Don’t Breathe Set Visit Report – Part 1: Director Fede Alvarez and Stars Jane Levy and Stephen Lang
Uruguayan filmmaker Fede Alvarez’s follow-up horror after his successful Evil Dead reboot was still untitled at the time of our set visit (a full year before its scheduled release date of August 26, 2016, via Sony Pictures Entertainment.), but now we know it’s called Don’t Breathe.
The film stars Evil Dead returnee Jane Levy as a money-snatching home invader, while legendary character actor Stephen Lang takes on the part of a blind man ready to defend his home to the death. We kick off our set visit report with those two stars plus director Alvarez. Check back next week for Part 2.
The story centers on a trio of young people who execute perfectly planned burglaries, thanks to an inside track at the local alarm installation company. When they break into the home of an antisocial blind man for their biggest and best heist, things go from bad to worse when it turns out the man is not only home, but he is a psychopath determined to keep his dark secrets from coming to light.
Dread Central was among the lucky few to be invited to the set in Budapest, Hungary. While the flight was long and the miles many, the set itself wasn’t much different from others we’ve seen. The major difference was craft services (cafeteria lunch) which featured — instead of the usual slim-minded Hollywood salad and anything gluten-free — hot gravy soups, mystery meat, baked breads with butter, and heavy rice dishes (mind you, this was in August during a humid heatwave).
The movie was shot almost entirely on a soundstage, Stern Studios, which was made to look like a ramshackle neighborhood in Detroit, Michigan, and on sets fashioned to be the booby-trapped home of an enraged blind man. Our interviews took place in the basement amongst dust, cobwebs, and fake (we hope!) spiders.
We got to see a scene being shot, in which “The Blind Man” is carrying a gun and dragging an inert (presumably dead) body around from one end of the house to the other. Two of the home invaders are inside, but he can’t see them. There is no dialogue on our day of the visit. In a variation of the scene we saw initially, The Blind Man emerges from the basement with a black rubbish bag. Closing the door behind him, he stays at the door. Alex (Dylan Minnette) and Rocky (Levy) are standing in the middle of the living room, still as statues, breathing through their mouths… trying not to make a sound. Terrified.
After that scene we did our interviews, and then we were treated to a sizzle reel Alvarez edited together for us to see – since filming was at its end by the time we arrived on set, we got to see a great overview of the film, including several scenes of nail-biting suspense. Looks like it will be another hit horror flick from Ghost House!
Now, on with the first batch of our interviews. Ladies first…
Dread Central: We don’t really know anything about this film right now. Jane, can you tell us a bit about your character, Rocky?
Jane Levy: Rocky is a young girl from Detroit who doesn’t want to live there anymore and wants to start her own life and doesn’t have the means to do so. So she and her friends start stealing stuff so that they can make enough money to get out of Detroit forever.
DC: So this isn’t their first robbery, or is it?
JL: The main robbery in this film is not their first, no. It’s their first stealing cash.
DC: What’s the relationship like among the three of you? Are you all good mates? Was there a bit of friction?
JL: They’re friends situationally. Like, they all need each other to be able to pull these things off. But also, there’s a bit of a love triangle.
DC: Always a love triangle.
JL: Always, yeah.
DC: Where does Rocky want to go after Detroit?
JL: Rocky has a little sister that she’s really close to. She wants to get away with her sister. They say California. I think anywhere. California is like an obvious dreamy getaway place. That’s their fantasy, the beach in California.
DC: How horrific does the movie get? Is it more like a thriller, or does it get pretty bloody?
JL: This is where me and the director and a lot of people on set don’t agree. For some reason everyone likes to call it a thriller. To me it’s 100% a horror movie. It’s very horrific. Less blood maybe than something like Evil Dead, but still terrifying and shock value. There is gore and violence.
DC: I talked to you on the set of Monster Trucks. I remember you saying that you weren’t too keen on doing another horror movie.
JL: I knew this question was going to come up…
[laughter]
DC: What lured you back?
JL: I don’t know. They caught me at a bad moment.
[laughter]
JL: Or they caught me at a good moment, whichever way you want to see it.
DC: They told you it was a thriller.
JL: No. Actually, I signed on to do this movie five days before I flew to Budapest. I had one day to decide whether I was going to do this. Fede just called me. A couple actresses were going to play this part. I wasn’t even up for it. I didn’t audition for it. We weren’t even talking about it. He was like, “You know what? I want you to do it.” And I was like, “OK.” I guess that’s how I ended up here.
DC: You didn’t have very long to prepare though. Are there stunts and things like that that you have to do?
JL: There are stunts. The preparation for me… stunts you can sort of figure it out the day before or week before. But yeah, I didn’t have a lot of time to prepare the character. But sometimes that is cool because winging it can sometimes create… I don’t know…
DC: …an unknown situation anyway.
JL: Yeah.
DC: What do you think of the character?
JL: She’s cool because she’s like an anti-hero. I don’t know how many people are going to like her. I think you will root for her hopefully. But Fede likes to play with those roles of the heart of the story, the brains of the story, the protagonist, they’re all like mixed together. Each character, you can’t tell… I think in this movie you are not necessarily going to know who is the survivor in the end, which all these horror films have, right?
DC: What is it like working with Fede again?
JL: It’s cool. We have a really honest rapport. He can be like, “Don’t frown like that. You look old.”
[laughter]
JL: And I’ll be like, “Oh, OK. Thank you.” But he’s also… you know, three years [have passed]… first of all, he speaks better English. He didn’t speak very good English in the first one. He speaks really good English [now]. He’s really confident. He’s been working on this for a long time. He’s had a lot of opportunities to work on other things, but this is the project that he wanted to. He has an answer for everything. You ask him like, “What about this little…?” And he has thought about this for so long that he’s really, really excited about it. He’s happy to be at work every day. It’s really a pleasant environment. I think with Evil Dead he was really excited to be there and they did give him a lot of free rein, but he was more of an employee because he was walking into someone else’s project, like their baby, basically. And this one is like his. So it’s cool to see him grow as a director. Everyone here is really excited to be here, and everyone really loves Fede. He’s really nice to everybody on the crew and the actors.
DC: How long have you been filming now?
JL: I think this is Week 7.
DC: So quite close to the end then.
JL: Yeah. We’re done in Budapest next week, and then we go to Detroit for one week.
DC: How has it been filming in Budapest? Is this your first time filming over here?
JL: Yeah. It’s really nice to be in Europe. Things are open late. You can go out to dinner after you wrap. It’s funny; the set is super international. Not only are most people speaking Hungarian and you have no idea what anyone is saying all the time, there’s like Uruguayans, Australians, South Africans, Costa Ricans. It’s like half the time… most of the time there is nobody speaking English, which is funny because right before you roll, you have absolutely no idea what’s going on. But it’s a beautiful city. People are nice. Food is really heavy.
DC: It will be a bit of a shock then going to Detroit after all this, I’m sure.
JL: Yeah. I’ve never been to Detroit. I’ve heard it’s pretty shocking how like a ghost town it is.
DC: It’s not that bad…
JL: I wasn’t necessarily saying it was bad. Just to see a city with emptiness… I’ve never seen that. But we actually have four days before we start shooting in Detroit, so I’m going to go to Lake Michigan and go swimming.
DC: Do our opinions, the way we root for the characters, change much during the course of the movie do you think as we learn more or less about them?
JL: This movie is like criminals fighting criminals. Everybody is “bad guys.” They are all breaking the law. I think it’s probably going to be different for each audience member who you like the most or who you want to win.
DC: How would you describe the horror in the film? You said it’s very scary. Is it like a ghost kind of horror or is it just very tense?
JL: It’s tense. There’s suspense. The most violent stuff to me I actually can’t talk about. I can’t give it away.
DC: Do you have to have any makeup or any special prosthetics?
JL: Yeah. I mean, there’s bruising and cuts.
DC: I always like to ask with the horror films and stuff, just with you personally, is there a horror movie or anything that you saw, you feel like, too young that’s a horror movie that’s stuck with you?
JL: You know what actually freaked me out? And I actually wasn’t that young. The Sixth Sense. I think I was like 11 or 12, and I lost my mind. My parents were actually scared of me. I was like screaming to turn it off. I don’t know what happened that freaked me out so bad. I can’t even remember the scene, but I remember like…
DC: Was it the little girl?
JL: It might have been that. In like the kitchen or something? It’s like late at night…
DC: There’s the woman…
JL: Something like that.
DC: Have you been able to watch it against since?
JL: I haven’t actually seen it. It’s good, right?
DC: Yeah. It’s good.
JL: I can’t remember if movies are good that I watched when I was 11. But I needed it to be off.
DC: You were saying this is a horror movie. Some are saying it’s a thriller. What kind of movies would you say would compare in terms of this?
