Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
I am soooooooooo jealous. I was invited to do this, and it simply wasn’t possible thanks to timing and location, and it KILLS ME.
It kills me because Anton got to meet Rob Schmidt, whose first film SATURN was darn good, and who I’ve heard is a real stand-up guy. I’m interested to talk to him and see where he’s headed with his career.
It kills me because Anton got to see some cool-ass genre filmmaking in progress with huge sets and Stan Winston beasties running around.
It kills me because I’ve heard the WRONG TURN script is good, gory fun, and I’m always up for that.
Mainly, though, it kills me because he got to hang out with Eliza Dushku... Faith... who is, as Nic Cage once put it, “hotter’n Georgia asphalt.” And a damn fine actress to boot. My interest in TRUE LIES 2 evaporated when I heard she was written completely out of the film. Makes no sense. She’s the franchise. Mom and Dad and their fears about their little girl being all grown up. FATHER OF THE BRIDE with machine guns and CGI. This isn’t brain surgery, guys... I mean, she’s notorious!
Anyway... Anton... I hate you. And it’s a damn fine report, too, so dig in and see why you should hate him, too...
Fabulous Exclusive Set Report from Wrong Turn!
Hullo, starkinder! Anton here. Me am happy boy.
Yeah, yeah, I know, I've been a little delinquent in finishing up my Toronto Film Fest coverage. Harry had email problems, then I had pooter problems, then, well, stuff came up. Like getting to hang out with Stan Winston and Eliza Dushku kind of stuff.
Toronto wha-? Film Fest who?
I crept out of bed at some ungodly pre-noon hour and headed to the dark side of Toronto, the no-mans-land east of downtown and north of the lake. It's the kind of place Lovecraft used to write about- stunted, twisted undergrowth dotting the lots and the alleyways, a smoky heaviness clinging to the dilapidated brickwork of the old warehouses, a feeling a weary, nervous desolation. (Also not too far from Dangerous Dan's, the best burgers in the city, but that would kind of spoil the mood. Oops.) The perfect place, really, to be filming Wrong Turn, a horror movie about... nah, not yet. Go read the Lurking Fear if you want a clue before I get to the good stuff.
I grab a bottle of water from the Craft Services truck before I head inside to take a look at the set, and it turns out to be a wise move the way they've got the fog machine working overtime. I almost don't even notice, though, as it takes me a moment to adjust to what I'm seeing.
Trees. BIG trees. Big bad evergreen trees surrounding a fire tower. Inside a converted warehouse space in a city. I had to check over my shoulder to see if I'd accidentally wandered through a wardrobe filled with old fur coats or something. As I got my bearings though I realized I wasn't seeing all of the trees- someone had cut the bottoms of the trunks off, leaving the branchy middle sections sitting on the floor.
"Each trunk we've built represents the area somewhere between forty and sixty feet up in the treetops," production designer Alicia Keywan told me a bit later. "The characters jump down to this level from about eighty or ninety feet, from the top of the tower. So what we're looking at is about forty or fifty feet above the ground, which is where the action takes place."
Hang on... built?
Alicia continued. "If you take off the skin of the bark you'd find a very elaborate meshwork of steel which is half-inch square tubing, like trussing for a bridge. It makes it very strong. Then we put in tubular connectors- where every one of those big branches juts out is a connector system. So our branches pop out. It takes about five minutes to pull one of those bigger branches out."
Dear Goddess, I'm looking at the world's biggest Tinker Toy set. I've died and gone to heaven.
"It was a real technical problem, because we're constantly pulling out the branches to get lighting and camera in, and also to reconfigure the tree to make it look like a different tree or a different portion of the same tree."
OK. Wow. 10:23 am- restate my assumptions. The set I'm on consists of the top fifty feet of a ninety foot fire tower in the West Virginia backwoods, surrounded by four extremely real looking but completely fake steel lattice Tinker Toy treetops, which are themselves surrounded by extremely real looking because they ARE real thirty foot tall evergreen trees to use in the background of the shots. Arborial extras, if you will. As I watch the crew set up for some stunt work, I realize they're about to shoot the characters as they plummet from that tower and slam through those branches. Sweet.
I fight off the urge to do some climbing and check out the (must remind myself they're) fake trees. The detail on them is phenomenal- sap glistens along some of the branches, the bark is some rubberized substance (Alicia tells me the bark is rubberized so that the actors' shoes will adhere better when they shoot the chase scene along them... yes I said 'chase scene.' To quote something a wise man once said, "Whoa") but flakes like real bark when you bump into it (um, heh heh, I'm sure nobody saw that), the branches flex and give like real branches... only when you knock on them do you realize something isn't kosher. There's a buried metallic sort of clank where a sturdy thump should be. I SO want one of these for my backyard. Forget a jungle gym- every kid should have a Stan Winston TinkerTree (TM) to play on.
