EXCL: The Birth of Peter Kwong's Hybrid

The script turned comic book turned film

Surveying the landscape of cinema, one has to wonder why man doesn’t just stay the hell out of the water. “Shrinkage” from the cold temperatures aside, there’s plenty to be afraid of. Who wants to take a dip when there are smart-ass sharks (Jaws, Deep Blue Sea), cranky mutant crustaceans (Deep Star Six), feisty fish (Piranha, Finding Nemo) and other unidentified creatures lurking in our oceans (Leviathan, Deep Rising)? Beats us, but those suckers who choose to risk their lives at sea are repeatedly the subjects of some entertaining horror films. The latest is Hybrid, shooting this year under the direction of Ernie Barbarash (Stir of Echoes 2) for Myriad Pictures and Studio 407. Not to be confused with the killer car movie of the same name, this beast springs from the mind of writer Peter Kwong who filled us in on Hybrid‘s journey to the screen and detour to the comic book medium.

“It started off as a film pitch which came close to getting picked up,” explains Kwong. “The head of Studio 407 read the script and said it would make a cool comic. It just grew from there.” Hybrid is set on a derelict fishing trawler where four friends discover an abandoned little girl and creature, born of environmental abuse, lurking within the bowels of the ship. “When I started writing it, I really wanted to do something on the open water, so I had my setting. Part of that was because I have a natural fear of water, I can’t swim. I thought I could apply that fear to a few of the characters. I’m also a huge fan of Phillip Noyce’s Dead Calm and one of the things I loved about it is how isolated it was. Initially, I had something more supernatural, but that didn’t really work. A movie called Ghost Ship had just come out.”

What he went for is what he calls “Alien on the water.” And unlike the monsters in the aforementioned Leviathan and Deep Star Six, two films Kwong says he wasn’t too familiar with, the creature of Hybrid is a much more fearsome being in that it bears a certain level of intelligence.

“The creature is like a chameleon who’s able to hide itself,” he reveals. “He has a plan. We’re playing with the missing link angle – a creature with a history and a mythology. The ocean is so unexplored you can believe this creature could exist. That’s what was important to me – that I could do a creature that was so outrageous and out there. There has to be believability. He’s a predator and a hunter, he uses his intelligence against the characters.”

Translating the script into a four-issue mini-series was, ultimately, not an effortless task. Still, Kwong, who often looked at the medium as merely a hub for superheroes, eased into the adaptation, looking at it as a learning process. “A lot of the [feature film] script got into the comic book. Some of the character stuff got left out. In a comic book you can’t have double action inside a panel. I would write: ‘Panel one, a character picks up a cup and looks over her shoulder.’ The editor said, ‘You can’t have her do both.’ Simple things like that. I had to think less about emotion and more about pictures. Certain jokes got left out, at the same time, there are psychological elements that were emphasized through thought balloons that I could not put in a screenplay. There’s always that give and take. In terms of the overall visceral effect, it’s one-to-one.”

Kwong is confident with Barbarash at the helm of Hybrid‘s film counterpart (“He did a good supernatural film called They Wait.”) and says there are talks of moving the production to Puerto Rico. “While the conventional thinking is that Hybrid is a horror movie, I also very much wanted it to be an adventure movie. A great adventure movie on the water. When the audience first sees the creature, I’d love them to have that thrill that they got when they first saw the giant squid in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea or the shark in Jaws. That’s a high threshold, but I hope we measure up.”