EXCL: David Twohy on Continuing the Riddick Saga

Earlier today, ShockTillYouDrop.com had a chance to sit down with director David Twohy to talk about his upcoming psychological thriller A Perfect Getaway and during our interview, we got around to talking about Twohy's dark sci-fi franchise, which seemingly petered out with 2005's The Chronicles of Riddick, but in fact, Twohy has been in regular communication with the movie's star, Vin Diesel, on how to continue the series.

"I've sketched out two ideas for the next installment," he told us during the exclusive interview. "Vin and I have decided on one approach of those two, and there's some interest at the studio level but it would be as a PG-13 film, and we don't want to do that anymore. That's one of the concessions we thought we made with 'Riddick' that we shouldn't have made. We also spent too much money and we were too ambitions, so yes, if we do go back to a third one, it will be focused again, hopefully again the same way that 'Pitch Black' was, and we'll spend less money doing it. We're just trying to figure out how much less we can do it for, because I don't think Vin is going to work for scale again."

"The third movie would be more modestly-scaled and it would probably feel more like 'Pitch Black' then 'Chronicles'," he continued. "It will always be Riddick-centric. If the question is whether it will be more like the first one than the second one, the difference is that yeah, you can sell it on its creatures and say 'This is a creature fest and we're going to go out as us vs. the creatures' but that's like a lot of different movies. However, the hallmark of a good movie, and I think 'Pitch Black' is a good movie, is that even if you took the creatures out of the picture, you'd still have some pretty interesting character dynamics going on within that group, and it's almost like you can tell the same story without the creature or substitute some other external pressure on the group, because there were internal pressures as well that were interesting. So was it really a creature feature? It had the hallmarks of it, the trappings of a creature movie, but it also had pretty good characters."

Even though Twohy and Diesel may be seriously talking about the way to move forward with the Riddick franchise, that's not the only thing on Twohy's plate, as he admits to always having a few original scripts in some stage of development to tackle after he finishes whatever movie he's working on. The one he seems most interested in doing is something called Crying Havoc, which will be produced by Ridley Scott. Twohy filled us in on the premise: "It is about an FBI Agent who uses technology to track a spy around the world, only to learn that the spy is more demon than human, and that demon leads him into the lower circles of Hell, psychologically speaking. That's a cool one, and it hopefully has the same visual prowess of a movie like 'Constantine' but a hopefully more coherent script. That's in the works and that may be next."

Look for our full interview with Mr. Twohy sometime next week before A Perfect Getaway opens on August 7.