The psychological thriller follows an 18-year-old who is haunted by a Dybbuk - the soul of a dead person barred from heaven - in the form of a young boy who perished in Auschwitz.

DG: I like your shirt there [editor’s note – BC had on his prized Halloween III shirt]

BD: Rock on! Halloween III is awesome.

DG: I think it’s a very unheralded film.

BD: If it just had a different name...

DG: Exactly. But yeah, I love that movie.

BD: OK, so let’s talk Unborn... at Dark Knight you couldn’t really talk about it much, but now that we’ve seen it...

DG: Yeah, well I don’t like to talk about a movie at the junket for a different movie, and also we didn’t have anything cut together yet. We only wrapped the film about eight weeks ago, and just over the course of the last two weeks... in fact, I came back from the Dark Knight junket and sat down with my editor to cut together some things for the film. And it’s cool; it’s nice that we were able to present some things here at Comic Con, because no one really knows anything about the movie yet. So this is the first time we’ve been able to show people what it’s about.

BD: Can you talk about the genesis of the project?

DG: I hadn’t written an original script in a long time, and I had such an amazing experience on Batman Begins and The Dark Knight with Chris [Nolan]. The studio just gave us such an incredible amount of freedom in terms of the story, and I thought, “God, it would be nice to do something like that again”, and since with Batman I sort of had Chris to protect me, the only way I could really do that was if I just wrote something outside of the studio system completely. So I came up with this idea and wrote it. And it’s funny, I had offers from studios to buy it while I was writing it, sight unseen, but I said no, because I really wanted to write it the way I wanted to do it. So then we kind of took it around, and Rogue and Michael Bay’s company really liked it. We showed it to them and a week later we were in production! It was amazing, we shot the first draft!

BD: How’s it been working with Platinum Dunes? This is going to be their first complete original release.

DG: They’ve been great. They’ve had amazing success with their remakes, but they want to branch out and do original films, so I walked in the door at the right time, because this was something totally new and original, and they loved the script; Michael was really supportive. It was just perfect timing.

BD: Can you talk about the cast? You got Gary Oldman!

DG: The cast is a dream cast. I wanted to do a really smart horror film, which are hard to do, because sometimes sort of look down on these movies. But once we got Gary everyone was like “Wow! This is like a real movie!” I just set my sights high; I knew Gary from Batman, but he wouldn’t have done it unless he likes the script. And Gary likes horror films, but he just doesn’t think that most of them are smart enough, but he really liked this. Then we got Jane Alexander, who’s another accomplished actress, then we got the kids on: Cam, Odette, Megan Good... we just got a dream cast. We got everyone I wanted; everyone I set out to get, we got. So that was nice.

BD: You’ve worked for so long as a screenwriter and only recently began directing yourself; do you sort of write knowing that you’ll be the director or is it the same process for you as it would writing for someone else?

DG: Because I knew I was directing it, and that we were shooting the first draft, I was able to really prepare. I storyboarded a bunch of sequences before I even went to the studio. We really pretty much shot the script exactly is, so it was definitely the best experience I’ve had as a director.

BD: Can you talk about the Dark City director’s cut? How much were you involved?

DG: My main involvement was doing interviews for the new documentary. And then Alex had me come in and look at the new version. There’s some new effects and music, stuff like that. I think that things that bugged him, he was able to go back and tweak and get more to his liking. I am enormously proud of that film, and it was really nice to have Alex revisit it ten years later. I’m really excited for that to come out.

BD: Me too! The original release, it was the first DVD I ever had I think, and I went through the entire disc, all the extras, which I rarely do.

DG: He’s been taking a while... always tinkering!

BD: So back to Unborn, you shot all of it in Chicago, right?

DG: Yeah, I got to know Chicago during the Dark Knight, and I used a lot of the same crew, which was really nice. I got to cherry pick, and it was an amazing, AMAZING crew. Even though it’s a smaller film, we got an A+ crew, which was great.

BD: Speaking of Dark Knight, how’s that been for the past two weeks? Must be nice to go on Boxofficemojo and see a bold “1” next to all of those records...

DG: Its surreal! It may be a once in a lifetime experience. Nobody knows how high it’s going to go. But it’s nice to see... like Dark City is a good example of a movie that was critically well-received, but didn’t do that well at the box office. So it’s nice to be involved with something that is critically well-received but embraced by the general public. And I am proud of the American audiences, because it’s not an easy movie. I loved Iron Man, but Dark Knight is not like that, it isn’t something you watch and go “YEAH! I feel great!”, and cheer, you know?

BD: Pretty much only when Gary shows back up...

DG: Yeah, exactly. I’m, well, we’re ALL amazed that a movie that dark and challenging is going to be one of the most successful movies of all time. It’s just mind-blowing.

BD: So Unborn, what’s the status, you’re still editing?

DG: We’re editing, we just showed it to the studio last week, and it went really well. We’re just now in the midst of starting to put together the campaign and the trailer and all that. I don’t know yet, I don’t think anyone at Universal knows yet whether it’s going to come out this year or next. Literally, they just saw it on Tuesday. They were really happy with it, and shockingly they gave me virtually no notes.

BD: So have you begun writing your next project yet? 


DG: I’m writing The Invisible Man, also for Universal. I’m writing that right now, and it’s a project I’ve always loved. It’s funny, I was writing Unborn, and I picked up the old HG Wells book, and sort of went off on a tangent for a day, writing notes for Invisible Man. And I went back to Universal and said “Are you guys doing anything with this?” and they said “No”. So I told them I got this take that kind of re-invents it. And they were psyched! Because obviously, with The Wolf Man and hopefully Creature From The Black Lagoon, they’re into reviving those.

BD: Good! More monster movies!

DG: Exactly.