Editorials
Set Report: ‘Drive Angry’ Part 1: Get Ready for a Violent, Bumpy Ride!
Those of you dying for a film actually shot in 3-D rather than post-converted into a pop-up book will be happy to know that Patrick Lussier’s Drive Angry 3D, the follow-up to his hit My Bloody Valentine reboot, is exactly what you’re looking for. Though it isn’t scheduled to hit screens until February 11th, 2011, inside you can check out the first part of B-D reporter Chris Eggertsen’s visit to the Shreveport, Louisiana set back in May. In addition to interviews with producer Michael De Luca, co-screenwriter Todd Farmer and actor William Fichtner, Chris also had the opportunity to check out the fiery outdoor set to get a closer look at all the action.
“‘Jason X’…did not become the movie that I thought it would be. That happens. It’s happened with every movie I’ve ever [worked on]. It didn’t happen on this one. We wrote it and it’s there. Nobody changed it. Nobody gave us notes and said, ‘We want this. We want the girl to be more this. We want the hero to be a dog.’ We didn’t get any of that crap. This is the movie that we wrote and it’s never happened before.” — Co-screenwriter Todd Farmer
I did have to leave my room, of course, in order to travel to the nearby set – located at the Louisiana State Fairgrounds – and I have to say I was pretty excited to check out what was in store. In case you couldn’t tell by the official title, Drive Angry 3-D is indeed being shot in the third dimension – meaning, like, actually shot in it, not post-converted like other recent weak-sauce debacles (Clash of the Titans, The Last Airbender, et al). The film follows Cage as Milton, a man who is called up from Hell to embark on a bloody quest across the country to hunt down members of the satanic cult who killed his daughter and kidnapped her baby girl.
Lussier wrote the 3-D specific screenplay with his Bloody Valentine partner Todd Farmer; they then shopped the script around to several producers, including Michael De Luca (Ghost Rider, Lost Souls), who immediately warmed to the project and signed on to shepherd it. The producer, having established a relationship with Nicolas Cage following their collaboration on Ghost Rider, knew the car-and-genre-film-loving actor would appreciate the aesthetics of the script and sent it along to him; once Cage signed on, he brought production company Millenium/Nu Image – who he had a pre-existing deal with – on to the project, knowing they were currently looking to finance an action movie in that budget range. After the movie was officially greenlit, Summit Entertainment quickly snagged distribution rights Stateside.
“That all happened within a matter of weeks“, said the amiable De Luca when he sat down with us early in the evening, in an auditorium located across the street from the current shooting location. “It was one of the quickest-financed movies I’ve ever had in my experience.”
The producer gave off a casual, relaxed vibe as he explained his first reaction to reading the script. “It blew me away because I like hyper pulpy, super violent kind of Tarentino- esque, Shane Black-esque, Jim Thompson-esque, hard-`R’ character-based stuff. The script that Todd and Patrick wrote is an homage to that aesthetic…it seemed to marry that single minded personal mission of righteous revenge…with the smash `em up redneck car chase movie, `Two Lane Blacktop’ or `Vanishing Point’ or `Dirty Mary Crazy Larry’. So it seemed like a movie written by movie lovers, for movie lovers, and that’s how I took it when I read so that’s why I got really excited.“
Speaking of car chases, the film is certainly heavy on those – the breakdown, as De Luca spitballed, is somewhere around 40% driving, 60% on foot. To that end, the film features a fuckload of classic muscle cars driving at unreasonable speeds to give it the feel of one of the `70s action films mentioned above – think loud engines, twisted steel, gunfights out car windows and massive crashes and explosions done in-camera – no fake CG shit.
“We all kneel at the altar of William Friedkin in `French Connection’ and the stuff in `Bullitt’ and anything we can do practical“, said the producer. “We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel, but we wanted to be the anti-CGI enhanced car chase movie. So a little bit of what Tarantino tried to do with `Death Proof’. We went in that direction.“
De Luca gave us a little more insight into some specific action scenes featured in the film that he feels really capture the overall tone of the movie.
