Blade II (2002)

The legendary superhero Blade was first introduced in the pages of Marvel comics and brought to life in the 1998 hit film, Blade. Producer Peter Frankfurt and screenwriter David S. Gayer's working relationship goes back to the original film. I met David Goyer and he was this total comic book aficionado," says Peter Frankfurt. When the time came to plan the sequel there was no question that Goyer would once again write it. "He is the mind from where all this comes and he was absolutely essential."

Goyer, who also serves as an Executive Producer, says that he "envisioned a trilogy of films" when he first wrote Blade, so consequently while writing, he left himself a couple of "outs." "One of the outs we left ourselves was that you don't actually see Kris Kristofferson's character, Whistler, on camera taking a bullet to his head. You hear the gun shot but you don't actually see what happens.

Goyer and Frankfurt both admired director Guillermo del Toro and believed his dark sensibilities to be ideal for Blade II. Frankfurt first met del Toro when Frankfurt's design company, Imaginary Forces, did the title sequences for Mimic. "I admired Mimic and got to know Guillermo through that film," says Frankfurt. "Both David Goyer and I have been fans of his since Cronos and were enthusiastic about him coming on board. Guillermo is such a visual director and has a very strong sense of how he wants a movie to look. When you sign on with someone like Guillermo you're not going to tell him what the movie should look like, you're going to let him run with it."

Adds Goyer, "Guillermo has been a friend of mine for years and he knew I was writing Blade II. I kept saying to him 'when I'm done we're going to be coming for you."'

Everyone was unanimous in wanting Blade II to be much scarier than the first. Frankfurt says, "Guillermo understood what worked in the first movie and was very excited about keeping that kind of baseline and amplifying it in places, but then also bringing what he does best - to make it really, really scary."

Like Gayer, del Toro also has an enormous passion for comic books. "Guillermo was weaned on comic books, as was I," says Gayer. "I was a huge comic book collector... my brother and I had about twelve thousand comic books that we assembled when we were kids, so I know my background."

del Toro was very careful not to alter the script too much as the idea had already been created by Gayer and Snipes. "I wanted the movie to have a feeling of both a comic book and Japanese animation," says the director. "I resurrected those sources and viewed them again. I dissected most of the dailies from the first movie; I literally grabbed about four boxes of tapes and one by one saw every single tape from beginning to end until I perfectly understood where the language of the first film came from. I studied the style of the first one and I think Norrington used a tremendous narrative style. His work is very elegant."

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