JL: Hmm. That’s a good question. Fede is a cinephile. And every scene, every beat he has a scene reference or a movie reference for me. Most of the time I have no idea what he’s talking about. But he’s taken cues from many great directors and great movies. I don’t think I have a specific film that this really feels like to me. It is a weird movie. When you’re making something, personally I never know what the outcome is going to be. But this one feels definitely strange in that it doesn’t feel like a typical horror or a typical thriller. It feels like a mash between a lot of things. I’d be curious to see what you guys think.
DC: Do you watch the playback?
JL: I do, yeah. Fede has been really open about that. We have a screening room, and any dailies you want to see, he’ll show anybody. That’s cool.
DC: Does that help inform your performance?
JL: Sometimes… yeah. Sometimes you see stuff that doesn’t work, and you are like, “Oh, I gotta change that,” or sometimes you see stuff that surprisingly worked that felt really strange. That’s been cool. Fede has also been putting together mood reels or trailers for all of us to see the progress of the film. But music changes everything. Editing changes everything. I don’t know what the final product is going to be, but so far everyone has been super excited about all the footage that we’ve seen.
DC: I’m sure we can ask him what he thinks of his character, but what is your impression of what Stephen Lang is doing as sort of the central villain of the piece?
JL: He’s really scary.
[laughter]
JL: He really freaks me out.
DC: Is he scary all day long, like on set, off set?
JL: No. He’s a nice man, but when he’s in character about to roll, he’s terrifying. And he also can’t see. He’s wearing contacts that actually… not make him fully blind, but basically. I think he can see shapes. So he runs into you. [laughs] He’s also really strong. That, to me, is the coolest part of the script. And it’s something that I’ve never seen before, watching this villain in the same room as these people, but he actually can’t see them. There’s really cool stuff there, like shot-wise… That to me is iconic about this movie.
DC: In terms of that kind of icon status, do you think that the character that Fede and Stephen are going for is more of like a Michael Myers type of an icon, or is he more of a grounded…?
JL: Sorry. I don’t know who Michael Myers is.
DC: He’s the villain in Halloween. Like a Freddy Krueger, one of those types of boogeymen.
JL: Yeah. There’s backstory with this man and you know why he is the way he is. I think that they are trying to make him sympathetic. I don’t find him sympathetic. But that could just be my character. I find nothing about what he does to be justifiable. Maybe you will. I don’t know.
DC: Going on how extensive and brutal Evil Dead was for you personally, physically, how does this film compare?
JL: Much less. It’s like half the shooting time, half the gore, as in like I was actually, every take, dumped blood on my head. It was winter and I was outside. I was buried alive… everything. That movie was really, really, really hard. This is like 15% of that.
DC: Do you get to keep your hand?
JL: I do, yeah.
DC: I was watching the Blu-ray extras, like behind the scenes and stuff like that. That was more intense for me. Some of the film I’m like, “Oh, that poor girl!”
JL: Yeah. It was really hard. These movies are hard to do. I don’t know why the hell I’m here.
[laughter]
DC: What’s it like working with the guys?
JL: Everyone’s great. Really, it’s like a pleasure. Everyone here is super nice and fun and supportive of each other. It’s weird that we’re making such a morbid movie because in between takes and on the weekends we’re all hanging out. Like we had a huge dance party on Saturday that was the funnest night. We all played music together. Everybody is really close. That’s been a real pleasure, actually.
DC: How would you differentiate the trio? Is someone the brains and someone the brawn…?
JL: Yeah, totally. Dylan’s character, Alex, is the brains. My character, Rocky, is the heart. And Money is the muscle. Not necessarily physically… I mean, he’s a big guy, but he is the one who finds us the opportunities.
DC: The facilitator.
JL: Yeah.
DC: Is there a story of how you guys get together, or were you already friends and just decided?
JL: You don’t see any of that. But we’ve grown up around each other. Basically, as I think kids do, we’re all sort of using one another. Not necessarily in some bad way or sadistic way, but we’re kids who are all… we all have our own thing that we need to do and we want to do, and we use each other to steal stuff and get money and try and change our lives.
DC: So Rocky is not planning to bring the guys to California with her and her little sister?
JL: No.
DC: Do they know that?
JL: No.
[laughter]
DC: One of the things that horror fans really loved about Evil Dead was the practical effects and how meaty it felt. Is Fede continuing to use mostly practical effects with this film, or will there be more CGI?
JL: I don’t think there’s any real need for CGI in this one. I don’t want to give it away, but there’s a lot of scenes in this movie… I mean, I guess this isn’t giving anything away, but a lot of the scenes take place in the dark because we’re in his world and his house, and this man doesn’t need lights and stuff. And we’ve put in… there’s some like… I don’t know if I’m allowed to say it. There’s cool stuff.
Next we spoke with the “villain” himself, the great Stephen Lang…
Dread Central: So we see you’re not in costume…? [Lang is wearing a bloody “wife-beater” tank top]
SL: This is how I dress. My normal wife-beater. That’s my wife [points to prop of lifeless body].
[laughter]
DC: Jane sort of filled us in and let us know that for most of your performance you are wearing contacts so that you are mostly blind. Where did that idea come from? Is that something you and Fede came up with, or was it your idea?
SL: The contacts? It’s so difficult to maintain the blind thing. Let me start it this way. The nature of his blindness is a war wound; it’s shrapnel that shredded the eye. So it’s not just being born blind. It’s not a normal eye. They’ve been ripped up a bit. And so, you want to create… As fine an actor as I am…
[laughter]
SL: …I can’t do that. So you create the lens. But I think we conferred about it, and they did a very smart, canny job of it. It’s not that sort of zombie-like or white horror lens that you’ll see. They’re lenses that let you see the eye has been sort of messed up, but not jarringly. And the other one is different than the other.
DC: How hard is it for you to be in these scenes not being able to see? Does that inform your performance?
SL: Totally. You know, you say this all the time. When you can do it, when it can be real, it’s so much easier, simpler than acting. It’s just something you don’t have to worry about. What you do have to do is become adept at it because I’m not blind, and he has been blind for a good period of time. He’s really learned to kind of deal with it in a very effective way. So that becomes the challenge, it seems to me.
DC: What can you actually see?
SL: I wondered about exactly what the percentage is. If I put the lenses in and try to look, then I think I can see probably around 30%. But I relax my eyes constantly anyway. And if I do, which is kind of a helpful thing to do when you are doing it… it cuts it down to just shadows. And when they say “action,” I really try and turn my vision off.
DC: I want to know more about relaxing your eyes.
SL: I spend my life in makeup chairs, for example. I self-hypnotize all the time because if you are going to be in a chair for an hour and a half or whatever, you really want to kinda go down. That’s what I do. So I’ve been doing it for years. It’s not that hard. You just sort of learn to do it.
DC: Does all the action take place in your house?
SL: Yes. There are a few sequences around the house, and certainly for me that’s a really good subject because within the confines of his environment, he’s the master of his environment. He understands it. He understood it when he had sight. And now that he doesn’t have sight, he’s set it up so that he can deal with it in a very effective way. He knows where everything is. So what does that say? If something is out of place, that’s a problem.
DC: So is it like guerilla warfare in this film where all these kids are coming into his house and they also don’t know where anything is..? Would you say your character is the villain of the film?
SL: I wouldn’t say that at all. I’ve talked about villainy a lot over the years in different things. I’m sure you’ve all interviewed other actors before where you’ve asked them about the villain and we always say, “Well, he’s really not a villain.”
[laughter]
SL: I preface it by saying that, with this one, I understand the character’s function in the piece. You can understand why I don’t approach him as a villain, right? OK. But this particular piece, one of the things that attracted me to it is it’s extremely ambiguous. This guy, the character role I play, is a victim first and foremost and has been a victim. He’s Job-like in many respects. That was the first thing that I thought of. It’s like, “Why, God? Why? Why are you piling all this stuff on me?” And this is all prior to the story, the blindness being only part of it. And then when these home invaders come in, I didn’t do anything to [deserve] this! Anything! It’s just more of the same. So I’ll be very, very curious [to see the final film]. I think it’s a very canny piece of writing. That’s what really got me about this thing.
DC: Do we learn about the character’s life prior to the events?
SL: He recants finally when I speak. He’s not a man of a lot of words. So when I do speak, it’s important what kind of emerges. He’s not used to speaking too much anymore. So it’s kind of a creaky door of a voice that’s going to come out of him. But he will kind of… lay out his point of view.
DC: So you are like Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone, just setting up you booby traps?
SL: I actually channel Macaulay Culkin.
[laughter]
SL: Actually, I channel Macaulay in every way, particularly the way he looks now, which is quite frightening.
DC: I was watching Wait Until Dark last night. Were there any specific ticks or mistakes that you’ve seen with other people playing blind that you tried to avoid?
SL: I did Wait Until Dark on Broadway with Marisa Tomei in the role that Hepburn played and Quentin Tarantino as Harry Roat. I played Mike Talman, the role that Richard Crenna played, which, in a lot of ways, was an extremely interesting role, although Harry Roat is kind of a glory porn, in a way. And that was quite an experience doing that. So I’ve been around it.