“Nic starts this movie off in this same kind of genre of `I’m mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. I can’t trust anyone else to do this but me.’“, he said. “We’re back in the age of the individualistic righteous hero. That [opening] scene is a great indicator of the kind of movie you’re going to see. There’s an insane car chase involving an RV, a Suburban, the Dodge Charger, police cars – it was a big clusterfuck multi-vehicle car chase scene after a church gun fight that I think will be a showstopper and that’s kind of in the middle of the movie. And then of course our ending, where Nic goes in for the final kill. Which actually shows his car performing the last example of heroics and just jumping over a prison wall and landing in the middle of this horrific scene where he has to rescue his granddaughter. I think those three bits will be the calling card for this movie in terms of `I haven’t seen that before’. What’s great is they all have an emotional undercurrent.”
Joining De Luca was Millenium/Nu Image-based executive producer Rene Besson, who spoke about the company’s immediate belief in the project and their mandate to allow Lussier to make exactly the film he wanted. “We read the script and immediately knew we loved it“, he told us enthusiastically. “We said, `That’s it. We wanna make this film, period.’ And from that day, we just ran some numbers, we put it together, and within I’d say a week we knew we were making the movie and that was it…you know, we’re very good in that way. And we really don’t get in the way of…the filmmakers making a really cool movie if they know the space really, really well. We’re generally hands-off, you know? And we believed in the script when we read it. And we just felt like we needed to go, and literally weeks later we were making the movie.”
Also joining us in our “holding area” was co-scripter Todd Farmer, a solid tower of a man sporting a beard and shaved head who looks something like a Hell’s Angels bruiser. He made sure to drive home the point that the film won’t be a PG-13 cop-out but the genuine article – a limb-severing, bone-crunching hard-`R’ affair much as My Bloody Valentine was.
“It’s as violent as you can get and still get an `R’, I think. We start and the moment the movie opens it’s in your face“, said the writer, while also making sure to add that there’s a real character-driven engine driving the movie. “There’s tons of hardcore `R’ action, nudity and you name it, but at the same time there really is a story there. It’s got heart and at the end of the movie people will feel it.“
He also went on to bolster Besson’s contention that Millenium is overseeing the production in a very “hands-off” fashion, giving he and Lussier mostly free reign to indulge in their unhinged, balls-to-the-wall vision for the film. He contrasted that with his experience on another movie he wrote nearly a decade ago, before the studio forced considerable changes on the project that deviated severely from his original conception of it. “‘Jason X’…did not become the movie that I thought it would be. That happens. It’s happened with every movie I’ve ever [worked on]. It didn’t happen on this one. We wrote it and it’s there. Nobody changed it. Nobody gave us notes and said, ‘We want this. We want the girl to be more this. We want the hero to be a dog.’ We didn’t get any of that crap. This is the movie that we wrote and it’s never happened before.”
As far as the 3-D format is concerned, Farmer indicated that they hope to strike a good balance between the fully immersive 3-D of, say, Avatar, and the more “gimmicky” 3-D of a movie like The Final Destination (my comparisons, not his). “I think there’s a place for both…there are moments where it’s just Nic Cage and Amber Heard and you’re in the car with them and it’s not stuff flying at your face but you’re literally sitting in the backseat. You’re sitting there and it’s just sort of interesting. At the same time we’re going to throw cars and guns and bullets and frogs and naked people at your face because it’s fun and that’s the roller coaster.”
Following these initial conversations we were shepherded over to the set, a bombed-out, open-air building located across the street that those on the production were calling an “abandoned prison yard“. The building, sporting exposed walls painted with all manner of Satanic imagery (inverted pentagrams, et al), featured as its centerpiece the aftermath of a car chase that apparently didn’t end well – the two vehicles (one an RV, another a classic muscle car of some sort) casting a devilish orange glow along the walls of the crumbling building as fire shot through their windows in a controlled burn.
The stakes on set were clearly high; I couldn’t help but feel like I was in the way as I desperately tried to keep out of the path of scurrying crew members, rushing around like ants, barked orders nipping at their heels, the flaming vehicles giving the entire scene a hellish severity. The movie does deal with Satanists, after all. Funnily enough, Farmer (under orders from the film’s publicists, no doubt) had been coy about the true nature of the cult during our talk with him, but as we stood there it wasn’t hard to guess at its true nature. Had they been hoping we wouldn’t notice the “666” symbols spray-painted on the walls?
