Saint Sinner

Saint Sinner

Saint Sinner

"I had a deal over at Fox television for a while, and though nothing came of that deal in terms of actual programming, we had gotten to the point where they had said to [Seraphim], 'We'd like to be in the business of making movies-of-the-week again.' It turns out they made none of them for anyone. But what it did was cause me to create six stories for that venue. One of them was Saint Sinner, and it existed in this twenty-five page treatment. When we came to talk to the Sci-Fi Channel, it turned out that they really did want to make movies. I said, 'I've got this one that I think is really cool'. It found a life over there."

Clive And Kicking

By Mike Watt, The Dark Side, Issue 101, February/March 2003

"Meanwhile we have a deal pending with the Sci-Fi channel for the "Saint Sinner" series, well actually the first episode is being written. We're just waiting on notes from them, hopefully we'll get the green light and make that."

Confessions

By Craig Fohr and Kelly Shaw, Lost Souls at www.clivebarker.com, 18 May 2001

"We have Saint Sinner which is a show I'm doing for the Sci-Fi Channel. It's not based on the comic - I just love that title! We'll probably start shooting that towards the end of this year."

Nips And Tucks, Tits And Fucks

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 10 July 2001 (note - full text here)

Production art by Patrick Tatopoulos

"I had been thinking [2002] was going to be another year of development hell - and it's turned out not to be. Saint Sinner starts shooting in seven weeks' time - it's only a $4 million movie but it's still a $4 million movie which we're going to make."

Open Roads... What Price Wonderland?

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 3 April 2002 (note - full text here)

"It's basically about a priest named Brother Tomas, in 1815, who moves through time to capture two demon women who he has unwittingly released from a depository in his monastery. When these women arrive in contemporary America, they commence to create sexual and horrific havoc, most of which Patrick [Tatopoulos] is responsible for. He has also sinned by letting these women out, and he is in pursuit of them in present-day Seattle. They also get pregnant. It's messy and a lot of fun...
"The cool thing about the effects on this project is that since it's costing less than the price of Godzilla's toenail, we can get these cool things going. Hey, that would be a good name for a book: 'The Toenail of Godzilla and Other Stories'..."

Original Sinners

By Anthony C. Ferrante, Cinescape, Issue 62, July 2002

"The notion was to create something that would be genuinely scary, but would also have a lot of style to it. I wanted to do something that would have a little metaphysics going for it as well.
"The fun of [it] lies not only in the fact that Tomás and the demons are appearing in our time, and that they therefore have to learn about what this world is really like, but also that we have a chance to create two villainesses. When you get two Lady Macbeths, if you will, together, they can be some real fun."

Barker Eyes Faith In Saint

By [ ], Sci-Fi Wire, 14 June 2002 (note - available online at www.scifi.com)

"[Saint Sinner]'s a damnation and redemption story. It's about a man who is travelling through time to undo a terrible error he made. This being a Clive Barker show, the error involves demons. We've got two female creatures who are the evil in this, and we've got this guy going after them because he needs to redeem himself from this terrible mistake he made, which was releasing these things...
"It seemed like a very manageable piece of work. Manageable, I mean, in terms of its budget and its creative demands. It seemed as though it was something we could do with relatively modest finances, and obviously that influences whether you get a thing made or not. We were keen to get something on television this year; this was a nice, workably sized project and it played out well...
"Joshua [Butler] was somebody who had advocates at Sci-Fi, and when I got in a room with him he seemed just exactly the right choice, excited by the idea of doing this. He had a kind of passion for making it feel like part of the Clive Barker canon. When we talked about the details, it was very obvious that he wanted to treat the material seriously, and I liked that."

Saint Sinner Sees Splatter?

By Dayna Van Buskirk, Fangoria, No. 217, October 2002

"The main character is a member of a monastic order that acts like a repository for evil artifacts. Through the monk's own disobedience, he releases the monsters and is forced to be the one to track them down.
"I think Saint Sinner will be one of the scariest things on television. Obviously, you can't be as intense as you would on film, but I think everyone's going to be surprised by what we get away with.
"We're in talks about making more of them. I could see it as a franchise of television films, or I could see it as a series. But first we have to see if the public is interested, if they tune in."