But to see people making mistakes in blind? It’s been a long time since I’ve seen that old chestnut. To be perfectly honest, when I was preparing to do this part, I didn’t watch Malkovich in Places in the Heart to see him sort of flail.
[laughter]
SL: Audrey Hepburn… You know, I’m going blind in my own particular way. What I did do is I went to the internet and I looked at real blind people and how they do it. And I’m going to do my best to make it totally believable.
DC: What are some of the sort of hallmarks of people who are legitimately blind?
SL: Well, one of the things is closed eyes, of course. And when I asked, “Why do you keep your eyes closed?” It’s because there’s no point opening them, for one thing. Also, your lids begin to atrophy after a little while. So there is that. And that can be a down hat. But by the same token, you’ll see if you ask me a question and I reply this way, like that, just that little bit of being off-kilter and everything. It’s the tilt of the head. It’s the lean of the shoulder. It’s the trying to compensate with other senses, whether it be the smell, or the touch, or certainly the auditory becomes a big thing. So you want to do that. You want to create differences, but you don’t want them to be radical. You don’t want them to be too extreme. But, of course we get under extreme circumstances here. It’s not just taking the dog for a walk to the corner. If this character walks his dog to the corner and if you see him from half a block away and he’s not carrying his cane, you won’t know he’s blind. But that’s not the circumstances that happen here.
I don’t know. There’s kind of a hyper reality to things as circumstances begin to kind of… as the pace increases in this, as the situation gets sort of more and more intense and everything. His reality, his movements become kind of maybe a little more hyper real. When you take a turn… If you go down the hall and take a right to go into the bathroom, there’s something that’s very natural about the way you do it. When you get hyper real, it’s like “jump, jump…” You know, it’s like, “This is the center. I want to keep to the center…”
And you feel it out scene by scene because we’re building the role in the film in increments. And so much of it has to do with creating suspense. If there’s one word that is operative for the filmmaker in every scene: How does this affect my suspense? Does this ratchet it up? Does this relax it? Where do I want it right now? So the choices that I make and that he wants me to make, encourages me to make, are all geared towards that.
DC: We’ve heard different things. From some people we’ve heard this is definitely a thriller, don’t call it a horror movie. And Jane says she thinks it’s definitely a horror movie.
SL: I think it’s a thriller totally, and I know – I’ve been looking at movies a long time. I would say it’s a thriller with a dollop of horror thrown in, but first of all, it’s completely reality-based. There’s nothing supernatural about it. I know you can do a horror film that is reality-based, but there’s something that’s very… what’s the word? It’s a totally believable situation. The benchmark that this film tries to reach, and this is about a high a benchmark as one can get, is, of course, Psycho. Now, you tell me. Is Psycho a thriller or a horror film?
DC: I guess it became famous as a horror movie.
SL: It’s not a horror movie. The Exorcist is a horror movie. It’s also one of the 10 greatest films ever made. Psycho is a thriller and one of the 10 greatest films ever made. And they both have great suspense in them. So that’s where the confusion is because it’s like kind of the quick scare, the surprising scares.
DC: Certain scenes become famous, like the shower scene in Psycho, and then I think sometimes the rest of the film gets forgotten.
SL: Not by me. That film is extraordinary. And both those films are about pacing. That’s the crucial thing.
DC: Speaking of that, Jane was telling us that Fede is letting people come in and watch select scenes and he’s doing sort of trailers and stuff. Have you been watching that to see the direction in which he’s taking the film?
SL: When we first started, I did… I haven’t seen anything in a week or so, and I think it’s mostly just because we’re working so damn hard right now. You want to see that the look is working. You want to see that the makeup is working, the eyes are working. And he wants you to know what he’s doing visually. So you can see the shadows on your face and how he’s framing scenes and everything. So yeah, it’s very valuable. It’s part of the process. It’s helpful to us. He’s a wonderful filmmaker.
DC: He’s a real cinephile. What sort of touchstones does he give you? Obviously Hitchcock being one of them.
SL: Yeah, Hitchcock. Maybe Billy Friedkin a little bit. He’s got a real mastery over the spectrum of what’s available working in film. He’s bringing out lots and lots of techniques. And I like watching him and listening to him. He always wants another shot, always wants another angle. I have a lot of faith in his ability to make a movie.
DC: Speaking of the full spectrum, you talked a little bit about the visuals. What part does sound play, not only in informing your performance but in the overall structure of the film?
SL: It will be real interesting to see the sound mix on this because it’s a big percentage of the success of this film. But certainly the whole auditory aspect of it is very, very important to my character. I alluded to it before just in terms of when one sense is gone, others begin to compensate hopefully. And I’m listening. I mean, I’m listening, and there are certain times… what is it I hear? And the sense of smell is just as important. But I bet it’ll sound great.
[laughter]
DC: Are there certain beats built in where a sound will play a crucial role?
SL: Sure. Yeah. I’m trying to… there are beats where a sound will play or the lack of a sound. If my dog ain’t barkin’, why ain’t he barkin’? My dog ought to be barking right now. My alarm isn’t going off. That’s a problem. So it’s not only the sounds, it’s the absence of sounds that can do it.
We’re just doing a scene right now we’re going to shoot in a little while where I sense something. And that’s kinda sketchy territory because you want to go, “Well, what do you mean?” I know what my senses are. Do I smell it? Do I hear it? I certainly don’t see it. And a discussion ensues because what you are trying to do is you are trying to make a suspenseful movie moment. So you have to figure out how to bring that about. You have to figure out what actually does that mean when you sense something? I’ve already established that there’s nobody there. I guess nobody is there.
DC: How much time do you spend interacting verbally with these three burglars? Do you talk to them much at all?
SL: No. Actually, you’re in… you know this is part of my home.
[laughter]
DC: It’s lovely…
SL: It’s part of the basement. We have dialogue here. Not right here, but somewhere around here…
DC: Do the sets reflect the fact that the character is blind? Are they designed in a certain way?
SL: Yeah. Well, it’s a house that wasn’t built for a blind person, not a special needs home. But he’s just jerry-rigged it in a way. The carpets have been kinda taped down so he doesn’t trip over them.
DC: You’ve got a mirror up there.
SL: Mirrors are irrelevant, of course, to me. If you look along the walls. you’ll see right in the center of the wall where my hand… if I raise my hand, it’s worn into the wallpaper because I trace it as part of my path. So various things like that.
DC: Are we making a false assumption? Has he jerry-rigged his home in case burglars do come or someone does try to break in?
SL: Well, he doesn’t really want visitors. He doesn’t want visitors at all. He’s a victim, but he’s not a total victim. There are surprises in the script. So you’ll find that he is… there are reasons that he wouldn’t want anyone to come in the house.
DC: Well, he must have valuables. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have selected his house because it looks pretty run down.
SL: That’s right. You know, I think of him a bit as an urban legend. How much do you all know? Do you know anything?
DC: This is where we should say we know everything!
SL: You know absolutely nothing. Is that correct?
DC: Very little.
SL: All I’m going to tell you is that at one point, what he went through, the trials that he went through, were public. They were in the paper, the pain that he had to endure. So it’s a logical conclusion for someone to say that, at some point, he probably received some compensation for that pain. So yeah, you could say that there is…
But by extension, in my own mind, as I said, I would view this guy… If I grew up in a neighborhood with this guy, I would view him as an urban legend: “Don’t go. That’s where the blind dude lives. He’s crazy. He’s got a Rottweiler. Don’t go there. But he’s got really good stuff…”
[laughter]
DC: It reminds me of Rolling Thunder where a Vietnam vet gets compensation publicly. A bunch of silver dollars. And then, of course, things go bad.
SL: I don’t know the picture, actually.
DC: From the way that you are describing this character, it sounds like he prefers solitude. But why would he choose that?
SL: Why would he choose solitude? Life has closed in on him because his experiences of dealing with the world have been pretty much tragic and negative. And the only place he has control… and he truly is… his life has been sort of this existential crisis. He’s reached this point where I want to be in control of my life, and here I can be. And that’s it. Outside he can’t be. He’s diminished by a huge percentage the minute he walks out. He wants to be dependent on no one. And by nature, the fact that he’s blind and needs groceries and needs to get a haircut once a month, and needs this, of course he is dependent. But he wants to minimize that. He really wants to get that because he’s gotten nothing from the world but heartache up till now. So the more that he can isolate himself… he’s a very isolated character.
DC: You say that people have feared this man. Do you think that they have reason to fear him?
