Special Event Q&A with Ouija: Origin of Evil Filmmakers
Several weeks ago, Universal Studios hosted the first-ever, exclusive to horror sites, screening of Ouija: Origin of Evil. Finally, we can tell you all about it – after the film was shown, producers Jason Blum, Andrew Form, and Brad Fuller were joined by director Mike Flanagan for a no-holds-barred, anything-goes Q&A. They were very candid in their replies, and explained the pains they took to improve on the original film.
Dread Central: Jason, you have said you didn’t want a repeat of Ouija because it wasn’t all that good… can you explain –
Jason Blum: I mean… I feel like the financial result of the first one was fantastic. The critical result was not fantastic. But every time you start a movie you think and hope you’re making Gone with the Wind but sometimes it doesn’t turn out like that. It wasn’t like we thought we had Gone with the Wind but oh my god, some of you guys [the horror critics] were super harsh! I definitely feel when we [the producers] saw the movie it wasn’t what we had hoped. Mike [Flanagan] actually helped a lot [as an editor] with that movie, in terms of getting it from where it had started but… Really, the idea of making a sequel was two parts, obviously with the financial success we had the opportunity to do one but then, the trick is to do one that really lived up to our expectations which the first movie didn’t meet.
Brad Fuller: Also, you learn from the first movie and I think that’s what happened with The Purge with all of us. We had aspirations for that movie and we weren’t able to meet them because of budget and other things but we were able to do that in the second one. I think when you are able to go back and learn from your mistakes hopefully you make something better the second time around.
DC: Seems like you really do care about the critical reception, and not just the box office. Is that fair to say? And do you read all the reviews?
Andrew Form: First, we live in a culture that makes it really easy to find out what people think of your movie. So we sit and talk and figure out what can we do better, why did we not succeed to the level we wanted and if those thoughts are echoed by our audience we know we’ve hit on something.
JB: Sometimes you start a movie where the script isn’t exactly where you want it but you start the movie and you have a start and release date and you go and try and fix things along the way and that doesn’t work usually so I think you learn from movies and I think that we’re very lucky that we met Mike Flanagan on post on Ouija. He came in and really helped us out and he did some nice surgery for the movie and we were lucky he wanted to join us for the sequel and as you see, he just made that movie for us which we’re very, very proud of.
DC: Mike, what exactly did you do on the first one as far as reshaping it?
Mike Flanagan: Well, the first Ouija, my involvement with that was very after the fact. It’s like I was more of a consultant on that, just because I think there was already a sense of the issues the movie was facing. It never felt to me like oh, that is my movie, more like I was coming into something where the die is cast and I’m just trying to react to it the way you guys react to it. Then for this one, what made me excited about it was that when you look at the financial success of the first picture and aware what that audience is, you’re looking at teenager’s kind of driving the success of the whole thing. Of course, there was a sense with the sequel that initially that would be the same target, teenagers viewers, and I really started to think back to the kind of horror movies I saw when I was a kid because I do think there’s some cynicism out there about PG-13 horror and having started my career with R rated horror I really enjoyed playing in that world but I think kids deserve something as well, you don’t necessarily have to be completely boxed in by the rating and so I thought, what movies was I watching before I was thirteen, what are those movies for me and it was like ok, it’s Poltergeist, The Changeling, a bad VHS copy of The Exorcist at a friend’s house. So for me it was like ok well, if you know there is this very eager group of viewers that certainly stood up and sort of raised their hands when the first movie first came out, that group exists, that market exists, so how can you take this movie that we know succeeded in that market and kind of broaden it. Start from a place where what would be a cool movie that a thirteen year old could go see, what’s this generation’s version of sitting and watching The Changeling? Let’s take that as the starting point and try and open that up to the people that didn’t enjoy the first movie and might not even be considering giving the second one a spin, what can we do to kind of open that audience up a little bit.
BF: When Mike came to us about the sequel, he stuck to his guns, he said we’re going back to the sixties and it was a big discussion, as it always is. He couldn’t have been more right and I’m happy that we did that but it was him up front saying guys, we’ve got to go back, we’ve got to go to the sixties.
AF: The thing was, he said he wanted to do a period movie. Ok, we’ve done those, that presents its own challenges, but he said I’m going to shoot it like it takes place in 1967, that’s a gutsy move and I think when you put this movie up it does look like it was something that was shot in that era and that’s a tribute to him, knowing that he’s going into the movie and it’s exactly like he wanted it to be.
