-
- Source: CHUD
- EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: PLATINUM DUNES
PRODUCERS (THE HITCHER)
01.18.07
By Devin Faraci
-
- Here’s a way to make someone feel
important: ignore not one but two
phone calls from Michael Bay while talking to him.
-
- My one on one with Andrew Form and Brad
Fuller – two thirds of Platinum
Dunes, the other third being Bay – came at the end of the
day at the
junket for The Hitcher in Los Angeles two weekends ago. With
nothing
else on their schedule, what had been a twenty minute interview
stretched to an hour, and we covered a lot of ground – not
just about
The Hitcher, but about their future projects, their thoughts
on
remakes, and the future of the horror genre.
-
- Towards the end of the interview, Fuller’s
phone began ringing. It was
Bay. There was a moment where he looked at the caller ID, and
then
silenced the buzzing of the phone, going back to the interview.
A
couple of minutes later, the phone buzzed again. Again it was
Bay.
Again the phone was silenced, but you could tell that this time
it took
a little more consideration.
-
- Form and Fuller are no bullshit guys.
Form has long Jesus hair and
beard, and he showed up at the pre-screening party the night
before
with Jordana Brewster, his fiancée. Fuller looks more
like your usual
handsome, young Hollywood player, dressed casually but nicely.
They had
a strong rapport, often finishing each other’s sentences.
And they
didn’t give me a lot of spin. You may not like all their
answers, but
they’re being upfront and every reply felt very honest.
-
- The Hitcher is the latest remake from
Platinum Dunes. This time they've
reached back to the 80s cult classic and updated it for today.
Sean
Bean plays the creepy and seemingly unstoppable hitchhiker who
gets
mixed up in the road trip of Jim (newcomer Zachary Knighton)
and Grace
(hottie Sophia Bush). The dynamics in this version are changed
- in the
original hitchhiker Rutger Hauer was obsessed with C Thomas Howell,
whose girlfriend Jennifer Jason Leigh receives some legendarily
bad
treatment. This time around the lead is the girl, with the boy
finding
himself feeling torn.
-
- This interview contains complete and
total spoilers for The Hitcher. If
you’ve seen the original, you should be in good shape, since
the new
version sticks pretty close to that. I had originally intended
to break
this interview up into two parts, and maybe keep the parts that
spoiled
scenes from the movie for next week, but in the end I decided
that the
conversational flow was worth preserving. I will not be blacking
out
spoilers, so continue at your own risk.
-
- I’m interested in the philosophy
of how Platinum Dunes approaches
remakes. This is a pretty faithful remake –
-
- Form: As we learned when [writer of
the original] Eric Red got credit
[from the WGA]! We weren’t expecting that.
-
- What is the philosophy, though? Do you
come looking to keep most of the
film or are you looking to make big changes?
-
- Fuller: The movies that we’ve remade
are all movies that we
authentically had a tremendous amount of affection for. Out of
the
movies we’ve remade, The Hitcher is the one that we all
had the same
level of passion for.
-
- Form: It’s the only one I saw in
the theaters. I wasn’t old enough to
see Chainsaw, and I didn’t see Amityville in theaters.
-
- Fuller: The concept of remaking it kind
of came from the fact with
Michael Bay talking about this film. Drew looked it up on his
computer
and I said, ‘How much did this make at the box office?’
It made 6
million dollars. I said, ‘This is a travesty. Why didn’t
anybody see
this film?’ That’s what started us.
-
- There are things in the original you
have to do. If you’re remaking
this film, you have to pull a character apart. Are you going
to pull
apart the girl, are you going to pull apart the guy? Our marketing
campaign says it right there – you know who’s getting
pulled apart;
there’s no mystique about who’s getting it. So rather
than hide that,
we played into it. When he walked out of that shower, you know
he’s
going to get pulled apart.
-
- At the screening last night, when they
came over the hill and saw the
truck stop, someone applauded the truck stop, knowing what was
coming
next.
