"Sequels are whores' movies," comments award-winning screenwriter William Goldman in his latest book 'Which Lie Did I Tell?'

Goldman states that when "we start to write our screenplay, it must be so original and dazzling, so different and glorious, people will have no choice but to love us. And Why. Because we are wonderful."

For those who are not familiar with William Goldman, he has been writing books and movies for forty years: he wrote three novels: The Princess Bride, Marathon Man, and Magic, and the screenplays for The Great Waldo Pepper, The Stepford Wives, All The President's Men, Marathon Man, A Bridge Too Far, Magic, Butch Cassidiy and the Sundance Kid, The Princess Bride, Misery, Maverick and Absolute Power.

"The pulse of what we write then is always this: creative. The pulse for a sequel is always this: financial. So they are never of a similar quality."

Goldman mentions that there are exceptions; George Miller said that he had no money to make the first 'Mad Max'. He did the sequel because he wanted, hopefully, "to get it right this time'.

"Steven Spielberg, the most successful figure of our time, has six sequels to his credit so far: one 'Jurassic Park, one 'Gremlins', two Indiana Jones, and two Back to the Futures. With Attack of the Clones, Lucas has tied him: one American Grafitti, two Indiana Jones, and four Star Wars… So the two richest film guys have the most whores' movies…"

"People will come up with all kinds of bullshit for whoring,"says Goldman. I remember telling people, Well, there was just so much great stuff about 'Butch and Sundance' I couldn't fit in the first one. Womderful interesting new material. Bullshit. That was a whore talking. And whatever Lucas tells us today about why he did the deed, whatever excuse he comes up with, it will be bullshit. If you disagree, then answer this: Why didn't he finance a sequel to Howard the Duck?"

One of the most eagerly awaited sequels of the year is surely Blade 2.

The legendary superhero Blade was first introduced in the pages of the Marvel comics and brought to life in the 1998 blockbuster, Blade.

Goyer, screenwriter for both the original and Blade II (as well as serving as Executive Producer), says that he "envisioned a trilogy of films" when he first wrote Blade, so consequently while writing, he left himself a couple of "outs." "One of the outs we left ourselves was that you don't actually see Kris Kristofferson on camera taking a bullet to his head. You hear the gun shot but you don't actually see what happens."

Producer Frankfurt and screenwriter David S. Goyer's working relationship goes back to the original film.

"I met Goyer and he was this young whipper snapper and a total comic book aficionado," says Frankfurt. When the time came to plan the sequel there was no question that Goyer would write it. "He is the mind from where all this comes and he was absolutely essential."

Goyer and Frankfurt both admired director Guillermo Del Toro and believed his dark sensibilities to be ideal for Blade II. Frankfurt first met Del Toro when his design company, Imaginary Forces, did the title sequences for Mimic. "I admired Mimic and got to know Guillermo through that film," says Frankfurt. "Both Goyer and I have been fans of his since Cronos and were enthusiastic about him coming on board. Guillermo is such a visual director and has a very strong sense of how he wants a movie to look. When you sign on with someone like Guillermo you're not going to tell him what the movie should look like, you're going to let him run with it."

Adds Goyer, "Guillermo has been a friend of mine for years and he knew I was writing Blade II. I kept saying to him 'when I'm done we're going to be coming for you.'"

Everyone was unanimous in wanting Blade II to be much scarier than the first. Frankfurt says, "Guillermo understood what worked in the first movie and was very excited about keeping that kind of baseline and amplifying it in places, but then also bringing what he does best -- to make it really, really scary."

Like Goyer, Del Toro also has an enormous passion for comic books. "Guillermo was weaned on comic books, as was I. I was a huge comic book collector… my brother and I had about twelve thousand comic books that we assembled when we were kids, so I know my background," Goyer says.