MF: I wanted it to feel like the movies when I remembered watching them as a kid. I wanted to use a lot of zooms, I wanted to play with the split diopter, I was surprised and delighted that everyone was behind it. I really wanted real changes, I wanted to feel the movie the way I felt it, when I was younger, so we had these antique lenses, antique equipment, it was instead of doing the techno crane and Libra head, it was set the camera up on sticks and let’s operate a zoom and if the operator hitches it at the beginning, it kind of bumps and it has to land, even better. All those little artifacts that we’d kind of gotten away from, it was like the more of that we can get in there the better for me. I remember the first time we brought in the split diopter out there, it was seeing that kind of defined vertical line, separating the two focal points we have so successfully eradicated from our work today, it was great to see it again, it was so great to be back there. It was kind of a playground for Mike the DP, he and I have worked together a ton, it was a real playground for us. We were kind of waiting for someone to come up to us and kind of stop it but it was like playing in the sandbox for us, it was really fun.
DC: You had a fair amount of jump scares, but not necessarily “boo scares” – they felt organic to the action. But when it comes to hitting the beats for scares, is that something you really have to focus on? Like… every 15 minutes, we need a scare moment.
MF: That’s a great question, I try to answer that question every day. I lot if it is kind of just how you feel in the moment. There’s always a kind of tug of war between the requirements of the genre and what audiences and studios have come to expect, we’ve had some really fun conversations about jump scares which I totally believe are required with the way genre audiences have grown up and been trained but they’re not my favorite thing to do. So if I know I have to do a jump scare how do I do one that is a little bit different or how do I balance it with something else. One of my favorite parts of this whole thing was the first jump scare and the first jump scare in a movie is always a big deal because that’s going to set the table. We waited seventeen minutes to do it, which is the kids playing and the thing about a jump scare is that everybody jumps, everybody laughs, everybody giggles and it takes thirty to forty seconds to get everybody back into the movie after that. I love tension and atmosphere and I feel those jump scares pop the balloon that we’ve been so busy inflating for everybody. So the first one set the tone by going through the entire thing that the audience does, if they’re going to jump and scream, jump and scream, sustain the scream and invite the laugh and giggle and give us fifteen seconds before we have to get back into the movie. This is what is expected, this is what a movie like this needs to be doing but let’s be smart about it, it’s been one of the most consistent whenever we have screened the movie. It’s been one of the few times in my career that I’ve been grateful to hear the chuckle, usually laughter in one of my movies makes me really scared and I hate to hear it but this was an exception to that. When it comes to the fantastic stuff I guess I don’t really differentiate that from the rest of the story elements, there’s nothing really about the monsters or the ghosts or whatever else that is any more or less out of place than the human characters for me.
BF: In this case we left it all up to Mike but I think if you backend a story into timing with jump scares, it’s a very Hollywood thing to do, I believe it leads to not so very satisfying movies. Even if it was a first time director we were working with I would never frame it, I would say work on the jump scares and make them great but if you push a story into the timing of jump scares the story suffers I think.
DC: You have some really great ghosts in this. That are played by actors.
MF: Whenever you get into creature design and our creatures, the wonderful Doug Jones who is a friend, if you want a canvas to paint a creature on Doug Jones is it, which is why so many people use Doug. But we went through quite a bit of development and creature designs, and when I’m doing something like the Oculus short or to an extent, the Oculus feature, there’s never any expectation that any creature I design is ever going to have a life outside of that movie. When you’re doing a sequel to a very successful studio horror film it’s like, in the best case scenario, next year there’s going to be a little Ouija room and everybody’s going to walk in and we’re going to see Doris or the creatures so there really is a lot more thought that goes into, what if this does have a life outside of the ninety-five minutes that everybody spends in the theatre. But that’s also really fun because you get to look back and you always want to find the balance between referencing movies and creature designs that you love. There’s kind of a joy in using things that you like and also trying very hard to make sure you’re not accidentally repeating something and that your little loving homage doesn’t go too far and some of that can be challenging because if you’re like me and you’ve been watching movies since you were a kid, there’s so much junk rattling around in my head, I don’t know if it came from another movie I’ve seen, so you are never really a hundred percent certain that what you’re presenting is incredibly cool and different and a loving nod to something or, people call me out when Absentia came out, the tunnel that kidnaps people and holds their spirits was a plot point from Fraggle Rock and I was shocked, it was oh my god you’re right and I remember being afraid of it as a kid but it wasn’t until the movie was out there in the world that someone brought it up and it was like oh my god, I just completely Fraggle Rocked the movie, you’re so right, but it just doesn’t cross your mind until it’s too late.
