HIGHLANDER FAN CENTRAL INTRODUCES
…DOUG AARNIOKOSKI:
ENDGAME DIRECTOR BLENDS CLEAR VISION WITH ENTHUSIASM AND EXPERIENCE
By John Bierly
Doug
Aarniokoski is one of the nicest guys you could ever talk to about
anything. And when that something just happens to be the movie Highlander:
Endgame, the first Highlander project to unite Adrian Paul and Christopher
Lambert as Highland heroes Duncan MacLeod and Connor MacLeod since the
first episode of the TV series, it's an even bigger honor for a fan like
me. Highlander swordmaster F. Braun McAsh says Doug is "the epitome
of cool," and after talking to him that's something to which I can
certainly testify.
Christopher
Lambert describes Doug as a very visual director, something that has
become an established Highlander tradition. Russell Mulcahy helmed
Highlander and later Highlander 2, establishing the trademark Highlander
style of awesome swordplay, beautifully filmed flashbacks, and
heartbreakingly good character moments that explored what it means to be
an Immortal. Mulcahy had cut his teeth directing music videos just like
Andy Morahan, who directed Highlander: The Final Dimension. It was the
first feature film for both.
And
while Highlander: Endgame also marks Doug's directing debut, his
filmography as a first assistant director reads like a who's who of the
most talented and visionary directors working today on some of the most
cutting edge films of the last decade. Doug performed first A.D. duties
for directors including Robert Rodriguez on The Faculty and the George
Clooney vampire flick From Dusk Till Dawn, Jay Roach on the hit Mike Myers
comedy Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, and Richard
LaGravenese in the critically acclaimed Living Out Loud, which starred
Holly Hunter and Danny DeVito as two troubled people who form a fragile
and unlikely friendship. He was also first A.D. on Fear and Loathing in
Las Vegas for Terry Gilliam, whose own directorial credits include Monty
Python and the Holy Grail, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Time
Bandits, Brazil, and 12 Monkeys. It's quite a varied and talented pool of
directors with whom Doug has worked.
The
Faculty found him in front of the camera as a coach, and Austin Powers
made his voice a star. Remember the scene where Dr. Evil talks on the
phone? The voice on the other end of the line is Doug's. "Yeah, I
made it into some sort of cult status," he laughs. "I'm the
Phone Guy. It's a funny story. They happened to be at the looping stage
that day and they were doing some work with Mike and I happened to be
there at post and Mike wanted to play off somebody on the phone. He said,
'Doug, come on down here and jump on the mic. It'll be fun. I'll talk and
you just answer back.' So I sat there and just sort of did improv for like
20 minutes on the phone and we had some fun with it. I didn't think they'd
keep my voice!"
It
was on the Austin Powers set that Doug met his wife, Suzanne Todd, one of
the film's producers. They are now proud parents of a little boy named
Hunter, named after Steve McQueen's last movie. Doug has called Los
Angeles home for the last fifteen years, though he grew up in the Bay
Area. He is very relaxed, open, and exuberant as we discuss Highlander:
Endgame.
"There
are so many websites!" Doug says of the Highlander fan community.
"That's incredible! I knew of the first Highlander movie but I'd
never really seen the series or the second or third movies."
Indeed,
Doug was too busy making great movies with great directors. But that work
caught the attention of Miramax, whose genre arm, Dimension Films, will
release Endgame on September 1st.
"The
last show I did with Robert Rodriguez was called The Faculty," he
explains, "and we were shooting some additional photography that
Robert was unable to attend. So he recommended me to Miramax to finish the
film. I shot some of that and they were very impressed with what they got
back."
So
impressed, in fact, that they turned to Doug to film additional material
for the upcoming Dimension Films western Texas Rangers, which was filmed
in Canada. "I went up there and I shot some promotional stuff for
them, and as it turned out they had a very troubled schedule due to the
fact that all the stars in that movie were television stars, so when they
had an end date they had a drop-dead end date. They basically created a
third-unit action unit that I was directing, and I went on to become a
second-unit director. We ended up shooting for what was supposed to be six
days but ended up being almost six weeks. It was pretty intense. Once I
got finished with that, Miramax was becoming a bigger and bigger fan of my
work and they said, 'We need to put you in a film right away. The next
film we do that gets green lit, we're going to put you on.' And that was
Highlander. It all happened literally over a span of about two
weeks."
While
Doug had already established himself by helping other directors bring
their visions to the big screen, Endgame was Doug's baby from the word go.