Saint Clive

By Chris Wyatt and Anthony C. Ferrante, Cinescape, Issue 66 and 67, November / December 2002

...other comments

Doris Egan : "This year I'm on the staff of Dark Angel. My first episode airs November 14. It's a wilder ride than Mr. Toad ever knew, and I'm having a great but incredibly busy year. In my spare time I'm working on a cable movie for the Sci-Fi Channel. I don't actually have any spare time, but I'm doing it anyway. Occasionally my editor drops me an e-mail asking how the new book is coming, and I laugh hollowly"

Doris Egan Website

Update, June 11, 2000 (note - online at www.sff.net/people/Doris.Egan)

Hans Rodionoff : "Saint Sinner is not really based on the comic, more on an original idea by Clive. What it shares with the comic book is the idea of a man who is struggling with the good and evil inside himself. Philip Fetter is not in this movie, and neither are the Runesmith or Regina. It's the story of a monk named Tomas who unwittingly releases two demons who travel forward in time to wreak havoc. It's literally dripping with all the visceral creepiness that Clive excels at. I think that people who have been longing for a return to the vibe of the original Hellraiser will be happy with the tone of this movie. The director, Josh Butler, is talented guy who has a great vision for the look of the film and a good grasp of the characters. I don't want to talk about the kind of things you'll see, because I wouldn't want to spoil it for anyone, but Patrick Tatoupolis has done some fantastic work on the effects and I can't wait to see the end result."

Creatures Of The Night

By Johnny Butane, Creature Corner, 24 June 2002 (note - online at www.creature-corner.com)

Hans Rodionoff : "Doris Egan had written several drafts of the teleplay for Saint Sinner, and she was also doing work on Smallville and Dark Angel. When they hired Josh Butler as director, he had a lot of things that he wanted to implement, and Doris was juggling a lot of stuff at the time and just couldn't do it in the given time frame. This was about a month before the cameras started rolling, so it was definitely a squeeze. This was my first time working for television, so I don't know if this is typical, but we went through about six drafts in three weeks. Josh was bouncing back and forth between LA and Canada, everything was happening all at once. Writing for a movie that's already been budgeted and is in pre-production is very different. Things were not as elastic."

An Interview With Hans Rodionoff

By Ryan Rotten, Creature Corner, 4 December 2002 (note - online at www.creature-corner.com)

Production art by Patrick Tatopoulos

Joshua Butler : "We're trying to create, with Clive's assistance and his vision, a new breed of female demon for the screen that we haven't seen before. [They are] incredibly sexually charged, almost drug-addicts in the sense that their drug is everything around them, the world around them. Their senses are heightened, and they have to suck the life out of every room they're in, every object they encounter, and every human that crosses their paths. They're just ravenous, ravenous creatures. So ultimately, once that's set up in an almost mystical way, the film really takes off and really commits to the horror of what these two women are doing and the need to stop them."

Saint Sinner

By Mike Watt, Cinefantastique, Vol 34 No 6, October / November 2002

Patrick Tatopolous : "Oscar [Costo] came to me out of the blue and asked me to join the project. The next day, Clive came over, and that was obviously a big moment! We quickly realised that we were in synch. The design came together really quickly. Clive had a very strong idea of what he wanted to see. Of course, Clive is an accomplished artist and he had a sketch for a creature - which ended up looking very different from that sketch! But it gave us a flavour. Some of the funkiest creatures I've done are in this story."

I, Patrick

By [ ], SFX, No 97, November 2002

Patrick Tatopolous : "It really wasn't a big budget, but we didn't go into the project saying, 'We're treating this as TV'. The producer Oscar Costo was a director on Special Unit 2, so he brought me on board, and then meeting Clive Barker was great. On the first day we found out we got the job, Clive came to the shop and brought a few drawings that he had done, so we played with those concepts and discussed them for a few hours. Clive is a very visual guy, and the flavour of the project is very definitely based on his vision more than anything else."

