December 22, 2009

It’s mid-December 2009 and this Shock writer is braving the cold and rain in Baton Rouge, Louisiana as I make my way to the shooting location of Fox’s upcoming direct-to-DVD feature Mirrors 2. Thankfully, the evening’s shoot is indoors at Boudreaux & Thibodeaux – part music venue/part bar/ part apartment complex where the production crew for this sequel is set up on the third floor, gearing up to spill a little blood in a scene where actor Jon Michael Davis goes up against his evil mirror doppelganger. With the shoot nearing it’s end, director Victor Garcia is coordinating with KNB FX, as well as the Visual FX crew to pull off all of the movie’s grotesque (and optical) gags, which they’ve saved for last.

While we can’t divulge just yet exactly what it is we witnessed on set, we can tell you a bit about what this follow up to Alex Aja’s Mirrors is about. We asked producer Todd Williams how this connects to the first film, which starred Kiefer Sutherland. Is this a direct sequel? Or is it a new original story that uses the first as a template?

“It uses the idea of the first one as a template, but the movie is actually much closer to the original Korean movie Into The Mirror that the first Mirrors is based on,” explains Williams. “Story-wise it connects to the first movie in that at the end of Mirrors everything is basically destroyed. But the idea is that the mirror that is located at the centerpiece of our movie was found in the remnants of the Mayflower from the original movie. So basically we take that mirror over and have a whole new storyline that capitalizes on what’s fun about the concept of these demonic mirrors, which is that the mirror can have control over you and make you do things you wouldn’t do.”

“As far as the setting, this one takes place at a boutique store, so it’s a smaller more upscale store,” he continues. “Max (played by Nick Stahl) is a night watchman and he’s brought in there by his father (William Katt), because the previous night watchman has had some sort of mental breakdown, and Max is the only person who he can trust with the opening of his new store in New Orleans. Max shows up and suddenly he starts getting haunted by a vision of a girl in the mirrors. Slowly his co-workers around him start dying in gruesome ways and Max figures out that the girl in the mirror is a girl who’s been missing, so he hooks up with that girl’s sister (Emmanuelle Vaugier) and they have to figure out how to solve this mystery through the girl in the mirror.”

Ironically enough, director Victor Garcia (who helmed another sequel, Return To House On Haunted Hill) was always fascinated in telling an ambitious story revolving around mirrors since the beginning of his professional filmmaking career.

“The funny thing is that I had screened my short film El Ciclo at Sitges Film Festival in Spain back in 2003, and the previous short film I had wanted to make was about mirrors and a girl that falls in love with her image,” says Garcia. “It was a weird kind of story that I was never able to shoot because it would’ve been way too expensive, so I decided to shoot El Ciclo instead. When I showed it at Sitges, I caught a screening of Into The Mirror and I was watching it with my girlfriend at the time, and during the opening sequence, we both looked at each other and thought ‘This is the short we wanted to make! They made it into a movie.’ So it’s funny and now fitting. It feels like I’ve come full circle by doing Mirrors 2.”

Mirrors 2 was scripted by Matt Venne (Masters of Horror’s Pelts, White Noise 2) and stars Nick Stahl, William Katt, Emmanuelle Vaugier, Lawrence Turner, Stephanie Honore, Christy Charlson Romano, Jon Michael Davis, Evan Jones, Wayne Pere, Lance E. Nichols, Ann McKenzie and Jennifer Sipes.

We’ll have more in our continued coverage from the set of Mirrors 2 shortly, including interviews with KNB special FX artists Kevin Wasner and Alex Diaz, as well as Visual FX supervisor Sean Findley.