The Ten Commandments have been a cornerstone of our society for nearly one hundred years. If you've ever taken a Sunday off, or if you've ever stopped yourself from murdering someone, then you yourself have been following the Ten Commandments without even knowing it.
Fascinated by the concept of these simple directives, Ken Marino and I began to spin the tales that make up our new feature film, THE TEN.
Before attacking such a weighty subject in a screenplay, we knew we needed to to do a great deal of research. Taking a tip from a friend, we found google.com, where we learned not only what The Ten Commandments are, but what order they're in.
We were thrilled to learn that all Ten Commandments were available -- they'd been optioned by Universal but had reverted back to the writer last year.
Armed with our newfound source material, the characters flowed out of our imaginations -- so vividly that it was often the characters themselves who wrote the story!
* A guy (Adam Brody) who becomes an accidental hero after falling out of a plane
* A librarian (Gretchen Mol) who has a sexual awakening in Mexico with a swarthy local (Justin Theroux)
* A doctor (Ken Marino) who kills his patients "as a goof"
* A police detective (Liev Schreiber) who covets his neighbor's Cat Scan machine
* A mother (Kerri Kenney-Silver) who enlists an Arnold Schwarzenneger impersonator (Oliver Platt) to be a father figure to her children
* A prisoner (Rob Corddry) who covets his fellow inmate's "wife"
* A woman (Winona Ryder) who falls in love with, and then steals a ventriloquist's puppet
* A Rhinoceros who learns the pitfalls of gossip
* A husband (A. D. Miles) who skips church with his family to get naked with his friends and listen to Roberta Flack
Jeff Reigert (Paul Rudd) presents all of these stories to the audience, while struggling with his own moral dilemma: having to choose between his beautiful wife (Famke Janssen) and his also beautiful but somewhat younger mistress (Jessica Alba).
We began the writing process in June of 2004 and completed our final draft in early June of 2004.
Before production started in 2006, I had to make numerous choices about the visual style. The only one I can remember right now, is that I chose to shoot in color, for three primary reasons:
1) Most movies these days are in color
2) Black & white didn't seem appropriate
3) Black & White having been eliminated, color seemed like the only other choice.
After completing principal photography, we decided to "edit" the film, which is just a fancy way of saying we edited it.
We debuted at Sundance Film Festival in January and now are opening around the country on August 3rd. I have no pretensions that this movie will change the world; my only expectation is that it will change the way everyone on this planet thinks and behaves.
I hope you'll go to a theater near you and see THE TEN.
- David Wain
Reply With Quote
Zoobesucherin
Originally Posted by YellerDog
Posting Permissions
Bookmarks