-
- Fuller: Right. So when you’re remaking
a movie you know there are
things the audience is expecting, and there are places you need
to be
really clever. On this movie we felt that they know what’s
going to
happen, and we’ll let them in on it, and we’ll all
have fun with it.
But what we tried to do was take key elements, like the pull-apart,
when he pulls up in the station wagon, and what we try to do
is add
something they couldn’t do twenty years ago. The whole car
[chase]
sequence – that was pretty hard for us to shoot. In the
pull-apart,
they didn’t show the body come apart. When we shot it, we
didn’t know
how explicit it was going to be, but we knew we could do a pull-apart
that would look real. The battle between the two of them at the
end –
you have these two people, Rutger and C Tommy Howell, and he
shoots him
on the side of the road – I said to Drew, ‘How can
we make that more
interesting?’ You try to build on it and be true to the
spirit of the
original.
-
- Form: The original is a good movie,
and there’s a lot of action in that
movie also. We thought, ‘What a great movie to remake, this
movie that
no one has seen.’ We wanted to get these characters out
there.
- The movie people keep asking about,
and you got asked about it today,
is the Friday the 13th remake. That’s been a tortured process.
Can you
talk about what happened?
-
- Form: First we brought on Jonathan Liebsman
to direct the movie.
- Fuller: We had just worked with him
on Chainsaw and loved him.
- Form: We would love to work with him
on everything. We were at New
Line, we had two movies for them, and Friday the 13th came up.
- Fuller: They gave us a call.
-
- Form: I said, ‘I love Jason Voorhees.’
Those are movies I lived on when
I was younger. We got down with Liebsman, and what we learned
is that
Paramount owns the original Friday the 13th.
-
- They own the title as well, right?
-
- Form: Yes. New Line owns all the sequels.
So we were put in a box – we
couldn’t use anything from the first one. So we started
going down the
road of making a Friday the 13th movie that didn’t include
anything
from part one.
-
- Fuller: So we had to create our own
backstory.
-
- Form: And then Paramount came around
and said, ‘Why don’t we do this
together?’ And then MTV came around and said they wanted
in. So now I
think we’re at a place where Paramount, MTV, New Line and
Platinum
Dunes have come together and the box is completely open –
we can use 1,
2 or 3. The title will be Friday the 13th. So we’re now
going to bring
in a new writer, Liebsman is going to direct, and we’re
going to pull
from the first three movies.
-
- It’s interesting that you said
you couldn’t pull from the first movie –
when people think of Friday the 13th, they don’t think of
the first
one, because Jason’s not in that movie.
-
- Fuller: That’s right. You know
that and we know that, but most people
don’t know that. Most people think Jason is a guy with a
hockey mask
and that’s the way it’s been since the first movie.
-
- Form: They don’t know that Part
III is when the hockey mask comes out.
I think there are moments we want to address, like how does the
hockey
mask happen. It’ll happen differently in our movie than
in the third
one. Where is Jason from, why do these killings happen, and what
is
Crystal Lake?
-
- Fuller: And how does Tommy Jarvis fit
in?
-
- You’re going to have Tommy Jarvis!
-
- Fuller: [laughs] You got all excited.
-
- Form: We’re talking about how do
you put all these elements into one
[film]. We haven’t decided, but we’re excited. We’re
talking with new
writers, and once we get that down, the movie goes right away.
It’s a
movie we’re excited about.
-
- Again, you want the movie to feel real.
When the killing gets over the
top, it can feel campy, and we don’t want that. And with
a machete and
the way Jason kills, there’s a fine line. We want it to
feel real, and
he is a brutal killer. We’re dancing with that; we’ll
put all of these
elements together. It’s a movie we can’t wait to make.
-
- Are you guys going to tackle the biggest
continuity question for any
Friday fan – how did Jason drown in the lake as a kid but
come back as
a zombie that ages?