DC: How many cuts were there of Ouija: Origin of Evil before you were satisfied?
MF: With this one, the difference between my first cut and what you guys have just seen is primarily one of the things about the creative support that I got from the producers. I really crammed the movie full of stuff from the beginning. The first cut of this, [to Jason] do you remember, was it two hours and ten minutes long…?
JB: You know Mike cuts his own movies, right? He’s a one-man band and we saw a cut earlier than we would have otherwise, I think he brought it to us after five or six weeks.
MF: And there was just a lot more, it was a question of removing forty minutes of movie and still kind of have it stand up, I knew that when we went into production that yeah, you really kind of over wrote it. When Jeff Howard and I were working on the script, I think under normal circumstances we’d try and go back and thin it out but I really liked it, it was cool, we get to play with all these cool characters, it’s going to be awesome, so a lot of it was cutting that. It did have some additional photography, I think we did two days and it was exactly what you said, it wasn’t about re-shooting something that wasn’t working, it was we got a chance to do something new. In this case it was actually, in the original cut, Lena had stabbed Alice and never come back to being herself, she stayed evil and it just felt weak, not to let them have another moment, and so there was this real sense from everybody that wouldn’t it be nice to have some kind of emotional resolution to that, as devastating as it would be for Annalise, so we shot that last conversation where Alice died, then we also shot the very last shot of the movie. What you guys saw after the credits with Lin Shaye, originally was the end of the movie and it didn’t resonate the way we hoped it would in the script phase, and there was also this sense of being like drawing a straight line to the movie isn’t going to be the most satisfying of endings, especially if you were a fan of the first movie. So we moved it to the back and decided to end it with this new scene in the asylum and I remember for that, we were all talking about it, we have a chance to get back on stage, we have John Prosky the doctor, son of the great Robert Prosky from The Natural and I remember talking to you guys about really wanting, because if I go out on a scare which is not how I usually go out, I really want to go out on a really cool oner. We spent a day on that shot, and that’s actually little ten year old Lulu on the ceiling, who had to hang up there and wait for the camera to get into position and then sent her running on the ceiling which was her favorite thing in the world because she’s an interesting and crazy kid, but that’s the kind of stuff we did for our two days of additional work. I know for a lot of other movies it can be even more drastic but there is this unfortunate stigma, oh you’re going back to shoot, you must have messed something up. No, this is an opportunity, which is something the producers are always quick to say to someone like, who initially never wants to change his movie to frame once it’s finished, and has to acknowledge that I’m wrong, which has happened with every film I’ve done.
DC: With all the edits back and forth, is there an alternate ending? Like, a happier one?
MF: Not really. The closest I could come to a happy ending… I mean, Hush has kind of a happy ending because at least she lives-ish. For me, the favorite stuff that I read tends to end dark and when it does it tends to stick with me. There was a certain amount of fate involved in this story because we had characters whose fates had been established in the first movie and there’s an argument of well, who’s really going to remember all the details about what was supposed to happen to them? It’s like well, for the fans of the first one we wanted to keep that fidelity but also if we’re talking about the origin of this ghost we went into it knowing we had to kill a nine year old and if we’re going to kill a nine year old there’s kind of no point in attempting to make a happy ending beyond that. Actually, I think there was talk early on of being even more brutal than it ended up being so yeah, I’m not really the happy ending guy. And that’s kind of that trade off that I love, I love a good bittersweet ending but yes, this is horrible, we murdered a nine year old but she’s happier than she was a few minutes ago, that’s about as close as I can go. I think when you deal with horror movies, because I think at their core they’re about evil, most of them anyway, the only way to have a happy ending is to defeat evil and I’ve always kind of balked at this idea that this ancient powerful force in a horror movie can be bested by a teenager in nineties minutes because as I like to say, it had a bad day. Like this ancient demon can go and kill anybody using only it’s reflection anywhere in the world until it bumped into Kiefer Sutherland and then whoops, bad day. So I think it always feels more honest to me if you might be able to have a character victory or leave things on a note of happiness to it but I never believe it if evil is kind of squashed that easily.
