The first "Blade" was the start of the Marvel comic turned good movie trend, the second was a much beloved cult classic. Can a third film which caps off the trilogy be up to the standard? It might just be. New Line kicked off their two-hour Comic Con panel with Writer/Director David Goyer and actors Ryan Reynolds & Jessica Biel for "Blade: Trinity".
The acting duo were the focus of both clips - in one she lulls some vamps into a trap by pretending to be a weak woman with a child, before the creatures find out the kid is a fake and she gets fighting with arrows, stakes and holy water. The second had super buff shirtless Reynolds chained up and getting rough treatment from Triple H, Parker Posey and a vampire monster dog.
Before their public appearance, the duo spoke about the production with me and other press for around 40 minutes. Due to recent reshoots, both actors were again pumped up (Biel's shoulders are astonishing). The training required for that sounds intense: "Basically, Ryan and I spent about two months before we even started shooting in the gym every day – two or three hours. Crazy nutritional plans. Martial arts fight training every day for an hour. I had archery training every day and that's every day and slowly but surely we got bigger and leaner".
That archery turned out to be dangerous - "We did some tests with the arrowheads she was firing and we did one test where it actually went through the wall of the set. We just said, 'Yeah, we've got to reduce the poundage because, literally, she's going to kill somebody". Biel was so buff that after her first wardrobe fitting for "Stealth", she had to tone down a bunch. In fact Muscle & Fitness magazine wanted to do an article on the pair, but didn't focus too much on Reynolds as they thought his new look super abs were in fact implants - "they thought it was a prosthetic on my stomach".
He wasn't fussed, his wardrobe was enough of a workout for him - "I just have thirty guns on me at any time. I had two electronic pistols... and they have little gun cameras on them with little mini-CDs so they record a first-person of you when you're shooting. Then when he comes home, he pops them in and watches what he just shot. We also had a beefeater, we called it. Just a big, huge gun. Remember that show Sledgehammer? It felt like that. I slept with it, I talked to it, it's under my pillow (sighs). So, I had that one and then I had this one called a 'bonejack' and it was just gigantic. It was built in the late 19th century. It was a pump-action shotgun that has five barrels. At the beginning of the movie, I couldn't lift it. I couldn't swing it over my head. By the end, we had trained so much that I could finally get it".
One of the more fun tales involved some rather wild destruction of property - "One of the days when Jessica was shooting the bow. We've got this camera aimed at her and we're shooting with a high-speed camera so it's very slow-motion. She had learned how to shoot the arrow very well. She was thirty or forty feet away, up in the air three stories and all the crew were behind glass. The only thing that was uncovered was literally a two inch-by-two inch thing right in front of the lens. We said, 'Aim for the camera!' and BAM! She shoots right down the lens, into the housing and destroying the $300,000 camera. We caught it on film and we're going to put it on the DVD. It embedded like eight inches. We ended up destroying about five cameras on this movie".
Goyer was a practical joker - "Biel had just done Texas Chainsaw Massacre and here she's going down these dark corridors with a flashlight, really scary, and she's gotta open up a meat locker. On the third take I jumped out at her and blaah!!". Naturally Biel screamed, much like she did when Goyer lulled her into a conversation amongst fake corpse parts only to discover a stunt guy had secretly placed himself amongst the bodies and grabbed the unsuspecting actress.
When it comes to Snipes, the trio played it carefully about reports of the actor's rather odd behaviour - Goyer says "It's just the way he works. It's his process. He could be completely different when the film is done, but on the three Blade films, he was Blade. On and off the set". The one time they did manage to see him crack a laugh involved a stuntman being injured - "our first assistant camerman walking backwards tripped and completely did a Benny Hill style fall down this hill and Wesley cracked up".