SL: I don’t know that they fear him… that really is my own conjecture, in a way. I mean, I think at heart… I don’t play him as a terrible guy at all. I wouldn’t say he’s got a good heart or a bad heart. I’d say he’s got a broken heart, in a way. He’s a brokenhearted man is what he is. But for all his heartbreak, he’s got a steel backbone, too. This all takes place in a really kind of a bombed out section of Detroit. It’s a place that was at one time a nice neighborhood that really reflected the values of the country in the ‘40s and ‘50s that was affluent and growing, and industry was booming and everything like that. And now when you see it, he’s an isolated guy in this neighborhood. People have left. Everything is falling to disrepair. It’s not only a metaphor of the nation and that city, it’s a metaphor for his own state of being, it seems to me. But there’s something stalwart about it. Sometimes Fede likes to bring up Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino.
DC: It used to be, as you say, a wonderful city. From the sound of it, this character just has been through some bad situations, much like the city of Detroit. Now the city of Detroit is fighting back. You are sitting in front of us with bloody knuckles and blood on your wife-beater. So you are fighting back. What’s going on?
SL: You draw a line in the sand only so far. But that line stops at my front door. If you come further than that, I’ll do everything I have to do. I’m not going to retreat anymore. You can bomb out the neighborhood. You can destroy it around me. But this is mine. So if it takes bloody knuckles or a lot more than that, then I’ll do what I have to do. In that respect he is no different than you or I or any of us, it seems to me.
DC: We know that production is moving to Detroit soon. Filming in Budapest, what’s that been like?
SL: It’s a good place to make a movie. Budapest is a lovely city, for one thing. But it’s not so culturally rich that you feel like, “My god. I came to Budapest and I didn’t see anything.” If you went to Florence to make a movie and you didn’t see The Duomo and all this stuff, you’d feel like an idiot. Here you can see things. I went to The Grand Synagogue. I went here, I went here, I went here. And now I feel like, “OK. Now I can just sort of make [the movie]…” If I see one thing on my day off, it’s great. But it’s a very conducive place to make a film. It’s a nice studio. The studio is 25 minutes from the hotel. I like the Hungarians. I feel like home here. And I’m half-Hungarian. The food is… it’s all kind of comfort food, which is good and bad.
DC: Jane said it’s heavy.
SL: It’s heavy food, but there’s something very sort of comforting about it, but maybe a little too comforting.
[laughter]
SL: And the crew is a seasoned, knowledgeable crew. And if I ever get depressed, I think, “Well, I’m not in Bulgaria!”
[laughter]
DC: When it comes to horror films, if you’re a fan, is there one you feel like you saw when you were too young or one that’s stayed with you that’s sort of haunted you?
SL: There are a couple of them that made an impression on me. Certainly The Exorcist stayed with me. But I wasn’t too young when I saw it, or else you’re always too young for that… it’s so incredible. And I think The Omen is an amazing… there’s such cool stuff in The Omen. But there’s a film I saw when I was probably about nine that I shouldn’t have seen. It was called Two on a Guillotine. I believe it’s with Cesar Romero and possibly Dean Jones, which would be weird. If I look at it now, it’s probably the campiest, stupidest thing in the world. It scared the living shit out of me. And then, also, when I was a kid, Bride of Frankenstein was an amazing movie, but it had such whip. It scared me, but it kept you coming back because it was so kinda cool at the same time.
DC: It’s so campy.
SL: It’s wonderful. I would say those. And, of course, Psycho. I’m not a connoisseur of the genre because I don’t particularly like being scared in the movies.
DC: But you like being scary in this movie?
SL: I want to be real. I’ll kinda leave it to the… Yeah, I’m going to be scary in the movie. Look. I’m a piece on the chessboard. He’s the one who is going to move it around. I’ll do the best I can.
DC: You probably know better than anybody how Hollywood’s perception of you changed after Avatar. Is this the kind of role you think you would have gotten before that movie?
SL: No. I think Avatar changed a lot of things for me. I think I would have been considered for this role, but I think I would have been #11 of #15 on the list. It’s that simple. Avatar moves you up on the list is what happens. There’s no correlation between the role in Avatar and this role in the least.
DC: It’s just a matter of perception, like, “Oh, we remember him from that movie…”
SL: One of the things… I do think that that happens. And I imagine the producers think of it… putting me in this role… remember I was talking before about this guy is a victim, no reason to suspect him? Putting me in the role probably does actually make me suspect from the beginning because I play a lot of hardass bad guys…
DC: “That’s the bad guy from Avatar…”
SL: Exactly. That can happen.
DC: So how big is the cast? Is it just four people?
SL: No. There are a few more roles. But the core is four.
DC: Tell us about the house itself. You say that this is not a special needs house but that you’ve built it around your own needs. In that way it seems like it’s a character in and of itself.
SL: I hope you’ll get a chance… I don’t know if you’ll go to the set we’re working on today, but you should because you’ll see the façade of the house. It is your proverbial brick shithouse. It’s a solid, solid building. That kinda plays into what we’ve been speaking about already, something that is, “By god, I’m here and I’m not going anywhere. You are going to have to blow me up.” And I like that. It’s solid and it’s forbidding. It’s got a slightly fortress-like quality, I think, to it. It’s not a thatch cottage.
DC: So did you character live here before he went blind?
SL: Yeah. It’s a house that he’s had with his wife and with his family. It’s not beyond possibility that it’s the house he grew up in.
DC: Tell me about the relationship between you and the Rottweiler.
SL: A man and his dog.
[laughter]
DC: Just a man and his dog? Was the dog gotten before or after you became blind?
SL: We got it after he became blind. It’s not the first dog that he’s had.
DC: Is it is a Seeing Eye dog or is it just an angry Rottweiler?
SL: It’s a watchdog. Rottweilers, as a rule, I don’t think can be Seeing Eye dogs. Right away that’s an interesting thing. “OK. He’s a blind man with a dog.” And one would think Seeing Eye dog. But that’s not really what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about a watchdog here. But he can function that way, too, and as a chauffeur.
[laughter]
SL: Do you want to know what happens in Avatar 2, 3, and, 4?
DC: I prefer just knowing about Avatar 17.
SL: I’m directing it!
[laughter]
DC: What happens at the end of Avatar 4?
[laughter]
SL: It’s really good. Quaritch goes blind, ends up in a house in Detroit.
[laughter]
Finally, we wrap up Part 1 of our report with director Fede Alvarez, who proved to be quite chatty… and witty!
Dread Central: How long has the story idea been percolating in your head?
Fede Alvarez: Enough, I guess I would say. We were coming back from Comic-Con. We were promoting the DVD release of Evil Dead. And on the way back we just drove from San Diego to Los Angeles with Rodo, a writer on Evil Dead and on this one, too, and many, many things we did in the past. We wanted to do something that was very, very, very, very suspenseful. That was what we really wanted to do. And we started thinking: What is one of the things that creates a lot of suspense? For me, and this is regardless of the genre or what kind of movie it is, it’s really when you have some character walking in someone else’s domain. We are so precious about our private space and our house, and we all have this fantasy of what if somebody walks into your house? But also when you are in somebody else’s house, and when you see characters doing that, like violating that space on the big screen…
I remember watching The Lovely Bones, which was amazing. But there was a scene where she breaks into the house. It was so scary. People would jump in their seats. I’m like, “Why are people terrified? This is not a horror movie at all.” But it’s just the concept of walking into someone else’s domain because you are under their rules. And in the real world, in the United States, you can be shot; and that’s completely legal and fine. So it’s pretty scary to be just walking into someone else’s house.
So just as a point of departure, we wanted to do something to tell the story of these kids. They are not really house robbers, just a bunch of punks. And they have a way into these house that you’ll learn when you see the movie. And they’re doing it. And they’re being a little bit reckless. Kids sometimes are not the sharpest pencil, the ones that decide to do that. But these ones happen to be quite smart, I guess. That was kind of the point of departure, where you start there and say, “OK, it’s going to be a story about these kids and see the story from their point of view.” And also, I come from Uruguay. And in Uruguay crime is quite a problem. And I’ve always been fascinated by stories that you hear when they were breaking into someone’s house, and the things that happen, the things they do… a lot of times they take a shit on your carpet. But not because they want to shit on your carpet. It’s because they’re so scared… that’s where the expression comes from: You shit yourself. You shit your pants.
But you rarely hear it from their point of view… what it is to just break into someone’s house and be there. You would tend to think they were reckless and they are brave, but it’s a pretty [scary] thing to do from a robber’s perspective, I guess. So that’s why we wanted to tell this story from their point of view. But that’s how it started. I don’t know how long ago was that… a couple years? Two years?
DC: Jane mentioned that she came in sort of at the last minute. Did you not consider her right away?
FA: I did. When I finished the script, she was the first one to read it. We got together in Los Angeles right after she knew about the script. We had dinner and we talked about it. And at that point I wasn’t casting. Just the script was just done. So we still needed to figure out a way to make the movie. And then, by the time we started casting the movie, when it was a go, she was busy with another project and she wasn’t available. So we went through the casting process and I was looking for someone. But I guess I always was looking for kind of Jane and she wasn’t available. So towards the end I remember being frustrated with the process and like, “Shit. I want to find that girl.” I think she put a picture on her Instagram. She was in San Francisco. I was like, “Aren’t you supposed to be making a movie?” And I called her and she was like, “No, that movie didn’t happen.” I was like, “Do you want to come to Budapest and make a movie?” It was like, “Fuck yeah! Let’s do it!” And she flew over the next week. But she was the first one to read it and always knew the story.