-
- Fuller: We don’t know. We talk
about that for hours on end. How do you
do that and not make it seem cheesy? If you don’t do that
well, they’re
not along for the ride of the movie. In some ways, you’re
better off
not addressing it – which I don’t think we’re
going to do – or you come
up with a writer and a group of people who sit in a room and
come up
with an idea so brilliant that it works, and that’s what
we’re striving
to do. Every discussion about this movie – you talk about
the kills,
you talk about the hot chicks, you talk about the nudity, you
talk
about Crystal Lake – but at the end of the day, the question
is, ‘Is
there a supernatural element to this movie?’ Is Jason a
demon? I think
you can’t figure out any of the other things until you figure
that out.
- It’s interesting that you bring
up nudity – there hasn’t really been
any in your films so far. You’re in the genre where that’s
considered
part and parcel of what you expect.
-
- Form: I don’t think any of the
movies we’ve done have called for it. We
haven’t had that scene with the two kids in the corner having
sex
before the killer –
-
- Well, you have the shower scene in this
one, which is shot very
tastefully so as to not show anything.
-
- Form: Again, I think with some of the
actors we’re working with…
- Fuller: We don’t have a problem
with nudity. I feel like an actress
saying this, but if it’s not part of the story and it doesn’t
make
sense and we’re just throwing it in there because we don’t
know how to
tell the story, that’s not how we work. We love nudity as
much as
everybody else, and to me Friday the 13th lends itself to it
more than
Chainsaw. In The Hitcher, we gave a little up. We gave a little
bit of
it.
-
- Considering how nudity was once part
of the expected package, do you
think that the expected package has changed since we were going
to
horror movies as kids?
-
- Fuller: I don’t have a specific
answer to that, but hopefully this will
help you get an answer to that. When we came to horror movies,
one
thing we talked about was that we wanted to have a better level
of
actor in all the main roles. Today a lot of the young actresses
don’t
want to do nudity. Biehl doesn’t do nudity, Alba doesn’t
do nudity,
Jordana Brewster doesn’t do it.
-
- Form: I think they’ll do it in
what they think is the right movie, but
not if they’re being chased by a chainsaw.
-
- Fuller: That’s the trade-off. You
can have a better actress to actually
act the role, or you can have someone who takes off her clothes
and it
doesn’t feel as authentic, and we err on the side of authenticity.
- Is part of it also that horror films
now are lobbed down the middle of
the gender road more often? Horror films in the 80s were aimed
squarely
at guys – these are date movies now.
-
- Fuller: I was surprised no one asked
us about it, but this is our
fourth movie with a female protagonist. We have never had a male
protagonist. But in Friday the 13th you have a lot of meat flying
around –
-
- Form: Lotta victims!
-
- Fuller: So you don’t need your
main actor… in that movie I think we’ll
have more leeway.
-
- Female protagonists have sort of been
the thing since Halloween. Do you
think it’s time to break the mold on that?
-
- Fuller: Can I tell you what I was honestly
thinking last night? I was
thinking with that whole thing in the shower – we should
have had Zach
get out of the shower, go to the store, come back and she’s
tied behind
the truck and gets pulled apart and he lives. Turn it around!
In the
next movie we do I want to have the character say ‘I’ll
be back in 15
minutes’ –
-
- Form: And he comes back!
-
- Fuller: You want to have fun with it.
There are things that are in the
language of the genre, so that when he says, ‘I’m coming
back in 15
minutes,’ there’s not a person in the audience who
thinks he’s coming
back. You know he’s going to die! So you either have fun
with it, which
what we tried to do here, or you can do the total opposite and
turn it
on its ear. So in the next movie, when someone says they’re
coming back
in 15 minutes, the other person will die!
-
- I thought it was fun that you guys had
a clip from The Birds in the
film. Is that the new thing? Will you announce every remake this
way?
- Form: You know what? We had a cartoon
in there, and the cartoon didn’t
clear, believe it or not. Because Rogue is Universal, they gave
us the
Universal catalog. Universal was fine with it, because we’re
doing the
movie for them, then we went to Tippi Hendren and Rod Taylor,
and they
both signed off on it.
-
- Fuller: Some people will get it, and
other people won’t know what it
is.
