Producer Mike De Luca Discusses Drive Angry & Dracula – Year Zero

By Masked Slasher
January 13th, 2010

Mike De Luca is a busy, busy man of late. Today he was on hand to chat about two of his most appealing projects, the Nic Cage car chase flick, Drive Angry, and Alex Proyas’ Dracula – Year Zero, both of which are shaping up quite nicely.

Collider nabbed the interview with the multi-tasking producer. Drive Angry is director Patrick Lussier’s follow-up to last year’s My Bloody Valentine remake and will come roaring out of all three dimensions. ”It’s hyper pulpy,” De Luca said of the revenge flick, featuring “car parts and body parts flying at you in 3D...If you’re a fan of from the 70’s Two Lane Blacktop or Vanishing Point and you’re a fan of Dusk Till Dawn or Sin City, this kind of glorious pulp movie-making, it aspires to be in that canon, so that’s my torch way of describing why I’m excited by it because I like all those things. And Drive Angry to me had a blend of things I liked about Two Lane Blacktop and Duel and Vanishing Point and things I loved about Dusk Till Dawn and things I loved about Sin City. And where we’re not as opulent as some of those films, we’re trying to be of that spirit.”

Regarding Dracula – Year Zero, he stated, “It chronicles the efforts of a young prince, Vlad of Transylvania, trying to keep the Ottoman empire and the Turks of the time from using his small country as a stepping stone to invade Europe. So there’s a historical basis for all of that history that’s in the script, but then his back is up against the wall and he can’t figure out how to keep the Turkish army out of his country and keep their hands off his country’s children, which they want to kidnap and press into their army as something they used to call the Jannisserie core, I guess the Romans did a version of it also, but this taking of male children from host countries and pressing them into military service for the invading army is another thing he’s trying to prevent. Because his own son is being threatened with that kidnapping. And in the script that we have, he was actually a victim of it himself.

He earned the reputation of being the impaler while he was serving the Turks. One Turk in particular, which is the antagonist in the movie, so in a moment of desperation he looks at this mountain top in Transylvania that all the gypsies in his country say is haunted and full of bad black magic. And he’s never believed in any of that supernatural kind of what he thinks is hogwash. But in a moment of desperation he ascends that mountain to see if there’s any truth to any kind of power that he could use to keep the invading army out. And he finds something that gets him to where we have come to know him as Dracula and uses that power source to kind of fight the Turks after he’s changed.”

I’m already in line for these suckers.

- MattFini