Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here.
If I were a cynical man, I might say that the filmmaking team of Drew and John Erick Dowdle were a couple of the unluckiest guys who are still lucky enough to get to make movies. Coming from a comedy background, it appeared that their breakthrough movie was going to be when their horror film--the faux documentary THE POUGHKEEPSIE TAPES--was released. People I know who saw it before I did told me it was pretty good, but a disastrous BNAT screening followed by the financial crisis at MGM has kept that film on ice since its completion in 2007. A year later saw the release of QUARANTINE, a faithful and fairly effective remake of the brilliant Spanish horror film [REC]. But whatever success--financial or artisitic--that that film experienced wasn't really an indication of the Dowdles' talents. They had a great template in [REC], and they followed it. The best thing to come out of QUARANTINE was the great performance by Jennifer Carpenter.
I'm sure that when the Dowdles signed on to make the first film under M. Night Shyamalan's production house, The Night Chronicles, they thought they were going to be a part of something truly wonderful, and that still might be the case. The trailer for DEVIL has me extremely interested in seeing the film, mainly because I'm a sucker for close-quarters horror. But no one could have anticipated the critical beating that Shyamalan's THE HAPPENING and THE LAST AIRBENDER took, and audiences watching the DEVIL trailer in some cities have actually booed it when Shyamalan's name appears on screen, which seems silly but there you go. Still, the Dowdles, working from a script by Brian Nelson (HARD CANDY; 30 DAYS OF NIGHT) may be onto something with DEVIL, whose story outline was drafted by Shyamalan.
I was fortunate enough to talk to the Dowdles minutes after they premiered an exclusive five-and-a-half-minute clip from DEVIL at Chicago Comic Con recently. This was the first glimpse of any footage from the film beyond the trailer, and it involves a moment in the film where the younger woman in the elevator is apparently bitten when the lights go out. The crowd loved the sequence, and I was right there with them. The Q&A was lively as people tried to get any little piece of information out of the Dowdles, who are keeping the secrets about the film very quiet. Imagine that, an M. Night Shyamalan movie cloaked in secrecy…
The Dowdle brothers are two of the nicest individuals you will ever meet, so much so that they were willing and able to talk about things such as the cloud surrounding Shyamalan, as well as and the fate of and reaction to THE POUGHKEEPSIE TAPES. I give them credit for not shying away from the tough questions and for setting the record straight in some cases. I think you'll enjoy their honesty and the entire interview; all I ask is that you read it all the way through before you start dropping bombs in the Talkbacks. Here are John and Drew Dowdle. As the interview opens, someone has just realized that in the Comic Con program, the separate photos of the brothers are actually two different photos of John, one with a beard and one without. Apparently, this is not the first time Drew has been misidentified in photos, but he's took it in stride.
Capone: [pushing the program to Drew] That’s for you to keep, sir.
[Everyone Laughs]
John Erick Dowdle: I’ll frame it. I'll put it up in the office.
Capone: I don’t know who it was, but somebody put that out so that you would see it, but I don’t think they realized you were misidentified.
Drew Dowdle: There was one photo after QUARANTINE floating around like in every single publication, identified as this photo of John and me, but the photo was actually John and our camera operator.
JED: You have a long history of being confused for any random bearded fellow.
Capone: Okay, let’s just walk through from the beginning. Start with this treatment coming to you, I guess. Had you ever met Night [Shyamalan] before you were approached for this?
JED: No. I don’t think we had met anyone like famous, like genuinely famous. We had just finished QUARANTINE and that was about to come out and we got word from one of our reps that "Night just saw THE POUGHKEEPSIE TAPES and loved it. He wants to see QUARANTINE.” They were very guarded with QUARANTINE; they were like “No, we are not showing him QUARANTINE,” and Night talked the studio into letting him see it and he saw it in New York and asked us to fly out the next day. We flew out.
DD: It was one of those great calls in life, “Go to the airport and go to Philadelphia right now.” That was extremely exciting.
JED: And then we met him. It’s like you read about people online and you have an image of someone, and when we met him, he was like super warm, really laid back and just such a nice guy, and it was great. We were like fast friends.
