SDCC 2011: Relativity Media Panel – HAYWIRE and THE RAVEN (Hall H)

Director Steven Soderbergh and leads Gina Carano and Channing Tatum of Haywire have taken the Hall H stage [12:30p]…

• Soderbergh’s rule for the film: “Everything in the fights had to be real, and as a result they’re a bit shorter than you’re used to seeing. There was [only] a little bit of padding. [...] It was brutal.”

Clip screened: An extended hotel room fight sequence, in which Carano kicks an expected amount of ass (although perhaps unexpected given said ass is Michael Fassbender’s), ending in a gunshot death that received enthusiastic audience applause.

• Soderbergh announced that they recently remastered his early film King of the Hill, but doesn’t know if/when the DVD/Blu-Ray will be put out.
• Soderbergh on his inspiration to get into the industry: “I just loved movies and I was lucky. I didn’t know anybody, I lived in a suburb of Baton Rouge, but I was just lucky. I loved making movies, it’s a good job.”
• Soderbergh on his alleged retirement: “Matt Damon is about as discrete as a four-year-old girl. I had a drunken conversation with him, and I was just going off. In this economy, nobody wants to hear about somebody quitting a good job, so it got blown out of proportion. [Jokingly] That’s Matt’s fault.”
• Carano says that she plans to return to MMA later this year.

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Director James McTeigue and stars Alice Eve, John Cusack, and Luke Evans are now onstage, talking their Edgar Allan Poe film, The Raven [12:55p].

• Eve on shooting uncomfortable scenes, including being buried alive: “I had to eat a lot of dirt and James [McTeigue] ended up being the one throwing it in my face. Then he would get engrossed in the monitor and being obsessed with how it looked. I had a spit bucket, and it was rough. We were in Serbia, and they built a room there inside the desolate landscape there, in winter. So, [it was] method.”
• McTeigue: “To do justice to [Edgar Allan] Poe, you have to honor what the guy’s life was [which is often misunderstood].”
• Cusack on Poe’s relationship with women: “It’s obviously conjecture [...] but it seems to be that he didn’t like men and he loved being in the company of women, but he wasn’t a playboy so much as he felt comfortable with them and held them up to a muse-like [standard]. So he had these very idealized relationships with women that I think swing back to him losing his mother and first wife to tuberculosis. But he was a bit of a rockstar, going to salons and high society functions in which women would swoon over him. He was sort of a bad boy, but not in an obvious sense.”
• Cusack: “The fact that [the movie] was a fictional account of [Poe's] last five days gave us some liberties. We talked about it, and figured it would be like a dream I or [one of the other stars had]. I don’t know if it’s Poe, but I think he’s somewhere in there.”
• Luke Evans on recovering after dark scenes: “Psychological horrors are displaced reality so you just have to have fun and not stay in the head of [the person]. I don’t have trouble snapping back into reality.”
• Cusack on Eve: “Alice is very smart, very funny, very talented, but she’s also [...] very interesting to watch because [as director McTeigue once observed] she’s got a secret. She’s got something indescribable, amorphous. She’s just a very charismatic person.”
• McTeigue: “We made the decision to go to Eastern Europe to capture Baltimore of the 1840s. There was a lot of European immigration to America at the time, so it wasn’t that much of a stretch.”
• Cusack of the project: “It’s kind of an art movie and a popcorn movie all at once.”