Interviews
Alexandre Aja Recalls the Time He Had to Choose Between Working With Raimi or Craven [Interview]
You probably can’t find a man-eating alligator movie with a more impressive pedigree than Crawl, the new thriller starring Kaya Scodelario as a college student who gets trapped in a crawlspace with her father during a hurricane, and gets attacked by gators while the whole house floods. That’s because Crawl comes courtesy of acclaimed horror director Alexandre Aja (High Tension, The Hills Have Eyes, Piranha, Mirrors, Horns), and influential horror director/producer Sam Raimi (The Evil Dead).
But did you know that Alexandre Aja and Sam Raimi came incredibly close to working together 15 years ago, only to have that opportunity taken away when Aja got an even more tempting offer from Wes Craven?
In a new interview with Bloody-Disgusting, Aja and Raimi talked about their working relationship today, and that first, missed opportunity to collaborate on the supernatural thriller The Messengers.
“Sam is really the producer that every filmmaker dreams to have,” Alexandre Aja says. “Someone who is here to help you defend your vision and who helps you be sure that the movie you’re making is your movie. He was not here to just force his vision on you. He was really, really helpful.”
“It was also amazing because back in 2003 or 2004, after High Tension, when we came to the U.S. for the first time and we met with Wes Craven to do The Hills Have Eyes, we also had an offer from Sam to make another movie.
“It was The Messengers. And we had to choose between going with Wes Craven or Sam Raimi, and it was a very tough decision as you can imagine,” Aja explains.
“I loved his work,” Sam Raimi remembers. “I’d seen only Haute Tension and it kind of blew my mind. I thought, he’s a master manipulator, creating suspense that really put the audience at the edge of their seat. And I thought, this is the guy I need to direct this movie I was producing for Columbia Pictures called The Messengers.”
“Alex said he was thinking about it but he had a job offer from Wes Craven at the time, and so he took that other job. So I missed my opportunity to work with him,” Raimi explained. “I never imagined 15 years later, 14 years later, I’d have another chance to work with him on this! This was fantastic for me.”
“I wrote a little letter to Sam explaining that one day I wish that one day we will find another one to do together,” Aja laughed. “It took a lot of time but we did it! And we finally worked together. I’m not only a big fan, he’s a genuinely amazing human being as well.”
Alexandre Aja’s remake of Wes Craven’s horror classic The Hills Have Eyes, starring Emilie de Ravin and Kathleen Quinlan, came out in 2006 to mixed reviews and a successful box office run. The Messengers would be released in 2007, directed by The Pang Brothers (The Eye) and starring Kristen Stewart. The film, about a rural family that rips itself apart, opened to unenthusiastic reviews but it, too, made a profit. Both films were popular enough to earn a sequel (or, in the case of Raimi’s production, a prequel).
We’ll finally get to see what a Sam Raimi/Alexandre Aja team-up looks like this weekend, when Crawl slithers into theaters!
Interviews
‘Rubberhead’ Director Nick Taylor on FX Maverick Steve Johnson, Practical Effects, and Seven-Year Journey
Horror journalist, producer, and podcast host Nick Taylor moves into the director’s seat for his feature debut with illuminating documentary Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson.
It chronicles the wild life and career of SFX maverick Steve Johnson, based on the multi-volume book series Rubberhead: Sex, Drugs and Special FX, and those familiar likely already know Rubberhead isn’t your standard horror documentary.
Johnson is responsible for so many memorable movie monsters, having worked on Fright Night, Poltergeist II, An American Werewolf in London, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Night of the Demons, to name a few. He’s also extremely candid in ways that feel atypical in this industry, open about his failures as much as his successes.
“It was a natural progression for sure,” Nick Taylor tells Bloody Disgusting of his transition into filmmaking ahead of Rubberhead‘s world premiere next week at the Fantasia Film Festival on July 23. “I think with my podcast, I got adept at interviewing people and pulling creative lessons out of them, which was the point of my podcast. I wanted this movie to be sort of a creativity pill for artists where if they’re starting a project or feel creatively stuck, they could watch this movie and be inspired and get actual practical creative lessons.”
Taylor’s background in PR and marketing also organically led him down this path.
He charts the course from book promo to documentary director: “But also Bloody Disgusting had a lot to do with this movie because in the very beginning when I first met Steve, I was helping him promote his book and I said, ‘Hey, I got a marketing background and a journalism background. Let me help you promote this book. I’ll just pitch stories from your life to the media, and we’ll see what happens.’ And John Squires wrote an article about Steve making Slimer under the influence of tons and tons of cocaine, and that went fairly viral.”
“For a week, it was story time with Steve,” Taylor continues. “He would tell me a story from his life, and every story was about a major movie, a major director, lots of drugs and alcohol and insanity. I would write them up, and I think John published about three or four of them. So huge shout out to John Squires because that was really great. So yeah, there were definitely a lot of outgrowths of my journalism background that definitely contributed to this movie.”
Rubberhead condenses the multi-book series into a cohesive feature film with a breezy runtime, sparking the obvious question as to how Taylor approached condensing Johnson’s life down to an under 2-hour documentary film.
“That was one of the more difficult parts of all of this, because we had enough for a series or an epically long six-hour fan documentary,” he answers. “But from day one, I did not want to make a fan documentary. I love them. They’re a lot of fun, but I did want the movie to stand on its own two feet as a character-driven portrait of an artist and a time period and a technology, that being practical effects. I did want to be objective. I didn’t want to make this too long. I wanted to make it re-watchable. So I think we just really had to focus on what the narratives were that we wanted to tell. So there were some basically almost cliché archetypical mythic narratives present in Steve’s life. We could have made this way longer, but we wanted to keep it short. But luckily that’s why you have special features.”
Johnson quickly proves to be an engaging subject thanks to his self-effacing wit and frank self-reflections; expect no shortage of stories about how drugs factored into the height of his career or the failures it wrought.
That rare quality was an asset for Rubberhead, Taylor confirms. “He does not shy away from anything about the drugs, the addiction, the bridges burned, the mistakes made, the lessons learned. He just is honest about all of it. He’s had a lot of time for reflection, and he’s done a lot of reflection, so he doesn’t shy away from any of it, which is huge because it’s very refreshing. I don’t think a lot of people are that way, at least in this industry from what I can see. So I think it was hugely beneficial. We wanted to lean into that, and we wanted to make this sort of a gonzo Hunter S. Thompson sort of wild tale through Steve’s overall life.“
Condensing his life into this doc was a slow and steady process for Taylor, too. “It’s been almost seven years. It’s been a labor of love. We’ve been as indie as it gets. We would shoot what we could when we could, and then we would edit when we could. Then after a while it all came together.”
In a way, making Rubberhead brings Taylor’s horror fandom full circle. It turns out that the very film that sparked his interest in the genre and practical effects also comes with an amusing Steve Johnson anecdote.
Taylor explains, “My gateway for sure was Beetlejuice. I saw that at a very young age; I think I was four or five. I felt somebody had shown me, my soul. I get a little emotional thinking about it. There was something about that movie that felt so strange and unusual, but also felt so familiar. It was spooky, but it was fun, and it was lighthearted, and it had humor, but it also had this macabre celebration to it that I just really got into as a kid. I felt somebody had shown me my own soul. And funny story, Steve got fired from Beetlejuice because Tim Burton gave him his hand-drawn designs and Steve’s like, ‘Oh my God, these look like kids did them. This is not what you want. I know what you want. I’m going to redesign these for you.’ And Tim Burton was like, ‘Yeah, no, you’re not.’ So yeah, funny story.”
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