"We didn't have a lot of prep time, unfortunately, on this film, and
it was kind of a crash course in preparation for photography due to the
fact that we had to finish before the holidays. So we literally only had
five weeks, which is probably about half of what this movie would normally
have had for prep. So there wasn't a lot of time to brainstorm and come up
with 'How are we going to develop this in a new way?' When I spoke to
(Bill) Panzer and (Peter) Davis and Miramax I pitched them my ideas to
take Highlander in sort of a new direction, which I think excited a lot of
people and scared a lot of people. It's hard when people get familiar and
used to a certain format for a story like Highlander. I'm sure it's the
same as if somebody went in for Star Trek and said, 'Let's lose the
Enterprise!' You know what I mean?" he laughs.
"People
go, 'Wow, we kind of like it, but … I don't know.' It's a tough film to
follow. So we tried to go in and develop some interesting ideas and
certainly wanted to take the fighting to a new level. And that's what we
really concentrated on the most in this film. Everyone's familiar with the
story, and you can only do so much with the story. And so what we really
tried to concentrate on was to give the fans something that they would
really be excited about, in terms of the fighting and in terms of the
swordplay. "
"Coming
on the heels of a film like The Matrix, people expect so much more out of
films these days. You just can't give them the same old one-two-parry,
one-two-parry and the guy's head comes off. Nobody's going to buy it. They
want something a notch, or five, better. That's what we really tried to
do, and Miramax did a fantastic job in terms of casting because they gave
me Donnie Yen." Yen is one of Hong Kong's hottest stars. "He is
fantastic," Doug says. "When they showed me his movies and they
showed me his martial arts tapes, I did a back flip! It was incredible! He
came on the set and he just took it to another level. And the fight
between him and Adrian, I think, is pretty spectacular. Being the fourth
film and me being a first-time director meant giving the audience
something new, and that's what I really wanted to bring to the table. I
wasn't trying to emulate any of the other directors. I tried to come up
with something that would really stylistically show off what I knew, and
that was action."
In
addition to the skills Adrian and Donnie brought to the Endgame table, F.
Braun McAsh was back as the Highlander sword master after playing that
role for four seasons of the TV series. "F. is one of those
guys," Doug says, "who you know, when he's telling you how
something is done or how a specific move is executed, you know you're
getting the best information money can buy. I keep waiting to see him on
the 'Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?' game show. He'd clean up. The guy
knows something about everything. His nickname should be 'Hard Drive.'
He's brilliant."
Endgame
finds Duncan and Connor standing against Immortal scourge Jacob Kell
(Bruce Payne) and his band of deadly apostles: Immortals who carry out his
dirty work for him. This element of the story created many possibilities
for different weapons and different styles of fighting that Highlander
fans have never seen before.
"We
went after actors who not only ripped up the dialogue in the
auditions," Doug explains, "but who also had some fighting
experience, whether it was martial arts or kickboxing. The only one who
wasn't a master at some fighting art form was Cracker Bob: Ian Paul
Cassidy. He just came into the room and I knew he had to be Cracker Bob.
So I designed a weapon that, if I were thrust into a world where I was
forced to fight, I would design myself. I took a 34" Louisville
Slugger and pounded nails into the end of it. All the other guys were
given weapons we designed using ancient Oriental weapons. I wanted to have
weapons for these guys that we'd never seen on film. I must say, they
rock. Same thing holds true for Kell's weapons. I wanted swords that had
never been seen before. So I designed, along with the help of F. Braun,
two kick-ass Kell swords. The first is a single sword that can separate
and become two swords. Very Oriental in concept. The second sword that he
uses most of the film has an inverted cross at the end of the hilt. Read
into it what ever you want. I have my reasons why I did that and I'll
reveal them on the DVD commentary ... maybe!"
All
this talk about action was sending my excitement through the roof, and the
very thought of owning a DVD copy of Endgame nearly made me faint. So I
took the opportunity to start blabbering to Doug about the trailer and how
colorful the film looks. The scene I mentioned shows Connor fighting Kell
at the edge of a cemetery. In the woods beyond the Immortals, stark brown
trees meet rich grays and blues that mingle in the mists and contrast the
white grave markers. Kell, draped in a long black coat with a shining
steel sword, battles Connor, wearing a long brown coat that plays
beautifully against the bright gold guard of his katana, the sword's ivory
dragon handle, and the dark gloves that have become a Connor MacLeod
trademark. Doug talks about color in Endgame.
