Hey, everyone. Capone in Chicago here.
Last June I took my first set visit for Ain't It Cool News, traveling all the way to the southwest side of Chicago with several other media types to check out a solid day of filming on the Platinum Dunes relaunch of A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, starring Jackie Earl Haley as the iconic killer of your dreams, Freddy Krueger. The Platinum Dunes folks (Andrew Form, Brad Fuller, and an absent Michael Bay) have given us such horror re-imaginings as THE HITCHER, THE AMITYVILLE HORROR, FRIDAY THE 13TH, and what I think is their strongest effort THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (the sequel to which is mostly crap). But I suspect, despite the rumblings to the contrary, that ELM STREET could be their most visually compelling work to date thanks to a talented first-time director Samuel Bayer, a long-time music video god, who has given us everything from Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" to "Bullet with Butterfly Wings" by Smashing Pumpkins to countless works from Green Day and Garbage, to name but a few.
I've heard the same rumors everybody else did about clashes between the director and producers, but what I saw on my set visit was a director absolutely in charge, but willing to hear what his producers had to say. Granted, they knew a dozen journalists were peering over their shoulders the whole day, but it looked like order was being maintained.
The day we pulled onto the set was June 25, 2009, shooting day 38 of 46, and some of what we saw would take place in final five minutes of the movie. I remember the specific date for reason that will be made clear later. As the bus pulled into the parking lot where our visit would take place, I noticed a wardrobe truck to my left with its doors open revealing a rack of clothes that included four or five similar and familiar striped sweater in various states of disrepair. On the back of a nearby semi, I saw what appeared to be fake dog corpses covered in blood. We never heard how/if dead animals figure into Freddy's story, and I didn't want to ask.
All of the shooting took place inside an abandoned warehouse where multiple sets had been built, including what appeared to be Freddy's quarters in the basement of the preschool where he worked as a gardener and did bad stuff to the kids, before the villagers came to set the building on fire with him trapped inside and left to die. Production designer Patrick Lumb (VALKYRIE; FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX; BATMAN BEGINS) took us into this room for a minute, since no shooting took place there on that day, but my eyes quickly scanned the room for signs of perversity and destruction. I saw a pair of familiar work gloves with metal trim, and sure enough in one corner of the room was a TV and VCR covered with dust. What disgusting snuff films does Freddy watch in his hovel to inspire his molestations? Most of the stacked videotapes were without covers or labels, but there was one whose spine was very clearly displayed: ORCA.
The fact that this set exists at all tells me something about this version of ELM STREET--we get see Freddy's backstory play out like we never have before. This is a trademark of sorts for the Platinum Dune team, and to some it's the biggest bone of contention they have for this remake team. Do we really need to know why Leatherface wears a tie? The reason I'm willing to forgive the telling of Freddy's beginnings is simple--we already know it. We've just never seen it to this degree, but with Jackie Earl Haley as the man behind the glove (playing another child molester as he did in LITTLE CHILDREN), I think the material from screenwriters Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer might actually work.
Lumb gave us a quick interview about how they attempted to avoid many of the traditional horror film trappings in terms of the look and design of the sets. Practical effects were used for most of the effects shots, and that became quite evident during the course of the day. In terms of story, he emphasized that this is not the joking Freddy from the sequels. Although he didn't rule out the possibility that a couple of one-liners might have made it into the movie, clearly dark was the tone everyone was shooting for. I'll let him explain:
Yeah, the story of this one, it’s NOT a remake. Don’t come and see it expecting to see the first one just word-for-word updated. It’s a different story, some of the same characters, and it kind of explains how Freddy came to be Freddy and hopefully why he’s so terrifying--so the whole story progresses. Again, I keep barking on about reality but basically the whole thing takes places in places that are real: the high school, the kids' houses, the preschool where Freddy was the gardener. The one place that isn’t a “reality place” at any time is the boiler room. Which again, is something that is taken from the whole franchise--so there’s this huge boiler room we found which plays a big part in the film.
