Akiva Goldsman is a very busy man. He's also someone that fandom has never been happy with. That's because as the producer or screenwriter of films like "Batman Forever", "Lost in Space", "The Da Vinci Code", "I Am Legend", "Angels & Demons", and "Hancock", he's easily pointed at for problems with the adaptations. But no matter what fandom thinks, the films he's involved with make tons of money, so he's not going anywhere.
Anyway, he's currently developing movie versions of "Lobo" and "Swamp Thing", and he might direct his first feature and it's looking like it'll be "Winter's Tale", which is Mark Helprin's 1983 fantasy about an alternate-history New York, a thief and flying white horse. So if you're curious about any of the projects, hit the jump to read what he had to say:
Below are some direct quotes from the L.A. Times article on Goldsman. Click this link to read the full feature.
On Guy Ritchie's "Lobo":
Goldsman said Ritchie will shoot a test scene in November, "We've got the character design pretty much done and the test will get us moving forward to the next step." Casting will be decided after that.
"There's something hyperbolic and authentic about a Guy Ritchie movie. His best movie are deeply, deeply stylized yet they are all grounded; there's a grit of stylization, which sounds like an oxymoron but it makes perfect sense when you've seen his films. We've never seen Guy's sensibility married to a project with such a large special effects budget."
On "Swamp Thing":
Goldsman said "Swamp Thing" will be closer in tone to the character as presented in Alan Moore's comics than the rubber-suit bog creature from the 1982 Wes Craven B-movie.
"We want a film with real Southern, dark horror overtones, a little bit like a classic Universal horror film," Goldsman said, knowing full well that his presence on the project will stir controversy -- it's a character that filmmaker Guillermo del Toro has called one of the "few remaining Holy Grails" in comics.
On his possible first feature:
According to the article, Goldsman might direct a movie version of his favorite novel, "Winter's Tale," Mark Helprin's 1983 fantasy about an alternate-history New York, a thief and flying white horse.
Here's what someone wrote on Amazon about the book:
Helprin never fails to reward readers with one surprise after another: a village hidden on an island in a solid lake of ice where time stands still and the inhabitants do nothing but skate, ice-sail and star gaze, equipped with sparkling lanterns and mugs of hot-buttered rum; dead loved ones who are not really dead at all but simply living joyously in another time and place awaiting our own arrival; and a majestic white horse that can actually jump five city blocks at one time and help its rider to escape anything that happens to be in pursuit.
In Winter's Tale, anything that can happen, does happen, and while some of it is impossible, though still always glorious, much of it really is possible, though not quite probable. There is Beverly, who sleeps on the roof of her father's mansion, in the cold, winter air, in a specially-made bed of furs and canopies, watching the stars and defying the advent of death; there is Lake, himself, who makes his home in the rafters of Grand Central Station; there are midnight horse-drawn sleigh rides from the heart of New York City to the almost mythical Lake of the Coheeries which can only be found by the light of the moon across almost endless expanses of ice and snow; there are the clouds that drop a living man into the icy waters beside the Staten Island Ferry; and there are boats that simply vanish into an opaque, lightening-flickered fog bank, never to be seen again.
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