January 29, 2011

Writer/director Adam Green has accumulated quite an impressive body of work over the course of the last 5 years. Compare his feature length films HATCHET, SPIRAL, FROZEN and GRACE (which he produced) along with the infamous Ariescope ROAD TO FRIGHTFEST short films, annual Halloween flicks and more and you’ll notice his influences run the gambit of all movie genres.

With HATCHET 2 hitting DVD and Blu-Ray on February 1st and considering we already had a lengthy chat about the making of that film in our previous Massive Hysteria interview with Green HERE, we thought it’d be more fun to pick the filmmaker’s brain and see what some of his favorite movies are. In this latest edition of our column “filmmaker fandom“, Adam Green shares with us in his own words his most influential films! Read on! -Robg.

ET: “Most people know I love ET. That’s my favorite movie of all time. It’s the movie that made me want to make movies. And mainly because I knew it wasn’t real, I didn’t think ET even looked real, yet I was uncontrollably crying by the end of that movie. It made me feel what it feels to be alive, what it feels to be a human being, and what friendship means and what love is. It touched the world. To me, no one’s ever going to make another ET (unless it’s the remake of ET!), but that movie is special in ways that you can’t describe. Nobody could’ve comprehended how it was going to touch people when it was made. I saw a screening of that at The Academy where they showed a pristine print from 1982; this was about 2 years ago. And everybody that worked on the movie was there and the sound mixer said, “In all honesty, we did not like this movie. We would make fun of it when Steven would leave. This is going to destroy him, it’s awful.” And then all of a sudden one day he came in with John Williams score and everybody was crying by the end of it. It’s a movie where everything works perfectly. The script, the performances, the music. Everything. It’s just perfect.”

STAR WARS: “Obviously it’s a big part of the culture for everybody, but as a kid, those toys I played with, that’s how I learned how to direct and create stories. I would sit there and play with the toys and move my head where the camera angles were. I would watch how it was playing as if it were a movie. And I would keep everyone true to character. Other friends would come over and have Han Solo shoot at Luke Skywalker and I’d be like, no that’s not what he would do! NEW HOPE, EMPIRE and JEDI. EMPIRE is my favorite of the 3 but I count those original 3 movies all as STAR WARS.”

THE GOONIES: “Another big movie for me was THE GOONIES. First time I saw a movie where the kids in the movie actually talked like kids. I could identify with everybody and it didn’t feel like adults telling me how they think kids would speak. Still to this day, one of Chris Columbus’ greatest scripts. If you’re flipping through the channels and it’s on, you have to sit and watch the rest of it.”

A CHRISTMAS STORY: “It’s a perfect movie. Every year, you can catch the 24 marathon of it and I’m the guy that watches all 24 hours of it. (Laughs) I’ll go away for a bit to open presents or cook dinner or whatever else is going on around the house, but I keep going back to it no matter where it is in that movie. I think that Jean Shepherd and Bob Clark truly captured the holiday. That is the best Christmas movie ever made. A lot of people go to IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE or MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET, but A CHRISTMAS STORY is a real, American movie.”

JOHN CARPENTER’S HALLOWEEN: “John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN is probably the best horror movie ever made as far as I’m concerned, especially in the “slasher” vein. Because everything after that became about the violence and kills. Hell, the HATCHET movies are more guilty of that than anybody. But John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN is a “slasher” movie that’s actually frightening and created this perfect mythology of this little kid who just snaps and we don’t know why and he doesn’t say a word. He’s just evil. That’s all you need. The mask was so scary, the suspense in that movie, Donald Pleasence. It’s just timeless. That movie is like chicken soup to me. If I don’t feel good, I can put it on and always feel better. I know it inside and out. Every edition that Anchor Bay has put out, I don’t care what the new feature is, I have to have it. On the Blu-ray, when Jamie Lee Curtis is in the classroom and looks outside and he’s standing there by the car, you can see his eyes. It’s fucking awesome on Blu-Ray!”

PAN’S LABYRINTH: “More recently, PAN’S LABYRINTH was a life-changing movie for me because I felt that I would never feel the magic of a fairy tale again because I was an adult now. And I understand how fairy tale movies are made for and aimed at kids and that it wasn’t for me anymore. But PAN’S was one of the best fairy tales I’d ever seen. It was frightening, it was dark, it was moving. It was perfect. Guillermo del Toro is not only one of the greatest filmmakers living right now, but also one of the greatest human beings. And then to see a movie like that with that much heart and that much of himself put into it was really inspiring. It’s amazing that movies like that can actually still happen.”