The particular shot being filmed at the moment was focused on Nicolas Cage’s hero, desperately crawling through the dirt near the flaming vehicles as the leader of the cult – the Jim Jones-meets-David Bowie-esque Jonah King (played by Twilight dad Billy Burke) – kicked him over and over, screaming something about “the baby” as he loomed like a rangy, black-leather-pants-clad madman. In short, he looked every inch the satanic dictator. A few paces off to the side, lounging about in disturbingly calm and collected fashion, was William Fichtner, who in the film plays an agent from Hell known only as “The Accountant“, sent to tail Nicolas Cage’s character on his quest.
As several different takes of the shot were filmed, a small group of us gathered around “video village” to look on at the monitors, trading off a thick pair of 3-D glasses to watch the scene unfold in all its 3-D glory. In all honesty I’m not much a fan of the format, but nevertheless it was very cool seeing the raw product unfolding live in three dimensions before my very eyes. I for one came away from the set impressed and grateful that I’d had the opportunity to witness a pretty awesome-looking scene.
After a quick trip to the craft services area to grab some munchies, our group then took a little trip over to a nearby warehouse, where several of the classic cars used for the production were being held. These included a ’69 Charger (more on that later) and a ’72 Chevelle. After several of the straight guys in our group had themselves a nice community circle jerk around the gleaming vehicles, it was off to talk with special makeup effects designer Gary Tunnicliffe, who gave us a peek at a few “severed limbs” from his trailer (including a leg blasted apart by a high-powered gun).
Back in the auditorium, we sat down to have a chat with the dapper William Fichtner, the instantly-recognizable character actor who has been doing great work in major films for years but whom most people don’t know by name. The actor has in the past worked for top-shelf directors like Michael Mann, Ridley Scott, Robert Zemeckis and Doug Liman. Clearly on lockdown thanks to the on-set publicist, when asked to describe his character in more depth Fichtner comically intoned: “Well, he wears one suit with one tie and one shirt. And he always looks really, really good.” Fichtner did indeed look mighty fine, the suit perfectly tailored to his lanky 6′ frame; however, he did sport one tell-tale facial scar. “That’s a 3-D moment; wait until you see how [I get the scar]! I was aware of the 3-D-ness of that one…[but] I think the Accountant has an ease and a grace that…well, he doesn’t want to get dirty. It’s not even about getting dirty, it’s not necessary.“
From Fichtner’s description, “The Accountant” is a fish-out-of-water in the film’s “Red State“, down-`n’-dirty aesthetic, as indicated when the actor described his character’s first appearance in the script.
“It might be 20 pages into the movie and you’ve seen so much by that point – colorful characters and grungy places, and slap the 3-D on top of that like eye candy“, he said. “All of a sudden, this character shows up and there’s no one else looking like him. Hopefully I’ve found the right rhythm; it’s different because he’s different. The first time you see him, he’s just walking down the road, then I run into some people we’ve already met, a waitress and a short order cook. We have a little exchange and it’s very interesting and it has a little ballet to it.“
CONTINUED IN PART 2
The great Ernest Dickerson turns seventy-five years old this month, so we’re looking back at his most memorable contribution to the horror genre – 1995’s Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight!
The film hit screens while the Tales from the Crypt series was winding down its run on television, and it stands apart with a story that feels a step or two removed from the franchise norm. That was the smart play, though, as the show’s stories – and those from the original EC comics – work best in short bites. The result is a film that holds up beautifully as a gory good time.
Now keep reading to see what I heard on the commentary for…
Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight (1995)
Commentator: Ernest Dickerson (director), Michael Felsher (moderator)
1. Dickerson was in post-production on Surviving the Game when he got a call from his agent saying that producer Gil Adler wanted to meet about a Tales from the Crypt feature film. It went well, so Dickerson met with Joel Silver next and secured the job.
2. The original screenplay for the film came to the producers as a spec script wholly detached from the Tales from the Crypt brand. They added the Crypt Keeper (voiced by John Kassir) bookends to make it fit.