DC: How much do you map out these movies in advance?
AF: A lot of times we think about that, let’s do a whole thing, and then the more you start thinking about that the more you start thinking it will not be satisfying for an audience because it will feel too much like an anthology. I kind of feel like with the sequels, we did it with The Purge as well for a while, when we restarted The Purge on two, we kind of restarted on three, so I guess we did it more on those but I guess it’s always the first thing you think of, to do an anthology, then it goes away as you get into what that would really be.
JB: We hope there is another Ouija film and if we are lucky enough to make another one, the first person we will ask to do it is Mike Flanagan.
DC: You’ve worked with kids in a lot of your movies. That’s not always easy, and finding ones that can act with so much gravitas is even harder, isn’t it?
MF: Yeah, I’ve been exceedingly lucky in my career with the kids. We lucked out big time with Annalise Basso in Oculus to the point that I really wanted her back for this. Jacob Tremblay in Before I Wake, we got him right before Room it was the same kind of thing, this kid is incredible. I just had that same feeling when Lulu auditioned. She came in with the, you know what it’s like to be strangled to death monologue, memorized for her audition and struck me as incredibly adult. She carried herself like a little grown up and we would joke she was nine going on forty, and she walked in the room and you always make this small talk with the actor to try and get a feel for who they are and I asked her, do you watch a lot of scary movies and she said oh heavens no. Did you just say oh heavens no, you are officially the strangest kid I have ever met and she just kind of always carried herself that way. I remember she delivered that speech and we had just hit stop on the camera and I said done, that’s it, there she is. She never changed that speech, to the point that we did a table read with the cast and everyone is reading off the script and she had already memorized it and when it got to that part she shut her script and pushed it aside and launched into the monologue, and I remember watching Henry Thomas sitting next to her, turn and look and his just starts to drop and Henry, being considered one of the great child actors of all time, simply said she’s amazing and I mean, I couldn’t even cut away from her when I did the movie, it’s like how are we going to cover the monologue because when you’re working with a nine year old we’re going to have to break it up, a lot, and we’re going to have to feed her leads and no, we just have to set the camera up of Lulu, I’d like you to zoom into a close up and I remember in the edit we tried to cut back to him in the middle and even you guys were like what are you doing, why are you editing off of Lulu and I was like yeah you’re right, that was a terrible instinct, there’s just something about her that’s commanding that way. I love that she went off from this and did Annabelle, I think you’re going to see a lot of her in the genre, I don’t know if you guys saw that video that she did where she pranked the crowd in D.C. a couple of weeks ago, I just saw the video too, it was awesome, just watching her holding character in a room full of hundreds of people who are going crazy, she was focused even then, there are grown-ups who can’t pull that off, she’s just very, very special.
Ouija: Origin of Evil arrives in theaters October 21st from Universal Pictures. Henry Thomas (Betrayal), Annalise Basso (Oculus), Elizabeth Reaser (“True Detective”), Lulu Wilson (Deliver Us from Evil), Parker Mack (MTV’s “Faking It”), Sam Anderson, Kate Siegel (Demon Legacy), and Doug Jones (Hellboy, “Fear Itself”) star.
Related Story: Ouija: Origins of Evil Video Interviews: Lulu Wilson, Annalise Basso, Elizabeth Reaser, and Henry Thomas
Mike Flanagan directs from a screenplay he wrote with his Oculus and Before I Wake collaborator, Jeff Howard. The film is produced by Platinum Dunes partners Michael Bay, Brad Fuller, and Andrew Form (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Purge series, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) and Blumhouse Productions’ Jason Blum (The Purge and Insidious series) alongside Hasbro’s Brian Goldner (Transformers and G.I. Joe series) and Stephen Davis (Ouija).
Synopsis:
It was never just a game. Inviting audiences again into the lore of the spirit board, Ouija: Origin of Evil tells a terrifying new tale as the follow-up to 2014’s sleeper hit that opened at number one.
In 1965 Los Angeles, a widowed mother and her two daughters add a new stunt to bolster their séance scam business and unwittingly invite authentic evil into their home. When the youngest daughter is overtaken by the merciless spirit, this small family confronts unthinkable fears to save her and send her possessor back to the other side.
For more info visit ouijamovie.com.
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