This basement there is actually, within the story, I don’t know how much you know about the story, but Freddy is the caretaker at the preschool where the kids were attending. And that’s how they kind of tell the story--of course I don’t know how much I’m supposed to tell you, so I won’t tell you the whole story but part of that, as the custodian of the school, he has a basement underneath, which is where we’re at now. So as the story unfolds, the characters return to these same environments repeatedly, and it kind of brings them all together, so there’s a common thread and one of them is the basement, which is almost like a portal to the boiler room--so there’s a relationship to the boiler room. It’s almost like the boiler room becomes their nightmare version of the basement.
Much of what we saw shot that day had to do with out two main heroes, Nancy (Rooney Mara, most recently seen in YOUTH IN REVOLT) and Quentin (the talented Kyle Gallner from JENNIFER'S BODY and THE HAUNTING IN CONNECTICUT), attempting to keep each other awake after about 70 hours of no sleeps. The pair are slipping in and out of dreams and reality, into what they call micro-naps. More often than not, they think they're awake, when in fact they're asleep on their feet with Freddy in the wings waiting to pounce. And this pouncing is what we're there to see filmed. It's my understanding that this is the scene in which Nancy manages to pull Freddy into the real world, where he will be more vulnerable.
For the record, Haley, Gallner, and Mara were the only three actors we saw shooting that day, plus one other actor whose name I didn't catch (playing a parent), who was in the studio doing a pick-up shot that involved him getting his throat slashed by Freddy. The film also stars Katie Cassidy, Thomas Dekker, Kellan Lutz (from the TWILIGHT films), Clancy Brown, and Connie Britton as Nancy's mother.
The pattern for most of the day was to watch a scene get shot, and while the next shot was being set up, we were ushered to some other location on the property to conduct interviews with whoever was the least busy at that moment. Since these were all roundtable interviews, I'll attempt to boil them down to the essentials rather than present the entire interview. However, I may present the interview with Jackie Earl Haley (in full Freddy makeup!) separately.
Our first talk was with prop master extraordinaire William "Billy" Dambra who began the day right by bringing us The Glove made of steel and copper (housed in a very secure looking lock box). Dambra is something of a Chicago legend, having worked on everything from HOME ALONE and RISKY BUSINESS to CHILD'S PLAY and THE FUGITIVE to PAYBACK and BARBERSHOP to THE BREAK-UP and THE UNBORN. If it shot in Chicago, Dambra probably was the property master.
Dambra explained that there were actually four versions of Freddy's glove, including a lightweight aluminum model and a rubber version for scenes where the blades would be near someone's face. The glove itself was built off a simple gardening glove and customized to Haley's hand. He even let on that he toyed with including thumb blade on the glove but decided against it. He passed it around the table, and weight of it surprised me, probably about four pounds. It would actually require practice to get used to the feel and heft of the piece.
Dambra said he was not instructed to recreate the glove from the Wes Craven films, only to make his shop's version similar, but he was given the freedom to add his own take on it. The biggest difference I noticed in this version was a plate of metal along the back of the hands with tiny rivets and other elements that gave the prop a more organic look, an idea Dambra says was Bayer's. There are also individual pieces of metal that run down the fingers to approximate where finger joints would be, rather than just a single strip of metal for each finger.
Eventually, we took our place behind the d.p., and thanks to a playback monitor, we all caught our first glimpse of Jackie Early Haley in full Freddy makeup and he was snarling like an animal. We didn't have any audio, the monitor was small, and the shot was dark, so it wasn't the ideal conditions to be introduced to Freddy 2.0, but it was a nice teaser for what came later. The scene being shot involved Gallner sitting in a chair holding a baseball bat. Mara rushes to him and shakes him in a failed attempt to wake him, not realizing that she's actually dreaming all of this. Director Bayer seemed fixated on the way the bat fell across Quentin's leg, but eventually the largely uneventful shot was completed, after which someone called out "Moving on to the eyeball!"
