Timur Bekmambetov, the Director of the Russian Night Watch trilogy, is currently starting to work on Wanted, the Hollywood version of the Mark Millar comic book, and he's been talking about the film and revealing some very odd details.

Wanted is the story of a man who hasn't really amounted to much. He lives a dreary life working in a cubicle day in, day out. One day his world is shattered and he finds that most of his existance is a lie, and he's actually the son of one of the greatest supervillains that ever lived, ever lived because he's just been killed and now his son must step up to the mark and take over where he left off. To do that he needs training, and lots of it.

I really enjoyed the comic book when I read it, and it was a strikingly original and readable tale. However what Timur Bekmambetov has to say about it reveals that there might be a lot of changes to the story behind the back page blurb. In a recent interview on MTV through SuperheroHype he reveals that the supervillain group the character belongs to is actually controlled by something that departs us from the comic book:

...he soon finds himself carrying out the death orders of the Fates, literal weavers of every human's lifeline...

...We built a huge textile factory in Prague. ... The production designer, John Myhre, made 'X-Men,' 'Chicago' and 'Memoirs of a Geisha.' He's built this huge set, and we've created a mythology in this world of weavers...

..."The hero will discover the whole world. It looks ordinary, but it's not. It's an industrial world filled with weaving machines, lots of traps, lot of looms flying back and forth and predicting the future. The looms weave these fabrics, and the fabrics have a pattern, like a binary code, that has information. The weavers can read the fabric - they see the structure of it and they can read its messages. Then they know who has to be killed to keep the balance of the world."

Now I don't remember any of that from the comic book, so it seems that there's going to be this whole new strand woven into the storyline (I couldn't resist it) and taking it away from the original material. Other than that though there's plenty that remains, for instance Angelina Jolie is playing the female supervillain that is training the young Wesley Gibson, played by James McAvoy, to be just like his Dad. Oh, and it also stars Morgan Freeman.

The Director also reveals that he has cast Konstantin Khabensky, the actor who played the lead Anton in Night Watch (Filmstalker review) and Day Watch.

It all reads well, apart from the stuff about the weavers. Although it's not really hurting the story that much, I' unsure if the changes are going to detract from the messages that the original story brought through. Weavers that are weaving man's fate? I liked the idea that the Fraternity were just in it for themselves and they were the bad guys throughout life.