Exclusive Interview with Horror Screenwriters Jace Anderson & Adam Gierasch

Staci Layne Wilson/Horror.com: How did it all come about, you guys working with Dario Argento?

Jace Anderson: It's sort of one of those like wonderful right place, right time sort of things, actually. He was in town editing his Masters of Horror episode and a good friend of ours is the assistant editor there. So he said "Come on down and you can meet Dario". So we went down hoping to say hello and shake his hand and maybe get an autograph. Then we went in, he was so wonderful and sat down and started talking to us. He's talking about upcoming projects and how he's going to do The Third Mother and how he's going to work with a collaborator. And we're like "Oh great!" thinking he already had one and there was no way we were going to pitch ourselves. Then he mentioned again and then asked us to bring in the scripts so I guess our friend had mentioned that we were writers.

We walked out of there going "What the heck? Did that just happen?" So we brought him a script the next day and then a couple of weeks later we sent him an email just saying "Hey how's it going. Don't know if you had a chance to read that," and we didn't hear back. So probably mid-September (I think we met him in August, July or August) Adam says "You know what, we'll just send Dario an email. Probably nothing will come from it but let's just send one". The whole way along we're just so thrilled that he's reading our script, that is enough, that's a great honor. So we sent another email and the next thing we know the email is like his ideas and we start working on the treatment and we go back and forth for a couple of weeks until we had worked out like a 28 page treatment.

Then his brother Claudio who is also his producer called us up and said "Could you guys come to Rome to work on the scripts?" We didn't have to think very hard about what the answer to that question was. Then a week later we were, after scrambling to get our passports renewed, we were on a plane to Rome. We got back and we were still sort of like "Wow, did that happen?"

Adam Giersch: And you can feel free to edit that answer now.

[laughter]

Staci: What's he like to work with? Everyone across the board says he's so sweet and he's so nice and he's so lovely but that his English is a bit broken. So, does he put his ideas across pretty well?

Adam: Yeah. We could understand him and he would also act scenes out for us. We could understand him just fine. I mean he doesn't really speak English a lot better than we speak Italian [chuckling]. But no, I mean really, he would come over and he'd act stuff out. Like he did a great impersonation of the chimpanzee from Phenomenon you know and hopped around the room. Working together was pretty easy. His imagination is just out there. He comes up with stuff and you're just like "Whoa! My God. What are you smoking, Dario?" I mean he's really so insanely creative.

Staci: And this is to be the final film of the Three Mothers trilogy?

Adam: It is.

Staci: So how does it tie in with Suspiria and Inferno?

Adam: It ties in...we can't say quite how. But we will say that it ties in very clearly.

Staci: So even though its totally different, fans will be able to tell that its part of a trilogy?

Adam: Definitely.

Jace: Dario's main objective is that he doesn't want to remake Suspiria. This is 25 years later and he wants to have this be a great scary film but he doesn't want to just do what he did before. But it definitely, you'll be able to see the links to the other movies.

Adam: And there's plot points that link things together too.

Staci: What was the process of working in Rome? Did you work in his production office, or home, or a hotel?

Adam: He rented us this, him and Claudio, they rented us this great apartment near Via Veneto which is the street where La Dolce Vita was shot. It was really cool, a little 2-story apartment. We worked there the whole time. It was a neat apartment because it was where Fellini stayed and where Dario stays when he writes movies too.

Jace: Because we're co-writing this after we left and it got translated to Italian he actually moved from his house into the apartment we had been in. He likes to seclude himself when he's writing so he moved into that same apartment to do his pass at the draft, which we'll probably be getting the translation of next week.

Staci: With such a historical place to work in, do you feel like it might have absorbed some of those souls who went before you?

Adam: I hope so. I mean, it's often hard to tell when you're just working away but it was certainly...we only got one tv station in English and that was BBC World News. That was pretty dull after a while and so really we got up in the morning, we went down to the little cafe, we had ourselves a shot of espresso, came back up to the apartment and wrote for like 4 hours, went and got lunch, had some more espresso, went back to the apartment and wrote for another 4 hours and then went out for dinner. I mean it was really like quite sort of the European bohemian kind lifestyle. The phone obviously didn't ring at all. There were just no distractions in terms of television, I read a lot of books.

It was great. I like settings like that because you're forced to create. You would just sit there and look out the window onto this ancient Roman wall, you know the ancient Roman city wall, which is huge. Everything around you is so old and since the movie is set in Rome, we would go check out places. Dario would take us to the catacombs.

Jace: One of the reasons for bringing us to Rome he really wanted us to absorb the feel because the movie will take place there. It definitely helped to be there and see it and go into the catacombs.

Staci: Can't you throw me a bone? Come on guys…

Jace: I think we can say catacombs.