While the mystery eyeball scene was being prepped, we got a few minutes with Rooney Mara, a pretty young woman who is not meant to look particularly glamorous. In fact, one of the elements of ELM STREET that many on set emphasized with us was that none of the usually good-looking young actors working on the film are looking especially pretty for this movie. Several cast members made a point to get the minimal amount of sleep the night before scenes involving nightmare sequences. Mara said three hours was about the most she'd allow herself each nigh. Her version of Nancy is not the preppie Heather Langenkamp version from the original film. She's a troubled, goth girl with dark-purple nail polish. Nancy is still a painter, but her paintings take on a much more sinister character, perhaps reflecting a childhood trauma that is the secret core of this new version of the story. While we spoke to Mara, she had quite a bit of blood on her skin and clothes, but she was incredibly nice and forthcoming with nice details about the differences in her portrayal of Nancy:
Rooney Mara: Nancy is goth in the sense that she's, quite obviously, disturbed and quiet and keeps to herself and can't really open up to people or connect with people. And she feels really alone in the world because of things that happened to her when she was younger. But throughout the movie you see that change, and you see her grow, so it's a good arc.
Question: Talk about working with Jackie and also the first time you saw him in the makeup.
RM: Jackie's like the sweetest man ever. When I met him, I was like "Ugh, I have to stay away from him. I can't talk to him because it'll just make it too hard." But that's impossible because it's kind of hard to stay away from him because he's such a nice guy. And the first time I saw in his makeup was on the set, and I actually started crying when I saw him [laughs]. They wouldn't let me see him until we had to do a scene together. So then he came out, and he had his monk [hood] so he can hide [his face] from everyone. And I was trying so hard not to cry.
Question: Can you talk about Nancy's art and that part of your character?
RM: Her art? Yeah, since Nancy was little--it shows it in the flashbacks--she's been an artist. I think it's her only outlet; she just does that, almost like the way someone with autism does things repeatedly. She'll just literally paint all night long. And the things she's painting are repressed memories that she can't understand or remember, so her art's quite dark, and she keeps painting the same things but doesn't know where they're coming from or what they mean, and she sort of starts to figure it out throughout the movie.…A lot of the things that I'm painting [involve] the preschool where everything happened or the boiler room. I'm painting all the things from my dreams.
Question: Did you revisit all the movies before?
RM: No I didn't. I didn't want to. Kyle's actually never seen the first one, so we're going to watch them when we're finished. I didn't want to have that in my head, because it's so different. I didn't want that to affect my performance. But we're definitely going to watch them when we're finished.
Question: Can you speak a little about to how Nancy's strength in this one is different than how you remember it from the other ones?
RM: I think because this Nancy is coming from such a weak place to begin with, she's just so alone in the world. The other Nancy was just a regular girl. This Nancy is very disturbed, so her growth is more. You get to see this girl come out of her shell, form a relationship with Quentin, and in the end she finally figures out why she is the way she is, and she's able to do something about it.
Question: Can you talk about her relationship with her mother, because that's such a big part in the original?
RM: Yeah, we still have a lot to do with the mother. I think her relationship with her mother in this is they don't really have much of a relationship, because I don't think Nancy has much of a relationship with anyone. It's really hard for her to get close or open up to anyone, including her mother.
Question: And the father?
RM: No father.
Question: No police officer father?
RM: Nope. Daddy issues all the way--no dad.
Question: Is the reason that Nancy is the way she is when we first meet her--can I go out on a limb and guess that maybe it's tied to Freddy?
RM: Definitely is tied to Freddy. [laughs] That's why the payoff at the end is so good.
Question: I've heard some things about them changing Freddy's backstory, so that he could definitely be interacting with your character as much younger children.
RM: Yeah, there's a lot of backstory in this one. A lot. And yes, there's a lot with the children that I'm not really allowed to talk about, but it's really good.
Mara also clarified that, despite reports that she's signed on for multiple sequels, she in fact has only signed on for one more trip down ELM STREET. "There only so long you can stay awake," she joked with us. "Sooner or later, you have to die."
The rest of the scene with Nancy and Quentin is certainly more (practical) effects heavy. First up, Nancy rushes to Quentin sleeping in a chair, shakes him, and eventually attempts to force his eyes open with her finger. The shot ends on a close-up of Gallner's eye. He stepped out on the effects team moved in with a false eye contraption that allowed them to pop the eye our of the socket. Each time the eye popped, you could clearly hear the crew cheer and scream because it looked so realistic. At one point I heard Bayer shout, "Less K.Y." I assume he was talking about the goopy quality of the eye.