3. Dickerson was more familiar with the original EC comic books having read them as a kid, but he had watched a few episodes of the HBO series, so he knew what the current vibe was for the project.
4. Adler directed the film’s wraparound segments, meaning Dickerson never actually got to work with the creepy puppet. “Gil and the Crypt Keeper had a great relationship,” he adds, “they worked together for years.”
5. While he was new to the Tales from the Crypt family, Dickerson had previously worked as a director of photography on the Tales from the Darkside anthology series. That show is underappreciated in my humble opinion, and I will go to bat for both it and the equally underloved Monsters.
6. A big appeal of the horror genre for Dickerson is the idea of dark mysteries that challenge our imagination. For this film, that came down to the mythology being created between the characters.
7. Five executive producers are listed in the opening credits, but Dickerson says the only two he had dealings with were Silver and Richard Donner. The other three were Walter Hill, Robert Zemeckis, and David Giler.
8. Dickerson had only ever seen Billy Zane in movies with a full head of hair, so he was surprised when Zane showed up on the first day with a bald head. “He had this case, and he opened up the case that he had all these hair pieces in, and he says, ‘So which one of these do you think I should use?’” Dickerson looked at him and suggested he just go bald for the character.
9. While the bulk of the opening exteriors were filmed in a desert just outside Los Angeles, the shot of the old church at 11:26 was created on a warehouse hangar soundstage where the film’s interiors were shot.
10. When he had read the script, Dickerson pictured the character of Jeryline (Jada Pinkett Smith) “as a little, tough lady.” He had recently seen Smith in Menace II Society, and while the producers had someone else in mind for the role, he fought to get her instead.
11. Just as Zane surprised Dickerson with his hair (or lack thereof), Smith arrived on the first day with her hair dyed platinum white. He “liked the idea” but asked her to please get it tweaked so it looked more yellowish blond. “It’s definitely a statement.”
12. He had seen Brenda Bakke in the 1989 sci-fi/action film from Japan, Gunhed, and thought she’d be great here as Cordelia. The rest of us might recognize her from Death Spa or Trucks.
13. Felsher comments that the film’s setup does a good job not telegraphing who’s going to live or die, and he uses the “nice guy” (Charles Fleischer) and “the kid” (Ryan O’Donohue) as examples. “You don’t play by those rules here,” he says, and Dickerson replies that he wanted to subvert those rules. That extends to Smith as well because she’s Black, “and usually in movies like this they’re the first folks to die.”
14. Dickerson says they had forty days of filming, “which, the way I’m used to working, was a very generous schedule.” It was budgeted at around $10 million.
15. This probably won’t surprise you, but Zane improvised the bit at 26:25 after he jumps out the window and says, “Fuck this cowboy shit! You fuckin’, hodunk Podunk, well, then, motherfuckers!”
16. In the original script, the demons that The Collector (Zane) raises from the dirt actually looked more like the people they used to be. “They were more human,” but the very smart decision was made in pre-production to make them look far more unique instead.
17. The demons are killed by shooting their eyes, but Dickerson felt there should be one more element to it. “Shoot out their eyes, you gotta duck because the souls come shooting out, and if it hits ya, boom, it can kill ya.” This is a fun touch.
18. He’s been asked more than once if these demons are where Peter Jackson got the idea for how the orcs would look in his Lord of the Rings movies. “They do look like orcs.”
19. He recalls having seen Ronny Yu’s The Bride with White Hair shortly before going to work on Demon Knight, and he hoped to bring some of that staged style into his own film. An example of that in practice is Brayker’s (William Sadler) brief flashbacks to Christ on the cross.
20. Character deaths were mostly based on the idea that “each person’s downfall was going to be predicated by their weakness.” The Collector discovers someone’s weakness and then uses it against them. Cordelia wants to be loved, Jeryline wants to travel, Uncle Willy (Dick Miller) is a horndog for both liquor and ladies, Danny loves horror comics, etc.
21. Dickerson says that plenty of genre classics were in the back of his head while making the film, including Assault on Precinct 13, Alien, Aliens, and more.
