Heisserer talks The Thing...

The Thing screenwriter Eric Heisserer spoke with io9 recently about how the film sets up the back story for John Carpenter's classic...

"You're actually in the Norwegian camp before all that stuff happens," Heisserer tells the site. "You get to see how it happens — that's the reverse engineering there. The way we approached it was by autopsy, where the director, producers, and I pored over Carpenter's film. We must have screened it two or three dozen times. And we'd freeze frames and have lengthy discussions about what evidence is there that would lead to so much blood. It was a forensic discussion of Carpenter's film. That's probably where the whole 'fire axe in the door' came from. Because we said, 'We have to justify that; we have to have a moment in our movie where you see that happen.'"

Heisserer continues, "If we do this right — I just spoke on the phone today with [producer] Eric Newman; he's on set up in Toronto, [and] he said things are going well. But if we can pull this off, this movie will work perfectly [as] the first half of a double feature. So that the last shot of this film will be two Norwegians and a chopper chasing after a dog. And you can plug in Carpenter's film, and they will both feel and look as they have been made around the same time."

I'm sure there will be more, as the film is currently shooting in Toronto, Canada with Matthijs Van Heijningen at the helm...


(Thanks to Dread Central)