-
- Form: But we put that last shot in there,
which I love, the car driving
away.
-
- Fuller: These movies should be fun.
I like to see movies that are
rides. I go and see Children of Men, which is an amazing movie,
and
you’re blown away by what cinema is capable of. That’s
not what we do.
What we do is, you go in for an hour and a half and hopefully
you have
a good time. You jump a little, laugh a little.
-
- Form: The audience claps a few times,
they enjoy the experience, and
you talk about it a few minutes on the way out.
-
- What is Alone?
-
- Fuller: Alone is an original script
that Rogue brought to us. The
closest thing I can compare it to is Misery. It’s a story
about a young
woman, who is about 25 years old, and her mother dies. They’ve
been
estranged for years, and when she gets the call that her mother
died,
she goes to her mother’s apartment for the first time and
goes through
her things.
-
- Form: It appears that the mother committed
suicide, jumped off a ledge.
The girl can’t believe it. We’ve witnessed the mother
jump off the
ledge… or so we think.
-
- The girl goes to the funeral with her
fiancé, and the superintendent is
there. He says he wants to pay his respects, he’s a nice
guy, he gives
her the keys to the apartment to clean it out. She goes there
and all
these photo albums, her whole childhood is in that apartment.
She
starts hanging around and doesn’t want to leave, and [the
superintendent] befriends her. He starts telling stories about
the
mother. Then you learn throughout the movie that the mother was
kept
there, and when the girl wants to leave he’s fallen for
her and won’t
let her leave. It takes place in an abandoned apartment building
that
doesn’t seem abandoned at all,and when she starts searching
the building – it’s got lots of fun horror elements
to it, lots of
action. People show up and don’t make it out.
-
- It’s an original piece for us,
and that’s exciting. We love Misery so
much that when we read this we were like, ‘Wow!’ It’s
not Misery – it’s
not a remake of Misery! But I think that could be next, after
Horsemen,
which is shooting in three weeks.
-
- Horror was out of favor for a while,
but now it’s back and it’s money.
It’s guaranteed box office –
-
- Fuller: There’s never guaranteed
box office.
-
- Well, it’s not guaranteed, but
it’s a good bet.
-
- Fuller: For the price, if you do it
right.
-
- And they’ve changed the way movies
are released. January was never a
release month, and now you put The Hitcher out in January and
you think
you could have a good weekend. But can the horror thing last,
or will
it burn out?
-
- Fuller: We wrestle with it. We felt
we were on the front end of a great
trend, but now we feel like we’re changing what we’re
doing. We’re not
interested in and nor do we think we can compete with Hostel
or Saw.
That’s not the kind of material we respond to, so we’re
trying to find
another place to do it. To us The Hitcher – and this is
blasphemy – is
not so much a horror film as a thriller. For us as producers,
it was
about us testing ourselves and seeing if we could take it out
of one
guy cutting people up. Could we take it out onto the highway,
roll
cars, do things we never did before and do it in a way that doesn’t
feel totally gratuitous and is loyal to an interesting story
and still
have the horror elements.
-
- We still have the big stings in there,
but – I’ll give you an example.
When [Sophia Bush] comes out of the interrogation room, and there’s
that cop dead on the ground and his throat has been slit –
in Chainsaw
we would have stung that in a big way. We didn’t sting that
in The
Hitcher.
-
- Form: In Chainsaw we would have showed
him get killed.
-
- Fuller: We kind of just let that hang
there. When the other cop is dead
on the ground, we used to have a scene where a dog is licking
his
brains out. We didn’t cut it because we shy away from that
stuff – we
love it and have done it – we just strove to make more of
a thriller
than a straight-ahead horror movie, because we wanted more people
to
see the movie. With Chainsaw: The Beginning, we felt that movie
got too
intense for all audiences.
-
- Form: That movie definitely does not
play for everyone.
