Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with a little chat I had with a couple of the people involved with the remake of John Carpenter's THE FOG. During Comic-Con I sat down with the yummy-yummy, hottie-bo-bottie Maggie Grace, who stars in THE FOG along with Tom Welling, but is probably best known for playing Shannon on LOST, and director Rupert Wainwright.

Wainwright's previous film was a movie all over the map. I didn't particularly care for STIGMATA, but I think with a good script and a little more focus Wainwright's style could work really, really well. I'm hoping that THE FOG is good... one of my all time favorite movie scenes is the campfire telling of the story of the Elizabeth Dane from the original. Love it!

So here's the interview. Just me, Maggie and Rupert done right before their presentation at the Con. I must confess to being quite taken with Ms. Grace. She's pretty on LOST. She's gorgeous in person and cool to boot. She even gave up a dirty joke! Read on for the chat!

QUINT: I'm a huge movie geek and a fan of Carpenter's work and when I first heard of a remake of THE FOG I thought... "Why?"

MAGGIE GRACE: (giggles)

QUINT: But at the same time one of John Carpenter's most celebrated films is THE THING, itself a remake. So, remakes aren't inherently bad...

RUPERT WAINWRIGHT: Why remake The Fog? A friend of mine had a very funny comment about the original FOG, which is a great movie in its way... He said it's half a brilliant movie. One of the things that's interesting about the movie is that it's so short that it gets out so quickly and you're finished with this sort of sense of, "What happened? Why, what?" That's one of the good things about the movie, but there's a huge range of things that you still want to know about the town and about what happened and about the crash.

One of the things that's interesting about this movie is that we get to really explore that. We really go into the past. Actually, through the character of Maggie we explore the past and the present sort of interweaving together.

In the end, it appears to be basically the same story halfway through. People know it's now on an island, not a seaside town, but it appears to be the same kind of thing. But it grows and grows and grows and the past and the present get tied together in a very, very different way than in the original.

QUINT: But you were familiar with the original film before you got this movie...

RUPERT WAINWRIGHT: Oh, yeah, yeah.

QUINT: (to Maggie) Had you seen it?

MAGGIE GRACE: Yes, of course. I mean, obviously it's the holy grail of horror films. I do think it's essentially a very different movie than the original. Obviously, it gives a great template...

RUPERT WAINWRIGHT: The other thing about it is... you can do so many interesting things with fog right now. You can create whole characters out of it. That's another thing... we can really... rather than just having it sort of going backwards through the engine bucket we can make it come alive, we can make characters out of these things... That's something that just wasn't possible when John made the original.

QUINT: Do you feel any added responsibility about doing a remake as opposed to doing an original film?

RUPERT WAINWRIGHT: I think that making films is so fucking terrifying as it is, it couldn't be more scary! (laughs) It's all so fucking scary! In a way, it can't be more scary!

QUINT: Can we talk a little about Maggie's character?

MAGGIE GRACE: Sure.

QUINT: Is it like Jamie Lee Curtis' character from the original?

RUPERT WAINWRIGHT: Not at all, not at all.

MAGGIE GRACE: It's the same name and she serves some similar purposes, but it's very loosely, loosely associated... This character, she's from the island. She had a somewhat messy love affair with a character now played by Tom Welling and it comes back with a lot of unanswered questions... She essentially abandoned him rather abruptly and suddenly comes back. So, she's no longer just passing through. She's very much invested in the town and its history.

QUINT: And you have Selma Blair playing the Adrienne Barbeau character?

MAGGIE GRACE: Yeah!

RUPERT WAINWRIGHT: Yeah. Obviously we kind of really went completely the opposite way there...

QUINT: Well, unless she still had her mammaries from A DIRTY SHAME.

MAGGIE GRACE: (laughs) If you didn't hear, she threw one at Rupert during a press conference!

RUPERT WAINWRIGHT: She threw half her glands at me...

MAGGIE GRACE: Her glands? That's a new one. Awesome!

QUINT: That's a story to tell the grandchildren!

MAGGIE GRACE: That girl is so gutsy, I freakin' adore her.

RUPERT WAINWRIGHT: She's hilarious.

MAGGIE GRACE: She'll do anything. Some reference to Adrienne Barbeau's lovely, voluptuous figure and she's like, yeah...

(Maggie mimes whipping a boob out)

RUPERT WAINWRIGHT: That's what you need, though, when you've got somebody that's stuck in a lighthouse for half the movie. You know what I mean? She's there on her own. She's doing a monologue the entire time. She has one scene with somebody else and that's her son, when he wakes up in the morning.

MAGGIE GRACE: We worked together for just a couple day, unfortunately. I really, really liked her.

RUPERT WAINWRIGHT: She's a hoot.

MAGGIE GRACE: Anybody that names their one-eyed dog "Wink," like, immediately goes up in my estimation, you know?

QUINT: (laughs) Can you tell me a little bit about the visual style of the movie? You're wanting to make something that's not a photocopy of the original, obviously.

RUPERT WAINWRIGHT: Well, if you want to see real things that are happening to real people you kind of want to make it feel as real as possible. Take a movie like HELLBOY, for example, which is obviously a very fantasy movie all the way through. This not a fantasy movie at all. It's a regular movie about regular people going about their daily business and suddenly all hell breaks loose, so in a sense you don't want it to be...

(an odd sound is coming from Rupert's pocket)

I'm sorry...