DC: We’ve heard that there are bits of the film that are shot almost completely in the dark. We saw a bit of that… who was it who told us there was a light around the camera and that was how it was shot?
FA: Yeah, you saw the shot… you know the last shot in the teaser? It’s kind of what I call the title shot because it’s a man going into darkness. But yes, that’s something that hasn’t been done before. It’s always been challenging in movies… how do you portray full darkness when you need light to see stuff? I guess the audience already is in a place from probably Silence of the Lambs to today… remember that creepy last scene before Bill in the cellar? But he had the device. He had the night vision device… and they’ve done it many times with night vision cameras. There’s always a device there. Our process was like, “OK. The audience gets it. They don’t need to have someone with a camera. They know that there’s a certain look, that it’s monochromatic. It has no shadows. There’s no shadows being cast. They buy it as darkness.” And also, you have the characters with their pupils completely dilated all the time. So we created a pretty effective effect. And it creates so many opportunities for darkness. Like that shot you’ve seen like seeing someone just sinking into darkness just because you are moving away from them is pretty bizarre. There’s actually a very nice piece in this cellar with that style. We’ll see if it works.
DC: Is it actually a visual effect or just something you are doing in camera?
FA: No, no. it’s all in camera. It’s practical. We are not doing many visual effects here. It’s a very old school movie in many, many aspects.
DC: You mentioned Silence of the Lambs. I think I remember in film school they told us that Demme put like a low hum over the whole movie until that scene. Then he dropped the hum out and it made it extra suspenseful. We talked a little bit with Stephen about the sound and the importance that sound plays. Do you have any kind of ideas in that vein of playing with sound?
FA: Definitely. The way it’s going to play in the movie and something that happens… in the moment they break into the house, because of the nature of the story, because you are in someone’s house. You don’t want to have the characters chatting. You will be trying to hide. I would say like 20 minutes into the movie when they are really inside the house, everything goes quite silent. There’s not much dialogue. The movie table is like a big set piece. From the moment it starts, it plays in real time from that moment on. And it’s going to be some of that. The goal actually is to have very little music. Sometimes you do some [sound effects]. That’s the humming that you have sometimes. But not per se like a score… we’ll have a score, and Roque Banos, my composer on Evil Dead, will be back on this one. He’s already working on the music. But even the music is made out of sounds that you would find in the house. So it’s pretty unique in that aspect. It’s all about the sound. I’m trying to have the longest set piece I can have with no music and all sound design because there’s nothing to be said. Once The Blind Man knows they are in his house, there’s nothing to be discussed or negotiated or anything.
DC: They have to stay quiet, I imagine, if there is a blind guy hunting them.
FA: Yes. Exactly. That’s why his senses are a little more refined, let’s say. So they really, really have to be so, so quiet. So there’s very few lines. There were more lines in the script and we’re really stripping it down to the bone. It’s looks. It’s where we go. We go that way, walk, stop, The Blind Man is there. As you’ve seen today in one of the scenes, The Blind Man happened to walk right in front of them just trying not to breathe. So sound design will play a big part because the camera is sometimes… in some moments we are working with two types of cameras. We’re working with Alexa, which is standard, and we’re working with Black Magic, which is a smaller camera, so we put it right up their noses sometimes. We can hear and we can even see their breathing when they are breathing in or breathing out. It’s just fun to really get in their heads and see that they’re trying not to breathe.
There’s a scene we did on the weekend. One of them gets hurt so then, suddenly, he’s trying to hide, but the problem is he has hurt his ribs so every time he breathes in, he does this sound. So it’s like either he gets found or he stops breathing, and stop breathing is not an option. So it eventually becomes this thing of trying to hide, and every time he breathes you have this tiny sound. So The Blind Man can get from one side of the house to the other.
It generates a lot of strange and pretty fun opportunities for me.
DC: Why did you decide to set the movie in Detroit in particular?
FA: I guess because it’s the isolation element. This guy lives in a house that’s on a street where there’s nobody. And not even a street. It’s a neighborhood that is empty. That’s something that you find in Detroit. It doesn’t represent the whole city. The city is actually starting to come back to life and it’s amazing how a lot of young people are going there. Downtown is beautiful. It’s a great place to go. But because it’s a city that was built for 2.5 million, 3 million people, and now there’s… big sections of that city are completely empty. And they were middle class, upper middle class neighborhoods that now are completely dilapidated and empty. So you can find a character like this one, which we did find. They are the last men standing in their neighborhoods. They have the right to stay there and the city cannot just cut them off and cut the power, so they have the right to be there. They stay there. And they live pretty particular lives, like surrounded by houses and all this kind of urban decay thing, but they keep their house pretty neat and they cut the lawn every morning.
And for the genre I think it’s something very strange. Usually you show a nice house and there’s a scary house and that’s where the story happens. In this one it’s the other way around. It’s like all the houses are scary, there’s a nice one there. That’s where the weird shit happens. So it’s pretty unique visually.
DC: Raimi is from Detroit. I’m sure he hasn’t lived there in a long time, but did he have any advice?
FA: He goes all the time.
DC: Did he have any advice about the city and how to portray it and the people?
FA: Yeah. Part of the reason why I knew Detroit was because I spent some time with Sam while he was shooting Oz in Detroit. So I had a chance to go there and spend some days with him. And I got to know the city a little bit. And we’d talk a lot about it back then. So yeah, I think he loved the script right away, partly because it was his town also, I guess. But while I was there spending some time with him on Oz, I had the chance to talk to a lot of people over there and kind of get to know the character a little bit, because the mentality of some of the guys from that generation is pretty unique and pretty particular.
But it’s not a coincidence that we are doing it in Detroit. I guess the Raimi factor played that way because I was there because of Oz. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been in Detroit. I wouldn’t know Detroit. I don’t think I would write a story in a city that I’ve never been to.
DC: How would you compare the experience of making this film to making Evil Dead?
FA: There’s many similarities, I guess. Of course I have Jane every morning here. But it’s kind of the same team… at least on the producer level it’s kind of the same team. I had a lot of freedom… when I was doing Evil Dead, honestly, there was no restriction whatsoever. Sam never wanted to step on set. So it was really like they sent me to New Zealand, where we shot that movie, and they really wanted me to do whatever I wanted. I was so grateful to them. Sam, being a director, because he knows that for a director, what he wants is producers that enable you and they give you the freedom to do what you think is cool. That’s what happened on Evil Dead.
So here it’s even more freedom, I guess, because there’s not a previous movie that I have to kind of honor and tap into. And there’s no story that I have to echo. On Evil Dead I was trying to tell a new story with new characters, but still I wanted to honor what it was previously there. Here it’s different, which is actually pretty bizarre. It’s a different way to do it. Every shot I did in my life, it was always from something new. But this is the first time I did a movie that is 100% that you take out from thin air. It’s pretty exciting. It’s pretty cool. The similarities are just… there are a lot. Again, I can do whatever I want, which is a blessing. As you know, I have a lot of colleagues in Hollywood that usually are always teasing me about that, like I have too much freedom to be making Hollywood movies. Even on Evil Dead we never had… the studio knows… the cut you’ve seen was my director’s cut put out there. There was none of that… and that’s all kudos to Sam and his partners. That the way they want to work with filmmakers. And here we’re kind of doing the same. It’s kind of the same thing, to be able to do whatever we want. And the way we work with the studios, also. They also encourage us to do whatever we want. I have complete creative freedom what I want to do here. So that’s a beautiful way to make movies.
DC: What qualities in Jane made her perfect for this role just like she was in Evil Dead?
FA: I love the strong female characters. I think she did a great job in Evil Dead of playing that character. At the same time, most of the movie she was a monster, right? And then eventually she became the hero in quite a strange storytelling twist. On horror, it’s not the drug addict that becomes the hero at the end, and definitely not the monster. So it was pretty strange.
But it really works. There’s a lot of people with tattoos… I still get on my Twitter every day like some new tattoo… not every day, but once in a while somebody has a tattoo of Jane on their arm and their leg. There’s a lot of those. They’re very strange. It’s creepy, but it’s cool.
DC: Has anyone gotten a tattoo of your face…?
FA: No.
DC: They’re tweeting it to Jane.
