IAR was recently invited to the Sony lot in Los Angeles, along with several other outlets, to screen some scenes from the movie, in both 2D and then in 3D, as well as speak with Scott Stewart about the new film. Here is what he had to say:

To begin with, can you talk about how you decided on the color scheme for the movie?

Stewart: The graphic novel is actually black and white. It’s just very stark, so it’s all about silhouettes, which is really informative because I like to think about things in terms of silhouettes. I worked with our costume designer, in terms of the silhouette for the Priests and how they look different. The Sheriff character has a more Western silhouette, while the monsignors look like they’re from some kind of Orwellian realm. You see a lot of those characters hitting specific poses, along with the vampires themselves. The color palette is quite controlled, so red is really restricted in the movie, except for just in really specific places, like Lucy’s (Lily Collins) hair. She’s the damsel in distress and her hair is red. We used red for blood, although it’s a little less red than it initially was because of the MPAA. They have a thing with the color red. We tried to create a very stark landscape, so the cities are blue cyan, vampire light is green, and we removed blue from the sky because blue skies feel happy. We made them all slate grey. Then, we bleached the deserts out white, so that even though they’re in the desert, it doesn’t look warm. It just really feels like it’s cold, and we thought that was interesting. The idea of making a movie that, in many respects, has lots of hallmarks of a Western, and then color-correcting it as a science fiction film, I thought was a really interesting contrast. We removed tobacco as a color from the movie. Yellow has been removed, so that the movie is much cooler. But, it does have various different color schemes. With the prologue, we actually left more color in because it’s the world before it became what it became in the story.

Did you always plan to have the prologue of the film be an animated sequence?

Stewart: I had been thinking about that, when I had gotten the script initially it was just a scroll, you know, it was just one of those scrolls, people never read the scroll, they read the scroll but they never really remember the scroll.  So I re-wrote it and then I boarded it out, we’ll maybe have this on the Blu-ray. When I first animated this opening prologue sequence it was a little different, in many ways, from what we have here. But the ideas and the beats were the same. We presented it to the studio, and they were looking over the visual effects budget of the film going, “well this is several million dollars just in the opening of the movie.” But I knew that if I held firm for as long as possible that I might get something. But this was before the title of the movie and before the main body of the story so this would be one of the areas where the studio would be like, “oh, let’s cut that one out”. So I came back to them and I said, well if I could do it with sort of a strategy. Fortunately the MPAA let us have the sequence without making us change it but essentially it was animated to be an R-rating and I knew it would be a fraction of the price to do it that way. So I came back to the studio and I said, “I’ve got an idea of a way to do the sequence. It’s going to pay homage to the graphic novel and it can be done for this price.” They said, “really?” I said, “You got to just let me do it.” They said “okay, are you sure you can really do it”.  Then the studio was like, “Well it doesn’t cost that much money so if we don’t like it we can always cut it out.” Of course, as soon as they started seeing the images and stuff in motion, they were like, “Oh, this is a super cool, kind of fun and engaging way to bring people into the movie.”

Can you talk about how you determine the look of the cross that would be on the faces of the Priests in the film?

Stewart: We designed and played around with hundreds and hundreds of different designs and colors, and we ultimately came back to one that was really very close to the graphic novel. We started ones that were the entire face and the whole face was painted, and they end up looking like The Riddler (from Batman) or a Mexican wrestler. We were just playing around with crosses and the marketing team came up with this very industrial feeling. I was interested in taking the cross and making it more of a corporate logo, so what you see a lot in the movie is a cross with a circle around it. You see that all over the cities and everything. So it was one more attempt to sort of step us away from this world’s Christianity into something else. We eventually settled on the design and started putting it on faces. We did a black one, and we ended up going with something that felt almost more like a Henna tattoo because that looked more natural on film. It was really interesting. It was definitely not a one size fits all type of situation. There was a lot of discussion about how far down the nose it would go. Does it stop hard? Does it fade? Because you’re making a decision to put something like that on your beautiful actor’s faces, and it’s a risky one. Pretty much everyone who has seen the film in its entirety is like, “Oh that’s what the Priests look like.” You forget that they’re wearing them pretty quickly throughout the movie. 

The vampires in this film look very different from what we’ve seen recently in other movies, are they based on creatures in the comic book?

