Green Hornet Writer Evan Goldberg on 3D and Michel Gondry's 'Secret Shelf of Shame'

Two hours before the Comic-Con panel for Michel Gondry's The Green Hornet this weekend, I sat down with co-writer Evan Goldberg, a longtime collaborator of star Seth Rogen who was eager to show the audience what they'd brought down to San Diego. The results may have been a mixed bag -- some attendees were charmed, while others walked out of the panel in droves -- but as he told Movieline, Goldberg is more than confident they've got the goods, and when it comes to 3D (to which Hornet will be converted after the fact), he speaks with religious fervor.

Michel Gondry has said that he had to softpedal some of his more outrageous ideas when he first came in to pitch the studio on directing the movie. Had he already told some of those ideas to you and Seth?

Oh yeah. [Laughs] We had what I'll call his "secret shelf of shame" in the back room of the art department. You never think about this until you work with him, but he's got all these genius creative ideas he thinks about, and they don't all work -- and he hides the bad ones somewhere! Like, we wanted to blow up a club in a very early draft of the screenplay, and he was like, "No, let's do something interesting, something really cool! Let's have a foam bomb explode that then hardens, and you see all these people trapped in it."

I was like, "Hey. This movie is PG-13, and that's horrific." He also wanted the cops to be cutting them out with chainsaws. I was like, "No." We all agreed that we were not gonna do that, and then one day Seth and I were taking around the DVD guys and interviewing some of the people in the art department, and we found a Lego club with Lego people, all solidified in a block of foam. And [Gondry] came in and was like, "What? No! You weren't supposed to see that!" He throws out all sorts of stuff. I probably shouldn't say the other ones, because he might do them in another movie, but the foam bomb failed, so I know he won't be doing that one.

Yesterday in the J.J. Abrams/Joss Whedon panel--

Wait a minute.

What?

J.J. Abrams and Joss Whedon? The nerds must have lost their minds!

Between that, the Marvel panel, and his own panel, Joss is in about eight thousand panels here this weekend.

Sheesh.

But anyway, in the panel, J.J. got a lot of applause when he said that Super 8 was not going to be shot in 3D or converted after the fact. There's definitely a backlash to post-conversion -- does that concern you, since that's what Green Hornet is doing?

No.

Not at all?

Not even slightly whatsoever. I actually think it's kind of silly. It's like when black and white existed and then they came out with color -- a lot of artists back in the day were like, "This color thing is fun and all, but black and white is what artists do." Exact same thing. People are talking about it like it's some gimmicky thing, but it's 3D. We're talking to each other in 3D right now. This is much more engaging than if I were talking to you on a computer screen. It's undeniable.

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