‘The Crow’ Director Rupert Sanders Clears Up the Misconception About His Film’s Ending
Rupert Sanders set out to make this generation’s version of The Crow.
His reimagining of James O’Barr’s seminal graphic novel isn’t meant to compete with Alex Proyas’ 1994 adaptation, but the English filmmaker hopes that his take on Eric Draven (Bill Skarsgard) and Shelly Webster’s (FKA Twigs) devastating love story will speak to today’s youth in a similar way. In May of 1994, Proyas’ genre classic was released at a time when its target audience was still grieving the recent loss of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain. But then it also had to come to terms with the tragic fact that Brandon Lee, as Eric Draven/The Crow, delivered a career-defining performance that ultimately cost him his life in an accidental shooting on the film’s North Carolina set.
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Thus, Sanders had a remarkably tough act to follow, which was further illustrated by the relaunch’s 13-plus years of development by the time he joined the fold in 2022. Progress moved so slowly over the years that family members of Sanders’ current lead actors were once tied to the role of Eric to varying degrees. Bill Skarsgard’s older brother, Alexander, was linked to the role in 2013, while Jack Huston — the nephew of Sanders’ villain, Danny Huston — was committed to the part in 2015.
Now that the gothic superhero romance is finally hitting the big screen after 15-plus years, Sanders can only speculate as to how he was able to succeed where so many other filmmakers and stars failed.
“Sometimes, these films just have their time. I was probably a little naive, but tenacious, and no film has a very easy gestation period. Maybe they just found someone crazy enough to not let go of the bone and keep barking and dragging it to the finish line,” Sanders tells The Hollywood Reporter.
Sanders also took the initiative by location scouting in Prague before anything was official.
“You needed to have that slightly maverick approach to these things, because we’re not a studio movie, we’re an independent movie,” Sanders says. “Maybe the key is that it needed to be made not as a Marvel movie, but as a darker indie movie, which, in essence, was more of what the original [1994] version was.”
Sanders’ film makes a point to establish the doomed romance of its two artistic vagabonds, Eric and Shelly, for the entire first act, as opposed to Proyas’ brief flashbacks of their murders on the eve of their wedding. The film then follows Eric’s perspective into the underworld, where the supernatural side of his resurrection arc is fleshed out before he seeks revenge on anyone and everyone who helped take Shelly away from him.
It’s been reported that the ending of Sanders’ film was changed to accommodate a potential sequel, and Skarsgard’s previous comments in his May Esquire profile about favoring a “more definitive” conclusion to Eric’s story only bolstered that narrative. However, Sanders disputes the notion that his finale is just setup for another film. (Writer’s note: I went into the film expecting blatant sequel bait, so I was pleasantly surprised when the ending felt more conclusive than anything else.)
“I’d love the audience to know that because it is important,” Sanders admits. “We live in a world where people get a snippet of something and it’s magnified through a million clacking laptops, but no one really knows anything about substantiating what they are actually putting out there. The movie, I think, stands alone. I personally hate movies where you have to see the sequel. A movie should finish in a way that feels satisfactory to the story, and this movie does.”
That said, Sanders won’t rule out a potential sequel, either.
“Can it continue for a second adventure? Yes. Bill’s Eric is an incredible character, and by the end of the movie, he’s become something new. In a way, it’s the origin story of a character like Batman, and I think Bill’s Dark Knight could very well be around the corner,” Sanders shares. “The exciting idea of him moving between worlds and between life and death is fascinating. So there’s definitely a million versions of what that could be, but right now, my focus was on telling the story of Eric and Shelly and finishing that story in a very finite way.”
Sanders then emphasizes once more that there was never even a conversation about sequel-baiting.
“The best endings are always open to discussion and they’re always open to different people taking different things from them, but I certainly don’t think this is a cheat ending that says you’ve got to have a sequel. And that was never the discussion,” Sanders states. “I looked at 30 endings, and you always do in a movie. It is very rare that you have exactly that on the page, and you exactly shoot that, but I think we found the best ending for the movie.”
Below, during a recent conversation with THR, Sanders also discusses the benefits of making The Crow (2024) outside of the major studio system and how its mid-budget of around $50 million led to more creativity.
The Crow (2024) has had quite the development history. A lot of directors and lead actors tried to crack it, but couldn’t for whatever reason. Once you signed on, could you get a sense for why it’s been such a challenge?
It’s been a journey, but no. Sometimes, these films just have their time. I was probably a little naive, but tenacious, and no film has a very easy gestation period. They’re all tough to get made as you know, and something just clicked on this. Or maybe they just found someone crazy enough to not let go of the bone and keep barking and dragging it to the finish line. I was in Prague, and they were like, “What are you doing in Prague?” And I was like, “I’m scouting!” And they were like, “Why!?” (Laughs.) So you needed to have that slightly maverick approach to these things, because we’re not a studio movie, we’re an independent movie. Maybe the key is that it needed to be made not as a Marvel movie, but as a darker indie movie, which, in essence, was more of what the original [1994] version was. So, me understanding how to achieve a big movie for a smaller budget might have been helpful and also knowing exactly where to do it and having a very clear vision of what I wanted the movie to be. The cast then fell in around it, and we had a very collaborative creative process, which was really fun.