Hmm, that's odd. One of the trees has a panel cut into the back of it, with a little platform for someone to stand on inside the tree and a hole just about big enough for their head to poke through. Wonder what that's for. (Today's word is 'foreshadowing', boys and girls.)
I wander back over to where the action is taking place, such as it is. The stunt folks are getting harnessed up and running through those plummets. That must mean there are some principal cast members sitting around nearby...
If you haven't checked out imdb yet, Wrong Turn's cast is a mixed bag to say the least. Eliza Dushku's the 'name', but you've seen Desmond Harrington in Besson's the Messenger and you're about to see him in Ghost Ship, and Kevin Zegers was the lead in the Air Bud movies (eek), and Jeremy Sisto plays Billy on Six Feet Under, and Emmanuelle Chriqui was the love interest in the N'Sync epic On the Line that makes me weep for Al Green's lost dignity every time I hear one of his songs.
"Oh, so you've seen it?", Emmanuelle asks.
Me- "Err, well yeah, I saw it in theaters. But it came out at about the same time as the Britney movie and the Mandy movie... I mean, I HAD to see them all."
"Right. Yeah."
"I had to. Really. Professional obligation."
"Yeah. Uh-huh."
I tried to conduct real-ish interviews with the principals who were there (Emmanuelle, Desmond and Eliza), I did I did. But inevitably we'd end up just gabbing about stuff, 'cause they're all just cool people. Emmanuelle is a total sweetie- I'd say cherubic except that cherubs aren't sexy. Desmond kept everybody in stitches over lunch riffing on lines from Jay & Silent Bob, which he'd seen the night before (Desmond to Eliza- "Have you seen it?"), and there is an Eastwood/McQueen '70s throw-back cop thriller in his future, I guarantee it. And then Eliza was... well, damn. She is absolutely the Queen of Carpe Diem you'd figure she'd be from watching her play Faith and Sissy and Missy. This is someone who, when it came her turn to do the stunt fall through the trees, would scream as she fell exactly until she dropped out of the shot, at which point the screams would become whoops of laughter. Consummate professional, but you know if someone's having fun somewhere in the building she's gonna strut over there and double it if she can.
Oh, yeah, that reminds me- the Dushku Strut. It's not an act, not a special effect. It's just her.
What do you mean you don't know the Dushku Strut? Of course you do. It's most pronounced when she's riding high in some snakeskin cowboy boots but it'd be there even when she's barefoot. Head thrown back and Next-Elite-Ford perfect posture down to the hips, which is where the swagger kicks in, almost like she's got a pair of six-shooters dangling, and the whole thing so perfectly expressing who she is on screen it would seem rehearsed if it weren't so blissfully unconscious. The thing's a work of art. A lethal one, but art nonetheless.
What was I talking about? Oh yeah, walking with Eliza over to her trailer for a (cough) 'interview'.
AS- I'm here with Eliza Dushku on the set of Wrong Turn. First question... how tough was it growing up with that name? 'Cause that is just so rife with schoolyard possibilities...
ED- I know! There was a two year period where... well, you know, it almost doesn't matter what it is, any name-calling just hurts. They could call you 'big fat dork' and it's just really really hurtful. But for those two years all the name changes and name calling absolutely ripped my heart out, and made me so hurt and upset, and I'd go home and scream at my mother for letting me have that name. And then after a while you're just who cares. "Oh, that's really original, like I've never heard that one before." What about you- what's your name?
(Which is pretty much how the whole conversation went. Let me pluck out the useful bits, since I'm sure you don't want to hear me explain how I actually have three different last names depending on whether we're talking in the ancient High dialect used only for formal gatherings of the Imperial Court or the common Elatzchan dialect, plus of course the secret name we only use at wedding, funerals and coming-of-age ceremonies. The weird part is Eliza's actually dated someone with a name really similar to mine, or as least as similar as human tongues allow.)
AS- So why another horror movie?
