He’s been with the Wachowski Bros. from the start, ushering them in to Hollywood and speaking for the recluse visionaries. So Joel Silver has no trouble letting fans in to have a guess around the new movie the three are working on, Speed Racer. However, fans of the TV series may worry a little bit. Take the jump to find out why.
Speed Racer - a movie that is almost entirely green screened – has just wrapped principal photography, and is moving to the visual effects stage. Silver gives us a little peak in to what the brothers Wachowski are up too.
"The Wachowski Brothers really can't do anything easy," said Silver. "They want to make it as hard as they possibly can. So Speed Racer has a look that you have never seen before. It's really a vast panorama of the story. There's going to be a trailer out at Christmas, and it's pretty spectacular. So you'll see it pretty soon."
This is the bit that has me a little worried. I don’t want a “vast panorama” for my Speed Racer movie, or a look I’ve “never seen before.” This is Speed Racer, not the Matrix, and is intended to be fun and full of campy comic relief, with a hint of dangerous driving.
"There were a lot of green screen elements in the Matrix movies,” Silver continued. “There were a lot of things that were done in those films that were done in a very serious CGI format. This is even more advanced than that.
“Look at a movie like Ben-Hur. They took nine months to shoot that chariot race and they had to deal with the horses and the chariots and the crowds. Here's a movie that's made not even 50 years later, these big huge car races, huge crowds. And there are no cars, anyplace. It's all on the computer."
Now I’m all for putting time and effort in to a film – it’s what I crave from the brothers Warner when it comes to Justice League - but do you think that they are going too far with this? Is Speed Racer going to evolve in to another Matrix 2 & 3?