Archenemy, the latest superhero movie from SpectreVision, sprang from the mind of writer-director Adam Egypt Mortimer. Co-written by Luke Passmore, it follows a drunken ex-superhero from another dimension named Max Fist (Joe Manganiello) and his eager sidekick Hamster (Skylan Brooks).
Mortimer spoke to Screen Rant about his inspiration for the film, available now through VOD, and how a lower budget helped increase his imagination.
I love the world you created and the story. How did this world come to be?
Adam Egypt Mortimer: It came to be after decades of loving comic books and the way that comic books tell superhero stories. Generally loving the possibilities of what people have done in comics with superheroes, more than I've loved the movies. I have an awesome bookshelf full of comic books, hardcover and paperback, and there's just so many different genres and colors. It's really exciting seeing some of the risks artists take when telling their stories, and I was feeling like we're in a world where everybody treats their audience like they're so sophisticated. We can do in movies what they're doing in comic books.
The superhero genre is blowing up, and Joe Manganiello has been flirting with it for a while with Superman and more recently Deathstroke. Talk to me about his presence and what he brought to the character of Max Fist that wasn't necessarily on the page.
Adam Egypt Mortimer: He is a trained theatre actor that has done, like, Tennessee Williams plays. He has this sensibility of knowing how to be a tragic, broken alcoholic. He's got all of that, but he is also the most ultra-human, most handsome, most muscular, physically perfect specimen. Just on the level of what he is as an actor, he's right there.
And the fact that he is a massive comic book nerd meant that, as soon as we start talking, we go deep into stories and felt like he really understood them. In his career, like you're saying, he was almost Superman at one point. And so, for him to play a character who was once a Superman and is now broken, was something he really knew how to make very personal and vulnerable. While also being able to bust through a door and beat someone to death with his giant fist. Who else could have been this character? It was really amazing to find him.
There's so many interesting characters: Max Fist, Indigo, Hamster. How did you come up with those creative names?
Adam Egypt Mortimer: I was really thinking about this, in a lot of ways, as a crime movie. Something like Point Blank from the 70s, or a Michael Mann movie, those kind of things. What I love about those movies is that they're almost like science fiction, and they have their own world and rules. Getting into this street level realm in some ways is a mirror of this giant science fiction realm.
Individually, Indigo was based on a woman I knew named Indigo a long time ago, who was a similarly cool, colorful, confident person. In some ways, the character started as an homage to her. Hamster, I thought that was such a funny name for a kid that was going to turn out to be a version of the sidekick in a superhero story. I had this image of him, and I talked to Skylan about this. The character got his name because when he was a little kid, he was hanging out on the stoop of his apartment and a rat came by. He picked up the rat, showed it to his sister and said it was a hamster, and everybody on the block and in his family thought that was so funny and ridiculous and charming. So, they all call him Hamster for the rest of his life.
How does having an unreliable narrator in Max add a new twist to the superhero genre?
Adam Egypt Mortimer: I think it takes the methodology and turns it into something that becomes a spiritual quest to find the truth. "I desperately want to know is the world bigger than it feels like, but I don't know. I'm constantly making like leaps of faith."
Part of it is him being unreliable to himself. You can see in his eyes that there are times where he's like, "Wait, did that happen? I'm confused. I don't know." I think he's on this quest to figure out how to get back to the feeling that he believes he once had. Hamster's journey is constantly about, "Do I believe him? Does it matter if I believe him? Can I trust him?" It becomes more about the emotional trust between the characters, even more so than some kind Usual Suspects twist of what was real and what really happened? The unreliability gives the opportunity for an emotional arc for everybody.
What is it about Hamster's personality that enables him to open his mind up to the far out possibilities Max brings up?
Adam Egypt Mortimer: I think it's because he believes that the world can be awesome. He's on the shittiest street we could possibly find to shoot on, his buddy is a drug dealer, and all he's got to work with is he's going to take pictures of this drug dealer. But you can see that with his passion and his enthusiasm, he's gonna make something of himself. He just wants to be creative. I think we can all relate to that almost desperate feeling of wanting to be creative, and how that takes us out of the place where we are.
What freedom does Archenemy's more mature playground give you in the superhero genre?
Adam Egypt Mortimer: Oh, man. That's just my vibe. That's what was so exciting about doing it as a movie, with SpectreVision, on a very low budget. I get to do what I want; I want all these crazy characters doing and saying crazy things, and we can make it as violent and psychedelic as we want.
I would love to have seen the version of Archenemy that's $100 million, but it probably wouldn't have had methamphetamine abuse or people's heads getting crushed. This doesn't feel like any superhero movie we've seen before, and that's where you make the sacrifice. You have very little money, and it's going to be a real pain in the ass; we're gonna have to cut some things we love, but nobody is going to tell me not to do it. In fact, the people I work with are just going to tell me to do more.
That's why I wanted to make this movie, man. This is my third movie, and it's the most personal to me in terms of the writing and the characters and the specificity of it. What a treat to be able to shoot a script this specific and weird.
It feels like this film has franchise possibility. Do you have any future ideas in mind of where you'd like to see these characters go next?
Adam Egypt Mortimer: Yeah, I wrote an outline for a graphic novel that would take place right after the movie ends and also fills in stuff from before the movie begins. I think it could be done as a book, it could be done as a show or as a movie. I would love for that to happen. I hope there's an interest to be able to do that, because that would be incredible.
There are some resonances in this movie that connect to Daniel Isn't Real, my previous movie. I kept thinking these probably take place in the same universe, because the universe created is a vast multiverse. I would love to get to a certain point where Max and Daniel are fighting over the cosmic abyss.
Archenemy is now available on Digital and on-demand.