Spoiler alert: This article contains complete spoilers for the movie “The Crow”, which is currently showing in theaters.
Director Rupert Sanders knows that “The Crow,” his third film, will inevitably be viewed through the lens of nostalgia for the 1994 hit.
“I just wanted to make something,” he says. “I knew there were people who wouldn’t want it to happen. But I didn’t make a video recording of someone — that movie still exists and those people will still love that movie.”
However, Sanders remains confident in his new vision of the antihero. In his film, Eric (Bill Skarsgård) and his fiancée Shelley (FKA Twigs) are murdered by crime lord Vincent Roeg (Danny Huston). However, Eric is offered the chance to walk the Earth once again as a powerful, dark vigilante known as The Crow and exact revenge by killing everyone in Roeg's organization.
For the 1989 comic book adaptation's second installment, the director had very specific inspirations in mind.
“I love movies like Jacob’s Ladder and Angel Heart,” he says. “They’re visually compelling and they deal with the psychological understanding of worlds beyond our own. I love the idea of a dark romantic love story, like the Cure song, that has this beautiful, broken sadness. It’s about love and loss and grief. I just wanted to speak to people in that way. … We’re an emotionally resonant movie that’s trying to compete with the big guys around us in this genre.”
One of the balancing acts Sanders focused on was making sure the love story was as epic as the action scenes and that the brawls weren't just empty images.
“It’s about making sure your character is present and emotionally engaged in these action scenes,” he says. “Bill did a great job, especially at the climax. He’s covered in blood, exhausted from killing, and he just stops for a minute to catch his breath — he’s almost crying inside. He doesn’t want to kill. In every action sequence there’s almost a page of dialogue, except that dialogue is choreographed action. In a way, he could have been talking in all these scenes, and the first part of the action is someone who doesn’t know how to hurt anybody, doesn’t want to hurt anybody, but he’s had to kill 20 people and he’s devastated by the fact that he did it.”
“There’s a sense of boredom with people throwing their bodies around and exploding if it’s repetitive,” he adds. “That’s where our film can compete with bigger films. I hope people will emotionally engage with the characters, and thus live those action scenes a little bit more. We didn’t reinvent the wheel — we didn’t have the money to blow up the White House. We’re in pretty bad shape, but it was about being smart and getting a great actor.”
The film's stunt coordinator, Adam Horton, agreed that there needed to be heart and emotion in the action scenes.
“In an early meeting, we went in a different direction,” Horton says. “We realized, ‘Wait a minute. This guy is a regular guy, but he just came back from the dead during his transition from being Eric.’ He didn’t go to a martial arts class. He just went back to this vengeful state. So we wanted to get rid of that, and it was all thanks to Robert’s guidance and Bill’s input. ‘Let’s really get him settled. He didn’t suddenly become a martial artist because he became the Raven. He’s still himself. He’s in pain.’ We want to sell that, we want to feel his journey and be emotional with him, empathize with him. We made it a little bit of a tug-of-war: What would a person with no skill do if you handed him a sword?”
Since portraying a less-than-skilled fighter is an uncommon request in most action films, Horton cited an unexpected inspiration: the 2004 romantic comedy “Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason.”
“I don’t think a lot of people know this, but there’s a beautiful fight in Bridget Jones where they’re fighting in the street and they end up in a fountain,” he says. “It’s like people who’ve never fought before. How are they going to fight? It’s obviously choreographed, but it’s very human. You feel this instinctive reflex to do something rather than the audience being able to read what he’s doing and what he’s about to do.”
As with many tragic love stories, “The Raven” ends on a sad but romantic note, as Eric ends his bloody journey and is given the option of letting Shelley come back to life if he is banished to Hell.
An interview with Skarsgård in Esquire caused a minor controversy over the film's ending, with the actor quoted as saying, “I personally prefer something more definitive,” and the author interpreted his answer to mean that the current ending “made the road easier for a sequel.” However, Sanders doesn't feel the film allows for any easy follow-ups in the future.
“Ironically, I don’t think that’s true at all,” he says. “If there’s a sequel, maybe 30 years from now, they’re going to have to find a way to get themselves out of jail a little bit because it’s definitely not, ‘What happens next?’ That would be cheap and not in keeping with the sentiment that we made the movie with.”
“Bill and I have watched five endings together, and I probably cut twenty,” he continues. “I think the editing and the language of cinema, rather than the words, is what really elevates the film. So the ending came out of a lot of trial and error: How do we find that emotional ending? The people you invest in throughout the film are never allowed to be together again, but you want that feeling that it was all worth it. It’s the right ending for the film and there’s something very definitive about our ending. It’s not predictable, it’s not ‘happy,’ and it’s definitely not like, ‘Wait for the sequel!’”
However, Sanders has a lot of big ideas about what future installments might look like.
“It’s hard because it was a love story between two people,” he says. “There’s a lot of things that I came up with and thought about that were ideas within some drafts of the script, or some elements that I was putting together that were kind of cool, but I felt like they weren’t ready yet. As far as his journey, I love the idea of being able to move like Nightcrawler between the other world and this world, and how you pull people in between, and the growing power of one side or the other — it’s cool.”
“There’s been conversations about it, and my mind is in a state of confusion right now… I’ve done everything I can creatively,” he continues. “But I’m sure after a couple of weeks of sitting around doing nothing and the movie being off my radar for a while, I’ll start to feel like doing it and I’ll start to think, ‘Maybe it’s…’ But we’ll see. If we’re lucky enough to have those conversations, that would be great. And I’m sure the team behind this can come up with something incredible for the next chapter.”
