Lussier, Patrick (Dracula Trilogy)
Dracula. In some films he sucks blood, in others he just plain sucks. The vampire genre has been done to death. Rarely does anyone bring anything new to it. Well, for Patrick Lussier lightning has struck twice, and two out of three ain’t bad!
Uncle Creepy: There’s so much to talk about with you. First of all, congratulations on a really interesting trilogy of films with the Dracula movies.
Patrick Lussier: Oh, thank you!
UC: You know, I’ve been a horror fan for years, and you’ve taken a really iconic character that has so much history behind it and put such an interesting spin on it with the whole Judas Iscariot thing. Where did the idea to do that come from?
PL: The idea for Judas came when we were developing the content for Dracula 2000. Joel [Soisson] and I were trying to come up with basically a reason to make it.
UC: It was really very interesting because, as you said, no one has really ever given a reason as to why he was afraid of crucifixes or silver or anything like that. The first time I watched Dracula 2000, I’ll be honest with you, I really didn’t expect much.
PL: Nobody did!
UC: But I’m sitting there watching the movie – and of the trilogy it’s probably my least favorite . . .
PL: Yeah, I agree with you there.
UC: Because it’s a little music videoish, a little too mainstream. You know what I’m saying?
PL: Yeah, it’s a little too corporate.
UC: Exactly! But what it did do is it unfolded this amazingly deep back story for this character that it never had before. I give you a lot of credit for coming up with something like that.
PL: Well, thank you. It was a real struggle to keep that in the film. As originally written, there were a lot more elements to that – how that unfolded, how it revealed itself. But the studio was very reluctant. They didn’t totally get it, the whole Judas thing . . .
UC: A studio not getting something? No!
PL: Yeah, they were very squeamish about it. So we were lucky we got as much in as we did. And we kept trying to feed more. We originally wanted to add so much more of that story. The opening of the film as intended starts with the rope going taut and snapping and somebody falling to the ground. You don’t quite know what, and you see these sandals walking, and we did this whole walk through time basically starting at the Crucifixion and going through ancient Rome and all these different time periods through the Napoleonic Era and ending at where Stoker’s novel starts with this figure kind of moving through this kind of war-torn landscape. But that was cut for budget reasons. There were always clues that we were adding, and again, there was a real reluctance. I’m surprised we got to do what we did. I’m thrilled we actually got to put in what we had and just do the reveal and get away with that. Even though I think a lot of diehard fans accused us of being pawns of the Religious Right, which we were anything but!
UC: In terms of the hardcore fans, obviously there are tons of Dracula fans. I don’t think there’s a single horror fan on Earth that doesn’t like Dracula in one form or another. Were you worried about the overall reaction? Was it something you considered before actually giving Dracula an identity?
PL: For some reason we thought the fans would be kind of into it, which ultimately I think they were very split about. A lot of them felt we had betrayed them and things like that whereas the other half were very much into it. Where we thought we were going to get blasted . . . While we were shooting it, we tried to shoot in a Catholic church, and we got turned down by the Archdiocese of Toronto and everything like that just flatly. The note was, “We have good news and bad news. The good news is we’re not going to try and stop you making your movie. The bad news is you’re never allowed to set foot in any of our churches.”
UC: Gee thanks!
PL: Right. We thought we were going to get creamed by religion, and it ended up being kind of the inverse in the final product. A lot of religious groups, not all of them but certainly a lot of them, actually kind of embraced that part of the film, which surprised Joel and me immensely. That was the last thing we expected!
UC: Again, it’s a very interesting take, and it takes a lot of chances with the story as well. Were you always a big Dracula fan? Was it always something you wanted to work on? Or did it just happen to come about?
PL: I always loved the Hammer films particularly. Christopher Lee in my mind was the most interesting Dracula. He was a real powerful, enigmatic figure who to me most resembled the figure in Stoker’s novel, which you know very little about other than just basically being there to fuck you up any way he sees fit. Because he knows he’s better than you, you know he’s better than you, and basically you’re just waiting for him to kill you. Christopher Lee always struck me as having that kind of power – just in his height, his stature, his performance. I was always kind of drawn to those stories, the Hammer world. The original opening of Dracula 2000, being the capture of Dracula with Van Helsing and everything like that, which ultimately became a flashback in the film although you can see it in the extras on the DVD, was designed to be very much an homage to a Hammer film. When we showed it to the studio, their comment was, “Well, you can’t open the movie like that.” We asked them why, and they said it feel like a Hammer movie. And we’re like, “That’s the point!”
