With the two successful films, Underworld and Underworld: Evolution, a franchise was created. Now they’re going back to how the whole war between the vampires and the Lycans all started with the prequel Underworld: The Rise of The Lycans, which will hit theaters nationwide on January 23. I had the opportunity to head to picturesque Venice, California to preview the film at Luma Pictures, where myself and selected press members also got to chat with first-time director Patrick Tatopoulos – who is no stranger to the franchise, having created the Lycan effects for the first two films – and VFX supervisor James McQuaide. Before we got into all that, though, we were lucky enough to see two thrilling sequences from the film, which I’ll describe below.
Michael Sheen as Lucian
The first sequence we were shown features Michael Sheen as Lucian, the very first Lycan, and his new love Sonja, played by the lovely Rhona Mitra, a vampire who is forbidden to be with Lucian but goes against her father Viktor’s (Bill Nighy) will and flees with Lucian and his trusted friend Raze, played by the hulking, deep-voiced Kevin Grevioux, who has appeared in all three films and co-wrote the original Underworld film with director Len Wiseman and co-writer Danny McBride (not the funnyman Danny McBride, FYI). This scene features Lucian, Sonja and Raze slaying an army of werewolves – in gruesomely awesome fashion, might I add – when, confronted with constant werewolves, Lucian removes his shackle that prevents him from turning into a werewolf and transforms – in a rather incredible fashion, I must say – into a hulking werewolf, which obviously confuses the hell out of the werewolves that were about to attack them.
The second sequence we were shown is the start of a huge battle sequence, most likely at the end of the film. We see Bill Nighy’s Viktor perched atop his huge castle who then readies the fort for battle when an army of Lycans are storming their way. It’s a really slick sequence, and we see a number of awesome transformations as they storm this fortress. We also see a number of sweet kills, some with these ginormous crossbows that the vampires employ… and some by the Lycans when they finally scale the walls, enter the compound and start tearing some vampires to shreds… literally. While the color matching was still not that accurate, according to Tatopoulos and McQuaide, it still looked pretty damn awesome to me and, if these two scenes are indicative of the action we’ll see when this hits theaters in a few weeks, I’m pretty damn pumped to see the rest then.
After that sneak peek of awesome footage, we all turned our recorders on and fired some questions at director Patrick Tatopoulos and visual effects supervisor James McQuaide, and here’s what they both had to say about a number of aspects on this new film.
Director Patrick Tatopoulos and VFX Supervisor James McQuaide
This is your directorial debut and you’re being bestowed with an origin/prequel story, but you’re also granted this big epic The Lord of the Rings-like battle that’s referred to in the first Underworld. How did you convince them to let you direct this one?
Patrick Tatopoulos: It was actually offered to me, at some point. They came to me and said, ‘Hey you’d be a logical choice. You’ve been working on the first two movies, we’ve known each other for awhile.’ It just came to me. When I read the script and I realized it was going to be about werewolves than anything else, I got excited about it. This is kind of all my stuff. It’s so interesting when you say The Lord of the Rings, because I don’t see it like that. I think it’s more like Gangs of New York with werewolves. It’s smaller, with clans fighting each other. The scale feels really big at the end. It’s like 300 werewolves versus 300 vampires. So I didn’t want the scale to feel ridiculous, just to be able to do it properly. The key for me was to do a movie that was a little more different than the two first ones. I don’t know what I could do to do another one like the first two ones. I was excited because it was a chance to retain the style but to do something fresh and new. That’s what was exciting to me.
