Seth Rogen is keeping busy. He’s got Judd Apatow’s Funny People happening right now, and then next year he’s going to be starring in The Green Hornet, directed by the amazing Stephen Chow.
I’ve talked to Seth about The Green Hornet a number of times in the last year, most recently on the set of Observe and Report. There he said that the film would be pretty serious, and that he and co-writer Evan Goldberg weren’t looking to do a send up. But that was before Stephen Chow, known for his comedic take on action, came on board. Which means The Green Hornet may be getting a sense of humor.
“We feel no obligation to live up to anything I’ve said to any of you people in the past,” Rogen told me today at the Zack & Miri press day. “When we’re writing I can’t go, ‘Fuck, I told CHUD we weren’t going to do that! Let’s do it anyway!’
“Me and Evan [Goldberg] talk a lot of shit. We have one rule when
writing, and that’s don’t get attached to anything. One day we want to
make a serious film and then Stephen Chow comes in with a good idea and
we’re like, ‘Well it’s funny.’ Should we not do it because we
originally wanted to do a serious film? We come from, nah fuck it,
we’ll just take the idea that seems good. So it’s definitely less
serious than a serious film, that’s for sure. We want the action… I
say now that we want the action to play serious but Stephen could come
in tomorrow and say ‘You know what? I want to throw you 400 feet in the
air!’ and I’d go, ‘OK, that sounds cool.’
“We’re very open now. Right now is when we’re in the process of deciding
what this movie is going to be on a practical level. The story is the
same; we’ve always known the story we wanted to tell, so it’s easy
within that to discuss the various sensibilities and reality levels and
humor levels and stuff like that. To us, we hoped the director would
come in and give us lots of ideas and directions to work with, and
that’s what he’s doing.”
He and Goldberg have been rewriting the script with Chow, who was actually holed up somewhere in the Four Seasons hotel while Rogen was doing the press rounds. According to Rogen, shooting should start in April or May.