But yeah, I was always attracted to the character. It was the studio’s idea to do it – Andrew Rona particularly had always been fascinated by Dracula 1972 – and they wanted to do their own updating of Dracula, and it was a great privilege that they considered us for that. The story took many twists and turns on its way to being made and ultimately became far more mainstream than it was originally intended. Then, when we had very little time to get it done . . . it’s a movie I re-cut in my head all the time because I know there’s a far better movie that we shot than we actually had time to cut together. It was released six months to the day from the first day of photography, so it was very hard.
UC: That’s a brutal schedule. Six months?
PL: Yeah, it was crazy.
UC: The last thing I expected after seeing Dracula 2000 was a sequel, much less two sequels! Was it something you envisioned as a trilogy from the beginning?
PL: We didn’t envision it as a trilogy originally. In the multiple versions that we wrote of Dracula 2000, the character had kind of a “choose your own adventure” aspect. The swimming pool movie that became Dracula II was the original movie of Dracula 2000. It started with the heist and ended up in the swimming pool with Dracula on the loose and going free. His end is that he’s triumphant. And the character Uffizi played by Jason Scott Lee was written into the original Dracula 2000. I think on the DVD there’s a treatment for Dracula 2000 where his character appears. He was designed to be just kind of the Vatican’s cleaner. They know that Van Helsing has his body and they know Van Helsing is a drug addict and they know he’s fucked up. They are basically coming to take over.
So given that once Dimension said the movie had made enough money that they wanted to do a direct-to-video sequel (and they only wanted to do one) based on our original idea because they thought in retrospect that was perhaps a better idea than the one we actually made, Joel and I wrote that – actually a bigger version than that thinking we’d have more than the $3 million we ultimately got. But of course, we were grateful to have that much! As we were finishing the script for Dracula II, we thought, okay, they’re going to send us to Romania to shoot this. Wouldn’t it be funny if we did a continuing story because we have Dracula getting away at the end where he goes back to Romania and Uffizi and Luke, like the guys in the boat and like Marlow from Heart of Darkness, have to go up and travel through this landscape to find Dracula at the end of the road and finally do him in after he’s been perverting the world around him and basically has become . . . is just waiting for a challenge. Out of that conversation suddenly we pitched it to Dimension, Andrew Rona and Nick Phillips, and the two of them really kind of dug it. They were like, “Well maybe we should just make that movie.” But finally they agreed to make both, and we were incredibly fortunate to make both stories. And the story of Dracula III really came together very quickly. It was a really simple idea that didn’t take a lot of selling. Everybody got it instantly.
UC: And you shot both films back-to-back?
PL: We shot them actually as one film, so the bulk of Dracula III was actually shot before Dracula II because it was exterior and we were shooting in the fall in Romania. We had to get it done before the weather turned and we started to freeze our asses off! We had to get as much of that shot as possible. All the final scenes in the castle were shot at the end of the schedule just before Christmas, but all the exteriors – the road and the journey up – were shot through October and the beginning of November. I think the coldest nights were the exterior of the castle, which was about Day 9, 10, or 11, something like that, where the weather had finally turned on us. Even the Romanians wouldn’t leave the heaters that were outside. It was so brutally cold that night – the night with the horse and everything like that where Jason comes up and pulls the priest off the impaling spike. That was a taste of: Wow! I’m glad we shot this movie first.
UC: You’ve really gone through the entire mythos of vampires more or less, but you’ve also managed to tap into a couple of other things. Especially in Dracula III I thought one of the most interesting things in the film was this vampiric carnival. I know a lot of people have a real fear of clowns and stuff like that. Is that something you took into consideration? Is it a personal fear of clowns?
PL: Clowns are terrifying things! That end of Poltergeist when that stupid clown attacks the kid from under the bed is one of the most horrific ever. Where we got that idea is when I first started talking to Dimension about directing back just as we were actually working on Scream, I pitched them a remake of Vampire Circus. A big period piece and everything like that. They were like, “No, we’re not interested in that.” But in part of the treatment writing I had done on that, I created this vampire stilt man, and I always thought, okay, a vampire on stilts could be really cool. I’ve never seen that before. And how he died and everything I also concocted at that time. Then, when it came time to write this, Joel and I were talking and were pitching ideas back and forth and I said, “And then they run into this circus.” And he’s like, “Yeah, right.” And then I kind of mapped it out for him, and he’s like, “Oh, that’s really cool.” Then we pitched it to Nick Phillips, our executive, and he was initially like, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” But then once he started seeing what we intended, they got right behind it.
UC: Yeah, it was a very cool scene.
PL: Such a nightmarish way to go, and that’s really what we wanted to do. We wanted to have these guys literally traveling through . . . you kind of begin to feel that there’s almost a timeless nature. They come in on the train, but gradually they start traveling back in time. Not literally, but just everything around them is changed. Everything around them is mutated. It’s become an abomination. And there’s this kind of corrupt landscape. And that was really appealing – to use that circus in that way because circuses . . . you know, they’re just scary! There’s something about them that’s not right.
