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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Firebeetle" data-source="post: 2799575" data-attributes="member: 34506">Beowulf times twoThere are TWO Beowulf movies.One is a live action, indie film <a href="http://www.beowulfandgrendel.com" target="_blank">http://www.beowulfandgrendel.com</a> Honestly, I think this one looks good.  The other is a motion capture computer animated picture by Robert Zemeckis, similar to Polar Express in method. Crispin Glover as Grendel and Angelina Jolie as Grendel's mother.  Neil Gaiman  co-wrote the script with Roger Avary.I'm not sure the link with work, so here's what Neil said about it.In 1998 Roger Avary asked me to cowrite a script for Beowulf for him to direct. We went off to Mexico together and wrote it as a sort of Dark Ages Trainspotting, filled with mead and blood and madness, and we went all the way from the beginning of the poem, with Beowulf as a hero battling Grendel, to the end, with Beowulf as an old man fighting a dragon. Robert Zemeckis really liked the script, and his production company, Imagemovers, bought it, for Roger to direct. (Imagemovers had a deal with Dreamworks at the time.)Dreamworks, for whatever reasons, didn't want to make it, and -- eventually -- the rights to the script reverted back to me and Roger.Roger went off and made Rules of Attraction. Last year he decided he wanted to make Beowulf as his next film. He started putting it together...Meanwhile Bob Zemeckis couldn't get our Beowulf movie out of his head. After the motion capture experience of Polar Express, he wanted to take the techniques on a bit, and make a film intended for adults with them. He and Steve Bing approached us about the script....And, after a certain amount of to-ing and fro-ing over the last month, Bob Zemeckis will be making a film of Beowulf, from our script. Roger and I are signed on to do any rewrites necessary (I suspect that some things that were easy to write for live action would be impossible or extremely costly to do as motion capture. But then, things that would have been impossible to do as live action may be easy as motion capture, so overall it should work out.)(No, it won't look or feel anything like Polar Express. When Bob Zemeckis told us the art style he had in mind our reaction was "Well, of course.")Roger and I are also executive producers on the film, and from what I've heard so far we're expected to work, it's not just a courtesy title.Roger's a little downcast about not directing Beowulf, though, so I've just agreed to go somewhere odd and write another film (a remake of a film I love, but wouldn't mind updating) with Roger for him to direct. (If I say "in my copious spare time", can we all agree that it should be read as if someone had actually invented the sarcasm mark as a unit of punctuation, and that "in my copious spare time" can be assumed to be inside sarcasm marks?)And that's all about that.</blockquote>

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