Production Information
JAMES McAVOY (Atonement, The Last King of Scotland), MORGAN FREEMAN (Batman Begins, Million Dollar Baby) and ANGELINA JOLIE (Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider) tell the tale of one overlooked nobody’s transformation into an unparalleled enforcer of justice in Wanted. In 2008, the world will be introduced to a hero for a new generation: Wesley Gibson.
Visionary director TIMUR BEKMAMBETOV (creator of Day Watch and Irony of Fate: The Continuation, the two biggest films in the history of Russian cinema) powers this twisted and visceral adventure of 25-year-old Wes (McAvoy), a slacker who hates his life—with good reason, because it sucks.
At work, his ballbuster of a boss lives to torment him in front of his fellow cube-dwelling drones. Back home, his skeezy girlfriend is a sexual magnet for everyone except him, including Wes’ supposed best friend. No wonder this loser is on his 10th prescription for panic attack pills, which he downs like candy between cardboard meals of vegan tofu wraps.
Wes’ pathetic excuse for an existence might just as well come to an end and save him a lifetime of prolonged misery.
Fortunately for Wes, his life is over—his old one, anyway…and all because of a girl. Enter hot Fox (Jolie), who crashes into Wes on the business end of a smoking gun. Seems Wes’ long-lost and mostly forgotten dad was killed while working for the Fraternity—a centuries-old league of supersensory trained assassins pledged to carry out the unbreakable orders of fate. Their motto: Kill one, save a thousand.
Now it’s Wes’ turn to follow in his father’s footsteps and release the caged wolf that’s always lurked inside of him. Killing is in Wes’ blood, and he trains under Fox and a motley-but-lethal crew that includes the Fraternity’s enigmatic leader, Sloan (Freeman). The neophyte is forcefully pummeled into developing lightning-quick reflexes and superhuman agility. No one said becoming an assassin would be easy.
The former slacker is reborn as the golden boy of the Fraternity and Wes starts to relish his new life, even exacting some best-served-cold revenge on tormentors past. But soon, the sweet taste of power sours when he realizes that the intentions of his deadly associates aren’t as noble as first presented. As he wavers between newfound heroism and soul-killing vengeance, Wes will come to learn what no one—neither cold-blooded father nor steaming-hot assassin—could ever teach him: He alone controls his destiny.
The film also stars TERENCE STAMP (Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace, The Limey) as Pekwarsky; THOMAS KRETSCHMANN (King Kong, Resident Evil: Apocalypse) as Cross; and COMMON (American Gangster, Smokin’ Aces) as The Gunsmith.
Universal Pictures and Spyglass Entertainment present the visually stunning world of Wanted, based on the series of comic books by MARK MILLAR and J.G. JONES. The screenplay for Wanted is written by MICHAEL BRANDT & DEREK HAAS (3:10 to Yuma, 2 Fast 2 Furious) and CHRIS MORGAN (Cellular, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift), with a story by Brandt & Haas.
Wanted is produced by MARC PLATT (Broadway’s Wicked, the Legally Blonde series), JIM LEMLEY (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Red Eye), JASON NETTER (television’s Wolverine & the X-Men, the upcoming The Red Star) and IAIN SMITH (Children of Men, The Fountain). Executive producing are ADAM SIEGEL (The Perfect Man) and MARC SILVESTRI (The Covenant) and Spyglass Entertainment’s ROGER BIRNBAUM and GARY BARBER (Eight Below, Bruce Almighty).
The filmmakers have assembled an international team of sterling behind-the-camera talent, including director of photography MITCHELL AMUNDSEN (Transformers, Transporter 2), Oscar®-winning production designer JOHN MYHRE (Memoirs of a Geisha, Chicago), Academy Award®-winning film editor DAVID BRENNER (Independence Day, Born on the Fourth of July), costume designer VARYA AVDYUSHKO (Day Watch, Night Watch) and composer DANNY ELFMAN (Spider-Man 2, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory).
BEFORE THE PRODUCTION
From Comic Book to Screen
“Cool as hell,” “unique,” “experimental,” “ironic” and “creative genius” are just some of the words used to describe Russian-born director Timur Bekmambetov, who hails from the city of Guryev in Kazakhstan. Bekmambetov’s vision has landed him his first English-language film, in collaboration with astute producers and an award-winning cast and crew, all under the aegis of a large American movie studio.
Just how did that happen? Perhaps a little background…
The year 2004 saw the release of Bekmambetov’s film Nochnoy Dozor (or Night Watch). The film was budgeted at $1.8 million but grossed more than $16 million in Russia alone, making it more of a hit in his own country than The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. The sequel to Night Watch (the first installment of the trilogy), Day Watch, was released in Russia in early 2006. Again, the film was considered low budget (costing just $4.2 million) and became a juggernaut—grossing nearly $40 million in Bekmambetov’s home country.
About the same time, executives at Marc Platt Productions had come across Mark Millar and J.G. Jones’ first issue of their comic book series “Wanted” and immediately thought the dark and inventive tale had huge cinematic potential…but the subject matter (a covert band of super villains who has split up the world into factions) needed an offbeat spin. They sought an exciting, creative new filmmaker who thought beyond limits and, after seeing Night Watch, they knew they’d found their man. If Bekmambetov could create such a visually stunning movie on such a low budget, producers reasoned, there would be no holding back the auteur’s energetic point of view and dark sensibility when given a large-scale budget and the vast resources available to a studio-made film.