Del Toro was very careful to not to alter the script too much as the idea had already been created by Goyer and Steven Norrington (director of the first Blade) and Snipes.
"I wanted the movie to have a feeling of both a comic book and Japanese animation," says the director. "I resurrected those sources and viewed them again. I dissected most of the dailies from the first movie; I literally grabbed about 4 boxes of tapes and one by one saw every single tape from beginning to end until I perfectly understood where the language of the film came from. I studied the style of the first one and I thought Norrington has a tremendous narrative style. His work is very elegant."

The film, which begins where Blade left off, in Moscow, was shot entirely in industrial warehouses in the suburbs of Prague, Czechoslovakia. Del Toro wanted Blade to exist in a decadent Eastern European city like Prague to differentiate the experience from the Blade universe in America. "The very first idea for Prague was exclusively an economic one," says the director. "But I also thought it made sense as the first one ended in Moscow to continue in Prague. So we went for the abandoned industrial kind of city but also tried to give it a goth tech look."

When it came to production design both Del Toro and Goyer had one person in mind, Carol Spier. "I think Carol is one of the best production designers in the business," says Goyer. Del Toro, who worked with Spier on Mimic, adds, "Carol has a way of making even the most outlandish set concept seem real.

Director of photography Gabriel Beristain (The Spanish Prisoner) was surprised by Del Toro's call. Though like the director, he is Mexican-born, Beristain has spent much of his film life in England, where his first international film was Caravaggio. "Gabriel shot two of my favorite looking films, Dolores Claiborne and Caravaggio," Del Toro explains. "Peter and I met with Gabriel and we basically said, 'Let's do an action Caravaggio; let's make the movie as beautiful as Caravaggio but as a kick-ass action movie."

Del Toro and Beristain met at length to discuss the visual look of the film. It wasn't until Del Toro showed Beristain a comic book of Hellboy that it all started to come together. "He gave me this book and the cover was the main character of Hellboy against a yellow, dark night sky - an amber." That was the look that would follow through. "We started creating a look that was not conventional, we started breaking certain rules and to give the film a comic book look without being overtly comic book. We were doing a Magritte, looking for colors and images that were quasi surreal in terms of colors and textures - yet unassuming." Del Toro adds, "When we were discussing the style of the movie I wanted it to be dark but with real chiaroscuro and a real sense of style."

"Guillermo is not a type of director you impose your style on - he has his style and I translate it," says the D.P. "I've seldom found any directors as talented and quick as Guillermo. His mind works at a tremendous speed and he has a clear visual idea of what he wants."

Del Toro worked with Beristain and the visual effects team to created what he calls "L-Cam" - a liberated camera that moves in ways normal cameras can't. "We go with some of the action to places," he explains, "following the characters in ways that a normal camera would just simply not be able to do."

The visual and special effects play a large part in the film and both teams are headed by Oscar winners: Nick Allder, Special Effects Supervisor, Oscar winner for Alien; and Nick Brooks, Visual Effects Supervisor, Oscar winner for What Dreams May Come.
Allder put together his crew relatively quickly for a movie this size, shipping over 80 tons of equipment from the UK alone. His team was both English and Czech. "I've got a tremendous crew," says Allder. "Even though the local guys don't have a huge amount of experience, they're more than willing to learn."

The crew's task would be to create a live action visual representation of Del Toro's sketches. Del Toro's mandate throughout was to realistically blend both the comic book nature of the movie into the visual effects and makeup.

One unifying concept among the ranks of cast and crew was to make a film that would be as fun to watch as it was to make. "It's not meant to be anything but a really fun anime comic book - a beautiful, shiny thing that moves and constantly amusing us. Part of that is to have special effects integrated into the action in a different way than you normally see. We are fusing digital effects with makeup, with prosthetics, with puppets, all into a single scene that keeps the eye of the audience guessing. I think a little more sleight of hand went into planning these effects. This movie is very much a ride."

Whether or not Blade 2 is Del Toro's 'whore', or not, it is clear that there will be plenty more prostituting going around to please the appetite of hungry fans of horror-action movies.

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