[laughter]
FA: I guess that something happened with that character that people really connect with her somehow. And, at the end of the day, in Evil Dead it was just like those last 10 minutes and the blood rain where she is just a girl trying to get away from all this, and she managed to come back on the other side of life. So I really wanted to make a movie with her exploiting that a little bit more. I think she’s so good to play that character. Me, personally, I really enjoy seeing her play that role and see her in a movie playing that character. It’s a completely different character, but that type of character, like a girl that starts in one place… At first she’s not that strong in this movie either. She has an abusive mother. She lived quite a shitty life. And part of the reason why she wants to break into the house is to kind of break free from all that. I’m not going to spoil it for you, but a lot of very interesting things happen to her and she really, really gives a fight. I guess that’s a pretty unique characteristic that not everybody can play to be fragile in one moment, because in some points in the movie, as you see in the teaser, you really feel like she’s a fragile young girl and she can turn it on and then suddenly she’s quite badass. I just love to see that. And she’s awesome at doing that. That’s why she’s playing the role.
DC: Do you have a favorite character in the movie?
FA: I guess I have to say The Blind Man… I love movies that force me to pick sides but without giving you the answer to the questions. In Hollywood, sometimes it doesn’t work. And the worst part of Hollywood is sometimes the movies just spoon-feed you with the answer of who you should like: “These are the good guys. Bad guy is the bad guy. And you are going to like this guy.” And particularly, “I like this girl because she’s nice and she’s good to her sister.” They don’t really give you much choice. And that’s changing a lot. If you think about “Games of Thrones” these days, you are so confused about who you should like. And I think we all enjoy that somehow, being able to like the bad guys eventually and then they make a choice and you go, “No. I don’t like you anymore.” I think in TV shows it’s easier because it’s a long run. In movies it’s harder, but I think you can do it anyways. And I think probably the characters I love the most usually aren’t the nicest people ever. There are a lot of great characters in movie history that weren’t nice. They have very shady morals.
So here that’s what I’m trying to do in this movie, not giving you good guys and a villain. They all are villains. They are all doing something that is very wrong, all of them, four of them, somehow in their own way. So it’s really up to the audience to choose who they are going to root for. They’re probably going to love the kids first. And then enters The Blind Man, which is a victim of these kids. He wants to defend his home and he’s not going to let them take his stuff and just walk away. So eventually you are going to understand him a little bit. Then I may show you something where you go like, “Yeah, I don’t agree with this guy,” but then you learn something else and you are like, “Oh, he’s actually pretty cool.”
That’s the game that we’re playing here. Even in the teaser you’ll get that, like you see him, you understand him. You put yourself in his skin and it feels like shit to be home invaded, right? Anyways, definitely The Blind Man I gotta say is my favorite character. Don’t tell the other characters.
DC: Was it difficult to write his exposition to sort of understand what’s happened in his life? With the other characters we see their lives build, but he’s already…
FA: Naaman Marshall, the production designer, really helped on that aspect… through the images of the house… we spend a lot of time in the house before anything happens… by seeing the house and by learning some details that the kids know about him, you start putting the pieces together and know who he is. And eventually he will say something maybe. But for a long time in the movie he doesn’t say much. But he’s not mysterious in that way. I mean, you kinda know about a lot of his life. It’s basically through the house. The house tells a lot of his story.
It actually spends time with him before the movie starts. It’s not where you are with the kids and then they go into the house and we meet the character. In the first act we spend some time with them, and then we spend some time with The Blind Man in his everyday life. He’s a gardener. He’s doing some gardening. And then we share some moments with him. The movie is set up, and the way I’m trying to build the storytelling here, it’s really like a chess game. So, first act is these are the players. There’s a beautiful shot we did the other day here in the house that’s just a long tracking shot in the house when the kids enter it for the first time. It not only shows you the kids, but it shows you these are the kids, but there’s a hammer in there. There’s a skylight in there. There’s this lock here, this door that is slightly ajar. And I show you all the elements right beforehand. So the audience probably hopefully will start trying to take guesses: “OK. That’s how that element is going to play.” Maybe they are right and maybe they are wrong. But that’s kind of how the whole story is designed.
It’s really like a chess game. And they make their move, The Blind Man makes his own. Then they make another one, and then The Blind Man another one. And then they make one and it’s check and then The Blind Man escapes that and then it’s check. And then eventually it will be checkmate for someone. It’s a nice puzzle, the house, and how every piece fall in one place. Again, you follow both sides. It’s not that we don’t know what The Blind Man is doing. Actually, we spend a lot of time with him seeing what he’s going through. When he fails, he’s frustrated, and we stay with him. It’s not a boogeyman. Usually when you have a character as a boogeyman, you don’t show him. You don’t spend time with him. He’s hiding somewhere. You don’t see Jason going against the wall going like…
[laughter]
FA: Here you do spend time with him and trying to understand what he tries to do and his plan. Hopefully that’s why… again, I tried to really give the audience the characters and let them choose who they are going to root for.
DC: Before I came here, I watched Wait Until Dark again, which feels almost like a role reversal version of this movie. Can you talk about if you’ve seen that and any other films that might have influenced you?
FA: Actually, Wait Until Dark is a movie that I hadn’t seen. And when my mother asked me what I was doing, I told her the new story, and she was like, “Oh. It’s like Wait Until Dark in reverse.” I was like, “What?” She goes, “This Audrey Hepburn movie. She was nominated for an Oscar for it.” I was like, “Fuck? What’s that thing?” And I went and watched it. But I didn’t know about it. But when I saw that, it just got me more excited because, of course, it’s a completely different story, but the opportunities of how you tell suspense when you have a blind character is great. In that movie she happens to be the poor victim that is invaded by this villain. Here it kinda works in a different way.
But I don’t remember seeing much of those characters. I don’t remember seeing a blind man portrayed in this way in movies. Believe me, what I’ve been in Hollywood so far… I’m really trying to stay away from just jumping into other people’s movies and trying to make my own. The challenge is of course you have to go and you have to convince someone to finance your movie or a studio to put it out there. You better go and tell them something that at least sounds like it hasn’t been seen before. That is a big challenge.
So when we discover kind of in our minds the character of The Blind Man, we’re excited… I never have seen a blind person portrayed in the light of this guy, because he’s pretty badass. Of course, Blind Fury, I know. But, again, those guys were like superheroes of their own world…
DC: Like Daredevil…
FA: Daredevil, exactly. But it’s like this superhero, a literal superhero like Daredevil, or even Zatoichi, which I don’t know if he was blind or not… he was blind. And Blind Fury which, again, is kind of Zatoichi in America. They’re always so noble, so nice. And, like I said, this guy is not really very, very noble. Which doesn’t mean you are not going to like him. There’s a lot of great villains, like The Joker. He’s not very noble, but everybody loves him.
DC: What made Stephen perfect for the role?
FA: I think he was born to play this role, honestly, every day when I see him, because there’s not very much… I can’t think of a lot of actors that are in his 60’s that will be able to play frail and their age and, again, be able to play so fierce and so strong. Also, it’s a guy that played many military roles in the past, but they are always from a very strong place. So it was nice to take his eyes away and see how he was going to deal with things. So it’s just someone that knows what it is to be a military guy and suddenly been confined to this life and this house by himself alone. When we started thinking about cast, we started thinking about, “Who is the guy who can pull that off?” As soon as somebody named Stephen Lang, it was like, “Oh, fuck yeah.”
DC: The way he moves is very scary in the clips we saw. He’s kind of like a shark. He moves very quickly.
FA: Yeah. He goes into hunter mode and he has to hunt these kids. I don’t want to spoil too much, but definitely he has to do it. There’s no way he can let them go. There’s not an option to, “Well, maybe I go and talk with them. Maybe I can just call the…” It’s not an option. He has to kill these kids. That’s why you see him so determined in the movie. But, I don’t know. I think he looks pretty badass playing that role. And he has a presence that is pretty unique.
DC: Did you ask him to change his physical appearance at all, like to bulk down or bulk up?
FA: No. Five years ago he wasn’t the guy that I knew in Avatar… three years ago he wasn’t. So now he’s in that line that it depends on how I shoot him in… when he’s kind of hunchback and not tensing up his muscles, he looks like he could be my father. They are the same age. My father is in very worse shape than he is. But he’s just a guy in his house… And then, suddenly, he turns into hunting where, suddenly, he stands straight. The character is doing the effort to be that guy again, to be able to survive this ordeal. That’s why I think people will connect so much with him, because among all the characters, I believe he is the one that has the biggest ordeal ahead of him in the story, the biggest challenge. He’s being home invaded by these kids. He really has to stop them from leaving the house. He happens to be blind and there are three of them. So he’s the underdog at first in the story. Bit by bit he will show that he has… like I said, he’s pretty resourceful.
DC: Do you have anything planned for after making this film, or you are focused on this right now?
FA: I don’t plan ahead much, honestly. I write a script and then once I’m doing it, I find the right producers for it and I go and do it. In between I develop stuff. I think it was announced I am developing with Sony Incognito, this Ed Brubaker graphic novel that I love. That’s something we’re developing together. We wrote a script. That may be the next thing after I come back. But honestly, I don’t spend a lot of mental time in thinking ahead too much. I should, maybe, but I don’t. I like to take one at a time.