Stewart: The Cory Goodman script diverged from the graphic novel, in the sense that the graphic novel takes place literally in the past, in the 1880s. It’s the Old West and they’re fighting these fallen angels. It’s sixteen books long, every book would end with a cliffhanger, and there were dozens of characters. book sixteen ends with a, “Wait until book seventeen when blah, blah, blah happens,” and it never arrived. They never continued the series. I think creator Min-Woo Hyung just decided to focus on other things. So, Cory imagined the story as if it had progressed into the future, and what would happen, and the following just evolved. So the film is, in some respects, almost like a sequel to the graphic novel. Min-Woo actually came out from Korea, sat with us, looked at all the designs and read a translation of the script. That was the first time we had a chance to say, “What happens after book sixteen?” And he said, “As a matter of fact, I had imagined that the fallen angels in the comic book would create a blood lust among the people and they would become these zombie-vampire characters. Interestingly enough, Cory took the story in a direction that I was planning on going to.” He then wrote Priest Purgatory, which is another extension of the series that goes from book sixteen to where the movie goes. Since there are not vampires in the graphic novel, that is a long about way of saying the vampires are not based on drawings that he did. I had Chet Zar come in, and he had designed for Guillermo del Toro and a bunch of other people. He’s someone whose work I was a really big fan of. He just creates these really iconic monsters that are beautiful and soulful, and not just horror movie characters. They appeal to a broader audience. We sat and just talked about it for a very long time. We talked about the anatomy of them and how they would work. I’m a big believer of form following function. They live in darkness and they’re cave dwellers with a hive mentality. They have a queen, so we just worked backwards from there. He did hundreds of drawings and, eventually, we had one where we went, “Oh, cool!” It was that drawing that led us to decide to do the characters digitally, for the most part. However you want to use practical as much as you can. We didn’t want to get really far down the road, like a lot of movies end up doing, and not like how it looks on film, and then have to erase them and spend even more money to do them digitally. So, we said, “Let’s do tests early, and then make a commitment to doing it one way or the other.”

Both Priest and your previous film, Legion, examine themes of religion. Is that a topic you are trying to explore as a filmmaker? And are you concerned about comparisons between those two films?

Stewart: I was concerned about comparisons, but they’re pretty different films. I was initially concerned when they called me about Priest, but I read the script and was a fan of it. The comparisons are understandable, but they’re literally superficial, in the sense that there is a religious element in the movies and Paul Bettany is a supernaturally gifted ass-kicker, kicking creature’s butts. Those elements are literally the same, but the world and the mythology are really different. The movie is really a science fiction film and a Western. It’s not a horror film, per say, it’s much more of an action movie. So I was concerned about that thematically. We were asking literal theological questions in Legion that way at all. I don’t equate it to this world’s Church. It’s really an Orwellian state, and it’s much more about war powers and fascism and the enemy that we don’t understand but we keep fighting, and about soldiers. Principally it’s an emotional story, and it’s about sacrifice, on an emotional character and story level. It’s about people who go off to fight for a reason that they believe is just, and then they’re not sure when they come back broken from those experiences. They’ve left their families and have no relationships, and society has moved on from them, and they didn’t come back to a ticker-tape parade. Then, when you finally feel like you need to go and do something again and they say no, you start to ask yourself questions like, “What did I sacrifice all this for? Did I sacrifice to make the world better? Maybe the world isn’t as good as it was, even when I was fighting.” I thought those questions resonated. That’s much more what the movie is about.

You’ve worked with Paul Bettany on two films in a row now, what do you enjoy most about working with him?

Stewart: He’s really such a generous soul. We are really close friends now, after having worked together for a while, and we like to geek out on the same stuff. We’re interested in the same stuff. He’s a really great filmmaker, in addition to being a really good actor, so he just makes your job a lot easier. Legion was an ensemble movie, and I just this was an opportunity to put the whole movie on his shoulders, given that it’s called Priest. He looked like a young Clint Eastwood to me. He has that really chiseled, haunted look with his thousand-yard stare that he’s really good at conveying. It’s so interesting because he’s really warm and funny, and yet he comes across as really cold and timeless. He really fits well into a science fiction world, just visually. There are certain actors that you just believe in these fantastic settings. Some actors are really wonderful, but they just feel very contemporary and you want to do a romantic comedy with them. Some actors are great and they can just do everything. Paul and I had a discussion pretty early on, before we started shooting, about being co-heads, in a way. We wanted to set a tone for the making of the film. Making films, no matter what, is really, really, really hard. It’s just a grueling grind, so we didn’t want it to be a miserable grind, any more than it needed to be. We actually wrapped a couple hours early on our last day, and everyone stayed. It was the weirdest thing in the world. Usually, people just disappear like rats on a sinking ship, but Maggie had food brought in and everybody just hung out. We had a really, really good time actually making the movie. We had a tremendous crew and everybody was really wonderful on the film.

How did you end up casting Maggie Q in her role?

Stewart: Maggie and I had already met, and I was a fan. I was really interested in having her be in the movie, and I was just hoping and praying, when she came in to read, that she would be as awesome as I was anticipating, and it far exceeded everything for us. It was really great. We did the casting thing and had a lot of young, very attractive, very well known actresses, who came in wearing these cat suits and boots. And, Maggie came in wearing ratty jeans and a faded Beastie Boys t-shirt. She walked in and was like, “I think I dressed wrong for this.” I think their initial instinct was Underworld.

