SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for the entire plot of “The Crow,” now in theaters.
Director Rupert Sanders knows that “The Crow,” his third film, will inevitably be viewed through the spectrum of nostalgia for the 1994 cult hit.
“I just wanted to do something,” he says. “I knew there would be people who didn’t want that to happen. But I didn’t record over anyone’s VHS—that movie is still there, and those people will still love that movie.”
Still, Sanders is confident in his new vision of the anti-hero. In his film, Eric (Bill Skarsgård) and his fiancée Shelly (FKA Twigs) are murdered by crime boss Vincent Roeg (Danny Huston). Yet Eric is offered the chance to walk the earth again as a powerful, dark vigilante known as The Crow and take revenge by killing everyone in Roeg’s organization.
For the second adaptation of the 1989 cartoon, the director had very specific inspirations in mind.
“I love movies like ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ and ‘Angel Heart,'” he says. “They’re visually compelling and deal with the psychological understanding of worlds outside of ours. I love this idea of a dark romantic love story, like a Cure song that has this beautiful broken melancholy. It’s about love, loss and grief . I just wanted to talk to people that way. … We’re an emotionally resonant film that’s trying to compete with the big guys around us in this genre.”
One balancing act Sanders focused on was making sure the love story was as epic as the action scenes and that the bickering wasn’t just empty imagery.
“It’s about making sure your character is present and emotionally working in these action scenes,” he says. “Bill did this incredible job, especially in the climax of the movie. He’s covered in blood, he’s exhausted from the kill, and he stops breathing for a minute—he’s almost crying inside. He doesn’t want to kill. In every action sequence, there’s almost a page of dialogue, except that the dialogue is choreographed movement. In a way, he could speak in all those scenes, and the first piece of action is a person who does not know how to hurt anyone, does not want to hurt anyone, but he has to cut 20 people down and is devastated that he has done it.
“There’s a pixel fatigue of bodies just being thrown around and exploding if it happens again,” he continues. “That’s where our film can compete with the bigger films. I hope people are emotionally engaged with the characters and so the action sequences live a little more. We didn’t reinvent the wheel – we didn’t have the money to, you know, blow it up White House on the air. We’re pretty down and dirty, but it was about being smart and having a great actor.”
The film’s stunt coordinator, Adam Horton, agreed about the need to have heart and pathos in the action scenes.
“In an early meeting, we went in a different direction,” Horton says. “We realized, ‘Wait a minute. This guy is a normal guy who, within the transition from being Eric, has just come back from the dead.’ He hasn’t gone to martial arts. He just got back into this vengeful state, and it was all because of the instruction from Rupert and the input from Bill. He hasn’t become a martial artist all of a sudden , because he has become The Crow. He is still himself. He feels the pain.’ We want to sell it, we want to feel his journey and be emotional with him, sympathize with him.We did it well: What would someone who had no skills do if you handed them a sword?
Given that portraying a less skilled fighter is an unusual task in most action films, Horton cited an unlikely inspiration: the 2004 rom-com “Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason.”
“I’m not sure a lot of people know this, but there’s a beautiful fight in ‘Bridget Jones’ where the two main characters are just scraping in the street and they end up walking into a fountain,” he says. “It’s like people who have never fought before. How would they fight? Obviously it’s been choreographed, but it’s so human. You feel the instinctive reflex of doing something as opposed to the audience reading , what he is doing and what he is about to do.”
As many tragic love stories do, “The Crow” ends on a depressing but romantic note as Eric ends his bloody journey and is given the choice to let Shelly come back to life if he is banished to Hell.
A May Esquire interview with Skarsgård caused a bit of controversy about the film’s ending, when the actor was quoted as saying “I personally preferred something more definitive” and the writer read his response as implying that the current ending “paved the way for a sequel easier.” Still, Sanders doesn’t feel the film allows for any easy follow-up down the line.
“Ironically, I don’t think that’s true at all,” he says. “If there’s a sequel, maybe 30 years from now, they’re going to have to figure out a way to get out of jail a little bit, because it’s definitely not, ‘What happens next?’ It would be cheap and not the feeling in which we made the film.
“Bill and I probably saw five endings together, I probably cut 20 endings,” he continues. “I think that the editing and the cinematic language instead of words is really what elevates the film. So the ending came out of a lot of trial and error: How do we find this emotional ending? The people you invest in throughout the film may not get back together, but you want to have this feeling that it was all worth it. It’s the right ending to the movie, and there’s something very crucial about our ending. It’s not expected, it’s not ‘happy,’ and it’s definitely not like ‘Wait for the sequel!’”
That said, Sanders has plenty of big ideas for what future installments might look like.
“It’s hard because it was such a love story between two people,” he says. “There are a lot of things that I had conceived and thought about that were ideas in some of the draft scripts or some of the elements that I was putting together that were pretty cool but felt like they weren’t ready yet. Because as far as his journey, I love the idea of being able to move like Nightcrawler between the other world and this world and how you pull people in between and the increased power from one side or the other—it’s fascinating.
“There have been conversations about it and my mind at the moment is a bit of a … I’ve given everything I can creatively,” he continues. “But I’m sure a few weeks of sitting around doing nothing, after the film has been off my radar for a while, I’ll start to get the itch and start thinking, ‘Maybe it could be. ..’ But we’ll see. If we’re lucky enough to have those conversations, it would be great. And I’m sure the team behind this can deliver something incredible for the next chapter.”