Once that shot was done, we were ushered outside to a pair of trailers, one of which simply said "Freddy," and that was our next stop, which I'll present in a separate report complete with the entire Jackie Earl Haley interview. Facing the Freddy trailer was another with a "SPFX MU" sign on the door. Andrew Clement was the man in charge of special effects make-up for ELM STREET, and his trailer was a little slice of heaven, with body parts, false heads (including one of Kyle Gallner that was about to be used), and all manner of make-up apparatus. He showed us a few early concept designs for the new Freddy look, which included a crusty look and one with flaky, ashy skin. Clement said he also contemplated whether Freddy should have a fresh-burn or healed-burn quality. A CG component was planned but then pulled back (although there was a bit of green painted into Freddy's left cheek that would clearly convey a Two-Face-like view of the inside of his mouth to give it a more "tendon-ous and mushy" look. Clement said that he literally pinned up photos of every Freddy design from each of the ELM STREET films
What Clement and his team clearly focused on for Freddy's look was that of a much more realistic burn victim, with smoothed over, almost shiny scar tissue. The original Freddy's deep, more monstrous wrinkles have given way to something more believable. As Haley told us, "Freddy doesn't turn into anything. He is flat-out horror." Clement said they brought in a woman who works with burn patients for a particular scene:
Andrew Clement: We had an actual woman who worked with burn patients who came in just to wrap him for a scene where he's in a burn ward, which was actually written after I finished the makeup design--which had I known there was going to be a burn ward, I would have had something to actually start from, but that was a later addition. But she said that it looked like a well-healed burn victim. It's funny, as subtle as it is, some of the lighting really kicks up a lot of the [detail], I really tried to keep it close to his face, keep the detail subtle, but the lighting really pops up some of the forms and it looks a lot more starkly sculpted than it really is.
Question: The left side of the face looks considerably more damaged than the right side. Is there a reason behind that?
AC: I've always wanted to get an asymmetry going on. I think that's really scary. Unfortunately, we did have to do some research into some tragic burn victims--and there's a lot of asymmetry going on there--and I just think that's interesting. A design that just makes you want to look.
Question: Is this Freddy's makeup the most complicated?
AC: Yeah, out of any of the Freddys that there've been. It takes two of us [to put it on Jackie's makeup] and we've got it down to three hours for the two of us. The design was evolving as we were working so I wound up making more pieces than were necessary. There's just a lot of application, and we're using silicon, which is a lot more difficult to put on somebody.
Question: I was looking at Freddy's hands with the burns and the tapered tips. Is that a prosthetic that you added on top of his hands?
AC: They're really small. He's a burn victim. For his character, I knew I was going to be adding a back-of-the-hand appliance and I thought it would be really nice, really creepy to have a tapered hand and I didn't want his fingers to get fat. So all I wanted to do, I thought it would be nice if the tips were burned away a little bit. I wanted to counteract anything I would be adding so it still looked nice and spidery. They're just little rubber fingertips, all silicon. This is a really straightforward horror film, there aren't a whole lot of gags--Freddy doesn't turn into anything. There are no Freddy pizzas. [laughs]
Also in the makeup trailer was the head of Kyle Gallner with a big zipper down the middle of his face. Constructed at about 20 percent bigger than the actor's actual head, the model was soon to be used for the next scene in which the eye-popping moment turns into Gallner screaming, clutching his head with one hand, and unzipping his face to reveal Mr. Krueger underneath. As shot, the sequence looks pretty silly, but we were told repeatedly that CG would clean up the obvious fakeness of the effect. If they pull it off, it's probably going to be one of the more memorable moments in the film.
Gallner is one of my favorite young actors working today. He got his break as a kid playing Beaver on "Veronica Mars" and worked steadily since then, mostly on TV. But in recent years he's made the transition to mostly genre works such as A HAUNTING IN CONNECTICUT and JENNIFER'S BODY. His ELM STREET character Quentin is not meant to be an updated version of Johnny Depp's Glen. Like the remolded Nancy, Quentin is a goth kid working with Nancy to stay awake and drifting into micronaps where the nightmare world and reality come crashing together. When we got to sit and chat with Gallner, he had blood trickling from his right eye (the one that was bulging out earlier). And like Mara, he seemed borderline exhausted.
Question: Can you tell us a little about your character, Quentin?
