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[Interview] Carla Gugino & Bruce Greenwood on Handcuffs, Sexuality and That Damn Hand in ‘Gerald’s Game’

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Gerald's Game Interview

For 25 years, Stephen King‘s 1992 novel Gerald’s Game was considered unfilmable by nearly every filmmaker. Well, every filmmaker except Mike Flanagan. Flanagan read Gerald’s Game when he was 19 years old, and ever since he has been dying to give it a proper film adaptation. Cut to 2017 and we finally have that adaptation (my review) courtesy of Flanagan and Netflix. I was able to interview Flanagan and producer Trevor Macy before the film’s world premiere at Fantastic Fest (the former of which you can read here), but I also had the opportunity to speak with the lovely Carla Gugino (Watchmen, Spy Kids, San Andreas) and the extremely personable Bruce Greenwood (Star Trek, Double Jeopardy, Kingsman: The Golden Circle) about the making of the film.

The main that King’s novel was considered unfilmable is because the bulk of it takes place inside the lead character’s head while she is handcuffed to a bed. In portraying the role of Jessie, Gugino delivers a career-defining performance in what could not have been an easy filming experience. After all, things are bound to get uncomfortable when you’re handcuffed to a bed for three weeks. On the subject of those handcuffs, Gugino had this to say:

“They were very attentive to taking me out of them whenever we could but no matter what I was in them a lot and it was really uncomfortable and I would get bruised. It was definitely a very strange challenge because I’m a very physical person and [with this role] there’s a combination of being kind of sedentary physically while uncomfortable but emotionally extremely active so it was a really odd….But it allowed in terms of that sense of needing to escape oneself and the chatter in our minds and those voices that we can’t get away from and being forced to deal with them. The physical restriction is very helpful for that.”

Gugino commented on how great of a collaborator Flanagan is as a director, as he went above and beyond to make sure she was comfortable throughout the entire filming process. When speaking with Flanagan shortly after speaking with Gugino and when I brought up the handcuffs he had his own input on the subject:

“I’m not going to ask one of my actors to do something that I’m not willing to do so I said ‘Here I’ll do it!’ and in less than five minutes I was like ‘Goddammit this hurts!’ They pinch every nerve in your wrists. Just the weight of your own arm is the thing that gets you. There is nothing to rest your elbow on and just holding yourself up, because you start to shift your weight to try to compensate your wrist for the pain cause by your arm just dangling. Five minutes was all I could take and Carla was in them for three weeks.”

Having Gugino hancuffed to a bed leaves plenty of opportunities for her body to be objectified. In fact, the character is topless in King’s novel. In most films it is usually the woman who is (over-)sexualized. Just look at all of the gratuitous close-ups of the female posterior in any Fast and the Furious film or compare the instances of female nudity to the instances of male nudity (especially when it comes to full-frontal nudity). Some people may have expected Flanagan to be faithful to the novel in that regard, but instead he reverses the stereotypical gender roles, leaving Gugino in a slip and Greenwood in his underwear for the majority of the film’s runtime. So here we have a physically exposed male and a mentally exposed female. It’s a clever move on Flanagan’s part, but Greenwood was not without his reservations, saying:

“I wanted to get clothed earlier because I thought it might feel gratuitous, so I came up with a couple of ideas as to why I might be wearing clothes since it’s her projection of me. I mean you could dress him up like a clown if you wanted to. But I realized that my aim there was just to cover myself up and wasn’t a good enough reason. And Mike just said ‘Look, I hear you man but….you know…you’re not being very persuasive.’ And he was right so we chose the one moment that dovetails with the father to soften the transition. And it’s shocking as a consequence because you just don’t expect it.”

Gugino also added to Greenwood’s statement, chiming in:

“We couldn’t quite justify why she would [imagine him clothed] in a way that was good enough,” said Gugino, “and also that it would almost make it seem more gratuitous. By trying to hide it you’re actually calling [his bare skin] out more.”

