Interviews
‘Cube’ – Vincenzo Natali Teases Trap He Designed for Japanese Remake and Reflects on Original Film [Interview]
![Vincenzo Natali Cube Remake SCREAMBOX Original [Trailer]](https://bloody-disgusting.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Sub_4.jpg)
The Japanese remake of Vincenzo Natali‘s sci-fi cult classic Cube, directed by Yasuhiko Shimizu (“Pension: Love Is Pink”), is now streaming on the Bloody Disgusting-powered SCREAMBOX.
The brutal sci-fi horror classic by Vincenzo Natali was so successful that it spawned Cube²: Hypercube (2002) and Cube Zero (2004). Natali (Splice, In the Tall Grass, NBC’s “Hannibal”) stayed on as a creative advisor for the Japanese remake, with Kôji Tokuo writing the adapted screenplay.
Bloody Disgusting spoke with Natali for the remake’s release on SCREAMBOX. The filmmaker revealed how he influenced the remake, including its director Yasuhiko Shimizu, and teased the trap he designed in the reimagining. The filmmaker reflects on his own film in the process.
Natali tells us how he got involved with the remake and why it appealed to him.
“I personally knew the producers who made it happen, who are Japanese, who I like very, very much, and wanted to support,” he shares. “And then I was excited by the idea of a Japanese remake, much more than an American remake, which has also been, I guess, batting around somebody’s development slate for a while. The American one, I was always fearful that was going to get the edges rounded off of it, and it’ll just be more of the same.
“But I felt with a Japanese one, it’s going to go through that cultural filter, and even if they tried to make it the same, it would never be the same. Combined with the fact that I think that Cube has a bit of Japanese in its DNA, I was even aware of that while we were making it. So I also felt they would understand and appreciate it for all the right reasons.“
![Cube Remake SCREAMBOX Original [Trailer]](https://i0.wp.com/bloody-disgusting.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Sub_1.jpg?resize=740%2C481&ssl=1)
When asked about the original film’s Japanese DNA, Natali elaborates, “When we were shooting Cube, we would joke that different cubes have different themes. There was one Cube that I called the Ozu Cube because I shot it like an [Yasujirō] Ozu movie with everyone seated on the ground. I mean, I’ve always admired Akira Kurosawa, of course. There is something again because it’s so archetypal. Those movies, the Kurosawa films in particular, are utterly timeless because they feel like they’re dealing with themes that will never die. They’re shot in such a dynamic but classical way; they don’t age at all.
“I don’t know how conscious I was at that, but I think I understood when I was making Cube that this is a similar kind of thing. As I say, it exists outside of time. I mean, if I were to go back again, I would remove more cultural references because I think that’s part of its strength, is it’s almost a myth, except that it’s in the science fictional context.”
Once the Japanese remake of Cube was officially set in motion, Natali gave the filmmakers the creative freedom to make it their own.
He explains, “I tried to stay out of the way as much as possible, to be honest. I must admit I was a big part of choosing who directed it, Yasuhiko Shimuzu-san, who I really liked. He had made a very cool movie called Vice that I recommend to anybody that can get their hands on it. He completely did what I thought he would do. He’s a very gifted filmmaker, a very deep thinker, highly aesthetic, poetic filmmaker. I commented on the script a little bit, but I wanted the film to be its own movie.
“I like the remakes that are different than the originals. I don’t want to see the same thing, just with the gloss of whatever the latest digital effects are. I want to see something that is fundamentally in its DNA shifted into something else that is more contemporary and specific to this moment, which is what they did, and very specific to Japan and the generation gap that is exploding in that country right now. That seems to me what that film is really about, which has nothing to do with our first film.”
Did he offer any advice to the filmmakers of the remake?
“I think maybe if I gave any advice to Shimuzu-san, it was, ‘Make sure you focus on the humans,'” Natali answers. “I don’t know, I may be inventing that memory, but I think I said that. I mean, one of the inspirations for me for Cube was the Alfred Hitchcock film Lifeboat, because you couldn’t be in a more confined space. Yet he made it cinematic, and then he made it engaging because the characters, I think it’s written by John Steinbeck, the characters are intensely engaging, and they transform. They appear to be one thing at the beginning of the film, and then they reveal themselves to be something else very different as it goes along. I think that is what you are in a great way forced to do when you are in this confined environment with a limited number of characters. The Japanese remake has taken that lesson to heart and made it a tremendously humanistic story, and probably much more compassionate than my film, which is somewhat surprising but lovely.”
Natali continues, “I can’t remember if I said this to Shimuzu-san, but I think I said, ‘Don’t go in the Cube, don’t do it. It’s a horrible place to shoot a movie.’ I don’t know if I actually said that out loud, but no, I wanted to support them and do that by being absent. The only specific thing I did, which was a fun, jokey thing, was I did design one of the traps; but I was more of a cheerleader, really.”
As for which trap, Natali offers one simple tease: “The last one.”
If you’ve seen it, you know it’s a creative showstopper. If you haven’t? The brand new remake of Cube is now available to stream only on SCREAMBOX.
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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