"We
were very concentrated on the color scheme of the film. Wendy Partridge,
who was our costume designer, and I spent many hours trying to design a
look that was not just black. We didn't want to just do Blade, as great a
movie as Blade is," he says, referencing the 1998 Wesley Snipes hit
that featured its own fair share of kick-ass martial arts and swordplay.
"We didn't just want to go jet black, jet black, jet black. As you
look at the film, you'll see that there are a lot of browns, and that's
just a conscious decision we made. These people are Immortals. They live
amongst us, and they blend in as opposed to stand out. They're not walking
around looking for battles. The battles find them. So we wanted to put
them into an everyman's world. We felt that by taking the black away we
put you in an everyman world as opposed to everyman into a movie world.
And then Doug Milsome, our director of photography, and I sat down in
Romania and came up with a couple of ideas."
Milsome
was a camera operator on the first Highlander, and has provided
cinematography for films like Full Metal Jacket, Breakdown, and Robin
Hood: Prince of Thieves. The Endgame director speaks highly of him.
"When you have somebody that talented, you literally let them run
with it. I say, 'This is what I want and this is the kind of feel I'm
going for,' and provided you guys are on the same page, you just let that
guy go. He's talent 101."
I
told Doug that both he and Milsome have appeared in the daily photos on
Adrian Paul's PEACE website, and it was then that our conversation turned
to the man behind Duncan MacLeod. "Adrian is such a great guy, and
obviously what he does with his charity is just fantastic. I'm glad for
him and I hope people will check out his website. He really does put heart
and soul into the MacLeod character."
Doug
explains how Adrian gets the most out of himself and everyone around him,
though never at the expense of the other actors or the crew. "Adrian
is very respectful in terms of everybody's job. Adrian is one of those
guys where I guarantee you he can do everybody's job. He could pull focus.
He could work the smoke machine. Design the costumes. He could run the DAT
machine and do sound at the same time. The guy is just so multi-talented.
He blows me away. He really does. He reminded me a lot of Robert
Rodriguez, who literally could do anything. He was really, really
talented, but very respectful and never tried to push his way into
somebody else's thoughts. He was always there for support. If you had a
question and you wanted to involve him he was definitely there and he'd
tell you what he thought about whatever it was you were asking him. But he
was very mellow, very laid back, and was definitely a team player. In this
kind of shoot, you needed to have somebody like that. You really couldn't
have an egomaniac on this film because the time crunch was so intense.
Shooting in Bucharest was so brutal, there was really no room for
egos."
At
the Gathering 5 convention held this March in Denver, Adrian praised Doug
and said he'd love to work with him again. "Wow! The feeling is
definitely mutual," Doug says. "Adrian puts 110% into everything
that he does."
And
so, says Doug, does Christopher Lambert. Their first day working together
involved a difficult scene between Connor and his mother. "It was a
tough scene, and I had very specific direction as to what I wanted to get
from the two characters," he explains. "Literally, when I walked
up to Chris after take one, I put my arm around him and said, 'This is
just the beginning of a long journey.' He stopped me in mid-sentence and
said, 'Exactly.' From that moment on we were on some type of wave
together, almost scary. He is so intense and focused. He can really turn
it on when it's go time."
And
what about the chemistry between Christopher and Adrian? "I feel so
fortunate as a first-time director having the opportunity to work with two
actors who truly knew who their characters were in Christopher Lambert and
Adrian Paul," Doug says. "I would sit down with them and we
would talk about what we wanted to achieve in the scene. "
"Instead
of me trying to sit there and say, 'You know, Adrian, I know you've played
this character for nine years but I think he would do this,' there was
none of that because they are the characters. They know exactly where
they're going, where they've been, and how they got there and what journey
their characters have taken. For them to get into a specific zone, if you
will, man, it's just like flipping a light switch. They are there. I was
shocked. I didn't actually know that ("The Gathering") was the
only episode they'd done together. When they came on the set, it was like
two brothers. Their camaraderie was incredible. "
"We
were out at dinner one night and I said, 'How many shows have you guys
done together?' And they said, 'One.' So I said, 'Come on, you guys see
each other all the time at conventions and stuff, right?' And they said,
'No.' But there was just something there. It was really a kinship. It was
really bizarre. What better way to play off of two guys who, in the story,
haven't seen each other for ten years and then come back together? They
were truly living out the story, which was great. And they never missed a
beat. They got together and it was just BOOM. It was like butter.
Especially for me! I just sat back and enjoyed the performances."
