SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for the entire plot of “The Crow,” now playing in theaters.
Director Rupert Sanders knows that “The Crow,” his third film, will inevitably be seen through the spectrum of nostalgia for the 1994 cult hit.
“I just wanted to make something,” he says. “I knew there would be people who didn’t want it to happen. But I didn’t record over someone’s VHS — that movie’s still there and those people are still going to love that movie.”
Yet Sanders is confident in his new vision of the antihero. 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 comic book, 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 the worlds beyond our world. I love this idea of a darkly 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 in that way. … We’re an emotionally resonant movie that’s trying to compete with the the big guys around us in this genre.”
One balancing act that Sanders focused on was making sure the love story was as epic as the action scenes and the brawling wasn’t just empty visuals.
“It’s about making sure that your character is present and emotionally working within those 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 killing, and he stops for just a minute of breath — he’s almost crying inside. He doesn’t want to be killing. In every action sequence there is almost a page of dialogue, except the dialogue is choreographed movement. In a way, he could be speaking in all of those scenes, and the first bit of action is someone who doesn’t know how to hurt anyone, doesn’t want to harm anyone, but he has to cut 20 people down and is broken about the fact that he has done so.
“There’s a pixel weariness of bodies just being flung around and exploding if it’s repetitive,” he continues. “That’s where our film can compete with those bigger movies. I hope people are emotionally engaged with the characters, and therefore live those action sequences a bit more. We haven’t reinvented the wheel — we didn’t have the money to, you know, blow up the White House. We’re pretty down and dirty, but it was about being clever 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 that, within the transition from being Eric, has just come back from the dead.’ He hasn’t gone to a martial arts class. He’s just come back to this vengeful state. So we wanted to strip that back, and it was all due to the direction from Rupert and input from Bill. ‘Let’s really ground him. He hasn’t suddenly become a martial artist because he’s become The Crow. He’s still himself. He feels the pain.’ We want to sell that, we want to feel his journey and be emotional with him, sympathize with him. We made it brawly: What would somebody that had no skill do if you handed them a sword?”
Given that portraying a less-than-proficient fighter is an uncommon ask in most action movies, Horton cited an unlikely inspiration: The 2004 rom-com “Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason.”
“I’m not sure many people know it, but there’s a beautiful fight in ‘Bridget Jones’ where the two lead characters just get scrappy in the street and they end up going into a fountain,” he says. “It’s just like people that have never fought before. How would they fight? Obviously it’s been choreographed, but it’s so human. You feel that instinctive reflex of doing something as opposed to the audience being able to read what he’s doing and what he’s about to do.”
As many tragic love stories do, “The Crow” ends on a downbeat yet romantic note, as Eric finishes 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 slight controversy about the film’s ending, as the actor was quoted as saying “I personally preferred something more definitive,” and the author read his answer as implying that the current ending “made the path for a sequel easier.” Yet Sanders doesn’t feel like the film allows for any easy follow-ups down the line.
“Ironically, I don’t think that’s true at all,” he says. “If there is a sequel down the line, maybe 30 years from now, they’re gonna have to figure out a way to get themselves out of jail a bit because it’s certainly not, ‘What happens next?’ That would be cheap and not the sentiment in which we made the film.
“Bill and I probably watched five endings together, I probably cut 20 endings,” he continues. “I think the editing and the cinema 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 through the whole film are not allowed to be together again, but you want this feeling that it all was worth it. It’s the right ending for the movie and there’s something very decisive about our ending. It’s not expected, it’s not ‘happy,’ and it’s certainly not like, ‘Wait for the sequel!’”
That said, Sanders has plenty of big ideas of what future installments could look like.
“It’s a hard one because it was such a love story between two people,” he says. “There’s a lot of things that I had devised and thought about that were ideas within some of the drafts of the script, or some of the elements that I was putting together that were kind of cool, but felt like they weren’t ready yet. As far as his journey was, I love the idea of being able to move like Nightcrawler between the other world and this world, and how pulling people between, and the increased power of 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 all I can creatively,” he continues. “But I’m sure a couple of weeks sitting around doing nothing after the film’s been off my radar for a bit, 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 that collectively the team behind this could deliver something incredible for the next chapter.”
