I know, I know—I said it was gonna be “all Marvel, all the time” this week, but that was before io9, the biggest Sci-Fi blog on the planet, dropped a bombshell on fan film lovers: the first major interview with Sandy Collora about his upcoming feature film debut, Hunter Prey.
Collora, you may recall, was the director of the classic DC Comics fan flicks Batman: Dead End and World’s Finest, and now he’s hard at work on this otherworldly adventure. It looks cool, it looks mean, it looks…well, really freaking hot on the set.
I’ve written about Hunter Prey before, but the new interview is your plentiful opportunity to learn more—a lot more—about it: The interview runs nearly 3,400 words (plus a few gorgeous pics that qualify for that old cliche that a picture is worth a thousand…ah, you get the idea). Early on, Collora is upfront about what fan films did for his career, and why he chose to make them, explaining:
I’ve written several scripts based on original ideas over the years… However for my last two short films to work the way I wanted them to, and generate the amount of buzz and publicity that they did, they needed to involve known characters that already had a huge fanbase. In my opinion, I feel that if instead of doing Batman Dead End and World’s Finest, I did more short films that were original, that no matter how good or well done they were, they simply would not have gained as much attention or praise from the fans. Case in point; Solomon Bernstein’s Bathroom and Archangel. Two short films I wrote and directed before I did my superhero fan films, and although both were professionally produced and shot on 35mm, even with Archangel winning some awards at festivals, not too many people are even aware they exist. Sometimes you need to look very pragmatically at the results of what you’re doing and what your work and career is yielding or not yielding, and make decisions based on those assessments.
I’ll unabashedly say that I’ve always dug io9.com. The first week it was up and running on the net, I emailed the editors a ‘hello’ and tipped them off to David Guivant’s unusual Iron Man fan film—and they ran it. More recently, they gave a rave review to my book, Homemade Hollywood (in which Collora’s flicks are featured, incidentally), and now there’s this. Give the interview a read for more insights into Collora’s step up to the big time.
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