John Wagner Visits The Dredd Set

And the Judge Dredd co-creator reports back via his Facebook page.

“I wasn’t able to take any photos, I'm afraid, still bound by the official secrets act,” he apologises before getting to the meaty stuff.

“The film occupies all four giant buildings at the new Cape Town Studios. Sets looked great – grim! Very pleased with what I saw of Karl Urban and Olivia Thirlby. Both excellent in their roles and work well as a team. Entire crew really dedicated and determined to produce a damned good movie. Sadly I had to leave before I could see them shooting any ultra-vi. Extremely impressed by the 3-D – apart from the demo at Universal Studios in LA, my memories were of the feeble efforts I saw as a youth. This is a real quantum leap from that, really adds depth. This is going to be good.”

Then, in response to questions from fans he also reveals:

“Alex Garland and I have had our disagreements but he has usually had a convincing argument for doing things his way. On the main issue, concentrating the plot on a slice of life rather than trying to convey the whole sweep of Dredd and Mega-City life, I now see that he’s right. It was one of the flaws of the first movie, they tried to do too much. I just had a brief conversation with Karl, he’s much too hard at work to spare a lot of time. There was one shot where the camera focused in on his face, a reaction to Anderson, and I swear Carlos* could have drawn that scowl.”

(*That’s Carlos Ezquerra, the original Dredd artist)

“Only got to see a partial shell of a lawmaster, so can’t really comment, but did handle a lawgiver. Looked good. Plenty of attention’s been given to the script already and of course everything at the moment is a little fluid, so where rewriting has to be done it gets done. There was plenty of graffiti and there was nothing I can think of that I thought was bad or wrong. Karl, when he’s acting (and even when he’s not!), IS Judge Dredd.”

He also confirmed that there’s no Judge Death: “Not in this film.”

Dave is a TV and film journalist who specializes in the science fiction and fantasy genres. He's written books about film posters and post-apocalypses, alongside writing for SFX Magazine for many years.