THE DARK NIGHT

As low-budget sci-fi horror Pitch Black celebrates its 20th anniversary with a 4K Blu-ray release, director David Twohy reminisces with Total Film about a tumultuous shoot, casting clashes and why he thought he was going to get fired.

- MATT MAYTUM

It’s pretty interesting how, 20 years later, you look at a movie, and your eyes go to the same fucking problems that you were grappling with 20 years before,” roars David Twohy, writer and director of 2000’s sleeper sci-fi hit and franchise-spawner, Pitch Black. “It all comes flooding back: the problems you had on the set, and getting that footage, and the problems you had in the editing room, and how you never got something right.”

Twohy has been overseeing the colour correction process on a new 4K restoration by Arrow Films for a 4K UHD Blu-ray release. As someone who doesn’t watch a lot of old movies, Twohy was eventually “able to sort of distance myself enough to say, ‘Hey, as a whole, that’s a pretty good movie for something that had the standard expectations of a sci-fi horror movie.’ But, nonetheless, I’m right back in that space of 20 years ago, saying, ‘I never fucking got that shot right. Why didn’t I? Goddamnit! Can I fix it now?’”

When Pitch Black opened at the dawn of this millennium, the movie industry was in a very different place. CG visual effects were becoming more accessible, and The Blair Witch Project redefined indie marketing. Studio tentpoles didn’t dominate with the same ubiquity they do now, and Pitch Black – or Nightfall, as its screenplay, written by Ken and Jim Wheat, was known – wasn’t exactly a property with a lot of expectation riding on it.