Will Zero Hour Films focus primarily on horror, or will it run a gamut of genres?
Zero Hour Films' original mandate remains mostly intact: to develop and produce small- to medium-budget genre films with a focus on original storytelling and with an angle on a more "minimally-invasive" development process -- working with writer-directors and retaining a certain amount of creative autonomy, as opposed to the oft-vicious cycle known as Studio Development.
However, we recently set up a stoner comedy called High School and are developing three other scripts whose budgets easily top $100M -- a zombie film, a dark fantasy and a summer-tentpole actioner. So, we're clearly a bit flexible on some of our own boundaries.
You're also involved with an upcoming movie called The Dybbuk Box, co-produced by Sam Raimi's Ghost House Pictures. Are you a writer or producer on this,or both? I've read a little bit about this; isn't it based on some real-life incident or urban legend? Can you clarify the plot?
Dybbuk Box is, in fact, based on a true story -- check out www.dibbukbox.com. I was originally going to write the project -- we got the whole ball rolling a few days before the release of Grudge 1 -- but after the opening weekend numbers came in, Grudge 2 became a priority project and I couldn't do both at the same time. So I became a producer on Dybbuk and worked with Ghost House Pictures and Mandate to find another writer. We ended up working Moira Buffini, a brilliant English playwright -- she cracked the story and wrote several drafts. I came back onboard much later and wrote a few drafts. But somewhere along the line, a decision was made to radically alter the approach to the film. The last I heard, a friend of mine (Evan Katz) was working on an entirely new version.
You're even working on a TV adaptation of the movie Flatliners! Sleep much? What's the status on this? Are you planning on a network or a cable show? How will the storyline be related to the movie?
Not very much, no. Though that's more due to having a one year-old than anything else. I developed the series with Michael Douglas (who produced the original film) and Sony Pictures Television. We took the concept around to networks, who were intrigued but reluctant -- it's a relatively dark concept in comparison to the shows the major networks are running. So we took a step back and focused on creating a two-hour pilot to launch the series. There's a chance we'll be shooting the pilot and then bringing the project back to networks and cable -- but I'm still waiting for word from the studio.
The storyline is a bit under wraps, but it's (fortunately) not a remake. In fact, it's more of a continuance of the story -- it begins 18 years after the events of the original movie and explores what the expansion of medical technology in that time could have revealed about the flatlining phenomena.
