Movie News
Sam Mendes Explains Why PREACHER Feature Never Happened
“It’s off my radar because the muscle that I wanted to kind of flex, the urge to do something like that, went into Skyfall,” he said. “For a while I wanted to do something on a bigger scale, I wanted to try and tackle a movie that wasn’t entirely real and I wanted to see whether I was capable of directing action, so I feel like I’ve done a lot of it in this movie.”The bigger issue, though, may be that Mendes never quite figured out how to make Preacher work:
The other problem was I could not find a way of making Preacher—tonally it’s a very difficult thing to make work, and there’s a reason why it’s struggled so much. It’s a brilliant graphic novel, I loved it, but a lot of it takes place in the real world and we’re surrounded now by fantasy and superhero genre pictures which are full of eye candy. And actually, Preacher is much more real world, it’s more of a Southern Gothic with elements of the fantastic in it; it’s a quite difficult thing to balance. So it wasn’t just that I sort of walked away from it because they wouldn’t pay for it or anything like that, it was because I couldn’t really make it work, I couldn’t find a way of defining what it was onscreen. My strong suspicion is someone will come along who has a really good take on it and is able to do it.Hopefully, some time soon, there WILL be someone who will be able to make it work, and make it work perfectly – it would be a real shame if this one hadn’t made it to the big screen. Oh, btw. if you’ve read the comic, which actor falls to your mind first for the role of Jesse?