by Staci Layne Wilson

Mirror, mirror on the wall — who's the scariest of them all? If French fright-sensation filmmaker Alexandre Aja has anything to say about it, it will be his upcoming horror movie starring Kiefer Sutherland, aptly entitled Mirrors.

Mirrors are inherently compelling — from the reflecting pools of old, to the great halls of Versailles, to the warped carnival funhouse, to watching Robert De Niro's self-reflective gunplay in Taxi Driver for the hundredth time. Mirrors are everywhere you look. But up till now, they really haven't been exploited to their full killer potential in an all-out horror movie.

Alex Aja, and his writing and producing partner Gregory Levasseur, are putting the final polish on Mirrors at Paramount Studios (the movie's got an August 15, 2008 release date scheduled), and Horror.com was invited to the editing bay to watch some scenes and chat with the scare merchants. (Horror.com has been avidly following their careers since 2003, when Haute Tension was released in the U.S.)

Check out our previous features here:

High Tension Exclusive Interview

High Tension Movie Review

The Hills Have Eyes Movie Review

The Hills Have Eyes Exclusive Interview

The Hills Have Eyes Video Interviews

P2 Movie Review and P2 Video Interviews

In one of the early Mirrors scenes we got to see, there's an unidentified man talking to himself in a looking glass, and he's apologizing profusely. He's wearing a rumpled guard's uniform and he looks quite distressed. We discover that he's a night watchman in the now-abandoned but still-swanky Mayflower Dept. Store in New York.

As the tearful man implores his own face, his reflected self begins to move independently and the guard finds himself forced to commit an abhorrent act that ends in a wash of blood. The next guard on the job, played by Kiefer Sutherland, has no idea what he's in for — but as soon as finds out, he's determined to get to the bottom of the deadly mystery, even if it kills him.

Alexandre Aja:  So, we are finishing the movie. Everything is completed, [but] the sound, the music, the timing, [and] the visual effects are really, really far from being finished, but we are looking at the picture this way.

Staci Layne Wilson/Horror.com:  What is the MPAA fighting you on?

Aja:  Violence. Graphic. 

Q:  Are you trying to get a PG-13?

Aja:  No.

Q:  So you are fighting to get an R?

Gregory Levasseur:    Yeah.  Every time it is a NC-17, but we are trying to get the R.  No, we just won the R.  Everything you are going to see is R and it is a pretty strong R.

Aja:  So, yeah, let's watch a clip now.  I was thinking of discussing which scene we should show. I was thinking the beginning of the movie, but not only the beginning, but a little bit more so you can see a little bit of Kiefer and the presentation of his character.  Then we can discuss a little bit.  Then I don't know exactly, but there are two other things I am thinking about.

Q:  Can you set up the movie, the premise?

Aja:  You're going to see the movie at the beginning, and then I can give you a little bit more detail, but it is better to just discover the thing as it is.  So, yeah, just to give you an idea of the main location - not all [of] the movie is just staying here or coming back here, but that is the center.  A little bit of the plot of the movie is that [the] guy used to be a detective, and he had almost lost everything.  He is taking that night job as a security guard, [a] watchman in New York.  That is really the premise of the movie.

Q:  That cinematography looks like it's going to be a great visual film.

Aja:  Yes. I am not supposed to say that.  The movie is completely believable because we saw some locations that were completely beautiful [and] the space was huge and stuff.

Q:  Actually, the first time that you and I ever talked was on the phone when you were scouting locations for The Hills Have Eyes a long time ago for horror.com.  Now, when you look for the space where you are going to be shooting, what do you take into account?  Was this a set or was it partially a real location?

Aja:  We are really attracted to the location.  When we were making The Hills Have Eyes, we were scouting all around the world to find the perfect desert and the perfect hills.  When we were writing the script for Mirrors, we were looking for that department store, and we remembered that when we were making Haute Tension in Bucharest, we visited some very huge underground buildings that Charles Cisco never finished because he died because the revolution came before he could finish the building.  He was restructuring the whole city as a megalomaniac.  This building that we took over in Bucharest was supposed to be the Academy of Science, and that kind of set you cannot build on the stage because it is too big.  So we really took the building, and we really built everything inside to create that burned down department store.  Joseph, our production designer, did an amazing job of that.  That is what really attracted us to Eastern Europe to do longer scenes.  And then we did all the outside stuff in New York.  When we were looking in New York, we found that building on Sixth Avenue that was exactly the same size as the building that we have been [in], so it was really easy to match and bring a building from Bucharest into the Avenue in New York.  That was really the idea and finding the right location.  We were just trying to find a place by the water.  It was not only on the water, but it was like a location, and we were looking at a lot of different lakes and a lot of different scenery and we just found the perfect one.

