On October 8th indie distributor Anchor Bay Films will be releasing Steven R. Monroe’s remake of I Spit On Your Grave (two reviews), the controversial rape/revenge horror film that caused a stir when it was released thirty years ago. In our sit-down interview with Monroe, the director opened up about his reaction to the original film upon seeing it as a teenager in 1980, what sets his remake apart from the rest of the current crop, and shooting the graphic, prolonged rape scenes that will have many moviegoers squirming in their seats. Read inside for the full interview – including Monroe’s thoughts on helming a possible sequel.Ever since helming the Dennis Hopper-starring horror film House of 9 in 2004 –which was released in a handful of theaters before being dumped on DVD – director Steven R. Monroe has mostly become known for directing a series of silly, over-the-top Syfy Original Movies with titles like Wyvern, Ogre, and Ice Twisters. Now he’s back with a big-screen film – I Spit On Your Grave, a remake of the notorious 1978 rape/revenge horror film made famous by Roger Ebert’s very public throttling of it on his T.V. show – that’s being released unrated on a handful of screens Oct. 8th. In our sit-down interview Monroe opened up about his reaction to the original film upon seeing it as a teenager in 1980, what sets his remake apart from the rest of the current crop, and shooting the graphic, prolonged rape scenes that will have many moviegoers squirming in their seats. Read on for the full interview – including Monroe’s justification for considerably amping up the gore factor.

Bloody-Disgusting: Tell me how this project came about.

CineTel acquired the rights. I found out right as they were acquiring the rights and I said, ‘you guys gotta let me direct that.’ And like a year passed, and then Lisa Hansen came to me and said, ‘we have a draft of the script, do you wanna read it?’ And I said, ‘yeah, absolutely.’ So I lobbied like on and off throughout that year going, ‘what’s happening with ‘I Spit’, cause I wanna do it, you guys gotta let me do it.’ And so she sent me that draft…and so I read it and I sat down with [Lisa Hansen and producer Paul Hertzberg] and talked about what I thought of the draft, what I thought about the remake, how I saw it, what I thought the mistakes would be or could be or what the mistakes shouldn’t be and blah blah blah. And Lisa called me back about an hour later and said, ‘you go the gig.’ So that’s kinda how it came about.

B-D: So you must have been a fan of the original film then.

Yeah, I saw it when I was 16 in 1980. It was one of those films that definitely stayed with me after I saw it.

B-D: It can’t help but stay with you.

Yeah, it does. [There] was definitely an uncomfortableness on me after I saw it. And that uncomfortableness kind of came and went for several days after that, and for me that’s when a film’s done its job. Look, I love wacky comedies more than the next guy, I like dramas…but I also like violent, disturbing movies…I grew up worshipping Sam Peckinpah. ‘Straw Dogs’ is one of my all-time favorite movies, and so is ‘Wild Bunch’…and ‘Clockwork Orange’ and all kinds of movies like that. So this kind of sat with me as one of those, you know, did you enjoy the film? No, but you were really emotionally affected by it. Therefore it was a good film that in a second-degree context you did enjoy the movie, you know what I mean? You don’t go, ‘yeah, I loved it! I enjoyed!’…same thing with ‘Clockwork Orange’. It’s an incredibly brilliant film, but it’s a very, very violent, dark, disturbing movie.

B-D: We’re in the age of remakes, especially in the horror genre. A lot of these recent remakes are criticized for being toothless and watered-down. Was the mandate going into this that you were just gonna go for it and not water it down, and do you think that’s what sets it apart from these other remakes?

Yeah…we didn’t have this discussion before I sat down with them. I sat down with them and I said, ‘if I do this, I can’t water it down, I gotta go full-on.’ And both Lisa and Paul said, ‘we don’t wanna water anything down. As a matter of fact, we want to amp up the revenge sequences more.’ Because if you watch the original, the revenge sequences, outside of the brilliant Johnny in the bathtub scene are really, really brief and quick and not really…it’s not a horror film. The movie was not a horror film. Because it was banned and banished and everything that happened with it and was said about it, it was adopted and embraced by horror audiences and therefore, when you’re doing a remake of something that was labeled a horror film, your remake’s gonna be expected to be a horror film also.

Which, you know, even the remake is not so much of a horror film either. The revenges are much more horrific. [Laughs] When I first met with Lisa and Paul, they said, ‘that’s what we feel like we can amp up from this movie. And we think that audiences are gonna expect it.’ And I agree with them. I’ve said several times in interviews that the hardest thing about making this film was walking that line as a director of, there’s a lot of hardcore fans of the original out there that are gonna be expecting one thing, and there’s gonna be a whole bunch of new fans that are gonna be expecting another thing out of this film. And you gotta walk that line to make both as happy as you possibly can. You’re never gonna make everyone happy. It’s an opinion, it’s a matter of taste. So you’re never gonna make everyone happy.