-
- One of the most effective scenes in
this film is when Sean Bean first
gets in the car – it’s not a horror sequence, but it
builds from being
just sort of creepy to crossing the line with the question about
fucking the girlfriend to breaking the cell phone. And none of
that is
stung –
-
- Fuller: That’s by design. It’s
interesting you bring up that scene,
because in our temp score there was a huge sting when he says,
‘How
long you been fucking her?’ There was a huge sting, and
we’ve been
pulling back from that.
-
- Form: We pulled music out sometimes
when there would usually be a
horror score. We let some scenes be naked. We didn’t want
the movie to
be wall-to-wall music, which I think a lot of horror films do.
We’ve
done that. When we were mixing the movie, we tried to find places
to
let it breathe. For example, when she comes out of the interrogation
room, on the temp track that was always always scored. Now it’s
quiet –
all you hear is the [police band] radio. There’s no music
at all. The
music starts when you see the dead body. We let it breathe a
little
bit.
-
- Fuller: We wanted this to feel more
broad.
-
- Did it test broad?
-
- Fuller: We didn’t test it.
-
- Really?
-
- Form: We didn’t have time. We finished
it three days ago.
-
- Fuller: We bought that song [Nine Inch
Nail’s Closer, which plays over
a car chase] on Friday. We were mixing on New Year’s Eve
up until 8
o’clock that night.
-
- Form: The movie was supposed to come
out in April, but Zodiac moved and
they said they liked January 19th.
-
- How does the Michael Bay part of Platinum
Dunes work?
-
- Fuller: He is there all the time. He’s
not physically there, but he’s
like having a professor. We’ll call him up and ask what
he thinks.
- Form: He says in every interview that
he doesn’t like going on the set.
- Fuller: He can’t. He used to do
it but doesn’t anymore. He wants to be
the director.
-
- Form: He’s on the set and he’s
a director. The first time he came to
one of our sets and someone said, ‘What do you think, what
lens?’ But
we call him every day at the end of the day, and he sees dailies.
If he
thinks we’re missing something, we’ll pick it up. He’s
very involved in
the casting. Wardrobe. Editing, of course.
-
- Fuller: We have an office together.
We see each other all the time.
- So you’ve seen a lot of Transformers
footage?
-
- Fuller: We’ve seen a lot of it.
It’s huge.
-
- Form: What did you think of the trailer?
-
- It’s great. It has a Spielberg
touch to it. I loved the trailer.
-
- Fuller: I think he’s gonna nail
it. What we’ve seen is amazing.
- Form: The movie’s really good.
We haven’t seen the whole thing, but the
transformations are incredible.
-
- You have a lot on your plate. What does
the next year realistically
look like for you guys?
-
- Form: Horsemen starts in three weeks.
-
- Fuller: I just want to say right off
the bat, that Horsemen feels like
nothing we’ve done. All of our films, hopefully people view
them as
commercial, Horsemen to me feels commercial, but it’s brutal
and it’s
intellectual. It’s a totally different type of movie for
us. Our
expectations are different for it. And when you step away from
straight
down the middle horror and do something with more character,
the cast
we’ve gotten for this movie is unbelievable. Dennis Quaid,
Zhang Ziyi,
Peter Stormare, Clifton Collins Jr. These kind of actors –
for us, it’s
a real treat.
-
- Form: It’s in the genre of Seven.
-
- Do you feel like maybe you guys have
reached the level of success where
you can make a picture without worrying about what it will make?
-
- Fuller: No. We don’t feel like
that at all. We are very cost conscious.
Our first movie was very successful, our second movie was very
successful, our third movie made all of it’s money back,
so that’s
good. But our budget level, since the second movie, has not moved.
It
doesn’t go up. I think on some level every time we come
to bat we’re
scared shitless we’re going to strike out and we’ll
be back on the
streets. There’s no comfort.
-
- Form: In two weeks there’s five
movies coming out. How do you compete?
Movies get hurt. There’s no way around it. Five movies can’t
open.
-
- Fuller: We have our weekend all to ourselves.
-
- Form: I don’t know how it happened,
because the weekend after us
there’s five movies. We’re excited. But when the prequel
came out, we
opened against The Departed. Best movie of the year, people are
saying.
