Interviews
[Interview] Jesse Eisenberg Recalls the Troubled Production of Wes Craven’s ‘Cursed’
Wes Craven‘s Cursed will turn 15 years old in just a few months, though if the film had been released when it was originally supposed to be, it would have turned 15 last August.
Cursed had a notoriously troubled production, with several filming delays and reshoots taking place between the start of filming in March 2003 and its eventual release in February 2005. Joe Lipsett and I discussed the film on the Horror Queers podcast last month, where we tried to decipher just what happened with it. Other than deciding that Bob Weinstein is a jerk (big shock there), we couldn’t figure it out. Still, that won’t stop us from continuing our investigation…
That brings us to the reason I’m writing this article.
If you listened to our episode on the film, you’ll recall that Craven shot roughly 90% of Kevin Williamson‘s original script before Weinstein came in and expressed his dissatisfaction over what had been filmed (why he waited that long to tell him is anyone’s guess). He ordered Williamson to re-write the script with a new plot and halted production until he finished. Almost a year later, filming resumed on the new version. Craven himself estimated that 70% of what he originally shot had to be discarded (though the footage supposedly still exists out there somewhere), making the final cut an admittedly choppy and uneven film. Here’s an estimated (but perhaps not 100% correct) timeline of events, based on information that has been made public over the years:
- August 2000 – Kevin Williamson writes the original script for Cursed.
- October 2002 – Bob Weinstein announces that Cursed would “reinvent the werewolf genre,” and Wes Craven would direct, with the movie being released around August 2003.
- March 2003 – Filming begins on Cursed.
- Late Spring/Early Summer 2003 – Bob Weinstein expresses his unhappiness with the 90% of Cursed that had been shot and orders the script to be re-written and the film re-shot with the new script. Production is postponed for almost a year.
- December 2003 – Shooting begins on the new script, with some actors being recast (Mandy Moore‘s character was recast with Mya due to the former’s scheduling conflicts) and some being removed entirely (Skeet Ulrich‘s character Vince, one of the three main protagonists of Williamson’s original script, was no longer a part of the new script).
- Mid-2004 – Two more sets of reshoots are done, one of which being a new ending (well, a newer ending, since it would be the third one written for the film). The film is scheduled to be released in October 2004.
- Fall 2004 – Bob Weinstein demands that the R-rated film be cut down to earn a PG-13 rating. The film is pushed from its October 2004 release date to accommodate these edits.
- February 25, 2005 – Cursed is released in theaters nationwide and opens to overwhelmingly negative reviews and a domestic opening weekend gross of $9.6 million. The film would go on to gross $19.3 million domestically and $10.3 million internationally, for a worldwide total of $29.6 million against a reported budget of $38 million (though some have claimed it ballooned as high as $75 million).
The original plot centered around three strangers brought together by a car accident on Mulholland Drive after they are all attacked and injured by a werewolf. The three characters were named Ellie Hudson (Christina Ricci), Vince Winston (Skeet Ulrich), and Jimmy Myers (Jesse Eisenberg). After Williamson’s re-write, Ellie and Jimmy were turned into siblings reeling from the recent deaths of their parents, and the Vince Winston character was written out entirely. There are plenty of other differences, and if you want to know them you can read the original script, which is available online if you’re good at searching. The re-writes weren’t the only change, however. Rick Baker‘s practical effects were eventually deleted and replaced with KNB EFX Group’s CGI (though Baker has posted some of his work on Twitter over the years).
Craven made his thoughts on his experience with the film clear in an interview with Ain’t It Cool News in 2009, but some of the film’s stars have mentioned Cursed in interviews as well. Judy Greer lamented the re-shoots in an interview with Buzzfeed in 2014 and Christina Ricci criticized the studio system in an interview with The AV Club in 2018. But as far as I know, Jesse Eisenberg has never publicly acknowledged the film outside of the press junkets leading to the film’s release in 2005. Until now, that is.
I had the pleasure of speaking to Eisenberg in advance of Zombieland: Double Tap‘s (our review) release this weekend, but I entered the interview with a secret mission: to ask him about the troubled production of shooting Cursed. As I received the “wrap-it-up” motion from the PR representative, I brought up the fact that Cursed would be turning 15 in February (“FIFTEEN?!”, Eisenberg yelped) and asked him if he could say anything about his experience working on the film. I expected him to be dodgy with his response, which is why I saved the question for the end of the interview (well, that and because it was a question that had nothing to do with Zombieland: Double Tap). So imagine my surprise when Eisenberg expressed not only shock, but excitement at answering the question! Upon being reminded of the rough timeline of the production, he said:
“The first movie was more interesting and provocative. I don’t know why it wasn’t working. Now that we know the behind-the-scenes of the Weinstein company, it makes sense as to why it was so chaotic.”
Seemingly having a blast recalling the complete and total clusterfuck that was his 2003 and 2004 (well, not total clusterfuck, as he was also shooting The Squid and the Whale and M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village during that time), Eisenberg delighted in offering his thoughts on the film, searching his brain for more tidbits of information to give me in the two minutes we had left to speak.
“What else can I tell you,” he asked. “They filmed 90% of the bigger budget version…the first movie was this very splashy thing. The second version was definitely cutting corners in a lot of different ways. And the plot? I thought it was so stupid. I thought the plot was so cliché. They made us brother and sister? The things that they kept [from the original film] were little snippets. Like a car rolling down a hill. They kept that shot.”
As if re-shooting a new film once wasn’t enough, the cast and crew had to go back two more times for reshoots, but they all got a keepsake during the final set of reshoots. As Eisenberg remembers it:
“The crazy part is that after we filmed the whole second version of the film, we had to go back for a third re-shoot which lasted about 20 days. That’s like the length of an independent movie. And then we had to go back a fourth time for like 10 days and they made shirts that said Cursed 4: Back for More.”
Not lost on Eisenberg is the fact that Cursed had a rather apt title. As mentioned above, the film was panned by critics when the film was released in February 2005, with many reviews bringing up the “cursed” production of the film. Eisenberg is fully aware of the irony, and concluded the interview with one final piece of advice:
“I’m not a big believer in…what is it? Semiotics? The study of meanings behind words and symbols? But anyway, don’t do a movie with that particular title.”
Zombieland: Double Tap will be released in theaters nationwide on Friday October 18.
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.”
You must be logged in to post a comment.