Case in point, two of your lead actors, Bill Skarsgard and Danny Huston, both had family members (Alexander Skarsgard and Jack Huston) who were in the mix for the role of Eric at different points.
(Laughs.) Yeah.
Did you guys ever talk about either of these past scenarios?
Well, they both come from two of cinema’s historic legacy families, so there were actually just funny stories about how both their dads had worked together and how Danny had worked together with Bill’s dad [Stellan Skarsgard]. So it was a small world, but no, I don’t think we connected the dots that everyone was related to who had been in [past] versions of the movie. But I didn’t really know much about it, to be honest. I hadn’t really read that much about it. We didn’t inherit a script or anything else.
It was totally like, “What would your imagination be of this story?” So, what excited me as an artist was very much the story of grief, really. We all fall in love, and then we all lose people around us who we love deeply. [The Crow creator] James O’Barr describes his graphic novel as a Cure song, and that’s really apt about the feeling of melancholy, but also the feeling of, “It’s OK. We’re all going through it.” So I hope that this movie will be for the generation that I feel it’s for, which is the younger audience who don’t really know much about The Crow. I hope this is one of those movies that really connects with 17, 18 year olds for that emotional reason.
It’s also about self-sacrifice. We’ve become quite selfish in our social media gaze that the thought of actually doing something for another has become quite foreign. So I wanted Eric to have this almost Greek mythological quest into the underworld where he’s offered to forgo his eternal soul for the mortal life of the woman he loves. I felt that was a really beautiful and romantic premise.
In case it needs to be said, you didn’t remake Alex Proyas’ original film; you readapted O’Barr’s source material. But did you still rewatch the 1994 film for curiosity’s sake?
Yeah, I rewatched it once. I could remember bits of it, but I couldn’t remember much of it. So I rewatched it when I had those first conversations, and then I obviously reread the graphic novel, which had a bit more connection. My process was to then start gathering images from other movies that spoke to me like Diva, Subway, Ghost Dog, Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death, Tarkovsky’s Stalker, Wings of Desire. They all had elements of the playground that I was working in, so then I created these visual bibles. I took a couple of hundred images and put them to music so they could play as a QuickTime, which helps when I’m talking to the people I work with and collaborate with. It’s like, “OK, this is the assignment. This is the world we’re in.”
I wanted it to have this kind of late ‘80s, ‘90s aesthetic, even though it was present day, and I thought Prague [for Detroit] really offered that, too. I love working in Prague. The crews are very good there. People are scared that we’re a Hollywood remake, but we’re really not. We’re like a very artistic, independent-spirited movie that I think delivers in an Imax cinema. Without Big Brother watching us, we’ve made an R-rated movie that’s sexy, a little bit druggy, a little bit violent, but it’s a beautiful emotional story, from the love story at the beginning to the violence at the end.
In the original movie, Eric and Shelly are dead at the start, so I really appreciated that you spent 35 minutes establishing their romance before everything went downhill for them. You offered more than just flashes of their time together.
Yeah, I think it’s important because where we are today, the idea of a movie starting with a woman being raped and then seeing a guy kill everyone who had anything to do with it is just quite brutal. So there’s brutality in the movie, but you had to establish this beautiful young couple who were so in love and so in need of each other. They’re both broken, but they came together as a whole, and to then be taken away from each other is just heartbreaking. So for him to be given the option to try and bring her back to life is the mythological romance of the movie. It’s not just blind nihilistic man rage and killing everyone because she died. So that was really important to me and that’s why I cast [FKA] Twigs. She’s just such a cipher and so unique and otherworldly. She’d really implant herself on our minds, and when she went, we’d be really bereft. Therefore, we would go along on the journey with Eric as he fights to bring her back, essentially.
There’s violence and action throughout the movie, but you really unleash Eric in the third act. Was it important to you that the bloodshed be earned?
Yeah, where we’re very different from a lot of movies that have this structure is that Eric is crying midway through an action sequence. He doesn’t want to kill. It’s that “beware, whoever fights monsters, be careful not to become one” kind of thing with Eric. He realizes that he’s becoming a monster and it’s not in him. A lot of times people unleash these slightly unrealistic revenge missions where they lose the character, but even the action sequences with Bill are like character monologues. You’re really connected to him through all of those pieces, and that’s what really makes them visceral and shocking in a way, because he’s so present in them emotionally. It’s not just a farmed-out second unit action piece with a couple of shots of the actors just popping up into frame and leaving. You’re watching a performance.
Whether it’s The Crow or any other set, it sounds like Bill really puts himself through the wringer. He isn’t full method, but would you say he’s method-adjacent?
