A Nightmare on Elm Street by way of Chicago
A Nightmare on Elm Street by way of Chicago
Set visit report on watching Freddy Krueger's latest victims die.
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Staci Layne Wilson reporting
Q: Are we going to hear the Freddy song?
[Producer] Brad Fuller: In the movie? Yeah, of course. Do you want me to sing it for you?
One, two, Freddy's coming for you.
Three, four, better lock your door.
Five, six, grab your crucifix.
Seven, eight, gonna stay up late.
Nine, ten, never sleep again...
Three, four, better lock your door.
Five, six, grab your crucifix.
Seven, eight, gonna stay up late.
Nine, ten, never sleep again...
The city of Chicago, IL., was the setting for the Platinum Dunes original film directed by David S. Goyer, Unborn, which was filmed in 2008. The driving forces behind the production company, Andrew Form and Brad Fuller, enjoyed working in the old American city so much, they endeavored to be sure their next film — the A Nightmare on Elm Street 2010 remake — would also be shot there.
This is somewhat of a change, as most of the company's slick remakes (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hitcher) were shot in Texas. It's also the first time we have been on the set of a Platinum Dunes movie during the day; usually, press is invited out to all-nighters. Today, we are on a soundstage, which has part of the set of Nancy's house and also some of Freddy Krueger's lair.
The story is basically the same as the 1984 classic horror, which was helmed by Wes Craven. It tells the story of a child molester who was killed by the vigilante neighborhood parents, and whose soul haunts the dreams of their kids. Unlike most ghosts, Freddy Krueger can actually kill people in their sleep. This time around, video music director Samuel Bayer makes his debut, directing Watchmen's Jackie Earle Haley as the murderous monster and Rooney Mara as his mortal nemesis, Nancy Thompson. While we are reminded that the stories and characters became more and more comedic over the years, the Platinum Dunes boys want to stress that there will be nothing funny in their version. They want to see Freddy be scary again.
Taking into account their surroundings, production designer Patrick Lumb was inspired by some other horror films shot in Chicago (especially Blind Terror starring Nastassja Kinski, but also Goyer's Unborn), and worked to make his sets as dark and dense as the city itself. He told us that Freddy's lair, situated underneath Nancy's school, will have stairs, pipes, steam and grit — but it will be a lot smaller and more self-contained than the boiler room from the 1984 film.
The day we were on the set, between interviewing the stars, director and producers, we saw a few scenes being shot. We saw Nancy trying to wake Quentin (Kyle Gallner) from a nightmare, then Quentin's head literally unzipping and showing Freddy's face popping out from the folds of the boy's flesh. This was all done with practical effects, and it looked really stunning in person. We're not sure if this scene will be augmented by CGI, but it looked good as-is… after a few bumpy starts with the zipper itself.
We also saw Freddy slash a man's throat from behind in one quick, very bloody, cut. (And then saw the bloodied actor laughing it up on his cell phone outside, a few minutes later. In fact, it kind of a surreal day; it was also right about the time we were talking to fictional "child murderer" and gloved one Freddy Krueger, that accused "child molester" and gloved one Michael Jackson was found dead.)
I've been lucky enough to hold in my hands the very first Freddy finger-knife weapon from the 1984 film, but I also got to touch the glove from the new reboot. This time around, it's designed by William Dambra. Handing it over, he confirms that it could, indeed, do some damage in the real world. "They aren't sharpened, but they are very pointy, so… We actually made another one, a set out of rubber in case he were ever really close to the actors faces. We also made one out of aluminum, so it's a lot lighter, but for the most part we've gone with the real glove. It's all copper. We didn't paint it, we didn't do anything. The heat transfer made the different colors, on the copper, when it heated up, it's got that purple tint to it. It came out really well." It is, as deadly weapons go, quite lovely.
The gloves are iconic, of course, but one of the cooler new props I liked was the Kyle Gallner zipper-head used in one of the nightmare sequences. Gallner can only laugh at it. "It's kind of hilarious. Like, when are you ever gonna see it? You're never gonna see a giant version of your own head except on a movie set, so…" We discussed the connections; in this version, the head unzips and Jackie Earl Haley as Freddy emerges, but somebody says they remember Robert Englund doing something like that in the TV movie V. "Yeah, and I think Sam did it in a music video too," Gallner adds. "I think someone unzipped themselves in one of Sam's videos and that's where he got the idea."
In this version of the film, it would seem that Freddy goes after Nancy's boyfriend with a different kind of vengeance. "It's 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 he doesn't incorporate my own personal issues with his vendetta."
Not that the original version of events will have much bearing here. Aside from the producers, there don't seem to be many Wes Craven fans on set. Mara Rooney says she has not seen A Nightmare on Elm Street since she was 12, and Gallner admits, "I have not seen it all the way through. I've never seen it beginning to end. I've seen bits." The director of the movie isn't a fan, either. "No, I wasn't really a fan of the original series," Bayer says, just prior to the throat-slitting scene being shot. "I thought they were, uh -- I thought the ideas in the first one were great and then 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 and -- OK, I'm a fan of the idea of Freddy, but not the movies."
When asked why, specifically, the director replies, "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.
"[For my version] I've looked at everything from German expressionistic film 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."
When it comes down to the visuals, he says, "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 like, 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."
Aside from the zippered heads and dream sequences, the producers did go for realism in some of the other details. "We had to change the make-up," Fuller says, "We had to change everything. We wanted Freddy to look like a real burn victim, and it started there."
