October 31, 2009

On Thursday October 29th, as a special Halloween surprise, Hatchet was added last minute as part of a triple feature to Slasherpalooza, an event sponsored by Bloody-Disgusting which took place at The Cinefamily (aka the Silent Movie Theater) here in Los Angeles, California.

On hand for a post-screening Q & A was writer/director Adam Green, stars Tamara Feldman (Mary Beth), Joleigh Fioravanti (Jenna) and composer Andy Garfield. The following is a transcription of the entire Q & A, which was moderated by Marcus Dunstan, screenwriter of the Feast films, as well as Saw IV, Saw V and Saw VI.

Marcus Dunstan: In honor of Halloween, this is a two part question. Firstly, what is your favorite horror movie? And second question is a little more layered. Why do you love the genre so much?

Tamara Feldman: My favorite horror movie is A Nightmare On Elm Street. (The scene) where the tongue comes out of the phone?

Marcus: I think that was Verizon!

Tamara: That was my favorite one and why do I love it so much? Everybody know why, because it’s just fun!

Marcus: In Hatchet, Jenna (Joleigh Fioravanti) has one of the most righteous deaths. If you could put Adam Green in your horror movie, how would you kill him?

Joleigh Fioravanti: I’d make him marry him! [Laughs] Um, I don’t know. I’m a big balls person. I think balls are amazing, so I’d probably do something to his balls.

[Audience laughs]

Joleigh: Oh he likes it. And my favorite horror movie is Halloween. I’m a huge Michael Myers fan. I always have been. I have like a huge crush on the guy. Everybody was being a Barbie or a little Princess for Halloween, I was in the Myers mask, wearing a Freddy sweater and glove. People would look at me and be like “What the hell is wrong with this person?” Love it!

Marcus: Well, Mister Garfield. You had the daunting task of coming up with a theme for Hatchet, for a new icon that likes to kick down the door and raise hell on a moment’s notice. How’d you go about doing that?

Andy Garfield: It was a lot of fun! Writing the score was the easiest part. We temped the whole movie to the score of Jurassic Park, in case you can’t tell from the (current) score. And we literally sat in the editing room just cutting in music from Jurassic Park through out the entire movie. The sound design went through several iterations. I did the first pass in my studio with Kane (Hodder), his kid would also record him screaming and yelling. And then I did the gore sound FX in the film. When we remixed it again almost a year later, Matt Waters stepped in and redid a lot of my work, and he did so much better then I did. It was really, really cool to have a score and a sound design so closely related. I knew what sounds to work with because I was making it at the same time so… As far as my favorite movie, I have to say I just saw it and this is embarrassing – I just saw An American Werewolf In London. That’s my new favorite horror movie.

Marcus: Instant cred! [Laughs] My favorite stories about Hatchet are about the young Victor Crowley. Adam, if you’d care to share, what became of young Victor Crowley?

Adam: I’m actually marrying Young Victor Crowley in June. Thank you. The way we made this film is we made a mock trailer for $4 dollars. That’s all we spent on it. It was just a little girl telling the story of Victor Crowley over shots of a swamp. But John Buechler and Robert Pendergraft offered to make a mold for Young Victor Crowley and asked if I knew any women with small features because they didn’t want to put it on a boy for all those hours, so I knew the hostess at The Rainbow (Rileah Vanderbilt) where I was a DJ at the time, and I asked her if I could make her up as a deformed little boy. And so they do it and she’s walking around the shop with this Elephant Man face and just a bra and underwear and I was like ‘ugh’, ‘oh’! It was so confusing! [Laughs] A few months later, I took her out to dinner just to thank her for doing that and by the time we started shooting the movie, we were already dating. Because we’d already made the mold, she played Young Victor Crowley in the movie too. It’s cool to have a hot chick to play a deformed little boy because when you do Fango conventions and say “Hey, you guys want to meet Young Victor Crowley?” And they’re like “Yeah!” Then she walks out and they’re all like (looks down) [Laughs] Hot chick. She won’t talk to me. So yeah, some people love Victor Crowley. I literally love Victor Crowley.

Marcus: How dare you cut to black and cruelly not let us know what happened to the one armed dude and the hot lady? When do we get Hatchet 2? Any news?