Kyle Gallner: Quentin is…he’s not like the super-popular kid, but everybody kind of knows him a little bit. He’s the kid that walks down the hallway, and it’s like, ‘Oh, hey, what’s going on.’ He’s that kind of guy. But Quentin’s an interesting kid. You know, we don’t touch on the fact that Quentin has a mom--he doesn’t really have a mom in the movie, so he’s got like the mom issues on top of the dreams and his dad. I don’t think he gets along very well with his dad. I think he has a little bit of a high stress home life, so he’s kind of got a little bit of anger issues, I feel. This is the way I’m playing him, with slight anger issues and maybe some daddy issues, and my mom’s not there. I pop Adderall--I’m kind of this weird, offbeat kid. He’s a good kid though. At the end of the day, he’s a good kid. It’s just he’s a little high strung, and I think what he’s going through, he doesn’t really know how to handle very well, so he kind of turns to drugs a little bit, and he gets very fidgety and agitated by the end of the movie.
Question: So are some of his personal issues specifically incorporated into his dreams? Does Freddy taunt him with things that bother him?
KG: Not really, not so much. I think that’s kind of a separate side. I don’t think Freddy really cares about my issues with my mom and whatever. My dreams are almost, they’re not so much like terrifying nightmares--I do have some scenes in the boiler room--but it’s almost like a weird thing where Freddy almost uses me as a bit of a vessel, I guess, to kind of show me what really happened to him, as opposed to just torturing me in my dreams. Like, in my first dream, he doesn’t even come after me. He’s showing me what really happened to him. Later on, he definitely gives me some business in the boiler room, but no, he doesn’t incorporate my own personal issues with his vendetta.
Question: What’s Quentin’s relationship with Nancy?
KG: Nancy’s kind of the girl that I think Quentin’s watched from afar for a little while. He’s liked her for a long time and he tries to reach out to Nancy, but Nancy’s so shut down that she doesn’t really let anybody in. So our relationship basically is forced to build through the movie. We’re thrown into a very chaotic, life-and-death situation and she’s the only person I have, so you either trust each other and try to figure this out together, or you take your own separate ways and hope for the best. But we bond, and our relationship really does grow throughout the whole movie.
Question: Have you been sleep-depriving yourself like Rooney has?
KG: Yes. When it gets to days that are really intense, especially days like this where it’s on night six, one of the last days, where you have average four hours of sleep, you just get in character (laughs).
Question: Des Quentin have a history similar to Nancy’s with Freddy?
KG: I think he does, I think the thing is with Quentin--Nancy is obviously "Freddy’s girl," you know what I mean? It’s Nancy and Freddy, so she, I think, is tortured by him more than I am, for sure. It’s a thing where I don’t think I remember as much as Nancy does, I don’t think I’m as affected as Nancy is. I think I get more and more affected and start to remember as the story goes on, as does she, but she knows there is something wrong.
Q: You’ve done a couple of horror movies now. Do you personally like them?
KG: I do. Horror movies are really fun. You get to do things in a horror movie that you don’t …you know, it’s very genre-specific. But I think with horror movies you can get a touch of action, you get a touch of drama, and you get the horror aspect of it, as opposed to doing just a straight drama or straight action film. But I think this is kind of gonna be the last one for a while (laughs). You can’t really get typecast, and this is kind of the one to go out on, I think. You go out with a bang. You fight Freddy Krueger, and then you see what happens next. But I’m very material-driven, like if the material’s good, I’d like to do it. So if a horror movie comes around again that’s really, really good, you never say never.
Q: Can you talk about working with Sam, Brad and Andrew?
KG: It’s been cool. Brad and Andrew, obviously they’re veterans of kind of these horror remakes, so they know what they’re doing with them. They have a very specific way of working and they take their time to keep the story but also kind of make it their own. And Sam is really good. Sam is very, very visual. Sam’s gonna make this movie look amazing. I mean, we saw like five minutes of it cut together, and the visuals of it are really pretty unbelievable. He’s gonna give it a very specific feel and a very specific vibe, and it’s been fun. And he’s really good about giving us all the freedom we need to create our characters and go where we need to go, so that’s been nice. But I mean, if everything gets out of control, you know, if the performance really isn’t working, he’ll pull you back in. He’ll kind of direct you in the right direction.