Endgame
marked several firsts. It was Doug's first directing gig and Adrian Paul's
first time bringing Duncan MacLeod to the big screen. Jim Byrnes and Peter
Wingfield were making their movie debuts, and so was the WWF's Edge (Adam
Copeland). Donnie Yen, a longtime legend on the Hong Kong martial arts
scene, was also making his first appearance in an American studio picture
of this size. "You have to be sort of a conductor and a shrink at the
same time," Doug laughs.
"You
really have to sort of feel out your actors and try to understand their
fears and be aware of their concerns and really be there for them. It was
such a melting pot of backgrounds. The TV actors I've worked with,
obviously the guys on Texas Rangers, they're so dialed in. They are so
sharp. They don't get 25 takes. They get in, they've got to hit their
mark, they've got to say their lines, they've got to deliver their
performance. So they're really, really tight, and I've found that the film
guys are just as tight, yet they sort of want to mature within the takes
and they really want to try different things and you have to respect that.
It's a fine line. You have to draw it, and walk it, and be careful that
you don't trip on it."
Every
good action film needs a good bad guy and a pretty girl. Endgame won't
disappoint. The Immortal villain of Endgame, Jacob Kell, is a Highlander
himself whose connection to Connor MacLeod goes back to Scotland where
they grew up together. When I asked Doug about Bruce Payne, who plays
Kell, I swear I could hear his smile through the phone. "Bruce
Payne," he says, "is the consummate professional." Payne
has a long list of movie bad guys under his belt, most notably making
trouble for Wesley Snipes as Charles "The Rane of Terror" Rane
in Passenger 57. "That guy is so tight. I worked with Bruce years and
years ago when I was a second A.D. on a film called The Howling."
Subtitled The Freaks, the film was the sixth sequel in the Howling series
of werewolf movies. This one found a reluctant werewolf battling an evil
vampire in a circus freak show, and Bruce played the vampire."
"At
that time I wasn't writing, I wasn't even thinking about directing. I was
just happy to be an A.D., to be working in Hollywood. Bruce was the
villain, and he and I just hit it off. Usually actors and assistant
directors are at each other's throats, and due to scheduling and
everything else that goes on you usually don't end up being friends with
actors per se. Bruce was just a great guy, and truly a hard worker. We hit
it off. We had not seen each other since then, and when I got this job and
I read the script and read the character of Kell, I knew that was Bruce. I
got on the phone with our L.A. casting director and with our London
casting office and I said, 'You have to find Bruce Payne.'
We
were seeing wonderful actors, I mean, really, really great actors, but
always in the back of my mind I knew this was a part that Bruce Payne had
to play. I tried to be very democratic about it. I tried to be very
open-minded. I saw the other actors and I thought some of them were just
absolutely incredible and did a wonderful job, but it's like when you see
a girl on the subway, you just go, man, if I'd just stayed on and waited I
wonder what would have happened. You should never let that instinct go. We
found Bruce, and he came in, he sat down and read for me, and he was the
girl on the subway that I knew he was going to be," he laughs,
"as terrible as that sounds!" I tell him the metaphor works.
"He was the girl on the subway that I couldn't let drive away. And we
had a great time working together."
"Speaking
of the girl on the subway," I ask, "what about Lisa
Barbuscia?"
I
can hear Doug smiling through the phone again as he begins to talk about
the actress who plays Faith, an Immortal femme fatale who is the key to
Duncan MacLeod's darkest and most painful secret. "Lisa B.," he
says, savoring the name. "Yeah. Yeah! Wow. Talk about pulling
somebody out of thin air. She walked into the London casting office and I
had never heard of her. Obviously our London casting director had heard of
her having a model background and a singing career. She came in and did a
reading and took direction so well. Literally she walked out of the room
and we turned to each other and said, 'OK. We've got her. There she is.
That's her.' Michelle Guish, who was our casting director in London, had
never seen her do anything of any sort of grit, and she was just blown
away. She said, 'I didn't know Lisa had that in her.' She did!"
The
Faith character loves Duncan MacLeod in the past and hates him in the
present, which allowed Lisa to explore different sides of the same
character. "It's really apparent when you look at her. Obviously the
look of her character-contemporary as opposed to the past-she's very soft,
sort of a princess in the past, sort of an angelic look, wide-eyed. In the
present, she's much harder. She's been around the block … a few hundred
times! Lisa just grabbed on and she really worked hard in terms of trying
to realize where she'd come from and how she would feel today when she saw
(Duncan MacLeod) again."