DC: You’ve been in horror for a while. Do you have any inkling to go back to sci-fi?
FA: Definitely. Yeah, definitely. And I have some projects there that hopefully I will have time to go back to at some point. But definitely. When I do these kinds of things, I definitely don’t want to use CGI. Which my friends were always surprised when I did Evil Dead and I was like, “There will be no CGI in Evil Dead.” They were like, “Man, that’s what you do!” But it was kind of the use of force, right? Turn off the computer! I was trying to do that.
And the same here. We’re going practical with so many things that these days you would just do CGI. And we fight that. But I definitely want to make a movie in the sci-fi world and be able to use that part of my expertise, which is a lot of video effects. Like, Panic Attack was something that I did by myself with a friend and was a full CG show.
DC: Right now in Hollywood there’s lots of franchises, but also shared universes being developed. So you’ve got Marvel. You’ve got Warner Brothers doing DC. And you’ve got Star Wars. There are so many different universes that are growing and they are grabbing directors from all over the place. Would you ever be interested in joining a franchise like that?
FA: No. Look… a lot of those movies are cool and audiences are going and watching them. It’s just as a director it’s harder to have your vision in those, if you go and do a Marvel movie…. At some point we were in conversations and really I… they already figured it out. They’ve figured out the style. They’ve figured out the way they shoot them. They’ve figured out the colors, the humor. What would I do?
I enjoy a lot more freedom than that. I don’t know; eventually I might. And it depends on probably the characters in the stories. But just something about my job as a director that I really enjoy is creating my own thing. It’s trying to do my own style when I shoot it and set the tone myself, those kinds of things.
Evil Dead was a challenge in that aspect. But, at the same time, at the end of the day I could quote things from the original movie. The original movie was such a long time ago. It wasn’t like the last one came out last year like it happens with those movies. It was such a long time ago, so it gave me a chance to kind of reinterpret that. And even the things like… stealing from Sam that a modern audience wouldn’t know about. So it was like, “OK. I feel fine. I can present this as my thing and people will know… This is mine. And this is Sam’s story. This is my story.” So it was fine.
But on something like this, I really enjoy being able to do what I want. It’s pretty cool when you can go your own way and not having to just replicate something. But yes, someday maybe doing one of those movies, hopefully. It’s not going to be tomorrow. Maybe one day. Who knows?
DC: I know you’ve directed an episode of TV. Is that anything you’d be interested in doing more of or like a limited series maybe?
FA: Yeah. If it’s something that I… Actually, I did an episode of “Dusk Till Dawn” because I’m friends with Robert Rodriguez. When I went to South by Southwest with Evil Dead, he saw the movie. He liked it. So we went to have dinner. And I’m a big fan of his movies and I grew up being influenced by his work so much. So he invited me to do an episode, and I was like, “Fuck yeah. Let’s do it.” And I went to see that world I didn’t know. And it’s a lot of fun. I mean, TV’s insane. It’s so good these days. But it’s really fast and furious. You have to go in there, get it done in five days, get out of there. And, again, the director is more like… again, there’s already a pre-established style they have to fit to. So that part wasn’t my favorite part, definitely, of doing TV. I think if it’s something that I can do a pilot and get created, that’s something I like to… Go and direct an episode? You do it. It’s actually a great exercise to keep yourself busy because you make a movie once in a while. You are not making one after the other one, at least if you’re not Woody Allen. Usually it takes a while. So it’s a good thing to just go and make a couple of episodes of TV. I was going to do a couple episodes of “American Horror Story” at some point and I couldn’t. I had a baby. I had to choose either doing that or being there when my baby was born. I was like, “OK. I’m sticking with the baby”.
DC: Are you always keeping in mind how you are eventually going to pitch a movie to an audience? Eventually a trailer is going to go into movie theaters. Do you keep that in mind while making a film?
FA: I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t know. I do tell the scenes for the audience. I always think about the audience when I’m shooting a scene, like this is what’s going to be the perception of the audience. Are they going to believe this is going to happen? Then I have to try to do this. I always have that in mind. Some directors, they don’t. They just don’t think about the audience. They think about themselves and what happens in the story. I do think a lot about the audience when I’m shooting a scene.
Not as a movie as a pitch. Like, if you mean in the market, how we are going to market the movie or what kind of movie this is going to be for the audience, that aspect not much, because if I know exactly what’s going to be for the audience, it means they have already seen it. If I can label something and say this is this meets that, it just means that you saw it. Again, you don’t know now. You will know once you watch the movie. There are some pretty fucked up choices we make in this movie. You’ll see them when you see the movie. There are some things that happen kind of not too far from where we are right now that are pretty, pretty, pretty particular, I would say. They have definitely never been done before, and it’s a scene that I have never seen before. The first time we talk about it… you’ll know what it is. We’ll talk about that scene when you know what the scene is.
But when we sit down and start talking about that scene, at first everybody was like, “Are you sure about that? Are we really going to do that? How do we do that?” That studio was like, “Are you considering just dropping that scene?”
[laughter]
FA: The more I heard that and every time somebody read the script, it was like, “Dude, are you sure about that scene?” Everybody says something like that, I’m even more excited… because they don’t know how that’s going to play with the audience and with anybody. That only means you haven’t seen it before; it hasn’t been tested before somehow. Evil Dead had a few of those, many of those. There were a lot of discussions about, like, “Are you really going to do that, and this, and that, and shoot this way? It may be too much. MPAA is going to give us an NC-17 and we’re not going to be able to release the movie.” All those things for me just proving that they may be the best things about the movie sometimes.
So if I cannot place it, really, in my mind of how that plays with the audience or it compares to what and stuff like that is when I get excited, because it just means I’m not stepping into sure ground, which stepping into sure ground just means that somebody just walked it before and it’s my turn. You go again on the same stones.
Anyway, so there’s a lot of not sure ground in this movie. It’s not based on what you saw, because I really tried to give you a nice experience when you see the movie and not spoil some things.
DC: That idea, did that evolve out of the story? Was that an idea you had which worked its way into the story?
FA: I think it evolved out of the story. I mean, it depends… I write in a way that once I write the first word in the actual draft, I already know what the whole story is. Some writers like to just jump into the adventure of: “Let’s see where this takes me…” I just have a treatment and I know exactly what’s going to happen. At least in the first draft I know what’s going to happen. And then that draft evolves and some things change. But yeah, that was definitely on the first draft. And that was actually something that really, like I said, got me excited as soon as everybody was reading it and jumping at that.
DC: Can you tell us more about the technique you used to shoot in the dark? You say it’s never been tried before.
FA: It’s never been tried to be included in the story where there’s not a device of night vision. This is just what I believe is a natural evolution of that language. I personally believe you don’t need that camera anymore. When the audience sees that, they will buy it as complete darkness. And it actually looks like that. I was showing footage to my brother the other day, and he was like, “Wait. How did you manage to shoot in the darkness?” I was showing him shots and he was like, “Wait. I don’t get it…” because you see the actors, they are walking, completely gone, their eyes are like this, and like, “How did you manage to get the actor to go around that corner or do this?” I was like, “Oh, because he has actually some light in the space…”
DC: So is there a light around the lens of the camera?
FA: Yes. The light is coming straight from the lens. So you don’t have shadows being projected. It just creates this very unique look. And, again, it’s not about the look. It’s about the tension that you can generate in complete darkness. I believe there’s a beat here where they are trying to get away from him walking in darkness, and of course they are completely lost, and he’s blind, so he’s just sprinting through the darkness. Not only is it his house that he knows pretty well, but that’s where he lives. So not only does it generate that opportunity, but also at some points they are actually walking towards him believing they are getting away from him and he’s right there. The audience can see it. Through that technique I can show the audience what is actually happening. But the characters don’t see it, which is, again, the key for good suspense: The audience knows a bit more and the characters are behind in those scenes.
DC: You were talking about this one particular scene that you think will shock people. Do you think this movie is more of a thriller, or do you think it’s more of a horror?
FA: I think it’s more of a thriller… It’s somewhere in between. It’s definitely somewhere in between because it has horror elements. But there’s a lot of thriller because a good thriller is a chase. Someone is being chased. Psychological thriller? In their mind. [Action] thriller? They are actually chasing them. There is a little bit of both sometimes in some movies. Here it is like it has definitely an element of a thriller, but it’s undeniable that it has some horror elements in some of the scenes. There are aspects… it’s pretty classical. Like when we were trying to find stories that kind of fit the structure, even trying to do those things… I remember talking with Stephen Lang about it. He said Psycho is one that kind of fits the structure. Psycho is horror, right? Is it still horror today? I don’t know if some young kid sees it if they are going to see it as horror or not. But half of the movie is Marion Crane trying to get away with some money that she stole. It’s a plot that seems to be about that. And Norman Bates is nowhere to be seen and it has nothing to do with him. And eventually at the midpoint she stops at the wrong motel. Just the story takes a turn and everything that had to do with the money just goes to hell and it has nothing to do with that.
