. With the film now streaming on Netflix, Polygon spoke to Gilroy about his inspirations for the fine-art madness, how the ending of the movie, in which John Malkovich’s artist character is seen wandering the beach, directly correlates to his screenwriting career, and exactly why Superman Lives died an untimely pre-production death. Twenty years later, the writer is directing his own independent features and, with Velvet Buzzsaw, finally working through the headache of his peak in Hollywood. The Nic Cage-led Man of Steel movie never happened, and as Gilroy puts it, the movie’s implosion was a wake up call for his career. Throughout the ’90s, Gilroy was the guy Hollywood called upon to make what wasn’t working work - a job that eventually landed him scripting duties on Tim Burton’s proposed epic, Superman Lives. The son of a playwright, and the brother of screenwriter Tony Gilroy ( Michael Clayton, the Bourne series), the brains behind Velvet Buzzsaw got his start after penning the 1992 sci-fi thriller Freejack, a script that earned him a few more writing jobs and a metric ton of punch-up work. Like his pawns in the art-world horror-thriller, Gilroy was once caught up in the commercial side of creativity. But according to writer-director Dan Gilroy, the gory mayhem comes from a very real place. Netflix’s new original film Velvet Buzzsaw, which premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, is outrageous: after discovering a deceased artist’s trove of uncelebrated work, an agent (Zawe Ashton), gallery owner (Rene Russo), and fine art critic (Jake Gyllenhaal) become the victims of a vengeful specter.