Gugino may not have been physically exposed for the film like Greenwood was, but she did have to endure one of the most grueling scenes in the film (rivaled only by the bedroom conversation between young Jessie and her father, played by Chiara Aurelia and E.T.‘s Henry Thomas, respectively). Concluding the interview, I moved on to that scene: the de-gloving scene. In the film, Jessie realizes that the only way to escape the handcuffs is to slice her wrist open and pull her hand out of the cuff. Doing so lifts the skin off of her hand, as if pulling off a glove. On the difficulty of filming the scene and working with the fake hand, Gugino said:

It was technically challenging because when we wanted shots of my hand and face together, and there were quite a few of those, we had to have the cuff tight enough so that it didn’t look like it was easy to pull out of it. So we basically did it as tight as I could handle it which meant that it was really painful but could actually get through so it was a brutal sequence to perform. They did such an amazing job with that prosthetic. It was all completely worth it. I’m not interested in hurting myself or, you know, looking for abuse that I don’t need to go through, but also with something like this you can’t really be too soft on yourself. It was just about getting in there and really going for it and seeing what we could get away with and how much I could handle. There was a lot of sweat and blood in that whole section, but I think our hand stuff took maybe a day or two. I think I put it on twice.”

Gerald’s Game is currently available for streaming on Netflix.

A journalist for Bloody Disgusting since 2015, Trace writes film reviews and editorials, as well as co-hosts Bloody Disgusting's Horror Queers podcast, which looks at horror films through a queer lens. He has since become dedicated to amplifying queer voices in the horror community, while also injecting his own personal flair into film discourse. Trace lives in Austin, TX with his husband and their two dogs. Find him on Twitter @TracedThurman

Interviews

“I Don’t See Retiring from This” – Joe Bob Briggs Talks New “Last Drive-In” Format and the Show’s Future [Interview]

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Hey everybody, have you heard the news? Joe Bob is back in town!

The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs has returned for its sixth season on Shudder. While the show’s format has been slightly revised adopting a new biweekly schedule with one film instead of a double feature the beloved horror host’s approach is much the same.

“It didn’t really change anything,” Briggs tells Bloody Disgusting. “We were crowding all of our movies into 10 weeks once a year and then having specials, and we found that people would rather have more weeks. It’s actually more movies than we had before.

“And some of the people on the East coast fall asleep in the second movie,” he laughs. “It’s about a five-hour show when it’s a double feature because we talk so much. Also, it’s hard to get thematic double features every single time. So our specials are still double features, but our regular episodes are single features.”

The season kicked off last week with The Last Drive-In Live: A Tribute to Roger Corman, celebrating the legendary filmmaker’s first 70 years in Hollywood with a double feature of 1959’s A Bucket of Blood and 1983’s Deathstalker. The special was filmed live in front of a fervent audience of Briggs’ fan base lovingly dubbed the Mutant Family at Joe Bob’s Drive-In Jamboree in Las Vegas last October.

In addition to his usual hosting duties, Briggs conducted a career-spanning interview with Corman and his wife, fellow producer Julie Corman. They were also joined by one of Corman’s oldest friends and collaborators, Bruce Dern. In a heartfelt moment of mutual admiration, Briggs and Corman exchanged lifetime achievement awards on hubcaps.

“I’ve known Roger for about 35 years, so I’ve only known him for half of his career,” Briggs chuckles. In his long history of reviewing, interviewing, and talking about Corman and his legendary work, one emblematic encounter sticks out to Briggs.

“I remember the very first time I went to the Corman studio, which was a lumber yard on Venice Boulevard. He had a standing set for a spaceship control room, a standing set for a strip club, and I think he had one other one, and then he had all of his editing facilities there, but it was still a lumber yard. They had not really changed any of the buildings or anything.

“He’s showing me around the studio, and we were walking past a pile of debris, and I said, ‘Roger, is that the mutant from Forbidden World?’ It had just been thrown over in a corner. And he just said, ‘Yes, Joe Bob, I believe that is. He was apparently no longer needed.’ I said, ‘Roger, you gotta get with it! That stuff is worth money.’ But he was like, ‘When the movie’s over, the movie’s over.’ That was Roget to a T.”

At least part of Corman’s longevity can be attributed to his shrewd business practices and pragmatic approach to the industry, which has included working in every conceivable genre of cinema. “I couldn’t think of a single genre he has not made,” Briggs says.

“When we did this interview at the Jamboree, I said, ‘I’m gonna name the genre, and you tell me what you love about that genre,’ and every comment that he made involved money and box office performance,” he snickers. “None of it was involved with love of cinema, although I did get him to say that his favorite genre is a genre that he didn’t dabble in much other than his first movie [1954’s Highway Dragnet], and that was film noir.”