DD: They were having a preproduction meeting of AIRBENDER when we first showed up and it was [cinematogrpaher] Andrew Lesnie and all the heads of ILM were there, and he let us sit in on this meeting for the next hour or so and we were just like overwhelmed.
Capone: There were a couple of things I wanted to bring up here that I didn’t want to bring up on stage necessarily, but one of them is there has been this shift in feelings about Night and his last couple of films. I saw at least one clip on YouTube of them showing the trailer for DEVIL, and you probably know what I’m talking about. Does that worry you at all? How does that sit with you, because this has all kind of happened since you were given this?
DD: Ever since we were done. And that's a fair quesiton…
JED: Even since July, yeah and thank you for not asking that onstage.
DD: Yeah, I appreciate that.
JED: On the one hand a lot more people have seen the trailer, and certainly with Night’s name attached in any atmosphere, it attracts a lot of attention and as a producer on this. I think a lot of the chatter has been that it was his idea, and he’s a producer and that he gave some up and comers a shot at this one, and it’s more about what this Night Chronicles idea is. So, I feel like in a lot of ways, like you said, that kind of reaction that we have seen is only fueled by people’s knowledge of the fact that this is something different. As our boss on this film, he’s incredibly supportive, and studios tend to play it safe and really try to not take too many risks, and Night was just… Any idea of ours that he loved, he would just push us to go for it, and “don’t worry about what anybody thinks, you go for it.” That kind of support on a film of this size in the current studio environment is not an opportunity you ever get anymore, and so I think a lot of people will see him in a different light as a producer here, because he is really making a cool contribution to the genre.
DD: I’m sure a lot of people will show up opening night to hate, and our hope is that the movie is strong, and we entertain the pants off them and beat the hate out of them or win the hate out of them. [laughs]
JED: And Night’s movies have always… He’s a director that has had a polarized audience forever, and we have a bit of a history of having that kind of reaction too, so we always felt somewhat connected on that.
Capone: Yeah, I was going to wait until the end to say this, but in the interest of full disclosure: I was at that Butt-Numb-a-Thon screening.
[Everyone Laughs]
JED: Oh, one of our low points.
DD: That was probably the low point in our career.
Capone: I felt so bad. When they asked me to do this, I was like “I would love to do it, because I think this movie looks like it’s going to be strong," but at some point I knew I'd have to tell you that I was there for that. But at the same time I’ve talked to people who saw POUGHKEEPSIE TAPES under different circumstances who really liked it.
JED: We never had a reaction quite like that.
Capone: And I’m sure you’ve heard every theory in the book about what happened there, but most of the theories I have heard have nothing to do with the film itself. They have to do more with the way it was introduced
JED: Absolutely. Drew was there.
DD: I was there, yeah.
Capone: Yeah, you can't lie to that audience. They will turn on you.
JED: He heard that introduction and was like “Oh no, you can’t do that."
Capone: Harry lies all of the time, but it’s to keep things secret, it's different. And I had seen the trailer, I knew it wasn’t real. Most of those people at BNAT are ultra aware of every upcoming movie, so that may have been a factor.
DD: Totally and there’s two things too, there’s that and MGM strictly said, “You can do this, but you cannot do any Q&A after it. No interviews or anything after it.” And it was introduced as a doc and said we were going to do a Q&A after, which I had to just walk out.
Capone: So you weren’t intending on doing one?
DD: No, we were strictly forbidden not to do one.
JED: That was a bad one, too.
Capone: That was the rumor, that you fled.
DD: [laughs]Yeah, and before I left I talked to Tim League, I was like “Please go up and tell people that there’s an MGM restriction,” which made it sound bullshitty anyway I was very concerned about it looking like we were just walking away from the Q&A because of the reaction, but that just wasn’t the case, and I was with a guy from MGM. He was like, “You are not doing a Q&A. You are not going on record and saying anything about if this is real or not.” MGM had a little bit different view on how to release that movie than we did. They didn’t want to promote it as real, but they didn’t want to officially say that it wasn’t real and they knew a Q&A at Butt Numb-a-Thon, you would have to go on the record. So that was a bit unfortunate.