Yeah, he’s an immersion actor, because he pretty much came out of the womb as an actor and into the arms of actors and older brothers who were actors. He’s just exceptionally good, but he’s not method to the point where you have to awkwardly hang out with him in character. He can joke around before a take, but he’s very focused and he’s very good at building characters. Like I was saying, the action sequences are monologues to him. He’s not just popping in and out of those scenes. He’s in there for the whole thing, and when he is physically emotional in those scenes, that’s what pulls you into the fight sequence, not the choreography or the fight itself or the music. It’s Bill being at the center of them, and he wouldn’t be that immersed in them unless he was doing all the stunts himself. So he’s very low maintenance and gung ho and will sit next to me and chat, and then he’ll take off his clothes at 2 in the morning and jump in a cold puddle in the middle of an abandoned train station in Prague. (Laughs.)
He’s a great director’s actor, and he’s really good at letting you know when something’s not working and then working together to make it work. It’s really good to have that because some people just do the lines and walk on. He’s a very questioning actor, which is challenging, because days are hard to make and you just want it to be easy. But it’s so important for him to do that because that makes you question the scene and make the scene better. So that’s part of just bringing the script onto set; we don’t really have the luxury of rehearsals that much anymore. But I’m really proud of Bill and Twigs. They both did really magical work, and Sami Bouajila, who’s a César-winning French actor, was amazing, as were Danny Huston and Laura Birn, who was on Foundation with me. They’re just a really great cast and an unusual cast. It’s not a formulaic cast by committee. It’s very unique.
One of my favorite scenes is when Eric and Shelly write a song together, and similar to Eric, I wish it wasn’t cut short. Was that song ever expanded?
Yeah, Twigs wrote the song, and it’s there somewhere. We all thought it should come out somewhere at the end of the film, but then it just felt like the musician side of them was the less forward-facing elements of their characters. The idea of them being outsiders and being in the margins and being street kids was a bit more interesting. So it’s a hard balance, but I’m glad that scene is in there. There was a moment where it wasn’t, but her voice is so beautiful. It gives you just enough to where you want to lean in, and then it’s taken away from you like she is.
It’s been said that the ending was changed in order to leave the door open for a sequel, but it’s not as open as I was expecting. The phrase “almost enough” is suggestive of a future, I suppose, but it felt pretty conclusive to me. What’s your take on all this?
We live in a world where people get a snippet of something and it’s magnified through a million clacking laptops, but no one really knows anything about substantiating what they are actually putting out there. The movie, I think, stands alone. I personally hate movies where you have to see the sequel. A movie should finish in a way that feels satisfactory to the story, and this movie does. Can it continue for a second adventure? Yes. Bill’s Eric is an incredible character, and by the end of the movie, he’s become something new. In a way, it’s the origin story of a character like Batman, and I think Bill’s Dark Knight could very well be around the corner. The exciting idea of him moving between worlds and between life and death is fascinating. So there’s definitely a million versions of what that could be, but right now, my focus was on telling the story of Eric and Shelly and finishing that story in a very finite way. The best endings are always open to discussion and they’re always open to different people taking different things from them, but I certainly don’t think this is a cheat ending that says you’ve got to have a sequel. And that was never the discussion. I looked at 30 endings, and you always do in a movie. It is very rare that you have exactly that on the page, and you exactly shoot that, but I think we found the best ending for the movie.
I’ve seen some shameless sequel bait, and this is not that.
I’d love the audience to know that because it is important. I live and work in Hollywood; I love it, but this is not a Hollywood movie. There’s a fear that Hollywood has come in and sanitized and saturated, but I actually think we’re quite unique in that respect. We’ve taken a piece of IP that’s known, and we’ve treated it with the same sensibility as the original was made. I’ve worked with [DP] Dariusz [Wolski], who shot the original. He is a friend of mine, and in talking to him, [our projects] are very similar. We didn’t have many days to shoot, and we were shooting all nights in Prague. I was flipping severed heads and sticking them down dummy tuxedos to make it work for another bit of special effect. We didn’t have the money to build the other end, and that’s just how it was. So it was quite hands-on, and I really enjoyed that process. It really forces you to be creative. Sometimes, when these big machines are just churning on, it’s quite hard to really get your hands dirty and really create something that artistically moves you.
In a perfect world, what would you want to make next?
??It’s funny, when you finish a movie, you’re so exhausted, and then you have this slight moment of relief when it comes out and everything’s fine. You should just be wanting to do nothing for a year, but you’re like, “What am I going to do?” You start jonesing for the next thing. But I’ve got quite a few things that I’ve been working on in development. They’re really exciting, and they’re different types of movies at different scales. I was trying to make a Vietnam movie based on Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, which had Tom Hardy. Weirdly, that’s also how I met Bill Skarsgard, but that sadly went by the wayside. So I’m always looking for unique and authored pieces that can exist in a big cinema environment, but they’re hard to find. That’s why IP is [so valuable]. I couldn’t have made this movie without it being called The Crow.
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The Crow opens in movie theaters Aug. 23.
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