For your reading pleasure, please enjoy this free excerpt from our nearly 2,000 word article interviewing screenwriter Kelly Marcel about Venom: Let There Be Carnage from Backstory Magazine’s continually updated issue #44!
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Current Cinema
Venom: Let There Be Carnage
Writer Kelly Marcel on power teaming with Tom Hardy, wrangling a symbiote and getting to the heart of the beast.
By David Somerset
Spoiler Alert: Major plot points discussed!
Onscreen in both 2018’s Venom and now Venom: Let There Be Carnage, Tom Hardy has a lot of fun playing both shabby, down-on-his-luck journalist Eddie Brock and (with the aid of some complex CG effects) Venom, the violent, needy, hangry symbiote from outer space who accidentally bonds (in more ways than one) with Brock. Together, they must combat low-level criminals and the occasional alien menace in San Francisco, assuming Venom doesn’t kill Eddie, that is.
Powering the problematic partnership is another pairing that has been developed over nearly two decades. Kelly Marcel, screenwriter on movies including Saving Mr. Banks and Cruella, has known Hardy since the days when she started writing for a theater group he founded in London. “It was more like an actors’ gym, where they could do scenes in between working on jobs to keep up their skills,” Marcel says, adding that the two clicked on an artistic level from the start. “We would just have a laugh writing together, riffing on ideas and thinking up crazy things. We’ve always had slightly batshit, anarchic taste.” That shared outlook has led to a fruitful collaboration across many of the films that starred Hardy. Marcel might not have full writing credits on the likes of Bronson (where she’s listed as script editor) and Mad Max: Fury Road, but she’s become an essential part of the actor’s process for his work on certain jobs.
Of course, that included the first Venom film in 2018, which found Hardy dipping another toe into comic-book territory after The Dark Knight Rises. The story sees Brock encountering the symbiote in a lab run by shady scientist Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed). Something of a mess, Eddie is given a whole new anarchic spin with the introduction of Venom into his life (and body). The original script came from Jeff Pinkner and Scott Rosenberg, and when Hardy was cast, he brought Marcel in to help adapt the character to how he wanted to play it. “It had a great structure, pretty much the story as you see it onscreen,” says Marcel. “Our task was really finding who Eddie and Venom are together—what was their relationship to each other, how do they relate to each other, how do they talk, what are their tones and their cadences. That’s what I was brought in to do.”
Directed by Ruben Fleischer, the film was not what you might call a critical smash, roundly trashed for its unusual tone and occasionally wayward narrative. But it was embraced by audiences to the tune of more than $850 million worldwide, which naturally put the wheels in motion for a sequel. Still, Hardy and Marcel didn’t want to simply replicate the first film. Instead, they worked to pinpoint what worked about it and trim away any potential pitfalls. “We do read our reviews, try to learn lessons and see how we can make it better and what we can do going forward to plus the last movie,” the writer says. “What we knew is we loved the quirkiness of the movie, and the fans that really understood it got that we were going for this kind of weird tone—and also one that had a lot of heart.”
The key this time around was really leaning into the dynamic of Eddie and Venom, one best described as dysfunctional, with the touchstones for the writers cited as the seemingly far afield films The Odd Couple and The Seven-Year Itch. “Venom as a character is this lovable, but very annoying, toddler,” Marcel says. “We wanted to double down on their connection and their push-pull and finding in this story an arc for them where they don’t want to be together. They completely stifle each other, as neither of them want the same thing but sometimes opposites are good together.” Around that central pair, Marcel and Hardy built the story of serial killer Cletus Kasady (Woody Harrelson), on death row and desperate to reach out to the love of his life, Frances Barrison (Naomie Harris). That particular twosome met in their old reform-school days, but were parted by Kasady’s criminal activities and Barrison having developed a piercing, superpowered scream ability, leading to her alter ego, Shriek—and to being locked up herself. While, lured by the idea of getting an exclusive from Cletus, visits the serial killer in prison, Cletus bites Eddie, noting that his blood has a weird taste. The result? Cletus is infected with his own, even more dangerous symbiote creature known as Carnage. You really don’t have to guess how that goes.
The advantage for the Hardy and Marcel this time is that they were on board from the very start, able to brainstorm ideas and shape the script using their well-honed connection, albeit with some technical assistance. For most of the writing process, the actor was in London, while the writer was based in the States. Their answer was to meet over FaceTime and hash out ideas. Hardy ended up with a story credit on the film, though it’s Marcel who did the main work of writing the eventual drafts. “We did lots of idea bashing and talking, kicking the doors down on everything, stress-testing storylines to see if they held firm and then whittling it down to what we liked best. Then I took it away, it culminated in the script, and we came back together to continue work on it.” At that point, the input opened up to include the studio and such collaborators as producer Hutch Parker, who contributed his own notes. Right before shooting, there was a week of actual face-to-face in London, and then Marcel was able to enjoy being in a position few non-director screenwriters enjoy: on set for every day of production.
–End of Free Excerpt – another 900 words await you in the FULL ARTICLE in Backstory issue 44!
In the rest of the article you’ll learn more about how Marcel and Hardy continued collaborating and more about the creative process it took to bring Venom: Let There Be Carnage to the screen!
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