Seth Rogen Says GREEN HORNET Is Difficult To Make

If you thought that Stephen Chow‘s departure from THE GREEN HORNET movie meant the project was doomed, you might wanna think again. Seth Rogen will play the masked hero Brit Reid but his ass-kicking sidekick Kato is back to square one, the zone of the unknown.
Rogen talked to Hitfix and AICN recently and denied every haters’ rumors out there saying that the project is Dead.

“we’re building sets! There’s more people working on the film every day! They traditionally don’t spend millions and millions of dollars on movies that are dead”
“It’s really hard to make a big movie. It’s exponentially more difficult to make a $100 million movie than it is to make a $20 million movie, especially in this economy,”
“Luckily it’s all very personal relationships with these people. I mean Matt Tolmach and and Amy Pascal, we’ve been working with since “Superbad.” So I’ve known these people for a while. They know us. They trust us. We trust them. So it’s been pretty pleasant. It’s not like anyone’s screwed anyone or anything like that. It’s been a great process. It’s just hard. It’s difficult to get a movie like this made.”

He mentioned that last part to inform the general public that the recent act of Pasal dropping Soderbergh’s MONEYBALL won’t happen to THE GREEN HORNET
As far as Chow, Rogen has considered him gone for a while now. Life moves on and the search continues

“In my head, we lost Stephen Chow in April, so it’s something I’ve had a lot of time to wrap my head around,”
We’re just looking everywhere, honestly. We’re looking at people who are really famous overseas, and we’re looking at people who are completely unknown. We’re looking at people who are American. We’re looking at people who are martial arts experts. We’re also looking at people who don’t do any martial arts, and who do Broadway and are actors. We know what we want. And there’s some wiggle room.”

I still stand by my position that I really don’t want to see Rogen doing this movie, but now that it has become even more inevitable than ever, the only reason I’d watch this movie is the possible trippy visual style that director Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) will incorporate to make things.. interesting and Rogen seems to be on the same page

“We’re encouraging him to make it as visually exciting and inventive as anything anyone has ever seen. We’re fans of these types of movies when they’re done well. We think that we can handle the story and the script and the dialogue, but we know nothing about cameras and lights and fancy ways of making things look amazing. And that’s what he’s better at than anyone in the world pretty much.
We like to push the envelope in some directions. We like to do things that we find interesting and original and you bring Michel Gondry into the equation and that opens up a whole new bag of worms. So, I think just for us to make a movie that we feel confident in and for them to have a movie that they feel confident in, that’s taking a long time.”

I mentioned previously that either Ernie Reyes Jr., Tony Jaa, or John Cho should be considered for the role KATO. When the name Reyes Jr. was brought to the table, Rogen didn’t seem to mind and said that anybody who’s seen TMNT 2 would agree that that martial art master can kick some serious ass. Eventhough THE GREEN HORNET won’t conduct a panel at the upcoming COMIC-CON, Rogen says there might be something that they’ve cooked up for that event. I’ll let you in on what Rogen has up his sleeves this weekend.

THE GREEN HORNET opens July 9, 2010