UC: It’s interesting that you say that too because each film has a very distinct look. The first one, as you said, was kind of corporate. It did its thing; it was flashy. The second one was pretty much very claustrophobic with the whole enclosed swimming pool thing. And the third one just takes you on this really vast landscape. And at every turn there are different types of horrors to face. It was really an interesting trip, and I got a helluva lot more enjoyment out of those last two films in your trilogy than I have most films coming out nowadays. I was really surprised. It just seemed like forever after seeing Dracula II, which I had no inkling would be anywhere near as good as it was, before Dracula III came out.
PL: Tell me about it! We shot them at the same time, and finally it took the death of Dimension and Miramax for them to finally get released. Buena Vista is like, “What is all this crap we have sitting on shelf? Let’s get it out there!” The Hellraiser movies. The Prophecy movies. All these movies that they are just putting out right now.
UC: All of which were actually pretty good.
PL: Yeah! Well, Joel Soisson and Keith Border and Mike Leahy and Ron Schmidt, all the guys at Neo who produced those films, take great pride in doing that. Even if they have no money, they will go above and beyond to put the best into it, to produce the best product possible. They were all made by people who love making movies, not by people who just saw this as a hack job and a paycheck. None of us did it for that. We all did it because we wanted to make them. Basically, with Dracula II and III the biggest sale we made is that we told them that all our fees were basically two for one. And that we really were just doing it because we wanted to make another movie.
UC: Interesting. When you watch those movies, you see a lot of the same names like Soisson and of course yourself. Has a clique formed?
PL: Absolutely! I think it can’t help but happen. Joel and those guys had started working together back on Prophecy III and I got hooked up with them. They’re just such fantastic guys, and they’re so passionate about doing it. They aren’t in any way in it for the money or the glory; they’re in it for the film. They’re in it to make the best films possible. It’s inspiring to be around people like that and a real privilege to work with them. That made it such a nice thing always to come back and do it because we had very much a family mentality.
UC: Sure. And when you have that type of strong unit behind you, it makes things a lot easier, and also it can really get the creative juices flowing. It shows in the movies. When you watch Dracula III or something else that was produced by the same core group of individuals, you can really see that there’s some passion behind it. People cared about the details.
PL: Exactly. There was passion and debate and times we would argue over this and that and the other thing. When we did Dracula II and were scouting the swimming pool, every one of us started to debate: Okay, where is Dracula in this pool and how is he sitting? Well, I thought he was sitting on the wall. I thought he was chained to the floor. I thought he was like this. And we’d written it together, we’d all read it over and over, and every one of us had a different view of how he was situated in the pool. It was later that day when we were scouting the morgue that we saw this cadaver display stand, and we’re all like, “Ohhhhhh! That’s it! He’s chained to that!” It was kind of unanimous; we all found it together and it worked great.
UC: Another thing that was really interesting with the trilogy is that you had different actors playing the main character in each film. What was that like, and what was the basis of that decision?
PL: It was a little tricky in the beginning because we had to be very conscious of (a) continuity and (b) the fact that we were just doing it. When we did the second film, we were very confident that we were going to end up getting Rutger for the third, so we decided that when Drac comes back, we were going to make him kind of an albino so that we could land on Rutger more easily. Basically all the pigment had been burned out of him. That seemed to fit and be interesting. I think a lot of people were shocked that we had done it. Suddenly there’s this blonde Dracula, which is very unusual, the concept being that he’s been bled out and now he’s come back different. We probably used somewhat of a “Dr. Who” explanation.
Rutger was really key. When he came on, we paid attention to the performances of Gerry [Butler] and Stephen [Billington]. Obviously, he didn’t get a chance to meet with Gerry, but he met with Stephen while we were shooting him and watched what he did and saw elements of his performance. He really wanted to embody the intensity of both performers and then twist on with his own. Rutger’s really intuitive and a very smart actor that way.
UC: It was great seeing him in a role like Dracula, which is something I normally wouldn’t have pictured him in, but it really worked.
PL: Yeah, he was very fun in it. And he was very passionate about it. He had a really keen sense of what he wanted to do with the character, how when you first find him he seems kind of decrepit and out of it and almost nonsensical. Like he’s not all there. And then gradually from scene to scene he becomes younger and more youthful and more on top of his game until the moment when he’s there facing Uffizi with his marbleized sword and his torch, and you realize, “Holy shit! This is what he once was.” He’s become everything he used to be. He’s been waiting for somebody worthy to do that. He’s become bored at the end of the road, and now he’s dying for one last challenge. The ultimate curse I suspect of living forever is that it’s hard to be entertained. You know? And now he’s looking for one last entertainment.
