#FIRSTLOOK: VINCENZO NATALI UPCOMING GRAPHIC NOVEL “TECH” COMING SOON

Director Vincenzo Natali, best known for directing iconic films like Cube, Splice, and In the Tall Grass, occasionally has spare time on his hands, especially during the pandemic and the subsequent strikes. Give Natali free time and an iPad Pro and what you get is his first graphic novel, the 200 page sci-crime-noir, TECH, (Encyclopocalypse Publications https://www.encyclopocalypse.com/), available on Amazon and all major online sources for books and a new hard cover edition of TECH will be issued later this year.

Natali began in the industry as a storyboard artist (on Ginger Snaps, for those who keep track) and has been a long-time lover of comic books. Written and illustrated by Natali, the project began five years ago between film and TV projects. Using Procreate, he was able to pencil it, ink it, colour it, create all the layouts and the lettering, spending 10-14 hours per page.

But wait! There’s more. He also created the techno-impressionist album, DELICATE MACHINE (soon to drop on all major streaming platforms: Apple Music, Spotify, etc.). The album contains nine tracks combining industrial sounds, synth and piano for a mixture of aggressive and ambient tones. The careful listener may find them reminiscent of some of the music in Natali’s films.

Both DELICATE MACHINE and TECH are united by themes of technology.

TECH is set in the near future when a mysterious extraterrestrial transmission containing the blueprints for advanced alien technology is intercepted and deciphered on Earth. The majority of the wealth accumulated from this discovery is controlled by the elite. However, an underground black market also flourishes. In this realm of thieves and smugglers we meet SHEL, a low-level courier who has a special talent for detecting and unlocking the merchandise. It’s a dangerous and ruthless profession that she desperately wants to escape, but the cost of her daughter’s expensive medical therapy prevents her from going straight. Little does she know that the tech has its own agenda and the key to unlocking it is buried within her.

In the making of DELICATE MACHINE, Natali let his iPad lead him through the recording process, discovering sounds much as one might find objects washed up on a beach, and then joining them and building upon them until they found a pleasing shape. A self-professed ‘non-musician’, Natali’s musical technique relies on child-like curiosity and exploration. It was never his intent to release this music publicly. Indeed, much of this album was recorded on airplanes— a way for Vincenzo to curb his fear of flying. “I would compose these tracks while on an airplane to distract me from my fear of being shot across the sky in a metal tube.” However, over the period of years during which the tracks emerged, the album took on a life of its own, finding a theme and an aural connectivity seemingly independent of his original intentions.

“After two decades of battling in the high-stakes and labyrinthine film and television industry, these two projects were all about allowing me to be a kid again. TECH fulfills my childhood dream of writing and illustrating my own graphic novel following in the footsteps of my heroes Jean Giraud (Moebius) and Enki Bilal. DELICATE MACHINE fulfills a need that I didn’t even know I had: to play in the unlimited sandbox of music and sound design. The inspiration came purely from the tools themselves and the primal pleasure of composing strange sounds unburdened by expectation,” said Natali. “My hope with both TECH and DELICATE MACHINE, which were made entirely on an iPad Pro, is that they will demonstrate how new technology can inspire and empower us to create things and share them with our fellow humans.”

ABOUT VINCENZO NATALI

Filmmaker Vincenzo Natali is no stranger to dystopian storytelling; each of his six features thrusts ordinary characters into a dark realm governed by seemingly impenetrable logic and follows the subjects as they struggle to come to terms with their environs. Through his creative endeavors, Natali shows a passionate study of the human condition and our place in the universe.

This narrative has also carried over into his television work including his last two releases:

Cabinet Of Curiosities, from acclaimed Academy Award-winning filmmaker and creator, executive producer and co-showrunner Guillermo del Toro, a curated collection of unprecedented and genre-defining stories meant to challenge our traditional notions of horror. For the series, del Toro personally chose Natali to write and direct an episode. Entitled “Graveyard Rats,” it stars David Hewlett (a recurring presence in Natali’s projects since he was 16 years old) and was adapted by Natali based on a short story by Henry Kuttner. The series launched on Netflix on October 25.

The Peripheral for Amazon reunited him with Executive Producers Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan with whom he worked on Westworld. Natali serves as an executive producer and director (4 episodes) on the new series. The show’s story centers on Flynne Fisher (Chloë Grace Moretz), a woman trying to hold together the pieces of her broken family in a forgotten corner of tomorrow’s America. Flynne is smart, ambitious, and doomed. She has no future. Until the future comes calling for her. The Peripheral is master storyteller William Gibson’s dazzling, hallucinatory glimpse into the fate of mankind — and what lies beyond.

Natali burst onto the scene in 1997 with his surreal, low-budget sci-fi thriller, Cube. This enigmatic film weaves a tale of a group of people clamoring to escape from an obscure cubic labyrinth where a casual misstep results in full dismemberment by the cube itself. The film impressed viewers and critics alike with Natali’s ability to stretch cinematic boundaries on a shoestring budget, and became a cult favorite.

