Pitch Black writer-director David Twohy
delivers danger Hawaiian-style with A
Perfect Getaway ’s tense tale of
honeymooners who suspect a killer is
lurking.

NEW YORK CITY—David Twohy’s résumé reads like a roller-coaster ride. He won a Writers Guild of America award nomination for The Fugitive but followed it up by scripting the unfortunate Waterworld. When he decided to direct the films he was writing, he won critical acclaim for the tiny film Pitch Black and then lost support when its sequel, the Vancouver-shot The Chronicles of Riddick, made substantially less than it cost to make. The jury is still out on his latest film, A Perfect Getaway, which is currently playing in Vancouver.

In a New York City hotel room, Twohy admits that he was interested in getting back to less ostentatious movies and decided that he would write it and then find a company that would allow him to have control over the final product. “This was an overreaction to big-scale films. I wanted to do something smaller, something where I was working close to the camera and closer to the actors, and that is what it was about for me. In terms of story and interesting characters, I probably could have done this movie at the studio level if I had wanted to make it more conventional. But I didn’t want to do that, and I found companies that would finance the movie as scripted. It [the finished product] is very close to the first draft.”

Twohy’s movie stars Milla Jovovich and Steve Zahn as honeymooners who begin to believe that there are killers in their midst. Twohy says that he felt the movie would work best if everyone the audience meets along the way is a suspect. “It’s a movie that lights a slow fuse and you introduce some characters and not much happens. You get a sense that some danger is happening and interesting characters float in and out. You think there is a killer amongst them, and you wonder, ‘Is it him or her?’ And then about 60 percent of the way through the movie, I just decided to turn all the cards up and show who the killers are and who the good guys are. Now you know who everyone is and I am going to make it a ‘run for your life’ movie.”

Although he wrote A Perfect Getaway in order to move to smaller films, Twohy says that he isn’t quite sure that he and Pitch Black/The Chronicles of Riddick star Vin Diesel have exhausted the Riddick character. And he says that he makes no apologies for spending more than $100 million on the sequel.

“When I go around to Hollywood to talk about movies, there are a lot of guys behind the desk who say ‘God, I loved Pitch Black.’ I know there is an audience that wants more [of Riddick]. We probably spent too much on the second one and were too ambitious and tried to reach for too much, but as [poet Robert] Browning said, ‘A man’s reach should exceed his grasp or else what is heaven for?’ So if we were guilty of overreaching, it is not the worst thing in the world.”