JED: That was a heartbreaker. But just so you know, that movie plays awesome in just about any other context.
Capone: For the last couple of years whenever the subject has come up, I’ve always said “It’s frustrating that I can’t watch it again,” because I really want to see it again, either with a different crowd or by myself and just see how I feel about it, because that negative vibe was infectious in that room.
JED: I think there are things like A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, I saw that in a little theater in New York for the first time and everyone was laughing like it was a comedy, and I found it so upsetting and it seemed so… It sort of has a comic tone, but it’s not a comedy. I found it so upsetting that I have never really gotten over liking that movie and I feel like there was some of that. THE POUGHKEEPSIE TAPES isn’t meant to be laughed at and I would guess that would hurt the vibe.
Capone: In terms of release, is it still in this weird MGM limbo at this point?
DD: Totally. It is, but I’ve got to say, when they send out their list of five movies that they are hoping to release in the next year, it’s one of them.
Capone: Every once in a while I see it on the schedule. I see it pop up.
DD: You know what, it played great at Tribeca, at all of those screenings, and people that watch it home alone seems to universally love it. MGM was going to release it in 2,300 theaters--we always thought that was maybe a little too big.
Capone: Like all documentaries.
DD: [laughs] Yeah. It’s the kind of movie that…. I think it’s the kind of movie that if people seek it out and find it and see it and know what they are going into watch, they love it, but if you were just to shove it onto everybody, it might not have the best reaction.
JED: It has to be something your friend gives you, not is jammed down your throat.
DD: It’s darker than a PARANORMAL or something like that.
JED: It’s not a feel good movie.
[Everyone Laughs]
Capone: I appreciate you being so candid about it.
DD: Oh, absolutely.
JED: I appreciate you bringing that up too.
Capone: So you did a really good job of explaining the Night Chronicles, and we were taking about the anthology nature of it. Can you talk a little bit about how it was explained to you, the vision of his production arm?
JED: It’d be a mid-size studio genre movies that he can oversee for the studios, so that they can go further and have more of an artistic angle than I think most studio environments allow and, yeah, not necessarily connected stories. I think his intent with these is to keep people guessing like the next one will be very different than this, and people will go “Oh wait, I thought it was this kind of thing.” I think he intends for it to be a confusing exactly what this moniker entails in a good way.
DD: Similar to "The Twilight Zone" and others different subgenres within the body of "The Twilight Zone."
JED: Right. The robot movie, the alien movie, time travel, etc…
DD: You know, there are very distinct subgenres within "The Twilight Zone" banner, and I think this one, if The Night Chronicles was to go on for 40 years I think you would start to see similar groupings.
Capone: Once he had given it over to you, how involved was Night on a day-to-day basis and into postproduction?
JED: He was hands on--not in an overbearing sense--but he was hands on. He was available, and one thing we always say is one of the nice things about coming on… There were moments in THE POUGHKEEPSIE TAPES, late in post when it was the two of us, and we had no one to ask. Who do you turn to? Who do you say, “What’s better, this or this?” There’s no one outside of our brains to discuss stuff with, and I remember at that time being like, “Oh, this is why it’s helpful to have studios,” because you have a lot of people who need something to work.
DD: Patrick Lussier came out as an executive producer very late in the project and it was just such a nice thing to be able to have someone smart that you trust that could help shed some light onto some things for us.
JED: So Night was helpful in that way. We could call him on his cell any time and just be like “Hey you know that shot from this and this? What do you think if we inverted that and switched the order of these scenes?” Whatever it might be, he was always available, and we discussed casting with him and locations and really everything. He has an almost endless amount of workability.
DD: His bandwidth is just massive.
JED: It’s crazy. He only works like 9 to 6 or something like that, or 8 to 6 and he works like a regular work day like normal people go and work. It's crazy. He’s everywhere at once and he would watch dailies and give us notes and thoughts.