- But is the Texas Chainsaw Massacre prequel
really hitting the same
audience as The Departed does in its first week?
-
- Fuller: As a producer, any time your
movie doesn’t do the numbers you
wanted it to do – we thought that movie would open over
20 million
dollars. It’s not the same audience, but at the end of the
day, you
have to justify it somehow!
-
- Form: The pie is only so big. If one
movie takes a chunk of it… it’s
rare when there’s two movies on a weekend that’s not
in the summer or
in the holidays that make over 20 million apiece. I think Employee
of
the Month took some of our audience.
-
- You guys have this interesting target
audience in that your audience is
the one that’s most likely to be downloading movies off
the internet,
that feels comfortable waiting for the DVD, but you’re making
these
pictures that are theatrical experiences, that should be seen
in a big
crowd that jumps and screams together.
-
- Form: It’s hard, because you hear
people say they would rather stay
home. They have amazing TVs, they wait for DVD and they invite
their
friends over. I think you nailed it – we like to make movies
that are
theater experiences. Yeah, some movies people watch them at home
and
have the same experience they had at the theater. But horror
films or
action thrillers, like you said, when you have the energy in
the
theater, it’s a different experience. If everyone’s
jumping or laughing
or screaming, the energy is amazing.
-
- Fuller: At the end of the day we don’t
fool ourselves, but we do
believe that if we create compelling content, we’ll still
have a job.
But my kids don’t feel the same urge to go there and eat
popcorn.
-
- Form: I still feel it.
-
- Fuller: I do too. But they’re used
to watching things on their
computers and iPods.
-
- Right now whatever suit is running the
studio grew up on the theatrical
experience, so he gets why it’s important. But when your
kids grow up
and run a studio, will they care about keeping the theatrical
aspect?
-
- Fuller: The theatrical aspect itself
will probably have to change.
Either there will be an advance in technology that gets people
out
there to see movies, or the moviegoing experience as we know
it won’t
exist in its current form. But at the end of the day there will
always
be a need for content. You can’t make these movies for YouTube
and put
them up there and hope. The level of expertise won’t be
the same.
- Form: I think you’ll always find
17, 18, 19 year old kids who want to
go on a date. They won’t want to go over the girl’s
house. They have to
get out of the house, and what’s better than dinner and
a movie. I
can’t imagine that going away.
-
- Fuller: It won’t go away, but I
used to go every single weekend when I
was 12 years old. It isn’t like that. There are a lot of
options now.
-
- Your pictures are the kind that do very
well on DVD. How do you
approach that aspect – how much of an eye on the home video
market when
you’re making the movie?
-
- Form: We definitely think about it.
We like to shoot behind the scenes,
and we like to document a lot of stuff, give the people those
special
features on the DVD. We shoot it all, because I love seeing that
stuff,
how they did it.
-
- Fuller: But as a producer the challenge
is that you don’t know what
your DVD content is going to be when you’re shooting. We
didn’t know
that the original Chainsaw would be a two disc set.
-
- Form: But you just shoot it all and
you hope.
-
- Fuller: We keep all our auditions.
-
- Form: It’s great to see Jessice
Biehl come in to read.
-
- You talked about keeping the budgets
of these films low. It seems
likely that print and advertising on The Hitcher will exceed
the budget –
-
- Form: It will.
-
- Fuller: Absolutely.
-
- Is that a model that makes sense?
-
- Form: The risk is much less. We make
these movies for what we think we
can make them for. Any movie could be made for 100 or 20, depending
on
what you need. We feel comfortable in this range.
-
- But when your low budget movie stops
being low budget because they just
doubled the cost on prints and advertising.
-
- Fuller: It scares the shit out of me.
We want these studios to make
money off of us, that way we keep working. But I don’t know
how else to
get a movie out there. We’re dealing with it right now with
The Hitcher
– we have our own weekend, but the market is so crowded
with the Golden
Globes and the SAG awards –
-
- Form: And all the Christmas movies that
still play. Night at the
Museum.
-