And it was sometime right around this point during our day, as we were about to meet with the Platinum Dunes guys, Andrew and Brad, that word began to spread on the set that Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett had both died. I couldn't think of a way for the day to get any more surreal. But there was work to be done, and more shooting to get to.
At this point, we sat down for a fairly lengthy chat with Andrew Form and Bradley Fuller of Platinum Dunes (alas, Michael Bay was nowhere to be seen on this day), but I'm saving that interview for later. The last interview I want to give you in this first report is with director Samuel Bayer, who we literally caught in his directing chair between shot for a brief chat. The first question has to do with Bayer's chosen visual style for this particular film and whether he was drawing inspiration from other horror films, etc., for the dream sequences.
Samuel Bayer: I mean, I look at the old movies and I think the dream sequences aren't that interesting. I think they feel like bad Broadway musicals or something, like with steam and smoke, and they're not scary, they're not beautiful, they're not interesting. I've looked at everything from German expressionistic films to Tim Burton movies to all kinds of disparate influences, and the one thing this movie is going to have--it has, I think it has a vision when it comes to the dream sequences. And I think they're beautiful and macabre and scary. And hopefully I answered that. I think I did.
Question: Why did you pick this one? Brad and Andrew said they had offered you other projects.
SB: I'm just getting really old and I had to make a movie. No, I'm kidding. I wanted to make the right movie and I've been offered a bunch of stuff and I've known the guys for a number of years, and there's a couple of projects we were gonna do that didn't happen, and this came around and it took me a moment to make the decision but when I made the decision I knew it was the right one and A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET is absolute a great first film to do.
Question: Are you a fan of the series?
SB: I wasn't that familiar with--I mean, I'm a fan--No, I wasn't really a fan of the original series. I thought the ideas in the first one were great and I thought that they became parodies. I think Freddy wasn't scary, I didn't think that the world that was created for each movie was that interesting. I'm a fan of the idea of Freddy, not the movies.
Question: How is it working with Jackie?
SB: Jackie's been great. Jackie--there was nobody else I ever thought of for the role of Freddy, and he owns it. I mean, we got an Academy Award-nominated actor playing Freddy Krueger; it's kind of exciting.
Question: A lot of the movies that you mentioned as inspirations were really based on character development to make you care about these people--that these things happen to them. Is that something you want to make sure you get done in this film?
SB: Absolutely. Hopefully you guys have talked to the kids that were--some of the kids that we're using in the movie and all these kids are great actors. We've invested a lot of time and energy to make you care about them and I think that true horror comes out of identifying with the protagonist. If you believe that someone is a human being--that they live and breathe and have feelings and they're terrorized by something and you identify with them--then that's really what horror is about. That's why ROSEMARY'S BABY is great because it's a simple story about a woman you identify with. THE EXORCIST is a 12-year-old girl and THE SHINING is a seemingly normal family. So in this case, all our kids have brought something to this so it's not just screaming teenagers in peril.
Question: In the shot we saw earlier [with the zipper head], we heard it was inspired by a music video you did.
SB: Yeah, I did a Rolling Stones video in 1997 with Angelina Jolie, and Angelina Jolie came out of somebody's head. I ripped off a bunch of my stuff. I mean, I've done music videos and commercials for 20 years, and I've pulled all sorts of things that I've done in my work over the years into this film--and some people have to look for it, but it's there.
Question: What was the most fun thing you got to incorporate from yourself?
SB: Fun thing? Yeah, the most fun thing is just making the movie. I've waited a long time to make a movie and I couldn't have made it with a bunch of better guys. I love my producers, and my actors, and everybody, and my crew. It's been a lot of fun.
Question: What's been the greatest surprise in making a film as opposed to a short form?
SB: How easy it is; it's so easy. I didn't know how easy it was. [laughs]
The next two segments taken from my A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET SET VISIT will consist of a joint interview with producers Andrew Form and Bradley Fuller, and a separate interview where the group chats with Freddy himself, Jackie Earl Haley, including a slightly informal chat a couple of us had with him just before the visit ended.
-- Capone
capone@aintitcool.com
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