DD: He was always paying super-close attention. There was never a stretch, even when he was busy on AIRBENDER where he just wasn’t aware of what was going on. He paid very close attention, but he’d never really give us the “You know, I would have done that differently.” It was usually more, if he thought we were going to have a problem with something, he’s got so much experience he could have some foresight on any potential danger spots that we might have, and so he’s really good about pointing those things out and making sure we were careful not to step in any potholes, but it was really in a very respectful way. You never know with a director like him producing for the first time and not directing, how that’s going to go, and he played the producer role really, really well.
Capone: Did you find that his sensibilities and yours were pretty close most of the time?
DD: Yes.
JED: Yeah.
Capone: There wasn’t too much going in opposite directions?
JED: Thankfully, we were all making the same movie. It’s nice, we sort of come from a similar school of thought filmmaking wise. We don’t like covering things with “Medium, medium, close, close.” We’ve done a lot of blocking; we like to rely more on blocking than coverage, and he’s very much of that mindset too, so any time we did a oner or something like that. On QUARANTINE the studio was like “Can’t we just run a second camera?” We were like “No.” “Can’t we just shoot everything at once?” It was nice working with someone who gets that aesthetic and is like “Nice oner.”
DD: He applauded that.
JED: Yeah, he applauded that, instead of getting nervous like “We won’t be able to cut that.” Aesthetically, we have similar ideologies, but it was nice. I think he felt a little more distance to this film than he does to his own films, and it allowed a different kind of working environment than he’s used to necessarily.
DD: Yeah, early in the process too when [screenwriter] Brian Nelson had been hire just before us and hadn’t started on the script yet, but we brought a lot of ideas and things that were, in addition to the treatment, we brought a lot of ideas to Brian that we wanted that Night really liked. So from a fairly early stage of that he saw this as a big collaboration between us and Brian and him, and it was never like “I really saw it this way.” By the end of the screenplay, it was all of our movie and he treated it as such.
Capone: I noticed one of the things about all of the films you have done it seems like it’s all very self contained, like there’s not a lot of out-in-the-world elements; it’s all in a very set space. Especially now that you have moved out of the documentary style, is it a great way to get your feet wet in a more traditional feature film without getting huge?
JED: Yeah, that’s true. Well said.
DD: Yeah.
JED: That’s sort of in our mantra “Let’s build slow and strong.” We did a $30,000 movie and then a half-a-million-dollar movie, and it’s like we have sort of built step by step, and shooting-wise, we love playing with perspective and subjectivity is like, for us… If we are doing a conversation here, don’t cut to the exterior of the convention center, because we are not experiencing that, we are experiencing this in here. Stay in here. It was fun in an elevator to really play with our QUARANTINE and POUGHKEEPSIE TAPES skills. We got to use those in the elevator and use something we've practiced a bunch and then out of it we got to “Let’s try a crane shot like this, and let’s do a long oner here.” We got to experiment with new stuff.
Capone: But you still have the elevator security camera as one of your vantage points, so you are still clinging to the past.
[Everyone Laughs]
JED: Totally.
DD: That’s true. Shooting that security camera stuff was probably the least fun thing in the entire movie. They never really scheduled it, so it was always like we were running out time, and that stuff wasn’t super fun, but yeah we had a lot of firsts on this one with cranes and rain rigs. It was a big step from QUARANTINE, but it was an appropriately big step, and it wasn’t a $200 million movie.
JED: And people like [cinematographer] Tak Fujimoto and Night, and dealing with more name personalities was an interesting new piece of the puzzle too that we hadn’t done before.
DD: And Universal proper and dealing with the heads at Universal rather than a division of a studio. It was a big step in a lot of ways.
Capone: Does having your release date pushed forward by so much give you a confidence boost. It’s so rare that a movie comes forward by this much especially, maybe a week, and I realize part of it was because they had an opening there that was freed up because of THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU. I’m sure there were other films that they could have slotted in there, but that’s got to be a real vote of confidence.
JED: The studio said as much, like “We think this is going to do well and we want to put it out now.” That, for us, was very exciting.