UC: Now, I’d like to get a little bit off the beaten path for a moment. You actually edited Wes Craven’s Cursed, right?
PL: Uh huh.
UC: And oh, the turmoil surrounding that film! Can you talk a little about it? Did you edit both versions? How much of the first version was actually filmed? What is the deal?
PL: Of the first version . . . the Skeet Ulrich version, which is how we refer to it . . . everything was filmed but two sequences. The climactic fight and a big battle in a limousine were not filmed. The rest of the movie was shot. There was about 95 minutes of that film. In the final version of the movie I think there’s maybe 20 minutes of that film. That should give you some inclination of the realms of insanity we all walked down.
UC: Did it actually feel like: God, this project is never going to end!?
PL: At times, yes.
UC: It was entertaining.
PL: Yes, it was entertaining, and ultimately at the end of the day, we all felt fortunate that that’s what had been achieved. Given the duress it had been made under.
UC: Do you think one day we’ll ever see the other version?
PL: No. I think if Dimension and Disney and everybody hadn’t gone their separate ways, you would have. I think they may have done something with that. But now, I’m not so sure it’ll ever rise from the ashes.
UC: So let’s do the tally. You make this one movie, and then all of a sudden you have to make this other movie, and then you make this other movie and it’s trimmed down to a PG-13. How heartbreaking was that?
PL: Yeah. I think especially for Wes because he had put so much into both films – the Skeet Ulrich version and the Josh Jackson version. He had put everything he had into both films and really did a great job with them even though they were very different, and then to have the final kind of slap in the face. The “oh yeah, by the way, we want you to neuter it.” I think he found it to be really devastating, but you’d have to talk to him about that. It really didn’t feel right after we had all gone through so much for so long and got it to a place where everybody was proud of what we’d done, and then suddenly it’s like, “Oh, by the way, you’ve got to gut it.”
UC: Well, thank god for DVD, huh?
PL: Yeah! Well, and that allows for people to see the better version. Have you seen it?
UC: The unrated version was far and away better. And that’s something that really annoys me. I think people are too centered on trying to make things too kid-friendly all the time. Sometimes movies just don’t work like that.
PL: I couldn’t agree more. I see how that kind of works for ghost stories because ghost stories kind of allow for that. But for a movie that’s about somebody turning into a monster and killing people? It’s about somebody turning into a monster and killing people!
UC: At least the fans at the end of the day and at the end of the road with the advent of DVD were able to see what you guys really put into it.
PL: Absolutely! And overall we’re grateful to the studio for perceiving that and making sure that version was released. And for preserving that. Because it cost a lot to finish the unrated version as well, and they stepped up to the plate and made sure both versions were done and complete. You gotta give them a lot of credit for that.
UC: There were some a really, really crazy effects in it, too. KNB and Nicotero – God bless them! They just never cease to amaze me.
PL: Yeah. Everybody did such a great job on it. It was just such a strange process. For that PG-13 version to come out . . . Everybody sweat blood for the movie! C’mon, don’t do that!
UC: You know there was one interesting thing that I didn’t expect in the unrated version: Mya’s death scene still took place off-screen.
PL: Yeah. There was another version that was shot where you actually see her body completely mutilated. We had it in, we had it out, we had it in, we had it out. And ultimately it was out, and that was Wes’ choice because he felt, I believe, that it was too much for the moment. Your imagination was going to do more than actually showing it.
UC: Fair enough.
PL: And I certainly don’t disagree with that. I think his instincts were right.
UC: So you’ve tackled werewolves and you’ve tackled Dracula. What’s next for you?
PL:
UC: Do you have any “dream” projects, something you really want to work on?
PL: I’ve always wanted to make a film version of Michael Slade’s Headhunter ever since I first read it years ago. There’s something about that story that’s always . . . it’s a brutal, ugly little story.
UC: You know, I’ve read that book. It’s funny you should mention it. It’s pure pulp, but wow, is it fun!
PL: Yeah, it’s such a fun story. It always struck me as being such a unique horror movie because it’s such a great mystery and has such a great reveal. I think in the book it’s in the final sentence that it’s revealed who the actual killer is. And how the killer gets away with it and has it pinned on everybody else, which is just amazing!
UC: Totally! You’re the first person I’ve met who has ever mentioned that book. So to hear you say that is a thrill. Wow!
PL: That’s something I’ve always wanted to pursue. I’m friends with Jay Clarke, who is one of the main writers as Michael Slade, and we talk about it frequently. The rights are available! We’ll see if we can make it happen.
UC: My prayers are with you!
PL: Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
Thanks to Patrick for hanging around with us!
Categorized:Interviews News
