Screenwriter Eric Heisserer Talks Bringing The Thing Story Full Circle
Steve Barton
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One thing on the minds of horror fans everywhere concerning Universal’s upcoming prequel to the John Carpenter classic The Thing is how this new film is going about setting up the back story. Finally, we have a bit of a clearer picture of the proceedings.
Website I09 recently caught up with screenwriter Eric Heisserer, who shed some light on the subject plot-wise.
“You’re actually in the Norwegian camp before all that stuff happens,” Heisserer tells the site. “You get to see how it happens — that’s the reverse engineering there. The way we approached it was by autopsy, where the director, producers, and I pored over Carpenter’s film. We must have screened it two or three dozen times. And we’d freeze frames and have lengthy discussions about what evidence is there that would lead to so much blood. It was a forensic discussion of Carpenter’s film. That’s probably where the whole ‘fire axe in the door’ came from. Because we said, ‘We have to justify that; we have to have a moment in our movie where you see that happen.’”
Heisserer continues, “If we do this right — I just spoke on the phone today with [producer] Eric Newman; he’s on set up in Toronto, [and] he said things are going well. But if we can pull this off, this movie will work perfectly [as] the first half of a double feature. So that the last shot of this film will be two Norwegians and a chopper chasing after a dog. And you can plug in Carpenter’s film, and they will both feel and look as they have been made around the same time.”
We like! We definitely like. It’s really nice to hear so much attention going into the details of making this new film co-exist with the other. There’s a lot more goodness in the interview, too, including some creature talk. Hit up the above linkage to dig!
Universal’s prequel to The Thing is now shooting up in Toronto, Canada under the direction of Matthijs Van Heijningen. Look for more soon.
Synopsis
A Ph.D. candidate (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) joins a Norwegian research team in Antarctica after it discovers an alien ship in the ice. When a trapped organism is freed and begins a series of attacks, she is forced to team with a blue-collar mercenary helicopter pilot (Joel Edgerton) to stop the rampage.
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