Producer Marc Platt comments, “The cinematic experience of Timur’s work and the visual language employed by him are so unique, eye-popping and extraordinary, I knew his was a voice that had to be heard. I had never experienced visual images in that way. I thought by matching him and his ability to create a completely new world with this material, we could create something exciting, experimental and yet accessible for audiences all over the world.”
Bekmambetov’s producing partner, Jim Lemley, adds, “We spent two years getting from the first draft of the script to the shoot. It was important for us to push through a comfort level of what had been seen on film before and come up with ideas—no matter how outlandish they seemed on paper—that could visually blow the audience away.”
Regarding his trust in the director’s unique vision, Lemley concludes, “You could put three people in a room, give them the same camera and ask them to take the same shot. Timur’s image would be amazing.”
Of his thoughts on visual imagery, Bekmambetov remarks, “It is like 100 ideas are going on inside my brain, all fighting to come out. What happens is this makes a new style, maybe something that no one has seen before. I want to put the audience in the action—in the middle—so that they go on a journey with the character, not just sit and watch.”
The director’s mantra seems to be a fantastic realism on each of his projects. He believes there should be a realistic base to every action, every emotion, no matter how outlandish the circumstances. As a director, his attention to detail gives him something on which to focus—a solid way into each scene.
“Making my first film in English is not so different from my other movies,” claims the director. “I just try to communicate with the audience, fall in love with them in a way and make a good movie for them—be a good storyteller for them.”
The director’s approach to filmmaking and skewed tone hardly changed with his move to an American-studio and English-language production. Platt adds, “Bekmambetov brings a very strong sardonic sense to his work, which was very present in all of his previous films. Not in a silly, broad way, but in a dark, comedic way that constantly undercuts the earnestness of the proceedings. It is the irony that he brings to the project, both narratively and visually, that gives Wanted a very unique tone.”
That black humor is also present in the project’s source material, Millar and Jones’ graphic novel of the same name (originally published as a six-issue limited series). More than just acquiring the property that was one of the best-selling independent comic books of the last decade, the filmmakers were also keen on obtaining the blessing of the original creators.
At the time Millar had sold the movie rights to Universal, he and Jones were only up to the second issue. So, while Millar was finishing the series, the studio had almost finished the first draft of the screenplay.
With two parties writing independently, both projects took on separate lives. Millar comments, “I was relaxed about this, because the comic book and movie were two distinct entities. Regardless of what they changed, my book would be untouched. But I was pleased to see them going back again and again to the source material, and once they had my entire book in a complete form, subsequent drafts by other screenwriters incorporated pretty much all of the main material. They dropped the super villain backstory I had in the original book, but everything else works very well.”
Before advancing on separate paths, both the graphic novel and graphically violent screen version of Wanted started in the same place (the first one-third of the screenplay mirrors the first two chapters of the series…but then diverges). The comic writer feels that although the stories take place in very different places, the tone, the characters and basic narrative remain the same in both versions.
Millar observes, “The first 40 minutes of the film are pretty much identical, scene for scene, to the book, and I was pleased with that. This wasn’t the case with the first draft, but once Timur was attached, he really just embraced many of the darker aspects of the material. I thought they might drop some of the slightly more edgy material, but captions, voiceovers, dialogue and entire sequences were lifted straight from the book. I was so pleased to see that. One of my favorite scenes that was transplanted was the opening scene where, suddenly, this guy sees a dot on his head, takes out his guns, jumps out the window and starts chasing after these assassins. It’s beautiful that the way it’s actually shot is almost panel for panel like the comic book.”
Not only was the writer impressed by the filmmakers’ attention to detail, but by how the screenwriters and Bekmambetov expanded upon key scenes from the first two chapters in his series. Says Millar, “There were a few scenes where I only had a couple of panels to play with, because you don’t really have a lot of room in a comic book. Timur and the guys fleshed them out and made them into cool scenes with gigantic chase sequences.” As a nod to die-hard “Wanted” comic aficionados, Millar acknowledges, “There’s all these little ‘Easter eggs’ that fans of the book will be able to pick up on. The second chapter, for example, is called ‘F--k you,’ and Timur had a little laugh with this by incorporating the words on a computer keyboard flying toward us when the main scene was brought to life in the movie.”
Producer Platt adds, “Mark really embraced Timur. The comic is fantastic and gutsy and it has a real edge to it, and that’s what we wanted to build into our script. We didn’t want to make something run-of-the-mill…We wanted to roll the dice and try for something special. Where the script follows the comic book, we didn’t change a word of it. But, of course, the movie is its own thing. Millar backs it, and that’s important to us as filmmakers.”
Not only was it important for the director to honor the inventiveness of the source material, he intended to respect Wesley’s search for reality in a world of deceit. “This is really a story about truth,” sums Bekmambetov. “Wesley is trying to escape from a world where people lie and find people who tell the truth. Along the way, he finds you can’t do anything about fate, but you can destiny. You choose and you steer your destiny. Something everybody is trying to do.”