Scott Speedman & Bryan Bertino - Exclusive
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Actor Scott Speedman is famous amongst horror hounds for playing a lovelorn werewolf in the Underworld film series, but "I really don't consider the Underworld movies to be horror," he told me recently, while doing interviews for his upcoming rated-R fright flick, The Strangers.
Scott wanted to play something more realistic, and scary. "What attracted me to The Strangers is, it really is horror. It's scary. When I was reading the script, it felt so real. And Bryan [Bertino, the director] just has such a feel for it. I can't really describe it, but when I was reading the script, I was like, 'I've got to do this movie'. It felt so strange; it felt so weird. I did feel like it was happening [as I was reading], and these were real people."
Bertino agrees that realism is paramount to the story and it's predicated on the fact that the audience must believe these are regular people being terrorized during a brutal home-invasion, and that such a thing could happen to any of us.
Liv Tyler, who was attached to the project first, plays Kristen, the longtime girlfriend of Speedman's character, James. Speedman feels he genuinely understood the role, but the director wasn't entirely convinced. "I had to audition for it," Scott laughs. "A couple of times!"
Bertino admits he did need a little push. "Scott is one of those actors, who, people threw his name around, and I kind of knew him through [the TV series] Felicity, so I had an idea about him. And then I started renting all of his movies, and I sat down with him a couple of times and realized, the thing that's great about him is that he is just a really down to earth guy.
"I was very lucky with both of them," says the first-time writer/director of his stars. "They're both well-known actors, but they really got down with these very difficult roles and never complained. They were able to capture the spirit of this couple. Just regular Americans." (Make that extraordinarily fit, impossibly good-looking regular Americans!)
To me, the movie does seem like it would be pretty grueling to make. A lot of the action includes running, hiding, shooting, looking for weapons, and being shot and stabbed. So I asked Scott if he knew exactly what he'd be signing up for. "[When I read the script] I just wanted to know how it was going to work, so that was a challenge to get to that level of anxiety and fear. I wanted to see if I could get there, and make it believable. I was curious about how that would affect the story: what we were going through [as actors]."
It never hurts when a scary movie is sensationally touted as being "Based on a True Story!", so I ask Bryan for the lowdown on that one. "It was a combination of different things," he reveals, "One being that when I was a kid, I was in the house in the middle of nowhere, much like The Strangers house, and when my parents were away I was there alone with my younger sister. [A strange man] was knocking on each door, you know, to see if anybody was home, and if not, we later found out, he'd rob it. And so my little sister opened the door. I was always just really struck by how that random nature of things can affect people. Like what if my little sister had gotten to the door just a little bit later [and didn't answer]? What would have happened? What would we, as children, have been involved in?"
In addition to that being left alone in a big, isolated house, there were some other stellar parenting decisions at work behind the inspiration of The Strangers. "Right around that time, my dad's summer reading was the book Helter Skelter — and he gave it to me to read. I was about 12. So I had that in my mind, too. What struck me was, that no matter how much we learned about the killers after the events, it did nothing to change the fact that the victims were dead. Nothing."
When it comes to playing the victim, it doesn't hurt to have someone as talented as Liv by one's side, Scott says. "Liv is a really special actress. So when I knew I'd be working with her, I knew we were going to work well together. She really is special; if it had been someone else, someone I didn't believe in, I would not have done the movie."
Both Kristen and James go through a living hell as the relentless movie's series of brutal events unfold. I wondered which scene might have given Scott more pause than the others. "I don't mean to be overly general, but all of it was hard to prepare for," he says. "There was no one specific scene I was worried about. I guess really it was just going to set everyday and putting myself into that mind set. You know, the movie takes place over [a period of] five hours, and basically just getting to that level of fear every day was exhausting, and that was a challenge in itself. And some days, to be honest, I just did feel like fucking doing it. [I got headaches] and we both looked like death. Which is fine for the movie, but…"
The three actors who played The Strangers (Laura Margolis, Gemma Ward, and Kip Weeks) didn't have to worry about how they were looking. They are clad in face masks most of the time. But how do you keep the mask concept fresh in a horror movie? It's been around since the silent era with Phantom of the Opera, for heaven's sake. "The scary thing that you always wonder is," Bryan explains, "What is the mask really hiding? For The Strangers [characters] we tried a bunch of different things. We went in a bunch of different directions. Tons and tons and tons of examples. But we wound up going basically back to what was in the initial script.
"What I loved about it, and still love about it, is that these are the kind of masks you could buy at a Wal-Mart. It's a such a jarring thing, to have this Betty Boopish face, all plastic and black eyes, but with a knife in her hand. It becomes kind of horrific. It's what you do in the mask, that makes the mask frightening."
Speaking of scares, you can forget about any comic relief here. "There are no laughs in this one," Scott says bluntly. So why should go see it? "People like to be terrified. Go see a comedy if you want laughter. I like being scared shitless in movie theaters, you know? I like the experience of being with an audience who's so scared, they are screaming."
Bryan agrees. "I never imagined there being any comic relief in the movie. It really was a conscious choice to never lighten the mood."
Just to make things a little more off-kilter, Bryan added some highly unusual musical aspects to the story. "About the record-player… When I started writing the script, I was listening to country music. And I tried to bring a little bit of that in. I tried make it real, not the latest pop song. I am very into country music, my parents were into folk music, you know, I grew up in Texas [where the film's action takes place]. So I always knew that there was going to be an old record player, and I always knew that I wanted to fuse that organic sound with score to just bring you into the house.
"I just love the sound of a record, and how the music is a little warmer, and so I wanted the house to feel very inviting. I liked the idea of having something warm and inviting playing, while all the brutal, horrible things are happening."
Face the music yourself, when The Strangers opens in theaters everywhere on Friday, May 30.