Q:  You guys seem to do an amazing job with P2, I mean, getting the parking garage. It has character, it really has.

Aja:  And you know that is a great example. I mean, I feel like I'm a casting director. There were pictures of seventy five different parking lots.

Q:  And you would never think that they could be that diverse, but they are.

Aja:  Yeah, yeah, completely different. I mean, like each of them are their own style, and the one that was not obvious at the beginning. Remember when Frank wanted to find a place and we could not disappoint him? It was very big, but as we transformed the place we changed the level.  We played with the color and everything, and it became something which I think is good.  I cannot even imagine the movie in another parking garage now.

Q:  The shot that you had in the beginning with all the mirrors, and the face reflected… this sounds like a silly question I guess, but what were the challenges of filming when you have all of these mirrors and not reflecting the camera.  Was that a trial?

Aja:  That is another element that is coming back in every movie.  What is really cool, I mean, like as an audience member we are agreeing to see.  We produce movies because we are thinking, “Oh yeah, we would love to see a movie beginning with me because we are all us,” and it is a very universal plot that we can reveal and play with. It's really fun and exciting and everything was great.  [When] we were waiting to do scenes with Emile, it was so scary and creepy on paper, but then we realized [it’s] okay, so that is going to be used in the final shoot. It was very wide and interesting to see yourself in the center half of the movie. It was the same in The Hills Have Eyes shooting. That was going to be so great, and then when you find yourself there, it is like [a] hundred and twenty degrees every day [with] sensitive film.  It is not enough for us, and we realized that the next [day] was exactly the same.  It was so cool on paper, and then it is going to be another nightmare.

Q:  But you are building character now for the Mirrors. Did you guys have any sort of inclination to do weird things like fun house mirrors and some weird creepy reflections or are they all pretty standard?

Aja:  No.  The concept of why we didn't [do that in] Hills Have Eyes was basically we were done with Hills, and we were thinking about trying to do something new in horror.  We did Haute Tension, and we had just finished The Hills Have Eyes, and we were starting to shoot a P2, and the two movies were very realistic.  I mean, radioactive dwellers [in] New Mexico is still very realistic and very survival, not slasher, but you know that kind of very real violence [is] in a position to all the supernatural in the movie.  [We] were trying to look for a subject, something that can give us the opportunity of exploring the other side of the jungle. When New Regency sent us that first draft, [it] was really bad. I mean, not really bad, but not very interesting.  It was really a bad story [and] a bad character.  Everything [was] not very interesting, but there was that concept of the mirrors.  We were discussing it, and we were realizing that it's true. I mean, any time of day, many women are into themselves. You know, every day it's impossible to count. I mean, not only the mirror, but the mirror of glass on the buildings. Everywhere there are mirrors.  Since the beginning of time with the water [it has been] like a big history.   When thinking about it, we all have a different relationship with the mirror. You know, some people are obsessed by the reflections and other people cannot stand their reflection.  And inside that obsession, that project of the Mirrors, there is always that kind of fear like why are you looking at yourself in the mirrors if it's not [to] sometimes check that you still are yourself?  You know, like you're not something else.  And from that simple idea we realized that we had something very universal to reveal, to do, and to give love for the fear and create a really creepy and scary movie. That is what I think makes a really good scary movie is when you reveal something that is already in the heads of the people. You know, like from Joe's swimming to P2, we are thinking [about] that underground parking garage.  Even though people have a sort of relation with the parking garage, and we are making a movie about that, and I think it is great because when you see that kind of film, you go back home and you keep some of the fear with you.  It is following you all over the place and the challenge of that movie was to really make a movie that was going to change the way of watching yourself in the mirrors.  To come back to the fun house question, we don't have that kind of gag where it’s distortion and everything, but we have some really creepy other effect in the Mirrors. 

Q:  I read somwhere that you were talking about why this movie is like The Shining.  How different is this [movie] from the remake?