What can you tell us about the Priests and their role in the on-screen world that you’ve created?

Stewart: The Priests are supernaturally gifted soldiers, akin to the Jedi Knights. They were discovered to have supernatural gifts, they were trained to fight this war, they fought the war and won for humanity’s side, and then they got decommissioned. An analogy is the Crusaders, who went off to fight for the Church, and then the Church felt quite threatened by how powerful they were, so they started labeling them as pariahs and imprisoned them. They have no names, and they have these brands on their foreheads. The movie is really an alternate world movie. It’s not this world’s Church and it’s not this world’s priests. Maggie’s character comes into the movie, at a time where you’re not sure if she’s friend or foe to the main character of the film, and then you realize that they’ve shared the same nightmares and that they couldn’t find work. These people who once saved everyone have no applicable skills, so now they work in waste management or shoveling coal. I just thought that was an interesting thing. The Priestess character is giving voice to the repressed emotion of the characters in the movie, and the loss that they’re feeling. That’s one of the really fun things about when the character enters the movie.

Did you have problems with the MPAA, as far as getting the rating you wanted?

Stewart: It was actually very interesting because when we were getting ready to make the film, I knew what I had designed and I knew what the script was. We were right on the edge of PG-13 and R, and I could easily tilt it one-way or the other. The studio said, “Normally, these kinds of movies are R, so push it where you want to push it, but don’t push it in a way that you’re hurting the movie by dialing things back.” So we actually really had to change very little of the picture of the movie, there were just a few frames, here and there. Somehow, miraculously, when we made the blood just a little less red, it allowed us to get a PG-13. They have a really big thing about gun violence against people, and we had very little gun violence in the movie against people. There’s some stuff, but mostly it’s fantasy character violence. That’s what allowed us to do it. Senior folks at the studio were blown away that we were able to get the PG-13, considering how intense the movie is. The sound is something that they get fixated on. They were said, “When he stabs the guy, can you make it not sound like a stabbing sound?” I was said, “So, what you’re saying is that it’s better to see it, but not have it have a consequence?” It just doesn’t make any sense at all. I was talking to a friend who was on Sucker Punch and I was told a story about how Zack Snyder had a scene in the film that involved a rape of a character. The MPAA has an issue with women that I find really offensive. She was being raped and, with the nature of what happens in that film, with the character in an asylum, she actually submits to the attacker. They found that very disturbing and said, “If it’s a rape, its PG-13. If she submits, it’s R.” He cut the whole scene from the movie because he was so upset about it. So, we turned the red blood to brown or black and, suddenly, you just didn’t feel it as intensely and it was more appropriate for viewers as young as thirteen. But, I’m sure we’ll release an unrated version.

Did coming from a visual effects background help you with the budget?

Stewart: Oh, yeah, we got a lot in for not a lot. Obviously, the movie is filled with effects that are not hard to see, but I’m also a big fan of the invisible stuff. You don’t think about the fact that there are very few mountains in the movie, but you see the desert landscapes. We had a lot of conversations about sensation of depth and shape, but the 3D is not distracting. I didn’t want dramatic scenes to be overly deep, so that you would be looking at the clock on the wall in the back, as opposed to looking at the actors’ faces. I wanted to make sure that your eyes were still really directed and weren’t wandering around on the screen.

Is there going to be an unrated DVD/Blu-ray and what other extras do you have planned for that?

Stewart: The studio definitely wants to do the unrated DVD. We have a ton of extras. I’m a huge Blu-ray geek. I’ve learned a lot about movies and making movies from listening to great directors talking about stuff, since I was a kid watching laser discs. So, I always wanted people to feel like we were being as generous as possible with as much material as we could include. We haven’t done commentaries yet, but we’re all going to do commentaries. There are a bunch of documentaries. There’s some cool stuff that they’re doing on the Blu-ray, where they’re going to show 3D models of things that you can rotate and spin and look at. Hopefully, there will be a lot of really fun, neat things.

Finally, are there plans for a sequel yet?

Stewart: That’s up to the audience, and then eventually the studio.

So they haven’t sent you a script for the sequel or anything like that?

Stewart: No, and if they did, I would say, “Please don’t jinx it. Let’s wait until late May.” We’re coming out at a very, very competitive time. I don’t think they would have put us here, if they didn’t think we could compete, but we’re also competing at a really different level. We’re a much less expensive movie than those other movies that are in the marketplace that had probably four times the budget of us. We don’t have to perform at that scale to be wildly successful, as a film. Hopefully, that will allow us to continue to tell the story. But, I know that Cory has thought a lot about where the story would go. He and I have discussed ideas, so we’ll keep those in our back pockets and hope for the best.

Priest opens in theaters on May 13th.