king_arthur
Senior Member
Did I tell you where the budget was initially?” Vin Diesel laughed hopelessly when asked the status of his upcoming feature film “Hannibal.” Planned as an epic tale to star the “xXx” actor as the young general who famously crossed the Alps on elephant-back to attack Rome, Diesel’s original larger-than-life vision of the piece – a pet project as close to his heart as “The Passion of the Christ” was to his friend and mentor Mel Gibson – hit a nasty budgeting snag that put the entire project in peril.
“David Franzoni, who wrote ‘Gladiator,’ ‘Amistad’ and ‘King Arthur,’ wrote a script for [‘Hannibal’]. It gets budgeted. I get the budget back and it’s $217 million,” shouts Diesel. “The studio thought it couldn't be done for under 200 million. Now what that means in Hollywood is you will not make this movie, you can’t make the movie.”
Unwilling to let the project die, Diesel decided to get creative with the film’s pre-production.
“I take the script and I go into soft pre-production for a year and a half. Soft pre-production’s a key to getting any budget down. Pre-production’s usually three to six months. Multiply that by three, and you do a year and a half of pre-production, you’re going to cut down your budget considerably. So we jump to now. I’ve cut down the budget to $50 million.”
Diesel, in theaters on March 4 with the family comedy “The Pacifier,” has also made the recent decision to direct as well as star in Hannibal as the young man from the ruling clans of the city of Carthage in North Africa who makes an oath of vengeance against Rome when they kill his father. Making the revenge his life’s goal, Hannibal becomes a general by the time he's in his mid-20s, and with an army of 100,000 who have his back, he sets out to bring Rome down, first by conquering Spain, and then by launching a surprise (and famous) attack on Italy by way of the Alps, with an array of forces that included war-trained elephants.
“To make things even more exciting, I’m going to make it a non-English, multi-lingual film that represents the many languages that Hannibal employed in his army,” enthuses Diesel. And the point being, Hannibal united people of no common culture, language, or religion and proved that united, they can defy tyranny. Very interesting point of where we are in our world.”
Diesel said Gibson had given him advice on the use of multiple languages, which helped to illustrate “The Passion of the Christ.”
“He’s always been a role model of mine in this industry,” said the action star. It’ll be Aramaic for Rome, Iberian for Spain, it’ll be some, you know, Maltese version. And it will represent all these different languages. So that’s what’s happening with ‘Hannibal.’”
Multiple languages? One wonders what does he think will come out of this one? Ancient Carthaginian? Celtic, Iberian and Latin?