Doug
explains that Adrian helped Lisa when it came to playing the same
character in different time periods and states of emotion. "Again,
Adrian lent so much to the other actors. He was very supporting to them in
terms of either being in their position or working with someone who's been
very close to their position, in terms of the structure of the story and
in terms of the time lapses and all that. So it was again great to have
Adrian there. He could say, 'Well, back in episode #18,' or what have you,
'what you have here is what you had there.' And (Lisa) really took that to
heart and really, really worked hard in rehearsals. It shows."
You can't have Highlander without swordfights and you can't have
Highlander without romance. Adrian and Lisa share some pretty hot love
scenes in Endgame. "Whoa!" he says, laughing. "I have to
tell you, we shot the film with sort of a Rated R version in mind,"
Doug explains.
"The
marketing at Miramax, at one point, had wanted a PG-13 for obvious
reasons. They wanted to broaden their audience. They feel that more people
can enjoy a film with a PG-13 instead of an R. But we knew. Because of
what Highlander is. Because of the action that takes place. Because of
what audiences expect in terms of the action. And there's violence. As
terrible as that is, when there can be only one, the only way to go down
is to get your head cut off. So we tried to do that very stylishly, and
the love scenes as well. I can say they're very, very steamy. You're going
to see a lot of skin, both Adrian and Lisa. But I think it's done very
tastefully. Both of the actors have seen it and they're both very pleased
with it. Nick Glennie-Smith, who did the score, gave us some music that's
really wonderful. If I was a gal and I was watching Adrian for seven years
on television, I mean, God! How can you not love that? When does reality
take over from the fantasy? It does in this movie. When we would walk into
a restaurant in Bucharest, literally you'd have thought these women had
been on an island and had not seen a man in thirty years. It was pretty
amazing."
Though
Doug never had a shortage of good material to film, the filming itself was
often complicated by the locations in Romania. "Moviemaking is really
about challenges, whether you have the best-case scenarios or the
worst-case scenarios. It's all about problem solving. Being in Romania
amplified the problems. It's a society that's post-Communism and is really
just coming out of it. It's very hard for people to sort of stand up and
be counted."
"They
really are used to staying back and laying low and not drawing attention
to themselves. On a film set that's very difficult because it's all about
getting stuff done, thinking ahead, and really planning your day and being
able to move left at a moment's notice. And they were not set up to do
that. We had some Americans, some British, and it was hard for them to get
the level of work they were used to out of the Romanian crew. But let me
tell you this: They are the sweetest people. They worked really hard. It's
like never having skied before. 'Jump on the skis and go down this hill.'
You might want to do it, and you might love it, but it doesn't mean you're
necessarily good at it. And I think this film was definitely the biggest
budget film they had had. They've had a lot of direct-to-video
million-dollar budgets, things like that. I think they were kind of blown
away by the speed and the efficiency we tried to bring to them."
The
Endgame crew, meanwhile, was nearly blown away by the weather. When
filming resumed this year after Bruce Payne recovered from a nasty
bronchial infection, the production found itself in London because key
locations were covered by snow.
"That
was unfortunate. But we knew the weather was coming, and there it was,
unfortunately, right smack in our face when we tried to go back there. The
producer of the movie, Patrick Palmer, who's been around for a long time,
went over to Romania and found there was absolutely no way we could do
this. He made an educated decision and it really saved the movie, because
we would have had to shoot everything there over again. I actually never
made it back to Romania. I was leaving for the airport when Patrick called
me and said, 'Stop everything, turn your ticket in, you're heading to
London.' It was a complete about-face."
London,
Doug says, provided more of the "creature comforts that movie people
are accustomed to. Fine restaurants, a nice hotel with hot water, that
kind of thing. We were able to recreate Bucharest. When you watch the
cemetery scene, half of it is shot in Bucharest and half of it is shot in
London, and I defy you to tell me which half is which. The production
designer in London, and again, Patrick Palmer, scoured the countryside to
find just the right hills, just the right trees, just the right backdrops.
If you show me where it's broken down between Romania and London, I will
buy you a steak dinner, my friend."
"I'll
take you up on that," I replied.
"You
got it!" Doug laughed.
With
all this talk of what was shot where, Doug explained that he and Chris
Blunden, "a very talented editor," did a lot of the film's
editing in London. "We had a great time there."