Adam: Hatchet 2 will happen next year for sure. It’s greenlit. It’s been greenlit since the opening weekend of the first one. There’s just other stuff we had to do. I was doing Spiral. I produced Grace. And all of us were off doing other stuff, so it’s been about waiting for the right time to do it right. The big thing too in talking about doing a sequel was to make sure that if I get to come back to do it, that I get to make a sequel that’s for the people that liked the first one. So if you didn’t like the first one, fuck you! I hope you don’t like the second one either. The truth of the matter is when you go to do one of these, the studio always says “Well, how can we make it reach a broader audience?” This was never meant for a broad audience and we knew that while we were making it. We were making the stuff that we liked when we grew up. People say “Well, it’s not really original to have a slasher in the woods.” Of course not. One of the funny stories about the original ending of the movie, originally he didn’t jump out of the boat, Victor jumped out of a tree. But everyone was like “Dude, you have to do the Friday The 13th and let him pull her out of the boat!” And I thought fine. That’s so cliché but I figured ok. So, the sequel is going to be for people that liked the first one and if you didn’t like it, then don’t see it. I wish I could tell you exactly what’s going to happen but we’re still getting that in order. It’s funny when you do a sequel and I know Marcus here just wrote Saw IV, Saw V and Saw VI, what usually happens because you’re doing bigger things, your agent will say “don’t do Hatchet 2. You don’t want to do that, you’ve got to keep going up.” You have to do what your heart tells you to do and especially after watching it again tonight with you guys – to know that the same crew, the same people are all going to all come back, it’s amazing.

Marcus: You’ve shown us rebellion in making this movie. We all grew up watching horror movies, maybe staying up a little too late, USA Up All night, watching between our split fingers and this is the type of movie that’s hopefully going to catch some kid by surprise and shock him and have him begging for the next one.

Adam: It’s funny how young the audience is for this stuff, because when I first saw Friday The 13th Part 2, obviously, my parents had gone away and my brother had shown me the movie. I was 8 or something like that and now doing conventions and meeting young fans. Actually, Grace was just playing at the Sunset 5 and people came with 3 year olds and were like “Oh but they love Hatchet”. In Spain promoting Hatchet I signed a baby! [Laughs] It’s just funny. It’s great how young kids are finding it, because this is a very polarizing film. Some people didn’t get the humor and would say “Why the fuck is this funny?” They hate that it’s funny. People that like stuff like Evil Dead or Slither love it. And then you have a new generation of kids that are so pissed off that nobody got raped or tortured. Because that’s what’s scary to some kids. Hopefully, the spirit of this brings it back. I always liked horror movies because they were entertaining. I don’t believe in punishing your audience. To watch people walk out of the Hollywood Arclight on opening weekend smiling was proof that it worked.

Marcus: It’s actually one of the few horror movies to have an actual army. You did recruit a squadron of fans for this. So, should Mary Beth return, what would you like to see Mary Beth do? Is that the last we see of her?

Adam: If Mary Beth returns, the whole idea is to sort of tailor her like Ripley from Aliens, and she’d just have guns and kick the shit out of everybody.

Tamara: Do I have to stick my thumbs in his eyes? That’s gross and I won’t do it!

Adam: This is so great, Tamara has a fear of latex. Which is… awesome in so many ways. [Audience laughs] Anytime when Kane would come near her, she’d be scared. But then also they had this strange connection, from the crying scene…

Tamara: Well, I’m scared of the material he’s made out of. I couldn’t get near him! But then we became really close when he didn’t have his make-up on. And we were talking and he wanted to see how he should cry, because this was the first time he’d have to cry and show emotion without any make-up on. So he kicked everybody out of the house. It was just a few people, the camera operator and I sat down next to the camera and we made eye contact and we just cried together for that scene. I cried with him! It was really sweet to cry with Jason! [Laughs]

Adam: That’s one of the interesting things, because they’re supposed to hate each other, but then they have this interesting bond, and whenever someone talks about the sequel, Kane’s like “I just want to work with Tamara again.”

Tamara: He wouldn’t stop chasing us either whenever they yelled cut. And I almost impaled myself on a big pole and had to tell Adam to tell him to stop chasing us!

Adam: If you get the DVD, get the unrated one. The version you just saw was the MPAA rated R version, unfortunately that’s all we had prints made of. But on the DVD, there’s about a minute more of gore and the behind the scenes is 90 minutes, and you can see what Tamara’s talking about. You can see Kane chasing all of them. With Deon, he wouldn’t stop laughing, because everybody reacts to fear differently. Everyone else would cry, but Deon would laugh. So Kane chased him through the woods on the first take, picked him up and threw him down and said “Is it fucking funny now?” And Deon’s like “No. No.” And it never happened again. Also in the behind the scenes, he went as far as to hide in Mercedes trailer for 20 minutes, just waiting to jump out of her bathroom and scare the shit out of her. He got everybody every day.

