Greg Nicotero of ‘The Walking Dead’ Joins ‘Spawn’ Reboot
As production on the upcoming Spawn surges forward, one more name has been added to its growing roster of talent. Spawn creator Todd McFarlane told ComicBook.com yesterday that he’ll be bringing The Walking Dead‘s Greg Nicotero and his KNB EFX Group on board to create the effects for the film.
Nicotero is a legendary special effects makeup artist with a career in film and television spanning over 30 years. Though he’s probably most known right now for his work on The Walking Dead, Nicotero first got his start on George Romero‘s Day of the Dead. From there he’s gone on to work pn over 400 projects and, fittingly, one of these projects was the original 1997 Spawn movie.
The reboot is working with a smaller budget, leading McFarlane to seek out practical effects over CGI. Here’s what he had to say about teaming up with Nicotero and KNB once more:
“When I conceived of the story to start with, I never really thought of it as big special effects extravaganza because I knew we weren’t going to have the budget for it… I knew I was going to rely heavily on practical makeup and costuming, and one of the places that kept popping up was my good pal Greg Nicotero on his KNB Group. And he’s obviously done a tremendous amount of work on dozens and dozens of movies.”
He went on to describe their work on the iconic Image Comics anti-hero’s design:
“I sat down with Greg and his staff, I just said, ‘Here’s what I see visually.’ I gave them some reference at some images throughout the 25-year history of Spawn that I thought was close to what I was talking about. And then I just stepped back and let them start taking a whack at it.
Each time they sent me something, I would then draw over it and go ‘Hey, how about a little bit of this, a little bit of that?’ And then I thought very quickly we actually got to our look of what it is that we want to go at. KNB came out of the gate, showed me a wide, wide range of looks. I was able to narrow it down.”
Nicotero also shared his insight into the character while designing:
“We spent about six weeks coming up with some concept art, and designing the character, and a lot of it was kind of getting to the roots of what he’s about. He’s this sort of part feral animal, driven completely by this rage that he has, and he really embraced the idea of getting the sense of how much we want to see of this character, and what we want the audience to see.”
McFarlane will be writing the script for the film, with Jamie Foxx starring as Spawn himself. There’s no start date for filming yet, and producers at Blumhouse are making the interesting choice of shopping the title to distributors. Watch this space for more developments as Spawn builds its way onto the screen.