Patrick Tatopolous: Creature Concepts

By Joe Nazzaro, Shivers, No 103, March 2003

Christopher Lennertz : "I worked with a director, Josh Butler, last year on a film entitled Beer Money, which aired on USA networks. He is doing another movie for the Sci-Fi Channel, Saint Sinner, which is a Clive Barker production. It's a bit of a horror film, but it has time travel, demons, and religious overtones. In this case, we have enough time, so here we can come up with several ideas early on and don't have to rely on a temp score. I'll be heading off to Budapest, Hungary to record the score! I'm pretty excited about that!"

The Pen And The Baton

By [ ], Tracksounds.com, 29 May 2002 (note - online at www.tracksounds.com)

Hans Rodionoff : "There's only one weapon that can harm these demons, the dagger of St. Nicodemus. It supposedly takes a saint to wield the dagger against these two demons. So the big question throughout is, will Tomas become a saint or is he too much of a sinner?...""The heart that beats in this movie is the same heart that was beating in the comic books. That's the heart of Clive. One of the things that Clive seems to enjoy going back to is a protagonist who's torn between the light and the dark..."
"Doris actually did the bulk of the work. She took Clive's idea and expanded on it. I did a few revisions but didn't change the core of the story. I just took the characters they had already fleshed out and made them breath a little bit more."
"All the crazy set pieces I thought for sure were going to be taken out were instead marked by the studio as 'absolute must have' scenes. After I read it I called Joe [Daley] and said, 'What about this? Are they gonna let you do this?' and Joe said, 'Oh yeah. We've already made the creature for it,'"

Saint Sinner Brings Barker Horror To SCI FI

By Rob M. Worley, Comics2Film.com, 11 September 2002 (note - online at www.comics2film.com)

Allan Magled : "We have a particular shot in the movie where one of the characters twists her head around 360 degrees. We'll shoot her in two places, in front of a green screen and actually in the shot. In the shot, she'll be acting away, but she'll have a green hood on her head. Once we get that footage into the computer, we'll remove the head by keying out the green. Then we'll shoot her again in front of a green screen and actually turn her around on a rig, so that she turns 360 degrees. We'll just remove her body digitally and we'll take her head and put it to the other shot. Thus: head twist. We have to make sure everything is measured exactly the same so that perspective and lighting will match, and it will line up correctly. It can be tricky.
"A lot of the shots are different than shots we've done before, but we're not doing any kind of ground-breaking technology. We doing all the stuff that you can't do [practically]. The 'Time Portal' sequence would be difficult to acheive practically, and you can't twist a real actor's head around. Well... you could, but they'd be dead. They're not too good with killing the actors."

Saint Sinner

By Mike Watt, Cinefantastique, Vol 34 No 6, October / November 2002

Ryan Rotten (for Creature Corner) : "Tomas, in his brief run-in with these hellish beauties, is unknowingly marked to carry the knife of St. Nicodemus... When his brother dies, Tomas sees it as a sign to take a trip through the Wheel of Time and recapture the beasts. From here on out it's your typical fish out of water tale. A stranger in a strange land scenario...You could probably count out on both hands the 'been there, done that' scenarios from this brief synopsis. And believe me, there are many more... Let's not forget about the dialogue which often feels old hat as well - filled with standard cop talk and not really an ounce of personality. A score, provided by Christopher Lennertz, is an unstoppable, over-dramatic earache that literally continues from minute one through to the closing credits - Chris Young this guy certainly isn't. Even creature FX designer Patrick Tatopolous' creations seem tired and uninspired. When 'Rose Red' aired earlier this year (penned by Stephen King himself), many critics and fans claimed King was treading old ground rehashing his old themes. The same case can be made here. Though Barker didn't write the script, it feels like a wicked concoction of his previous works. The taste is the same...and it's getting sour.
"But, I can honestly say that no matter its flaws...it held my interest for reasons stemmed merely from my silly sick amusement of the film's featured succubi. These two push television morality buttons to the limits almost every minute they're on screen. Necrophilia, blowjobs, lesbian lovin'...these are all implied, but they are there and I thank the Sci-Fi Channel for it. All this was strangely enough for me to watch the entire film with utter glee."

Saint Sinner

By Ryan Rotten, Creature Corner.com, 23 September 2002 (note - online at www.creature-corner.com)

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