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I wanted Dren to have a biological integrity to her. If you make a small change to somebody's face, it is much more jarring than some kind of gross deformation. I felt the small changes would actually be more shocking than the big ones. What I wanted to do with Dren, in her later stages, was to change the human form in subtle ways. And the way to do that, I felt, was to be subtractive. Our prime directive was to make a creature that we could believe really exists. PM: When you were working on creative design, what were you going for? What did you draw from? I didn't want to explicitly see what animal each part came from. I never wanted her to be like a mermaid a girl with a fishtail.

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It gave us more creative license to do more stuff with Dren. There is a dialectic between the different interspecies genes and that you get something that is greater than the sum of its parts.

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Also, in the logic of Splice, one plus one equals three. With Dren, the creature, and with Ginger and Fred, I did not make that a real consideration because the notion is that Clive and Elsa are not combining two or three things they are combining ten things. When it comes to life on this planet, it's surprising how little difference there is when you get down to the actual genetic makeup of each species. I was shocked that human beings share a lot of DNA with fruit flies, for example. Did you ask George what animals scientists usually use when they are splicing things together? PM: There are some similarities between Dren and Fred and Ginger, the first spliced creatures that Clive and Elsa create. We tried to make it in our own kind of obtuse way. And not in a way that I think would have given us any more of a sense of reality.

Dren movie movie#

We took liberties with some of the banter because we felt, frankly, that it is a movie and the reality is that when geneticists talk about genetics it's a little boring. George actually contributed a lot of technical dialogue. In fact, when I first met George, he was wearing a shirt that said `born to clone' and I put that in the movie. He`s a geneticist who I have to say, in the best possible way, is very similar to Adrien Brody's character in the film.

We had a guy on set named George Charames, who was our technical consultant. They both spent substantial time in a real genetics lab. PM: You had someone helping you with the script, but did you send Adrien and Sarah to any labs to do research? Real genetics labs look like high school labs. I avoided, as much as I could, making a Hollywood version of a genetics lab. At least give a flavor of the reality and the real science.

Sometimes it's hard to say, 'No, that could never, ever happen.'Īs much as I could, I felt it was important to adhere to the real science. What I gradually realized was within bioengineering there is a pretty wide bandwidth to what can be done. We kept coming to him and saying, 'Can we do this? Is this realistic? Is this possible?' To my shock he would almost always say yes and then top it off with something even more incredible. I was very sensitive to it because my co-writer Antoinette Terry and I worked with a real geneticist while we were writing the script. Were you aware as you were trying to get this to screen that science was changing and that what you had imagined was coming to pass in some ways? PM: You were developing Splice for a really long time-almost a decade. I must point out that the experiment that produced the mouse was not a product of genetic engineering, but it sure looked like it! Remember that? I found the image so arresting and shocking and intriguing that I instantly felt I wanted to make a movie about genetic engineering. It was a mouse that, by all appearances, had a human ear on its back. Vincenzo Natali: Splice, weirdly enough, was inspired by a mouse. Popular Mechanics: Where did you get the idea for Splice?