Last week, ComingSoon.net spoke with the production and writing team of Alex Kurtzman and Bob Orci (“Alias,” Transformers, Star Trek) about their upcoming action-thriller Eagle Eye, but they also talked a little about the writing of Michael Bay’s sequel Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and some of the movies they’ve optioned based on Platinum Studios’ comics like Cowboys & Aliens, currently under negotiation to star Robert Downey Jr.!
CS: Have you two been able to be as involved in the sequel? Because of the strike, there was a question whether they could get it going fast enough for a summer ’09 release.
Orci: We gave them a treatment before the strike which they prepared off of, then when we came back, we started writing immediately, and back to your question about how we were able to do it. On “Transformers,” we demanded to be teamed up with the amazing Ehren Kruger, who co-wrote the movie with us, so it was really the three of us just spent four months in a hotel room and we got the script in shape.
CS: When I talked to you for “The Island” a couple years ago, you had a lot of ideas that you wanted to put in the first movie. Were you able to bring some of that stuff over to the second movie? There’s probably a ton of things you can do in a sequel so did you have some idea of that when going in?
Orci: There were many things that we knew for sure, many things from the first script that we were able to use, and then Ehren brought a bunch of great ideas as a pair of fresh eyes, so the combination of those two things were just fantastic.
CS: I have to say I’m not the biggest Transformers out there in that I know them from the old comics but not so much from the cartoons. Are you going to bring in some of the mythology that only the real fans will know?
Orci: I think that now that the Transformers have been introduced, we felt that we could take more time to really find out about them.
CS: The last time we spoke, you guys were working on adapting a book called “2012” for Michael Bay…
Orci: Roland Emmerich beat us to it. During the strike, he wrote a movie called “2012” and he just got it going, and we couldn’t write during the strike because it was a book. It wasn’t a spec that he did, and so he beat us to it.
CS: So you can’t finish that up and have to wait to see what happens with his movie?
Kurtzman: I think we just felt that given the fact that movie had so much momentum and was a Roland Emmerich movie already, why go up against that when we had just sort of acquired the rights to Whitley’s book?
Orci: And they’re about the exact same thing, you know?
Kurtzman: I think the next big project is “Cowboys & Aliens.” We’re really excited about that. Robert Downey Jr. just signed on to do it, either before or after “Iron Man.”
Orci: I don’t know if that’s closed though. Yeah, it was leaked, but it’s not official.
CS: I think it was said he’s in negotiations, but he’s obviously someone who’s very much in demand. That’s with Platinum Studios run by Scott Rosenberg, and I know you’re doing another movie with him, too.
Kurtzman: Yeah, we actually have another one of their comics called “Atlantis Rising” which we just got and we’re starting to put together now. Absolutely, they have great ideas coming out of there and our relationship with them on “Cowboys” has been really good, so hopefully, there’ll be more stuff together.
Orci: Really, what we have to do is make our own comics. What a great idea, we’re missing out.
Kurtzman: I agree… let’s do that!
You can read the rest of our interview with Kurtzman/Orci here!
Source: Edward Douglas, ComingSoon.net
