Production
To get back into work after a family tragedy, Philip Eisner pitched the idea for Event Horizon to Paramount Pictures; he had no plot, he just pitched it as "The Shining in space", which gained a positive reception from the executives.
After releasing the highly successful Mortal Kombat in 1995, Anderson was offered the movie. The release date had already been set and Anderson agreed to do the film, despite that the deadline meant that the post-production period was severely reduced. On the commentary, Anderson cited this as the main cause for the many troubles faced during production and especially when Anderson was to make decisions on the final cut.
In the commentary Anderson mentions the wish he had to direct an R rated picture after the PG-13 rated Mortal Kombat and also mentions that he turned down the opportunity to direct X-Men in order to make Event Horizon.
In Eisner's original script, it was tentacular alien beings who were the cause behind the hauntings of the ship. Anderson felt it was too much like the 1979 film Alien and wanted to go more into the style of The Haunting and The Shining, so he hired Andrew Kevin Walker to do an uncredited revision to the script into more of a classic haunted house movie rather than a monster movie, incorporating a number of elements of Hell in the story.
Anderson said that his initial cut of the film, before the visual effects had been completed, ran to about 130 minutes in length. The film was even more graphic in this incarnation, and both test audiences and the studio were unnerved by the gore. Paramount ordered Anderson to cut the film by thirty minutes and delete some of the violence, a decision that he regrets. Some of the lost scenes were offered as special features on the 2006 DVD but were taken from poor quality video tape, the only format in which the scenes now exist; the studio had little interest in keeping unused footage and the film has since been lost.
The original cut including the missing footage was reportedly found on VHS as announced in an interview by Paul W.S. Anderson when he was at ComicCon 2012
Read more about this topic: Event Horizon (film)
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“In the production of the necessaries of life Nature is ready enough to assist man.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Perestroika basically is creating material incentives for the individual. Some of the comrades deny that, but I can’t see it any other way. In that sense human nature kinda goes backwards. It’s a step backwards. You have to realize the people weren’t quite ready for a socialist production system.”
—Gus Hall (b. 1910)
“The society based on production is only productive, not creative.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)