Visual effects artist turned director Scott Stewart is making his feature debut with the supernatural thriller Legion, due out in theaters on January 22, 2010. With The Terminator as an influence, the film promises to not only have kick-ass action, but also presents angels in a much less typical, darker, better armed light.

The new director, who has already begun developing his next project Priest, about a priest who disobeys church law to track down the vampires who kidnapped his niece, spoke to IESB about the importance of character-based mythology in film.

Q: How much action and violence is in Legion?

Scott: There is a great deal of that, but we’ve got a lot of other stuff going on in the movie, too. There’s a real mythology that we put a lot of effort into. The character story was important to me. It’s how I came to it, as a writer. I was focusing on that. When it’s about a bunch of characters that, for some substantial part of the movie are trapped together, you have to care about them. If you don’t care about them, you’re not going to care much about the movie.

Q: Do we care more about them or about the whole mythology?

Scott: I think you get there through the experience that you go through with them, as characters. I hope that’s what we achieve.

Read the entire interview here.

I cannot wait to see this movie and I just love getting into the director’s brain, don’t you?

What is your take on the themes in this movie?