Natali’s 2002 follow-up, Cypher, starred Jeremy Northam and Lucy Liu in the tale of a man who assumes a new identity in preparation for an espionage career, but instead gets systematically brainwashed and finds himself engulfed in a shaky, paranoid reality. The film performed well internationally and paved the way for 2003’s Nothing. Described by Natali as “a buddy comedy set in a void,” the film follows two eccentrics who literally wish the world out of existence and end up in a limitless white landscape. Natali then shot a documentary on Terry Gilliam’s production of Tideland, which premiered concurrently with the feature in 2005. He also contributed a segment, Quartier de la Madeleine, to the 2006 portmanteau film, Paris Je T’aime.

His fourth feature Splice received a wide release by Warner Bros in summer 2010. It starred Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley as two rebellious scientists who defy ethical boundaries to forge ahead with a dangerous genetic experiment, resulting in a new organism. The creature rapidly develops into a beautiful but dangerous winged human-chimera, who forges a bond with both of her creators — only to have that bond turn deadly.

Natali’s fifth film was the 2013 supernatural thriller Haunter starring Abigail Breslin. 2014 found him shooting episodes of the Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal and producing his first television series, Darknet. He has since directed episodes of the aforementioned Westworld, American Gods and The Stand.

His most recent feature was an adaptation Stephen King and Joe Hill’s novella, In The Tall Grass. After hearing a young boy’s cry for help, a sister and brother venture into a vast field of tall grass in Kansas but soon discover there may be no way out…and that something evil lurks within. The film premiered on Netflix in 2019 and starred Patrick Wilson, Laysla De Oliveira, and Avery Whitted.

A Directors Guild of Canada award winner, Natali’s films have won multiple international awards. This year’s FANTASIA FILM FESTIVAL in Montreal will present him with their Trailblazer Award. He is based in Toronto.

#SPOTTED: GUILLERMO DEL TORO & MARK GUSTAFSON IN TORONTO FOR “PINOCCHIO”

By Justin Waldman

Yesterday afternoon, I had the distinct pleasure of attending a conversation with Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson, moderated by Vincenzo Natali in a post-screening Q&A about PINOCCHIO, now streaming on Netflix. If you’ve ever had the distinct pleasure of listening to del Toro speak, you will know the man doesn’t mince his words, loves to tell stories, and isn’t afraid of shying away from speaking from the heart. His conversations regarding his own works are usually phenomenal and this special event was no different as he went and talked with Gustafson and Natali for a near hour! We had the privilege of sitting-in on the entire and below are some of the highlights of the magical talk, be warned though there is certainly some choice language.

Natali: “Why did you choose to explore what Pinocchio was?”.

del Toro: “Why don’t we make a movie about a father being a real father, instead of a movie about a boy being a real boy which is absolute bullshit.”.

Gustafson: “In the film, Pinocchio comes in the world kind of the way we all do, which is naked, and he goes through the whole story like that and everyone he gets in contact with by the end is changed for it.”.

Natali: “Why the small grim eyes for Pinocchio?”.

del Toro: “I found the art in 2002/2003 of Gris [Grimly] and I just knew this was my Pinocchio….it can be a little bit creepy. At the beginning we decided we didn’t want to make him cuddly.”.

Gustafson: “And he was carved when Geppetto was blind drunk!”.

There was a question posed by Natali about how he pitched the story of this darker re-telling of Pinocchio, to which del Toro originally told a story about how Sony Animation originally greenlit his Pinocchio pitch unheard, but he decided he wanted to pitch it and then Sony decided maybe it wasn’t the project for them because he wanted to tell Pinocchio with Mussolini and the backdrop of World War II. He followed it up by saying, “When someone doesn’t want to do your movie, it’s the second-best news. I learned it in Mimic and the Weinsteins tortured me because they wanted to do Alien 3.5 and I wanted to make mimic. I seek unemployment for the truth.”.

Some other fascinating tidbits of information were when Gustafson mentioned they had 32 puppets of Pinocchio, to which del Toro replied, “It’s like playing with your toys in the most expensive place”.

When probed about why they decided to make their Pinocchio such a dark version, Gustafson indicated, “We decided to never talk down to children, we knew they could handle it”. del Toro decided also to weigh-in with the following “I don’t think Animation is a fucking genre for kids. It’s a medium that can explore sadness and tragedy, and we keep it in that medium [for children] because of economic decisions.”.

This is a sentiment that has been said by many Directors in the past about how Animation should not be seen as a lesser medium, and isn’t always for children.

In a year filled with many fresh takes on Cinema, del Toro left the audience with this quote, “We are only as good as our last shot”. And it suffice it to say this was a pretty superb last shot.

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is now streaming on Netlfix.

(Photo credit: Genevieve Walker)