While the fourth annual Drive-In Jamboree is still in the planning stage, Briggs is delighted by the event’s continued success. “The Jamboree is something that we literally just threw together. We’ve had three of them now. It’s something where we just show up and try to come up with programming for each day.

But I really think the Jamboree is more about the mutant family meeting the mutant family. It’s more about people who know each other online gathering and partying with each other in person. It’s not so much about what movies we have. I mean, we always have an anniversary movie, and we always have some special guests and everything, but it’s more about the gathering of the mutants. It’s fun from that point of view. They’re exhausting, I can tell you that.”

The zeal among Briggs’ audience has only grown over the years, from hosting Joe Bob’s Drive-In Theater on The Movie Channel from 1986 to 1996, to MonsterVision on TNT from 1996 to 2000, and The Last-Drive-In on Shudder since 2018. “I’m amazed, having been in the business for this many years, that I still have a show at this time, because they say you can’t repeat TV,” Briggs notes.

“Nobody wants to see old TV, and yet I’ve done the same show three times on three different networks, and every time I try to change it everyone says, ‘No, no, don’t change it! That’s the part we love.’ I always want to do something new, and I’m always told, ‘No, you’re the CEO of Coca Cola who went to New Coke.’ You can’t do that. People will revolt. So we’re still doing it.

“It’s one of the few shows that I know of that’s just sort of grown organically over, gosh, almost 40 years. We’ve just added elements to the show. We try things. If something doesn’t work, we throw it away. If something works, we do it forever!”

The mutant family will be happy to know that Briggs plans to continue hosting and writing about movies for as long as he’s able to. “I don’t see retiring from this or retiring from writing. I’m primarily a writer, and the good thing about writing is long after they don’t wanna see you on TV anymore you can still write.

“The difference today, though, is I was pretty much the only guy doing genre films when I started. Now, there are academics that do it. There are entire books written about Dario Argento and Tobe Hooper and even lesser names than those, and there are, of course, a massive number of websites, including your own, so that when something comes out today, there’s immediately a hundred reviews of it; whereas in 1982, I was sort of the only guy, because the movies were considered disposable trash. So I have been surpassed in my deep knowledge, because who can keep up with all that? It’s impossible!”

Diana Prince, who serves as Briggs’ co-host Darcy the Mail Girl and was instrumental in getting him back in the hosting chair, has been promoted to an associate producer this season. “She was sort of always the associate producer, but I guess they finally gave her the title,” Briggs explains.

“Diana Prince is in on all the decisions about programming. I always listen to Austin Jennings, the director, and Diana Prince, the mail girl, because they come from opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of what kind of movies they wanna watch, and we try to strike a balance between. You know, she’s not gonna vote for Possession, and he’s not gonna vote for Mountaintop Motel Massacre,” he chortles.

“They’re probably the principal advisors, as far as what we show. Of course, [Diana] has a lot of social media clout, and she’s extremely knowledgeable about pop culture. Wow! She has seen everything. She’s seen more than I’ve seen!”

While surprises are part of the fun of The Last Drive-In, Briggs previews some of what’s in store this season. “The place we normally live is the neglected ’80 slasher, and we still live there,” he assures. “But we’re gonna pay a lot more attention to the ’70s especially. I’ve always thought the ’70s are more interesting than the ’80s anyway. And we’re gonna pay attention to some really recent stuff.”

He teases, “We’re gonna bring back Joe Bob’s Summer School, which is something that we used to do at MonsterVision. And we may have a marathon. There’s a possibility of that. But I’ll be digging this new format of being on every other week between now and at least up to Labor Day.”

While Briggs’ hosting format hasn’t changed much across four decades, the world around him certainly has and that’s why The Last Drive-In remains relevant. He points out, “In the era of streaming, where everything is menus and there are thousands and thousands and thousands of choices, we are that thing called a curator that can direct you to the fun places on the spectrum of streaming.

“Streaming is very confusing for people, and a lot of people don’t like it for that reason. I hope what we’re doing is cutting through the weeds and bringing things into perspective. And, you know, it’s just more fun to watch a movie with us!” he concludes with a Texas-sized grin.

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