(He takes a cell phone out that is going crazy with a kind of weird electronic beat)

I don't know how to change it!

MAGGIE GRACE: The ring?

RUPERT WAINWRIGHT: I have no idea!

MAGGIE GRACE: Oh, I'll show you...

RUPERT WAINWRIGHT: No, this is the one it comes with. You have to buy another ring!

MAGGIE GRACE: Or you can, download it, probably...

RUPERT WAINWRIGHT: That's what I said. You have to buy another ring.

MAGGIE GRACE: For, like, 99 cents.

RUPERT WAINWRIGHT: I know, but I tried to do it...

MAGGIE GRACE: You should, like, get one of the FOG's themes...

QUINT: Get some Carpenter music on there.

MAGGIE GRACE: Totally.

QUINT: If you were really cool you'd get the BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA Coupe de Villes theme song on your phone.

RUPERT WAINWRIGHT: Very good!

MAGGIE GRACE: I had TuPac on mine for a while... which people didn't seem to expect.

QUINT: That would have surprised me...

(laughs)

RUPERT WAINWRIGHT: So, in a sense the visual style needs to get people believing it's a real world rather than, "Look! How amazing!" You need to lead them in there and then, "Shit! The weirdest thing just happened! What the fuck!?!"

QUINT: Well, that's one of the talents Carpenter has... The films in that period were so personal and the sense of doom... with like PRINCE OF DARKNESS and THE FOG, especially. There's no escape.

MAGGIE GRACE: The terror out of the ordinary is so much more haunting. Days after you see HALLOWEEN, it just fucks you up 'cause you're still looking around every corner. It's not some dinosaur. It's really finding that terror in your backyard.

QUINT: I'm almost done, but I'd like to ask you directly about all these X3 rumors. I've read recently that you're off the project, but were you ever attached to X3?

MAGGIE GRACE: Um... You know, I met everybody over there... It was very much... You know, the press kinda ran with it, but...

QUINT: They just took a meeting and said it was a casting decision?

MAGGIE GRACE: Uh... not exactly, but it wasn't supposed to be public information. We did not close a deal, so yeah... But I am, of course, going back to LOST, so I don't know if the schedules would have worked out very well anyway.

QUINT: What're your favorite dirty jokes?

(laughs)

QUINT: I was going to ask Natalie Portman to give me a dirty joke yesterday, but the interview got cut short, so I need a pretty girl to give me a dirty joke or this trip is a failure!

MAGGIE GRACE: (laughs) All the dirty jokes I know are Josh Holloway... of LOST... dirty jokes... which being southern are just horrible, horrible, horrible... trying to think.

RUPERT WAINWRIGHT: I have a good one... This guy, this writer for The New Yorker, goes away to write a book and ends up in some little... I don't know much about the East Coast of America, but in like one of those sort of Tennessee... middle of fucking nowhere, okay? And he can see one tiny little house miles away, but he's just writing away all day. He's gotta get his book done.

Finally, this guy comes across the valley and he's got, like, one tooth and boils all over himself and one ear and a stumpy leg. The guy goes, "All right, don't be the New York... just be a nice guy." The other guy goes, "Argghh, neighbor... we're having a party tonight! You should come up."

The guy goes, "Oh, I'd love to... what'll be happening?" The guy goes, "We'll be drinkin'! Hahaha... and we'll be dancin'! And when we stop drinkin' and dancin' thing's go crazy! There'll be sex galore!!" The New Yorker says, "Alright, fine..." The guy starts walking away and the New Yorker says to him, "Well, what time should I come?"

He says, "Any time ya' like! It's just you and me!" Ba-dum-bump.

QUINT: Did you settle upon your Josh Holloway joke?

MAGGIE GRACE: Umm... alright. This guy goes through this horrible break-up with his girlfriend and goes into a bar. He's just slamming 'em back, right? There's a woman tending the bar and she's like, "Man, why are you so down?" The man says, "My girlfriend just broke up with me. She says I'm too kinky."

She goes, "Oh, my God! My boyfriend just dumped me. He said I was too kinky!" He goes, "Really, what time do you get off?" So, they hit it off, they hook up... She agrees to leave with him when her shift is over and they go back to her place.

She's like, "Well, I'm just gonna go slip into something a little more uncomfortable" and leaves for a few minutes. She comes back and he's halfway out the door. She's like, "What's the deal, man? I mean, I thought we were gonna have a good time."

He says, "Honey, I already shit in your purse and fucked your cat. What else do you want?"

(laughs)

QUINT: Awesome.

MAGGIE GRACE: Except it's so much better in a really dirty southern accent. It really requires the southern delivery.

There you have it. Dirty joke and all. Isn't Maggie cute holding up the little AICN logo? After the interview Wainwright told me a little about Dark Horse Comics doing a comic book of the movie and funnily enough (considering Selma Blair's involvement) Hellboy's Mike Mignola is doing the cover art. That's pretty cool. They both seem very enthused about the flick and I'm looking forward to giving it a look. I'm not 100% sold on it, but we'll all know what we're in for soon enough. I'm pulling for an ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 type remake myself. I love the new movie and the old one, just different enough to not draw direct comparisons, but the remake still kept the spirit of the original.

So, there it is. One interview down, four to go... yeesh. Keep your eyes peeled. Next week on the site should be Quint interview mania! 'Til then, this is Quint bidding you all a fond farewell and adieu.

-Quint