DD: Can’t help but be nervous about it, but it's exciting.
Capone: “It’s less than a month!” So every moment you are like, “Oh my God, we have got to fix this!”
JED: But they definitely liked the movie a lot when we finished it, and they have high hopes for it. I always felt like the February 2011 date might be a bit of a place holder and that maybe we were going to be like that utility player on the bench that you can put in for any position when there’s an opening. I kind of felt like maybe we would move into someone else’s slot at some point, but I never thought we could move up that far.
Capone: What rating is this going to have?
JED: PG-13.
Capone: You were saying people die in it; I didn't know how graphic things got.
JED: We had to wrestle for that rating. We had to reapply and reapply. It was tricky.
Capone: So are we talking about a different cut on the DVD then or are you sticking with this one?
JED: Potentially.
DD: Yeah, I mean we are talking frames, not scenes. We resubmitted it as many times as we had to, to lose as little as possible.
JED: Because you wear them out.
[Everyone Laughs]
JED: “How about now? No? Okay, how about now?”
Capone: It’s so arbitrary..
DD: It really does.
Capone: I know there's a story out there about a filmmaker submitting it, not getting the rating they wanted and then resubmitting the same cut and getting approval.
JED: I guarantee that’s happened.
DD: It’s like Hitchcock’s shower scene. He did that in the shower scene in PSYCHO, and they said, “No, this is too graphic.” He waited a week and sent it back, and they approved it.
JED: It depends on who you get, you know? It’s like anything; it just depends on who’s the one watching it.
DD: A bunch of nuns. [laughs]
Capone: Now one thing that I also didn’t bring up in the panel that is a little less controversial--you have said that people die in this film and let’s presume--and I don’t know if you can talk about this--but that maybe people in the elevator die, some of them, that would lead me to believe that that might even make the elevator even more claustrophobic by having parts of the elevator that you can’t even walk on anymore. Can you talk about that at all? Is that true?
[Everyone Laughs]
JED: We like to call that sort of our water line, in that as the movie goes on there’s less and less space to maneuver, so I don’t know how much I can say…
DD: I think that’s probably it…
Capone: I'm imagining six inches of just pure liquified gore at the bottom of the elevator, like a soup.
JED: The amount of floor space that you can and can’t use, like one down in an elevator this size cuts a lot of your floor space. Two down and you almost can’t walk. Plus it’s disgusting.
DD: Our starting point is a pretty small elevator as is, and we shot it in a way that it definitely feels like it continues to get smaller over the course of the movie.
Capone: Talk again about the sets. You said there were two elevator sets. How those were set up? One was more traditional for the security camera, but then the real one…
JED: The real one was fun getting to build an elevator. Because we storyboarded every thing, we knew what had to happen throughout the entire movie, and we analyzed it with our production designer Martin Wist who did CLOVERFIELD and SMOKIN' ACES. He’s doing SUPER 8 now, and it was things like we had Logan, we had to measure his hand and how high he reaches, and we built a ceiling exactly to that height, so he could exactly reach that spot. The railings were built for specific shots, and it was three panels per wall. We could remove the top or the bottom and keep the railing, so we could potentially shoot through it, which we never did, but we could do that for all nine panels of the elevator and the ceiling and the floor. There were all removable and the doors. There was a huge reset time, though.
DD: Yeah, it was a huge reset times, and we would stop, but we would only move what we had to for Tak. Everything else we wanted to keep the elevators as in tact as possible for every shot, and the actors wanted it as well as claustrophobic as it was, they wanted to keep it as real as they could, and we shot all of the elevator stuff consecutively, so the elevator became more and more havocked, and the actors could get more and more worn out over the course of shooting.
JED: We also went into the set and discussed with Martin like wood grain, like what can you do with wood grain to give people the willies, and usually wood grain is horizontal and we made it all vertical, so you don’t feel like you are standing on solid ground. Little subtle things like that, or the floor is that marble that looks veiny and sort of…
DD: Looks like an organism almost…
JED: Yeah, we tried to do little things like that to give the elevator really a creepy vibe.
