ShockTillYouDrop.com

Source:ShockTillYouDrop.com

December 3, 2007

Speaking openly with ShockTillYouDrop.com over the weekend in Beverly Hills, I Am Legend director Francis Lawrence addressed the talk of re-shoots that recently went down. For good or for worse, re-shoots on productions do often occur - yet on high-profile projects such as the latest "Legend" adaptation, when word leaks out, arched, suspicious eyebrows are raised and Internet chatter kicks up.

In Lawrence's case, he confirms final shooting was completed less than a month ago. "I'm a huge fan of pick-ups and re-shoots," he tells us. "There's this misconception that it's always a bad thing and for me it's like saying a painter only has one shot at a brush stroke. That you can't erase and do it again." Due to this production's tremendous CGI grocery list of scenes in various stages of evolution (an estimated 800 shots, he says), "we weren't seeing fully-rendered shots until about a month ago. The movie starts to take on a whole other life. It's not only until later that you can judge a movie as a whole and go, 'Huh, maybe we should shoot this little piece in the middle, or tweak this a little bit.' It just so happened that our re-shoots revolved around the end of the movie."

The director adds that re-shoots were called upon during the Keanu Reeves-starring Constantine and that he'd love to budget them into every film he tackles. "The studios just don't ever want to budget them in because it's like a contingency for them." More than happy to discuss the last-minute alterations Lawrence won't venture to say exactly what needed to change in the film's finale.