22. Cordelia is possessed into a demonic form, and Dickerson’s idea for how she’d look was originally a bit different. “Since Cordelia was a prostitute, I thought that her mouth should actually be a vertical slit that was in her stomach… which would open up with teeth and a tongue.” It was nixed, he says, when “the wife of one of the producers read that and said ‘no way you’re putting that in the movie.’”
23. The key makes an appearance in the followup, Tales from the Crypt: Bordello of Blood, but it wasn’t originally meant to. Apparently, early test audiences expected it to be a more connected sequel to Demon Knight, so the filmmakers added it in to appease them. This is where I go on record saying that Bordello of Blood is a fun time. Can’t touch Demon Knight, obviously, but it’s more entertaining than its reputation suggests.
24. They had to film Uncle Willy’s bar scene “dream” twice, once with the women topless and once with them in bikinis, to have versions for both theaters and television broadcast. “Dick’s a pro.” (To be fair, Dickerson says this in regard to Miller having to endure the makeup application, but the sentiment fits both situations, so…)
25. Dickerson says he’s “always amazed at the love that people show this film,” and adds that fans bring it up to him incredibly often. This is great to hear, as we should always be telling artists how much their work means to us while they’re still alive and able to hear it.
26. Zane also suggested the gag at 1:08:21 with the sponge coming out of his mouth. The beat reminds Dickerson to praise the actor even more, adding that he was an “ally” to the director when “bad ideas” came down from the studio suits.
27. He didn’t get any pushback on killing little Danny. He did insist on one added element, though, as he wanted to immediately follow the boy exploding in the air with a shot of his bloody and torn sneaker hitting the ground below. “And the sneaker had to be a hightop.”
28. Dickerson says there’s “something kinky sexy about” Smith being covered in blood, and then the two commentators go quiet for almost two minutes out of respect for the scene. It’s a good opportunity to reflect on how Dickerson had previously mentioned Alien and Aliens as films being in the back of his head during filming, and how two scenes here reflect that – Jeryline stripping down to her underwear for the final confrontation feels like a nod to Ridley Scott’s film, while an earlier scene with Irene (CCH Pounder) and Dep. Bob (Gary Farmer) realizing they’re surrounded and choosing to blow themselves up alongside some of the demons is something of a callback to the air vent sacrifice in James Cameron’s film.
29. Asked about the film’s critical reception at the time of release, Dickerson says it received good reviews from horror-loving critics and then talks about the importance of horror in general. “Horror has always been a great way of putting out ideas, of talking about some of the things that affect us as people. Some of the best horror, like the best science fiction, talks about what it’s like to be human. Some of the best horror gets very political.”
30. The original ending would have featured The Collector showing “his true self, which is a demon made of fire.” They spent a lot of time trying to make it work, but it was “extremely difficult… back in the day of analog effects.” It was rewritten into the faceoff between him and Jeryline featuring the dancing, the crotch fire, Zane’s attempts at saying “love,” and his eventual demise from her bloody spit.
31. They both agree that a direct sequel to Demon Knight could be a lot of fun, but Dickerson says he’s unaware of any talk on the possibility.
32. Dickerson was super excited about this new Scream Factory Blu-ray in 2015, and he mentions that before its release, he had imported a Blu-ray from Germany presumably to enjoy the film in HD. He’s just like us! (Or am I the only one here who’s imported a German Blu-ray of the much maligned werewolf flick Big Bad Wolf…)
Quotes Without Context
“I was so happy to get Dick Miller for this movie.”
“There was a time when guys used to put ketchup on everything.”
“I’m a big student of Hitchcock, and the best way to make a moment of horror work is to lull the audience into a false sense of security.”
“A villain should always be the most interesting person in a movie.”
“They were a really great bunch of performers who were performing on these little leg-extension stilts wearing a diaper that had a radio-controlled tail that was being manipulated by a special effects tech right out of the frame.”
“It’s hard to direct air; it doesn’t do what you want.”
“The only censorship problem came from the producer’s wife, who didn’t want the vagina dentalis [sic] in the movie.”
“One of the executives wanted to know why the devil didn’t try to have sex with Jada.”
“It always starts with the script.”
Keep up with more horror commentary breakdowns here.
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