DD: Yeah, we talked a lot about the materials we were using too sonically and what that would do. We really wanted to create a nice echo and have it remind you every time you would come into the elevator that you are in this tight confined space, and then the sound quality of the voices and the sound effects in there were a big part of it too.
Capone: I wondered if you had ever tempted to move the walls in.
DD: We were tempted to do that.
[Everyone Laughs]
DD: We talked about that. It’s actually a lot harder to do than you would think, yeah.
JED: Plus the ceiling is like 8,000 pounds, you start goofing… You can tell that the seams of the elevator started looking wrong. We wanted to make some of the corners less of a 90 degree angle and…
DD: That didn’t work.
[Everyone Laughs]
JED: That’s a great thought though.
Capone: That’s why I’m not a filmmaker.
DD: No, that’s brilliant. That’s a great idea.
Capone: What does the Devil means to you?
JED: For us, in pre-production, we would try to talk together about “What is the Devil?” and beyond the kind of Judeo-Christian nemesis of Jesus. We wanted to get away from all of that and the best we could come up with is “The Devil is the thing that divides people. The thing that turns people on each other.” I think lies and secrets and things like that, more than anything else, really drives that force.
DD: I think of the Devil as the deceiver or the separator.
Capone: The manipulator.
DD: Yeah, that’s what really attracted us to the idea of Satan and keeping it out of a real religious tone. That’s something that we can relate to in our lives, secrets that we have had or addictions that we have had that I hide from everyone I know, and I don’t call anyone back, because of that. That’s the work of the Devil, in my opinion. That’s something that keeps me from the people I love for no good reason.
Capone: And you have promised us a clear-cut, definitive, no-questions-remaining kind of ending?
DD: [laughs] No questions will remain on the table. It’s no kind of like “And the ending happened, and it doesn’t make any sense.” It’s logical and makes sense, I assure you.
Capone: This was Night’s ending? This is how he conceived it and sold it to you?
JED: Yes. A lot was added to the ending, but the twist is the same, but then there’s more layers to it.
DD: The order of events within the elevator is very much intact from the treatment and there’s… How do I say this without revealing?…. There are more connections outside of the elevator to what’s going on inside than existed in the treatment.
JED: But yes. Long answer to a short question.
Capone: I’m sure it’s something a lot of people are wondering.
JED: Early on we really went through this and said “Okay, logically if we were going to try and do this right.” Doing a supernatural thriller is a hard thing to do and to have it be logical, and so we said “Okay, let’s poke holes in all of the logic, anything we can kind find.”
DD: We took that approach from day one. “Let’s find anything that doesn’t add up,” and we would one by one try to eliminate any possible loophole. It was tough and Brian Nelson had an enormously difficult job even in getting his first draft done. It was the kind of thing that worked great in five pages, and when you expand it to a feature-length screenplay, there was just a lot of opportunity to start to ask questions of “Well, what about this?” It was a group effort and it was tricky.
Capone: Back to QUARANTINE for a second. When [REC] 2 came out last year, was there ever any discussion of trying to wrangle you guys in to do a sequel? Have you seen that film?
DD: I still haven’t seen [REC] 2.
Capone: It’s insane.
JED: Is it good?
Capone: I think it’s better actually, but it goes to places that the first one didn’t even touch, and yet it picks it up only about 15 minutes after the last one. It’s awesome what they have done, but it’s insane. It gets very religious.
DD: I can’t wait to see it. I know, I have a copy of it at home. It’s just one of those things where I just haven’t had a chance to watch it.
JED: I know they are doing QUARANTINE 2, but…
Capone: Oh are they?
DD: Yeah, but it’s not a remake of [REC] 2. We checked.
JED: We have nothing to do with it. We chose that other movie.
Capone: Gentlemen, I'm looking forward to the film.
JED: Thank you so much.
Capone: Thank you so much for hanging out and doing this. It was great of you to bring the footage. Great to meet you guys.
DD: We have been reading your reviews for so long.
Capone: Oh, thanks.
-- Capone
capone@aintitcool.com
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