Aja:  Okay, so let's start with the remake if you don’t mind.  Basically, when we read the script, we knew about our career move.  We rejected the script and then we heard about the remake. We asked to see the movie, and the movie was interesting for the opening scene and that was it.  Basically, we didn't like the story.  We didn't like the character.  We didn't like the middle of the movie.  We didn't like the story in the movie.  Really, anything in the movie except for the opening scene and another scene in the movie, [we did not like].  So, we went to New Regency, and we [said to] them, “You know we are really interested in making a moving [with] interesting effects because this is a great subject that nobody had done in the movies besides the Korean director before.”  We wanted to give another whole story. We wanted to start from page one and do an original script based on the Korean movie.

Levasseur:  But it is on the concept of the current movie that is based on the movie story.

Aja:  Like The Hills Have Eyes is a real remake. I know what a remake is. It's like we take the same character and just add the background information about where they are coming from, and that's it. [Not] the same story [or] the same structure.

Q:    Almost like a sequel in some ways.

Aja:   For The Hills?

Q:   For the Korean movie.

Levasseur:  No, it's not even the same. It is really taking just the idea of the Mirrors. I mean, basically right now we can go back in time and give ourselves the idea of the making of Mirrors, but we don't even need it.  It was like them previously coming to us and saying, “Hey guys, what about making a movie like Mirrors so that it might be the same, but it's not a remake?”  You know, it's not American.

Aja:  I read a lot of stories from the Internet and from magazines about [how] it's not a remake. It's an Asian foreign movie, but it is not completely.  Also the difference [for] me as a moviegoer [is that] I'm kind of fed up with all these Asian remakes which are PG-13 [and] very soft-core and not really scary and dramatic. In this movie, [it] is completely different, and that's where we make the second question about the The Shining. It’s not The Shining, of course. The Shining is, of course for me, the best movie ever made, but it's more in the vein of The Shining because it is like dealing with a real character and the real story with almost some kind of drama between the characters, but also with the fear that they will punch you in the face. It was like maybe huge and scary. I mean, I could show you another scene if you want which is a bit later in the movie where he is making a sealed bomb, so it is a little bit later.

Levasseur:  So we are getting to his family.

Q:  And more good stuff from KNB FX Studios.

Aja:  It [is] just one after his kid [is] burning.  There were no flames in the kitchen. [There will be] blasting, [and there] will be smoking; more like burning from inside, really, and that's what we're talking about [when] I mean [it’s] like in the vein of The Shining.  It's kind of not like a soft-core or like a remake.

Q:  There is also an excellent novel by Robert McCammon called Mirror.  I don't know if you're familiar with that.

Aja:  With Hollywood, with the boy actor…that's a great one.

Q:  Yeah, there have been some really great stories involving mirrors, but how do you kind of put your own twist on it?  What kind of scares you two about Mirrors and how did you incorporate that?

Aja:  [We wanted to] show something that you are not supposed to see, and one of the things in the Korean movie that we needed to conceptualize, which was like in the first opening scene, [was] that guy’s reflection being independent; making him do stuff that he [does not like] doing in real life, a kind of Freddy Krueger killing you in your dreams.  I think the most scary thing that we can think [of is that] we have a scene and previews for [the] movie where he is in the department store and he sees one door opening, like squeaking open, and effectively staring at the door and it's still closed, and he's looking back at the door, and he keeps on opening the door, but [the door] is still closed on the other side.  That is [what’s] really powerful in The Mirrors. I remember when we were thinking about that scene, I remember being really scared like, “Wow, this is going to be really scary.” You can feel the concept.

Q:  One thing that I was wondering about earlier was the poor prop person that would have to break all of those mirrors.  Does he feel very unlucky now?

Laughter

Levasseur:  We are all completely cursed.

Aja:  At one point in the movie, all of the mirrors are going to explode.

Q:  Did you use visual tricks going back and forth between what is in the mirror and what is not in real life?

Aja:  Basically, the idea in the movie was to stay close to a very practical kind of effect because it's really the kind of script and movie that could have been made in the seventies with just singing a lot and finding a great optical solution. It's not a movie that required a lot of CG. Even if you have a lot of CG for later in the movie, we pulled the mirrors status which is realistic.

Levasseur:  And it's not only that it seems that you just have CG to go to credit things…You have like a good or great actor, you know, and [then you] have great actors…

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Staci Layne Wilson reporting

Read Part 2