"We always loved the character," Fuller adds. "We wanted it for a long time. We pursued it for a really long time. Our company, for the most part, has been making these remakes, and we find ourselves always attracted to a very charismatic antagonist; charismatic either in their weaponry or their personality. I feel like Freddy is the jewel in the ground, really. Personally growing up, I loved those movies, and Michael [Bay] loved those movies, and Drew loved those movies."
In hearing so much about the realism striven for, I ask about the dreams and nightmares, because personally, that's what's always interested me in the series — not Freddy's back-story so much, or the personal issues the kids are having. Fuller says, "They are a big part of our film. That's what drew us to the project in the first place. To us, it's one of the best concepts for a horror film we've heard. You fall asleep, you die. All you have to do is stay awake. All the stuff you can do with your characters while they're trying to stay awake and while they're dozing off, and how you can blend the lines of reality and dream, and the audience never knowing until it's too late if you're in a nightmare or not.
"That's what we talked with Sam about early is doing those transitions and how important those transitions are which are done very well in the original Nightmare when you're not sure if someone fell asleep. Did they fall asleep? No they're still awake. Tricking the audience – it's a dream; no it's not a dream, and then taking them all the way through until you're truly in the nightmare, and it's way too late, and he's right there. Then bringing Sam in to elevate those nightmares with his visual style to a level that we never thought they could get to and they have. So yes, the nightmares are completely elevated in the movie."
Even at that point, while the movie was still shooting, naysayers were all over the internet saying the movie is going to suck. I ask the producers, who've been through this many times now, if they still pay attention.
Fuller: Every time you get your ass handed to you on-line, it hurts. It does. We read it. We pay attention to it, but on some level it's very easy Monday morning to quarterback all these films. I can tell you that when we did the kills on Friday the 13th, we didn't think, “That kill's okay.” We strived to do the best that we could within the confines of the budget and the date and all the resources that were available to us. This movie is the same thing. We're just doing the best possible thing that we can and trying to be as creative as we can. I guarantee that the audiences will rip us apart no matter what, so we're just putting our heads down and working as hard as we can.
Wilson: You talk about getting ripped up a lot, but some people have good things to say.
Fuller: Yes, but we ignore those.
[Laughter]
Wilson: What have you found that people do like about your films, and what encourages you to keep going?
Form: Nothing.
Fuller: Nothing!
[Laughter]
Fuller: You don't get in the position we're in because you love the accolades, honestly. It's great and we're lucky that we continue to make movies, and that in itself is good enough praise for us. The fact that the studios are giving us these incredible titles and letting us run with them…beyond that we're in the business of pleasing people.
Form: We sit in the movie theaters on opening night, and we watch people watch the movie. We watch people jump out of their seats. We'll use Friday the 13th as an example. We watched that in many theaters around Los Angeles that opening weekend. We watched people laugh and scream. We heard them come out of the theaters when the movie was over and that they had a great time. That makes you feel really good.
Wilson: Yeah, they'll laugh in the theater, but the people who do have something positive to say don't usually put that online. You don't see that.
Form: No, you really don't. It's amazing. The comments always skew very negatively.
Fuller: By the way, I'm not sitting here and being a victim about it. Michael's having a horrible time right now on Transformers 2, and we read other comments. We love horror movies, and we read what other people write about it. This is something that is part of the system now. This is not something that is specific to Platinum Dunes. The only movie that got away without any negative press was Drag Me to Hell. Every other horror movie gets it, and it's part of what we do. We're just not immune to the pain. We pay attention.
I think at the end of the day, I heard this from Jerry Bruckheimer and Drew worked for Jerry for four years, so he heard it a lot more than I did, but when I was talking to Jerry about what you were saying, Jerry says, 'At the end of the day, I go with my gut. I just go with my gut.' When you talk to Michael, who spent a lot of time with Jerry, Michael just says, 'I go with my gut.' These guys who are the guys that we look up to and who have done what we want to do, I think that Drew and I have this great way of working where we talk back and forth and we go with our gut.
Whatever the fans tell you what they want, they're still not going to be satisfied. There's going to be a contingency that's not going to be satisfied. You can't play to that exclusively, 'cause it feels like they're insatiable now. We try to do our research, and when I say 'research,' we watch all the films, try to discern what works for us in it, and try to bring that to it. Inevitably, some of it works and some of it doesn't. I can't speak for what other producers do. The internet has really changed the game, and you have to decide as a producer what you're roll is going to be with that group of people.
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While the famous glove has been retooled, so too has Freddy's face. Andrew Clement, the man in front of the makeup, says he had lots of specific ideas on how to change things up. "I started by off sending out different designs -- there are such a wide range of things you can do to somebody if they're burned: is it a healed burn, a fresh burn, is it dry and flaky and ashy, that sort of thing or – so, you know, I just started doing all different kinds of things based on all kinds of different references and I also posted up on a bulletin board pictures of every Freddy they'd ever done just to get a sense of the arc of Freddy and what people would accept as Freddy. Just to see how much leeway I really had. You know it's pretty broad. You start from the first film and then you go into how the second, third, fourth seem to look, you know, then it jumps into something really stylized, the old man, the really stylized one and everybody really accepted that as Freddy, so there's room to play."
As ever, conversation turns back to the zipper-head. "The zipper head of Quentin," Clement laughs, gesturing to the creepy countenance. "We're going to shoot that later today and Freddy's actually going to be inside. It's a riff on something that Sam had done previously for a Rolling Stones video that he really liked. We actually had to scale this whole thing up so Freddy could fit inside. It's working out great."
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[End]
Related Stories:
- Stay tuned for our complete interviews with Jackie Earle Haley and Rooney Mara.
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| 04-12-2010 by jam | discuss |