That was my biggest focus in making this movie was walking that line. Especially being someone who was a fan of the original and a fan of movies of that time where people were really able to push the envelope. It got banned because Roger Ebert took offense to the fact that she used her sexuality to draw these guys back in. It wasn’t so much everything else that was in the movie. That was what started the bandwagon.

B-D: I didn’t get a chance to ask Meir if he held a grudge against Roger Ebert for that.

No, he doesn’t. Actually I’ll say what he said in the other interviews. He jokingly says, ‘he was my best press of that movie.’ He said several times also, ‘I should probably pay him residuals.’ You know, I don’t think people are ever gonna get it. You see this happen time and time and time again with movies, especially like with religious groups, [they] take offense to things, boycott it and then the movie does 20 times better than it ever would’ve in the first place…it’s like, ‘when are you guys gonna figure it out? Ignore the movie and it’ll do more of what you want it to do. It’ll go away quicker.’

B-D: Did you guys ever want to go for an R-rating or did you always envision it as an unrated project?

Well, we knew we were gonna have trouble. We wanted to see where the R-rating would land. We thought, ‘What the fuck? We gotta go through the process anyway. Let’s send the MPAA everything we want in the film and see what they come back with.’ They watched it, and – this is a crazy story, we’ve all told this several times – the MPAA came back and said, ‘look, you’ve got an NC-17 movie, but we don’t recommend that you cut it down because we feel like it’s really impactful.’ It was the MPAA saying that. So that was the first time we kinda went, ‘wow, that’s pretty interesting to hear that from the MPAA.’…

So we went through the process of going through the cuts with them until we got it to an ‘R’, and then we just all looked at each other and went, ‘ok, what do we do? Do we go NC-17?’ I was pushing the NC-17, and then the discussions came up of, you know, we can go unrated and get it into more theaters that way than the NC-17. And I said, ‘Well, to me it’s not even a question. It’s what the fans are gonna want anyway.’…initially, before it was announced that it was unrated, everyone’s going online going, ‘oh, they’re gonna pussy out, they’re gonna wimp out, they’re gonna get it to an R and give us a crappy teen version of the movie.’ You know, all kinds of stuff online. And then we announce we’re going unrated and now everyone’s going, ‘oh gee, thanks a lot, now it’s not playing in any theaters anywhere!’ [Laughs] You know, it’s like you can’t win either way.

But I think that if people will go out…the trick is with unrated, if people go out and see it, and the theaters starts selling tickets, the theater chains that are saying ‘no’ will say ‘yes’. Then all of a sudden an unrated release can be a wide release. But it’s gonna take the people going to see it where it’s starting to get it to spread out from there. So that’s the trick. Whereas NC-17 is what it is, only certain theaters will ever take it. And you know, most of the country looks at NC-17 like, ‘oh, it must be a porno movie.’ You know, which, unfortunately, there’s a lot of uneducated people out there. But this situation with ‘I Spit On Your Grave’, with the unrated release, could be either the death or the beginning of wide releases for unrated films. But it’s gonna take the fans that really wanna see it that way getting to the theaters to see it and telling people about it. That’s the rub. You know, the fans become part of the release of the film because we need them. Whereas when it’s a studio film and it’s ‘R’, they spend all the money they want with the marketing and the movie’s wherever it wants to go.

B-D: So talk about the search for the lead actress. Was it hard to find a girl that was the right fit and that was also willing to do the things that were required of her?

You know, I thought it was gonna be. I was ready to see hundreds and hundreds of people. And Sarah’s was the second audition tape I watched. I barely got into the audition tape and I paused it and I wrote down, ‘this is Jennifer.’ And I called Lisa Hansen and told her to watch the audition tape. And she said, ‘yeah, I love her. Let’s bring her in for Anchor Bay to look at.’ She did two callbacks for us in a room as opposed to her audition tape and then I sat down with her and said, ‘Do you know what you’re getting into? Do you know about this movie?’ And she said, ‘well no, my managers kinda told me about it and filled me in.’ And I went through everything and she said ok.

