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Interview: Kyle Newman - Page 2 of 2 - SciFiNow

Interview: Kyle Newman

SciFiNow talks Fanboys with the film’s director.

There was a huge groundswell of support from the fans, the blogs, that whole area. How important was that in eventually getting the film released?

It was essential for multiple reasons. A, it was a grassroots type of promotion in a lot of ways, because we didn’t have a lot of money to spend on it. And it was organic, lots of people talked about it and spread it. And it also helped to set the record straight in a lot of ways. In some ways it was scary because there was a lot of talk about these problems and people started to talk about it, but in reality the movie was testing phenomenally well. Especially for something that I consider to be slightly polarising because it’s a niche, you know? It’s about Star Wars fandom, in a sense, it’s other things – pop culture, and music as well – but it’s really about a time and it’s about Star Wars fans, and you’re not going to win everybody over with that. The figures were phenomenal for what we were trying to do, but they were like ‘Well, if we offended fans – more people dislike Star Wars and make fun of nerds than like Star Wars – we can get even more people.’ That’s not the right strategy, sometimes you have to just set out restraints and say, ‘This is what we set out to do, this is it, and that’s what we made. Let’s embrace it.’ I’m just glad we did that, and as I say, it’s really helped to let people know where it was going and that’s what really helped the movie release, to open up around the country in every major city in America. We only planned in opening in 12, but because people kept demanding it and sites kept writing about it [it opened in more]. In fact, the very first screening we had in Celebration Europe on 2007 was a different cut of the movie, but we showed it there to over 1,000 people and that response was huge, because of those websites were there that talked about it and spread the word to other fans, they knew that it was a different sort of a cut that we were trying to make, and there was a cut that they were trying to force on people that none of the people who created this really wanted out there. And because of those sites we were able to communicate the difference, that there was a difference, that this is the version we were trying to make that was good, and this was the version they were trying to put on us. And that’s what helped us get the final cut out and salvage what we could of it. Without the websites, I don’t know what would have happened if this movie was done ten years ago, because there wasn’t that forum to do that, so it was a very unique film in that it fed into those sites, it’s what it was all about. It referenced all of the geek films, it’s all in there, everything that’s in pop culture in a rush like Dungeons & Dragons… but that’s what these sites cater for, and that’s what fans go there to talk about. So it really helped us – I knew what that audience was. I’m of that generation that knows what’s going to work and not going to work, I’m a Star Wars, pop culture fanatic. And I’m not trying to offend people – you can poke fun at it, but you have to be reverent, it had to feel real and you had to feel like you knew them and you could be friends with them.

Would you say that geek culture is becoming more mainstream?

I think so, yeah. If you look at movies in the Eighties, The Last Starfighter and things like that, where nerds were painted a certain way, or people who were into this niche type stuff, it’s evolved, I think. Look at schools around the world where people are free to wear their heart on their sleeves and just show what they’re into, whether it’s music or sport or comic books, videogames, and because of that, that acceptance, you’ve seen these things become massive. If you look at all of the movies that are coming out, that are really catching people’s eyes, they’re coming from big source material. They’re coming from videogames, they’re coming from comics and the studios have realised, really since Star Wars in a way, everything has shifted in that direction. And actually all of the big things are… I mean, Marvel’s a studio now. If you’d have thought that ten or fifteen years ago, people would have said ‘I don’t know if a comic book movie will work’. But the diversity that comes out of a comic book, that’s inspiring, I think it’s eye opening for people, like The Walking Dead becoming a series on AMC. Road To Perdition was a graphic novel, even Persepolis, the source material was a comic, History Of Violence, all these things… there’s a real breadth and depth to the stories that can be told in that medium, they can do things that you can’t do in other mediums, and some of it’s really rich for film. There’s no denying that they have to pay attention to it though – it connects in with this large, large base of people, and it also connects in to the internet. A lot of people who were into the internet in its infancy, you get these sites like Ain’t It Cool News and CHUD, who were the people breaking stories and people had to go to them, so they’re computer savvy. Everything was ripe for this kind of takeover, where they can almost dictate what studios make by having their voice heard.

Any chance of a Fanboys sequel in the future?

You never know. We actually worked up a story for the sequel, with Dan Fogler and Harry Kline, and we have something fun. There may be other things in the pipeline – I potentially want to do a comic book series, release what would be the sequel as a graphic novel, I think that could be fun. I want to do a couple of Star Wars scale action figures of overweight Stormtroopers, things like that, and some exclusive stuff through StarWars.com. So we’re trying to keep it alive – that’s the amazing thing, the movie came out in the States in the spring of 2009, and here we are now in the fall of 2010, it’s been a steady string of releases around the world with Germany, Japan and now the UK, all these bigger territories that just keeps happening. So we’re really, really pleased with that because of the staying power it seems to have with fans and with the Star Wars community. It’s a worldwide community, it really is. That said, we got to this position, so you never know what else can come.

Fanboys is released on DVD and Blu-ray today, through Anchor Bay Home Entertainment.