Joleigh: He did. He’s amazing and I love him. He’s the sweetest guy. But he’s terrifying!

Adam: You know what he likes to eat on set and he’ll kill me for saying this? It’s not babies, it’s peanut butter and jelly. So it’s like “Kane needs some food.” “OK, what’s he want?” “Peanut butter and jelly.” [Laughs]

Marcus: Adam, would you tell us what your favorite horror film is?

Adam: Andy already said American Werewolf In London so I can’t say that. Um, An American Werewolf In London oddly enough is my biggest influence for this movie. Everyone thinks it’s Friday The 13th, but if you watch An American Werewolf In London, not only did I rip off a lot of the banter, but even the shots. The two guys walking down the street. Because (John) Landis is the king of knowing how to entertain an audience no matter what, even in horror. My idea with this was you can’t develop good characters in movies like this, you have to get to the kills right away and you have an ensemble cast and you need all these people to die. So comedy is the best way to win the audience over, because when you hear the audience laughing at them, you know they’re vested. Casting this was the hardest thing I had to do. Frozen, which I just did was an impossible movie to shoot because it was on snow and it was all real. So much of it is drama and I hired the first girl that walked in. But with this, it was five months of casting because trying to find comedians that actually got the material and knew exactly how to walk the line was hard. Tamara’s audition was terrible! She kept laughing through it! But I knew right then that she was the girl. And Joleigh told the story about the Myers mask for Halloween, and I was like alright, you’re in. My camera operator, now he shoots movies like Transformers, I didn’t know him that much at the time, so I asked what’s your favorite movie? And he’s like “Evil Dead 2.” “Hired!” [Audience laughs] That’s how we did it. We had to hire people based on their personality. You have to pick projects you want to do based on the people you’re with because life’s too short to work with assholes.

Marcus: I wanted to ask about Victor Crowley’s look. Because when the light hits him just right, he looks like he’s got the biggest grin on his face.

Adam: Well, it wasn’t so much that he was smiling but it showed the teeth better when Kane opened his mouth a bit, because it was all these different appliances. As the movie went on, because we didn’t have time, we got it down to a 20 minute make-up job because we were like “dude, just throw him in the suit.” You can see the seams and it’s a disaster at times, but that’s what it is. In the sequel, that’s one of things we want to do is redefine him a little bit. We don’t want to change him too much because then the fans will revolt. But definitely tweak it. The scenes with Tamara running, they run five feet and it was like “OK, cool.” [Audience laughs] It’s because we couldn’t afford to light any further then that, I swear that’s what it was. We’d have them stand in a semi-circle like in a play and just have them talk and we thought “Dude, this sucks.” But we just had to get it done. Also, there’s only six feet of fence and three grates in that cemetery. We had to keep moving them around. We had to CGI the name on the tombstones because every one of them said “Cory Neal”. I came up with Victor Crowley when I was eight. I went to this summer camp called Camp Avodo. It was the worst experience of my life because they had us scrubbing toilets and cleaning floors. I found out later that avodo in Hebrew means work. So my fucking parents sent me to “Camp Work”. [Audience laughs] And the councilors said “stay away from this cabin or else Hatchetface will get you.” And I was like “Sweet! What’s he going to do to me?” And they’d say, “Well, he’ll get you.” And that’s all they had. That night when we were all going to sleep, the other kids were like “Do you think Hatchetface will get us?” And I was like “You know who Hatchetface is, right?” And I made up the whole story from the movie. The kids started crying, they were going to send me home from camp, they called my parents! I don’t want to get too cheesy, while I was growing up wearing this shirt (Dangerous Toys), I was ostracized by my teachers and they’d call my parents saying I had problems. I was a good kid, I got good grades! But because I was into metal and I liked horror movies, everyone thought something was wrong. To be made fun of and to be ridiculed for this stuff and the whole Victor Crowley story, but then to have this thing be released across America, it’s so redeeming to go home to Boston now and run into this people that say “Oh, I loved your movie.” I just want to say “Fuck you!” But… you don’t, ya gotta say “thanks, that’s great.”

Marcus: You can’t end on a much better note then that!