Michael Biehn on why THE BLOOD BOND isn't very good . . .
In a great "Random Roles" interview with Michael by The A.V. Club, the actor comes clean about why this movie turned out so poorly:
http://www.avclub.com/articles/michael-biehn-on-the-victim-william-fri edkin-and-h,85963/
MB: Okay, here’s what happened with The Blood Bond. It was a guy by the name of Bey Logan. He had a script, and he asked me to rewrite it, and if I rewrote his script, I could direct this movie. We were going to work in China. So I went over there and had some friends rewrite his script, and I basically did a lot of the directing on the set, and I thought I was gonna be the director, but what happened was that when I left China… I thought I had some pretty good material. I had a trailer that I thought was pretty good, and I thought I was gonna be brought back over to Hong Kong to cut the movie and do all the post-production on it, all the sound, visual effects, and so on and so forth. And they never brought me back. There were some problems, it turned out, with the Screen Actors Guild.
We were under the impression that we were working under the Screen Actors Guild tent, and that turned out not to be true. The production value, because we were shooting over in China, was so poor that my whole character really needed to be looped, but I didn’t find that out until I got back to Los Angeles, and because it wasn’t a SAG production, I couldn’t go back to do any looping, so… I don’t consider that to be a Michael Biehn production. I consider that to be a Bey Logan production. Supposedly the cover of the DVD lists me as having directed it, but it’s not even my voice! I had nothing to do with the movie after the physical production, I didn’t get a chance to edit the movie or colorize it or do any music on it, none of the things that usually kind of pull a movie together.
I thought there was a movie there, but it turned out that… [Hesitates.] I’m not even sure he hired an editor. I think he edited it himself. I’m not sure. But it was kind of a shame. I thought there was a movie there, but by the time he got done with it, from what I understand, it wasn’t very good. The post-production values, the sound design of the movie, the music… I guess he went out and he shot some extra footage, and he put that in the movie also. He sent me a rough cut of it, actually, but I watched about 10 minutes of it, and I was like, “Ugh, this isn’t the movie I shot, that’s for sure.” And that was kind of the end of it. I think Bey kind of shot himself in the foot. I don’t know what happened, whether he ran out of money or what. He’s a nice guy, but he didn’t have me back to finish what I started. The experience was difficult, because nobody knew how to make a movie there—the sound guys didn’t know how to do sound, they didn’t know how to light it, they didn’t know how to do anything—so me and about three or four other guys kind of made that whole movie. It was fun. I had a lot of fun doing it. I just wish I would’ve had a chance to finish it.
You can't deny (or certainly ignore) Bey Logan's passion for Hong Kong cinema — despite the sometimes questionable "expertise" that has long impressed amateur web reviewers of DVDs on which he contributed commentaries — or his glassy-eyed determination to "make it" in the "Hollywood of the Far East" with little but fanboy aggression and a glossy fanzine to fuel his dreams, but the truth is, he's a classic showbiz huckster and THE BLOOD BOND was only the latest evidence of his philosophy (and among his worst, unless the long "in production" SNOWBLADE and/or the star-less BORDERLAND proves otherwise - here's hoping!).
Weirdly, a while back, Bey Logan — somewhere, but I can't remember exactly where — made a very thinly veiled allusion that the problems with the production were the fault of Michael Biehn. Granted, he never mentioned Biehn by name, but he didn't have to; the implication was stunningly clear, as though HE'D been burned by the Hollywood big shot.
Strange situation . . . share