40K: The Lord Inquisitor Movie – Update
This is when Lordi as it is known today really took form. Erasmus received the go ahead from Games Workshop, assured that his project would not go the route of Damnatus, an older fan movie which was shut down just as it finished up production. With this a call went out to expand the production team as the project began to grow beyond the scope of just one person. Animators, designers, technicians, advertisers and screen writers were brought on board to help bring The Lord Inquisitor to fruition. It expanded in scope from a short film to a feature length movie and the original story was scrapped, retaining only the key players, to give the new screen writer a blank canvas to work on. Who might this new screen writer be I hear you ask? Well none other the Black Library’s own Aaron Dembski-Bowden.
What first attracted you to the project and how did you become involved?
Like pretty much everyone in the world, I saw the trailer when it came out of nowhere, and it just destroyed me. The detail in it; the obvious passion for the lore… I was freaking out. I didn’t dare comment, because I was fairly sure it was doomed. No one person was going to finish a movie like that. It felt like I was looking at something along the lines of Half-Life 3: it’d be amazing if it ever came out, but it was too big a deal, too much effort, and we’d never see it make it out into the light of day.
That changed when Erasmus started recruiting likeminded souls onto the team. The morning I saw the recruitment drive, I was checking my mail in bed on my iPad, still lying down, barely even awake. I typed my email to him right there, asking (read: begging) to help or do anything (even make the tea…) on the project.
I didn’t demand to write it. That’s just luck.
What’s different about writing for The Lord Inquisitor compared to your other projects and normal writing process?
Scripting is a different beast to prose, but that’s not much of an issue, because I did a lot of screenwriting on my writing degree, and a good idea is a good idea (same with bad ideas…) no matter how you write it down on the page. The main issue we’re all having is essentially time.
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Since this is all done in our spare time, it’s a struggle to keep pace, sometimes. It takes me almost a year to write a novel, which is pretty slow for professional novelists in the grand scheme of things, but there’s been a recent phase of getting everything moving forward in the last few months. Different iterations of the script; adding resources, and so on.
To tell you the truth, I did the first draft of the script without even really talking to Erasmus, and it was a disaster. Imagine 40 minutes of fairly plain, direct battlefield stuff. I’d never make a novel that bland and combatty (that’s not a word, but shut up) but I was running under the assumption that’s what we needed to aim for here. I hated it, but sent it to Erasmus anyway. He hated it, and sent it back. That’s when we first talked.
Since then, everything’s been awesome. It changed my entire outlook on the project.
