HeyUGuys Speaks with Martyn Pick – Director of WH40K

A few weeks ago, Codex Pictures announced an animated feature based on Games Workshop’s insanely popular wargames franchise, Wharhammer 40K. Apart from the title, Ultramarines, details were spares. We knew the film would be feature length, and that it would be animated, but that was pretty much it.

Earlier today we provided a few more details, found on the film’s production blog.

We now know that the film will be written by Dan Abnett, a novelist and comic book writer, already responsible for a large number of books set in the WH40K universe, as well as comics for Marvel and Dark Horse, and stories for 2000AD.

To direct the project the company have hired Martyn Pick, a British filmmaker and animator, who has created pop videos for U2 and Siouxsie and The Banshees. He also served as director of animation for recent Environmental Docu-drama Age of Stupid.

The announcement that Pick had been hired as director of the project had an interestingly worded sentence,

“Martyn was chosen to direct Ultramarines for his renowned and highly distinctive ability to fuse live action and animation and the fluid, rich painterly style of his film-making.”

We may be reading too much into it, but the phrase “fuse live action and animation” seems to suggest that the film might not be purely animated.

To try to get some more information on the film HeyUGuys contacted Pick.

While he was unable to confirm our suspicions, he did state that his previous work deals with a mixture of live action and animation.

Once that was out of the way he gave us some more details about the project.

To help guide Pick’s interpretation of the universe, Games Workshop have told him “It’s a war movie, not a gore movie” – which is not to say it won’t reflect the brutality and terrors of the Warhammer 40,000 universe.” Pick elaborated on this by explaining that bad things happen to the characters in the film, but for them it is nothing out of the ordinary. He added, “The storyline is very strong, with great characters and real drama.”

You can follow the progress of the movie at the official site, and on twitter.