ED- Because the first one didn't really quite cut it? I didn't want to say I had tried it, been there and done that, with that project. I'm not dissing anyone when I say that- I think it's clear that the film just didn't quite come together. But you just never know, do you? I remember I got Bring It On and then immediately signed on to do Soul Survivors, and everyone was saying "Bring It On is a joke, it's gonna go straight to video, no one's going to see it, it is so silly, it's a stupid film, awful, but then Soul Survivors... wow, Wes Bentley, he just did American Beauty, and Casey Affleck too, so let's just hope Bring It On comes and goes really fast and then Soul Survivors can redeem you." You just never know. What goes on between reading the script and when you shoot it and what ends up coming out depends on so many different people and good timing and ideas it's almost luck whether it's good or bad. So I just felt I shouldn't let that be my one and only chance at it. And Stan Winston is quite a salesman. He invited me down to the studio, and I met Rob Schmidt (the director- we'll talk to him a bit later) and I said "I don't want to do a movie with monsters. I don't want to have my guts on the table so to speak, to be giving a really honest, raw performance, which is what this called for, and then all of a sudden the monster runs through frame and everyone chuckles. It's not worth it to me to do that." So Stan says "Let me ask you this. Do these pictures make you chuckle?" And he pulls out this poster, these rough images of...
Let me break here and toss in a spoiler warning. Eliza's about to tell you who the bad guys are in this one- who it is chasing those kids through the treetops. If you don't wanna know you've been warned.
...these rough images of these mountain men, and he talks about how they weren't monsters and how all the things that are disfigured about them are actual human deformities, and the backwoods inbreeding thing was kind of intriguing too, like Deliverance, and really Stan could just talk a dog off a meat wagon. And he did.
AS- What grabbed you about Jessie (her character) the first time you read the script?
ED- I just thought that there could be a lot more to her than was obvious from the script. I mean it WAS in the script, but it was subtle, and I thought that was cool. So many characters in these kinds of movies can be written up really cheesy and ineffective... cheesily and ineffectively? I just though there was a lot of potential there, and she's a strong chick, you know, and no damsel in distress. She kicks some ass, and steps up. She's tough. I kinda like playing those characters.
AS- Really? Hadn't noticed.
ED- There's nine hundred thousand other movies out there you could go and see where the girl has hands folded in her lap or covering her eyes, screaming and shrieking. I don't feel that's why we're here. We're here to do something different, and make it interesting for people. And fortunately for me there's still more of those stories to be told.
AS- How much of those tough chicks you play- Jessie, Faith, etc.- is just you being you?
ED- Well, Jessie can't really be compared to Faith. Faith is someone that still means a great deal to me, and feel really close to, and really like. I respect Joss and everyone over there so much for how they put her story together, and of course I'm going back to Buffy as soon as I wrap on Wrong Turn. Jessie's not as extreme as Faith though. Jessie's someone- when people get really afraid, really terrified, you turn inward. Jessie gets to that point and finds this rock-hard strength inside her. She's out there, and all she has to rely on is herself, and I think that's really admirable. Even if you make mistakes, there's I think a bravery in not settling for being the victim, for finding that strength in yourself.
AS- How much of that is you?
ED- Oh, a lot! I mean, I never planned on being in this business at all, I'm really just rolling with it. My family has been supportive and there with me the whole time, but when you're ten years old and on a film set you're just kind of thrown out there alone, and you've got no one else. My mom is so great- she's going to Africa soon, Senegal, to like build a university from the ground up- and I know if I just packed it in tomorrow she'd be "Just hop on a plane out here and we'll figure things out." Not that I'm going to, I'm having a blast. But I know she'd be there for me.
AS- Does the image you project at all enter into your thinking when selecting these roles? You're so well known now for playing these tough, self-reliant characters, and you've become more than a little bit of a role model playing them.
ED- Not... no, I don't think about that. I'm just picking roles that appeal to me. But some of the letters and stuff I get, especially for Faith, it's the greatest feeling in the world. I got girls writing to me, "From the first time you walked in you were so strong, and you overcame so much, and I just felt if you could do it I could do it to", you know, getting themselves out of abusive relationships, all kinds of shit. And just knowing I helped inspire people to do things like that, it's such an amazing feeling.
We gabbed on after that, trading lists of fave horror movies (and I totally forgot Wise's the Haunting when I told her mine- stupid stupid Anton!) and her talking about seeing Johnny Depp get sucked down into that bed by Freddy when she was a kid and it freaked her out, but then she got all proud that she'd seen it and survived and whenever anybody came over she'd be all "Hey, you wanna watch a movie? This one's cool..." and talking about Kevin and Jen (I met Mr. and Mrs. Smith when they were up here for Vulgar- she knows 'em a bit better than I do though) and just general hey-how-you-doooin' kind of stuff. I also managed to turn her off ever seeing Dead Ringers until after menopause. Oh well.
More in Part Two, including Stan the Man and details on those nasties, which are... let's just say Stan did West Virginia tourism no favors with this one.
Can’t wait, man. It’s almost as good as being there. Except the whole NOT MEETING DUSKU PART!!!
Excuse me. I have to go seethe.
"Moriarty" out.