And that was pretty much it. We had several other conversations after she was booked on the job about how things were gonna be shot, what exactly was gonna be seen, what she was gonna have to do, but it’s funny. Once she really realized what this film was and what the potential for her was in the film, she was like, ‘no, this either has to be everything or nothing.’ God bless her, man, she just went for it. She was resilient, and brilliant…she was everything. We had a few discussions about what she had to do, and then when we were on the set there was very little communication. She knew, and she knew that I knew, and we didn’t have to talk too much on the set. She just nailed everything. She was brilliant.

B-D: The most disturbing part of the movie for me was the rape scenes. I feel like the latter half of the movie in some ways – though it’s a sick fantasy – is a revenge fantasy.

It is, I was just saying that to the last interview, and the guy looked at me like I was a little crazy. And I was like, ‘it is in a way, it goes a little bit into fantasy land. Because it’s every fantasy that every person that has known somebody or been close to somebody or who has gone through something like that – everybody has thought of these things. Everybody has. At the very least, you’ve thought of it. [Laughs]

B-D: She’s almost like a specter in some ways, as far as when she comes back, you don’t know what happens to her from when she drops into the water to when she shows up again for the first time.

Because the person that she was is completely dead anyway. I’ve also been asked like, ‘oh come on, could she really have done that to all those guys?’ Look, people believe stories when they read in the news like someone who’s in a car crash and who’s completely injured beyond repair and they’ve lifted a car off of people. I put this in that same context. She goes back into this world. She’s revenging on these guys. She’s a completely different person. And there’s things coming out of her that if she’d spent her whole life in the city writing her little books and everything, she would’ve never known that other side of her[self]. And everybody has another side to them, and some people never tap into [it].

B-D: Talk about filming the rape scenes specifically. I’m wondering what the mood was on set. It must have been pretty intense.

It was. It was very intense. Again, you know, there were so many discussions. Everyone knew what we were in for. Also, the way I shot the scenes, you know, we shot the whole scene from beginning to end. So even that entire nine page assault scene where they’re tormenting her, every one of those takes was from beginning to end. Each of the rapes were from beginning to end. So it wasn’t like we were going, ‘ok stop, now the camera’s gonna move over here, and when you’re doing this to her you gotta make sure you’re gonna look over this way’, you know?’

So when we went into the first take, and we went all the way from the beginning to the end, everybody got up and walked off in different directions. Each of the actors. Sarah walked off for a second, and came back, and said, ‘ok, we’re going again, right?’ I mean, she was just absolutely amazing. A couple of the guys would go out, smoke a cigarette, come back in, pace around out in the woods by themselves’…yeah, it was very difficult. It was very hard for me to sit there at the monitor or at the camera and at times get lost between watching the performance and what was going on and not wanna cut the camera. There were a couple times in the first few takes that I wanted to cut the camera, go in, and get Sarah out of there. Which is funny because she would’ve gotten pissed at me if I did that. [Laugh]

So yeah, it was very difficult. It was very, very emotionally, mentally and physically draining to do it. But you know, like I said, everybody knew what we were in for and what had to be done. And also, you know, when we got through that first take and I don’t know how many of the actors have dealt with being able to do an entire scene like that without cutting and resetting and all that, I think that set the tone and everybody was like, ‘well, this is what it feels like to go from point A to point B in this situation.’

And then it would just be a matter of, ‘ok, we’re going again, but the camera’s in a completely different place.’ But everyone’s doing the exact same thing from point A to point B. And we did that in every one of the rape sequences, and we picked up just very few little pieces. Because I wanted everything to feel real. I feel like when you watch movies a lot of times when you see a rape sequence, things feel very staged. You can just feel like, ‘oh yeah, your face needs to be here, and this needs to be here,’ and ‘oh, your light is here’, and stuff like that. I mean, we had like light flares hitting the lenses…I wanted it to feel like combat. So yeah, it was hard but it turned out quite brilliant in a disturbing way.

B-D: Meir was talking about a possible sequel. Are you going to be involved, do you want to be involved, what is your vision for it if you are gonna be involved?

I’ve been talked to about it. There’s nothing solid. I mean, I will wanna be involved in it if it has the potential to have the same impact as the original and the first remake. If it just turns into a sequel, I think it could be dangerous. But I think if there’s a story to be told that has the same amount of impact that you don’t feel like you’re just making the same movie over and over again, you know, a woman gets raped and then there’s revenge. The fact of the matter is, there’s a million of these stories out there to be told and they’re all absolutely horrific. So it just really, for me, just comes down to – is it something that can be done with the impact of the original and the remake, and it’s not just ‘IS2: Jennifer whatever’! Or something like that. Then you’re starting to pander to a different type of…audience.