Adam: Yeah say catacombs.

Staci: Ok, that's my bone, huh?

Adam: I'll say there's catacombs and uh...I'm not going to say anything else. I'm not getting in trouble. It was too good a job.

Staci: Fair enough.

[laughter]

Staci: Now it sounds like you guys are spoiled. You're gonna be wanting to be jetted off to all kinds of wonderful European locations.

Adam: I did a movie in Bulgaria a few years ago. That we wrote and actually acted in too. I've done the whole romantic European thing before but this was just... this was really special.

Jace: There definitely were a couple of days where we were like "Ooh, that's right. We're here to work. We can't go running around. We've got to write." And it was funny because Dario would come over to meet with us and then go "You're my slaves! Write! Write!" We're like, "Ok!"

Staci: What else are you guys working on? I know that you are big collaborators with Tobe Hooper.

Jace: We don't have anything going with him at the moment.

Staci: But Mortuary is not out yet, right?

Jace: No but I think... I don't know what the details are about its release. But other than that, let's see, we're hoping to line up a few jobs for this year... knock on wood. We don't have anything definite yet.

Adam: There's actually a really cool one that we've already written that unfortunately we cannot talk about because it's a major studio gig and they threatened us so...

Staci: I know they will threaten people with bodily harm.

[laughter]

Adam: It sort of sucks because I can't wait to tell people about it because it's a really cool movie and I think people will be excited about it.

Staci: What are your long-term career goals? What would you like to see yourselves doing 10 years from now?

Adam: I'm going to work my hardest to try to become a movie director. That's definitely something that I'm very interested in pursuing. I look at peoples' careers like David Cronenberg and even the way say like John Water's career is and stuff. I wouldn't want to make movies like him, but I admire people who do these odd, idiosyncratic independent films. You know, whether it be Dario Argento or David Cronenberg or Jim Jarmusch, I would love to be able to just write and direct like one little independent low-budget movie every other year.

One thing as a writer is that a lot of the time the jobs you get are assignments. You know, people give them to you, they tell you what to write and stuff like that. I would definitely be very interested in pursuing my own vision. I don't mean that to sound pretentious but I feel like there are some dark twisted psycho-sexual stories that I would very much like to tell as a director.

Staci: Sounds… interesting. And Jace, would you be writing the scripts?

Jace: Oh I love the idea of writing scripts for Adam to direct. To really go into those dark twisted places. I have no aspirations to direct, I'm very happy writing. I'm very excited to just keep on writing with Adam and see him direct some of the stuff we write.

Staci: I know that you're also not interested in doing those fun little cameos like Adam does in the movies. So I have to ask Adam... are you going to be in the Dario movie, do you think?

Adam: I haven't asked him yet.

Staci: Ah, you've got to ask him.

Adam: I would love to be, but I haven't had the courage to ask him.

Staci: You should get Tobe to put a bug in his ear on that.

Adam: I enjoyed acting in Toolbox Murders a lot. I was less fond of acting in Mortuary. Really way too much makeup. [see photo.] It was horrible, it took like 6 hours to put on.

Staci: Oh, my goodness. Six hours?

Adam: It was like torture. It really was. That would be my idea of hell.

Staci: Does that kind of put you in a different perspective, though? Say you're writing a scene for some creature who's going to need a lot of prosthetics... are you feeling sorry for the guy who's going to have to wear that?

Adam: Fuck no. Absofuckinglutely not. As long as it's not me, let him suffer. One thing I've been thinking a lot recently about, you know we've really sort of grown up and come into our own writing with getting movies made the whole time. Which has had its pros and cons. We were very excited that we got to have these low budget pictures made in the beginning, but its also very interesting ... now we look back and we're like "Oh my god we weren't that great back then".

Staci: And it's there forever for everyone to see!

Adam: Exactly. The film is permanent. And thinking about that, I feel it's really time now to try to spread our wings and fly and show people what we really can do. I realize some stuff we've done has been good and some stuff has been not so good. I try to be honest about it and give the directors and producers what they're looking for. Sometimes it works out well and sometimes it hasn't worked out quite as good.

The most important thing for me is to be able to grow and get better and be able to A) keep giving our employers what they're looking for, and B) even more importantly it's really now time for us to start writing stuff that's ultra-exciting for us: our own stories. We've got a couple of good ones that we're working on so hopefully, knock on wood, these will come out. And they're quite different than what we've done before, much darker and a lot more sex.

Staci: So you keep saying! [laughs] I take it you're not looking to get out of horror? So many people think of horror just as a stepping stone.

Adam: No, no. These are horror movies. Just weird, dark, sexual, twisted horror movies.

Staci: But will there be any sexual content?

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