So mainly what you saw in the teaser trailer today is the first half of the movie. but that’s the only one I kind of structurally… I mean. I hope we’re a thousand times as good as that one, like less good, like quarter, like Psycho over this and that will be an achievement. But that’s the only one that kind of fits kind of the structure, I guess.
DC: How important is the money in this film? Is it just a reason to get them in the house or is it a big part…?
FA: It is a part. In Psycho it completely goes away. Here it doesn’t work that way. But it’s just meaning that… Rosemary’s Baby is a psychological thriller, I would say. Still I would see it as one of those horror classics. Would it be today a horror movie? I don’t know. Everything I’m trying to connect this movie with just on this aspect of how we build and kind of the style of horror that we do in some points, it’s more connected to classic movies, I guess. It’s just the way we are approaching it. I’m not saying this is as good as that at all. I’m just saying that it connects more with those things than with anything that is more the modern horror. Which again, something that I’m definitely trying to do here is… if there’s a trend in what I’ve been trying to do all the time, if I spot the trend, I want to say I get it and I understand that’s what Hollywood wants. “That’s what they are doing. That’s what successful.” OK. I run the other direction. I go the other way because that’s the only chance to actually do something that actually works even better than that. If you just do one more of those, it might work, but…
Evil Dead was old-school gore, in your face gore. It wasn’t like, “Oh, we are doing another gory movie,” like a $20 million gory movie. They weren’t doing those. So it’s still one of those classic, old-school, gore in your face. And it worked great. The audience responded and they showed up.
So, here again, this kind of movie, kind of more on the line between horror and thrillers, they’re not the movies the studios are doing all the time. When they do horror, it is always supernatural. I don’t remember one that hasn’t been supernatural in a while. That’s the thing, right? That’s the trend today. You do supernatural horror. That’s what the audience wants to see. But I believe the audience wants to see something new all the time. They like those and it’s great. But if you show them something that’s different, they are excited if it’s good.
DC: Is there a recent horror movie that’s really impressed you?
FA: A recent one? It Follows. But it was a lot of nostalgia for me just because of the score and the John Carpenter style of it all. And just the premise was brilliant, I think. It was just so specific and so scary as an idea and something that taps into something that we all have, that social anxiety of seeing someone that you think is looking at us. “Is that person coming at me right now?” So that one, definitely. I haven’t seen Babadook yet, but I definitely want to see it. I heard it’s great.
DC: Is there a movie when you were growing up that really scared you as a little kid, you felt like you shouldn’t have seen it?
FA: It wasn’t a movie, actually. It was a music video. It was “Thriller.”
[laughter]
FA: In ’86. I was seven. And it was playing all the time on TV, all the time. And that was really my way into horror… Remember the movie, right? You had the movie in the theater, the werewolf story, and then the walk. And then at the end of the music video she is running away and goes into the house. As a kid, I was seven and that felt like… I never understood that it was a musician and it was a song. It was just scary. I had many of those that I thought were super scary, like Young Frankenstein was one of my favorite movies. I thought it was terrifying. As a kid, I was five and I was watching it every day. Eventually I realized how funny it is. And today it’s one of my favorite movies. But back then it was just the horror in it, which it was pretty scary and pretty dramatic in some moments.
DC: What was the first actual horror filmed that you watched?
FA: I don’t remember. It was probably when I was 12 and I started watching the Nightmare on Elm Street’s and Friday the 13th. All that stuff was kind of the ones that hit me when I was 11, 12, and we started getting together with kids from school and watch that. But Evil Dead was actually also one, the first one that really terrified the hell out of me. Again, I was 11 or 12 and we rented it. And we shouldn’t have done that. That’s why the take of my movie is what it is, because when I saw Evil Dead, I didn’t think it was funny at all, because it wasn’t. It was just so scary and so perverse and so wrong… And the low budget elements just make those films look scarier, because they didn’t look safe like other movies. There was no moment that felt like, “Oh, this feels homey.” It always feels weird and creepy because of the budget. But that was probably the first one… the first one I remember really being scared out of my mind and not being able to sleep, just thinking about that cellar. Little did I know.
DC: You talked about Hitchcock earlier, about Psycho. I think he used to design his movies so that literally nothing could be cut out of them, so that each shot led naturally into the next one. And that was his way of protecting his vision. How do you protect your vision on your films? How do you keep the studio from putting Limp Bizkit songs over your music-less scenes and stuff like that?
FA: There’s a very easy way. It’s in the contract before I start making the movie. So that’s one way, which is the way we’ve been doing it. Before I start I already know that there’s no creative control… and we really collaborate together and work. But really, at the end of the day, it will be my vision. So it’s not a matter of… I don’t have to kind of play around anything to kind of get it my way.
DC: You have final cut?
FA: Sam has it. Usually it’s Sam. And Evil Dead was the same. It’s the only way to get the studio, I think, to give you so much freedom. But the way we work, at least, Sam, in Evil Dead, never really even stepped in the editing room. And that was his baby. So I’m assuming that’s the way it will happen with this one. But who knows? Maybe I make a disaster and he has to come in and save it…
[laughter]
DC: You mentioned the budget of Evil Dead. Right now there’s kind of a trend, particularly from Blumhouse, to make movies from $1-$2 million and then make huge profits at the box office. How do you feel about budget? Do you like being kind of restricted, or do you like having money to spend?
FA: There’s always a sweet spot where you can have creative control because eventually you spend too much money, particularly on something like this. With Evil Dead we could because it was a title. When you are doing something that is original, you cannot spend so much money. There’s always a sweet spot there where you can still have creative control.
But I’m very conservative with my filmmaking. I like things to look good… I’m doing no handheld on this movie. I’m just sick of it. I like to be pretty old-school that way. So low budget works for certain stories and definitely works for Blumhouse. I know him and he’s a genius… He’s really giving young filmmakers the chance to go and try their things. A lot of times those movies don’t get released, but at least he’s really giving the chance to young filmmakers to come in because that’s a format that’s kind of an echo of what used to happen in the ‘90s and the ‘80s during the VHS boom. They were making movies all the time, nonstop, and that will bring so many young filmmakers into the game. It was through that. It’s always been through that. So I’m very respectful of that because of that reason, because that’s kind of the way that young filmmakers have to get into the game. I’m trying to remember… what’s his name? Oh, shit. His name went away, this producer.
DC: Corman?
FA: Yeah, Roger Corman. Corman never got a lot of respect as a filmmaker himself, but come on. How many… like Oliver Stone, and Coppola, how many of them…. like they all start working for Corman….
DC: Jim Cameron, Scorsese…
FA: All of them. So that’s why I think it’s a great format. It is expensive to make movies look a certain way and have your sets and to build your vision from the ground and get exactly what you need, and not trying to fit it to a particular location and stuff like that. But I think you can do great stuff in that format. If your mind is in the right place and you accept those boundaries, I think you can do great things, and they are being done.
DC: I tried to find an update on Dante’s Inferno. I couldn’t find anything….
FA: I was working on that till the last second until I left for this movie. And we’re still working on it. It’s a big challenge. It’s a huge movie. And always the debate is: Does the world know what it is? As soon as I came onboard… originally, I think Universal bought the rights for the game, which I’ve never played. I don’t really know much about it. Then when I came onboard, I was like, “We should make a movie about the poem, not about the game. The game is fine, but it’s something better behind it.” And we went back to that and we started developing the script based on that. And a lot of the story, a lot of the script is… just now we’re still trying to find the way to do it for a big audience that it’s not just too big and it becomes impossible. Because, again, for me it’s no doubt; it’s the title. It’s Dante’s Inferno. Who doesn’t know what that is? But the younger audience may go like, “Dante who?” So that’s the challenge right now, to figure that out.
DC: Also, Bruce Campbell and Sam Raimi have been very open and clear that there is going to be more Evil Dead films. Are you going to continue the story with Mia?
FA: Once we finished Evil Dead 1, we started thinking about Evil Dead 2. And it was probably going to be a continuation. I think what I wanted to do was kind of bring – and I actually said in one of the Comic-Cons and… I actually talked with Bruce at some point. It was like, “Let’s bring Bruce into the second one. Let’s connect to the universe and let’s keep going.” But I think Sam had kind of a similar plan, I guess, at the same time, and that’s what the TV show is about… I think what Sam is doing… I don’t know exactly what’s going on in his mind because it’s quite a particular mind. I think right now he’s kind of rebooting for a new generation the character of Ash… I love it. I thought it was amazing. So we’ll see what happens after that, and it will be great to see Bruce and Jane working together on a sequel.
DC: Do you have an idea or a vision of how you would like to see that?
FA: Yes. But if I talk about it, Sam would call me right now.
[laughter]
FA: I will tell you and my phone will ring and I can say hello and it’s going to be Sam knowing I just said something about Evil Dead…
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