Brian Austin Green Talks ‘Fathom’
Brian Austin Green as Derek Reese in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
If you’re wondering what projects Brian Austin Green (aka Derek Reese in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles) is involved with at the moment, there’s an in depth interview with him that’s been posted over at IESB.
During the interview he confirms that his time is devoted to the production of Fathom, the new super-hero film based upon the Top Cow comic of the same name. Green is co-producing the film for Fox together with Peter Safran (Slither / Meet the Spartans) and Steve Bessen (Gattaca).
Fathom will star Megan Fox as Aspen Matthews, a Jason Bourne-style amnesiac who is adopted by a military man after being found on an abandoned ship. She becomes a champion swimmer and marine biologist, but once she gets older realizes she is part of an underwater humanoid race that can control the power of water.
Green confirms to pull the movie off some ground will have to be broken in the way the film approaches its underwater sequences:
“I think the closest thing I’ve seen to this much underwater work was The Abyss, but they were either in their underwater station or they had the suits on and they’re swimming. They aren’t talking and swimming freely with sea-life. We have action sequences underwater, so, for us I think we are going to be breaking ground creatively with computers.”
He also states that one of the reasons Megan Fox is involved is her love for the comic and that for a very long time both he and Fox have been eager to bring the comic to the big-screen:
“Yeah, she grew up on it. She’s huge fan of Michael Turner [creator of the comic], she used to study his style of art and the way he drew things and the way he did things and she emulated that. She emulated his style for sure. Fathom was her comic, it related to her life. She was a swimmer and loved the ocean and wanted to do all that and was going to the Olympics and didn’t make it because she hurt herself but we always talked about Fathom and trying to make the movie which for me seemed, at that point, so far fetched. Like, “yeah! Let’s try and get a movie made, a big one! Let’s try to get this massive movie made based on a comic book that will no doubt cost so much money to make.”
Megan Fox as Mikaela Banes in Transformers
Fathom is presently in pre-production stage and Jordan Mechner (Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time) is currently working on the script.
“Yeah, Jordan (Mechner) who created the video game Prince of Persia and wrote the film is writing the script, he’s fantastic. He had a really fresh, great take on it, which we needed because it’s hard to take a graphic novel and then make a script – something you can shoot. And especially that one, so much of it was in this first-person, like you’d have Killian just sitting there talking right at you and it was really tough to make [movie] sense of and Jordan was great.”
Additionally, he confirms that every intention and effort will be made to honor the original work of creator Michael Turner (who has now passed away) by staying true to Turner’s original vision:
Yeah, at the point I went up to his house, he was actually sick at the time because he had just done chemo 3 days before and he was up and down. He was fighting already at that point. So, yeah, this for me, everytime we sit down up at Fox and read and talk about it, that’s the most important thing, I want to use as many of Michael’s sketches as we can for everything, for set design, costume design, everything. I want people, when they see this film, to see the vision he created. Genuinely, not just, this is the world, this is Aspen and the rest creative licensing, I don’t want to do that, Frank is a huge part of it, Frank loves the comic and obviously loved Mike and Mike was an amazing guy and I think we have a chance to make an amazing movie.
It is hoped filming will commence by Fall, but that no date has been set as there is still a lot of pre-production work to be done.
Read the full interview here.