But London would not be the last stop for Endgame. Some second-unit
footage was shot in Scotland, and additional footage was filmed in
Luxembourg. One of the additional scenes is a kata performed by Adrian
Paul, who talked at length about the sequence at Gathering 5. Doug was
just as excited as Adrian about the results. "We did shoot the kata
sequence, in Luxembourg. Highlander is a worldwide film! We had a week of
additional photography in Luxembourg doing some green screen and some of
the martial arts stuff like the kata. It's a moment where he's getting
ready to do battle and he does a kata to prepare. It was one of those
scenes where it was always on the schedule and always in the script and we
never had the time for it. But Adrian hung in there and trained and
trained, and got ready for it. He worked so hard. And literally he and I
would go out at our lunchtime and take a handful of crew and go out and
shoot the kata every day for a week. It's a great scene. He's such a
bad-ass."
Adrian's
bad-ass self isn't the only TV series face that will show up in Endgame.
Jim Byrnes reprises his role as Joe Dawson, and Peter Wingfield is back as
Methos. "Peter and Jim," Doug explains, "both came attached
to the project via the TV series, and I quickly became a huge fan of both
of these gentlemen. I had never worked with them before, I had never met
them. They were really open to my suggestions in terms of what I wanted to
get out of the various scenes, which a lot of times meant changing the way
they delivered their lines or their motivations. For me, as a director, I
love actors who take chances and aren't afraid to go left when everyone
else is going right. Even though Peter and Jim had done these characters
for years, they were willing to not only go left if I asked, but they'd
ask me how far. I love that."
Adam
Copeland, better known as the "The Edge" of the WWF, also made
his feature debut. "Adam is just a great guy. He obviously had never
done anything in terms of film, but what a presence, man, I mean, he knows
acting, without a doubt. It's like, 'Hey, cool, let's do it again. Great!'
For him it's just one shot, usually. You say your lines, you scream at the
audience, you do your thing." But Doug says that Adam Copeland was
not his WWF persona on the Highlander set. "We only had him for two
days. He walked on the set and we were like, 'That's him?' I was expecting
some big, heavyset guy. But he was like one of those professional models,
this ripped, cut, great-looking guy who spoke wonderfully and came in and
was really nice to everybody. We put shitty teeth on him and he was ready
to rock and roll. We had a lot of fun. I wouldn't be surprised if he gets
nailed for a few more parts."
It's
been three years since Adrian Paul signed on for the new Highlander movie
in September of 1997. In that time the film has been through several
writers and titles. Doug says that by the time he came on board,
everything had already been worked out. Endgame is a script by Joel
Soisson from a story by Gillian Horvath and Bill Panzer. It's a story that
Doug speaks quite highly of. "What storyline can you address that
hasn't been addressed over seven years on the TV series? We had to work it
into something new that people are excited about."
Doug
won't go into many details about the story. A theme, on the other hand, is
something he readily offers. "Without a doubt, redemption," he
says resolutely, echoing Adrian Paul's one word summary of the film from
G5. "Adrian and Christopher and myself have had hours and hours of
discussion about the film and the arc of the characters and why this story
needed to be told. The first movie was simple in its concept and so direct
in its execution. But the other two, they were contradicting what the
first one had set up. They tried to take it somewhere where it really
didn't need to go. It's not about sorcery. That is not representative of
what the film is about."
As
for Doug's future, he's writing a script about a college student who's
thrust into a situation that's "very much in the vein of The
Fugitive," Doug says. A script for Christopher Lambert is also in the
works.
And
as for the future of Highlander, Doug offers this: "I have heard
rumblings that there may in fact be a fifth installment. But at this point
they're only rumblings. I hope for the fans' sake they will allow Adrian
to carry the torch for at least two more. There are great stories yet to
be told, and I really feel Adrian is on the brink of big screen
superstardom. Whether or not I would direct another Highlander … I think
for me, there can be only one. But then again, Connery said 'never again.'
So, I'll never say never."
But in the meantime, there's Endgame. The previous Highlander sequels,
Doug explains, were simply not chapters of the same story introduced by
the first film. "When I came on board I was very concerned that we
didn't go off in a direction that the fans would be unhappy with. This
film is for the fans."
It's
something that Doug, Christopher, and Adrian were aware of before and
during filming, and Doug is certain the finished product will reflect
that. "Redemption always, always popped up. When you see the film,
you will realize why that is."
Highlander: Endgame, a Doug Aarniokoski film starring Adrian Paul and
Christopher Lambert, opens September 1st in a theater near you.