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK: “It’s another perfect movie. A lot of people think its Steven Spielberg’s best, but I still have to side with ET on that. But RAIDERS is another one that I always have to watch when it’s on. They just showed it at the Arclight recently, and going to see that movie with an audience that could literally say every line along with it was amazing. The sound design alone is so great. Another movie that probably shouldn’t have worked, because it was going back to the way the old adventure serials were told, but it did work and it’s so, so good.”

THE EXORCIST: “To me, this is still one of the scariest movies I’ve ever seen. You can have a serial killer movie, you can have a monster movie, you can have a movie with great FX, but for those you can always keep yourself one step away from it by thinking, “well, that wouldn’t really happen. It’s only a movie.” But whenever you get into religious horror or the paranormal, it gets you on a different level, because nobody can say with 100 percent complete confidence that that would never happen. And of course, the fact that they say it’s inspired by true events; those of us who are geeks and look that stuff up, we know that the boy’s head didn’t spin around, he didn’t spit green shit at anyone. That’s not what matters about that movie, it’s the fact that it’s a real problem for a real mother, and a real child and nobody can help them. It’s such an awesome movie.”

THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT: “This movie is the best example of independent filmmaking. These guys had an idea that nobody else had yet and they executed it perfectly; coupled with taking the world by storm with great marketing at the beginning of the internet. I was just coming out of film school at the time that movie came out, and every filmmaker looked at that movie as hope and thought, “OK, I can do this.” Because a lot of people finish school and give up because they think I don’t have connections, I don’t have money. I don’t know how to find a million dollars to finance a movie with. I was the same way. My dad’s a gym teacher; I didn’t have anything going into this. But you see with those filmmakers, where there’s a will there’s a way. That movie is insanely amazing.”

AIRPLANE: “AIRPLANE might be the most timeless of comedies in the fact that the tone of that movie and the comedy of that movie is so innocent and pure and it’s just silly jokes. It still holds up. My assistant on FROZEN Cody had never seen AIRPLANE. And I was like “alright, we’re all going to watch this movie together.” A lot of people were like “I don’t know if it’s still funny.” This is a kid who’s 19 and is used to Judd Apatow movies being funny. But of course, AIRPLANE still worked and he loved it.”

WEIRD SCIENCE: “John Hughes much like Chris Columbus actually wrote very real people and all of the characters in a Hughes movie were real people that you could identify with them no matter how ridiculous the situation was. You can repeat the jokes from that movie to your friends at anytime and everybody always exactly knows what it’s from. Hughes was a horrendous loss last year.”

ALFRED HITCHCOCK’S PSYCHO: “Another example of a movie people think is violent. It’s not violent, it’s scary because it’s real. Because at the time nobody had done that kind of movie yet. Anthony Perkins performance is still to this day untouchable. Not many old movies hold up. Normally you feel like, oh I’m watching an old movie. This was made in the 60’s because the acting is kind of cheesy. None of that applies to PSYCHO because it’s still the best. PSYCHO was the biggest influence on SPIRAL. Because if you can make a guy crazy and feel bad for them, that’s a tough balance. People often use the word “sick” when they talk about someone being crazy. And I don’t think they realize how that’s a really sad situation to be in to not have your head work right and not have a handle on reality. That’s very sad and very tragic. Normally we paint them in ways to be afraid of those people, but in SPIRAL and in PSYCHO you have compassion for them and you feel badly that they’re doing what they’re doing because they don’t mean to be a bad person, they don’t want to be a bad person, they just can’t help it.”

Honorable Mention: “Mike Dougherty’s TRICK ‘R TREAT. As someone who loves the holiday of Halloween, I’ve never understood why we don’t have more Halloween movies. We have Christmas movies, Valentine’s Day movies, we’ve got horror movies that take place on Halloween, but we’ve never had a movie that really captured the feeling of Halloween and for me, there are moments in that movie that made me tear up the first time I saw them. When they go to the girls house, and she’s got all the jack o lanterns that she carved hanging outside her house, that’s just absolutely magic what that looks like. And then the flashback scene that shows the kids on the bus, the way they color-timed that, that dusk, orange feeling, it reminds me of me at 8 years old coming home from school at 3pm on Halloween and literally waiting for it to be dark outside so I could go trick ‘r treating. “Is it Halloween yet? Can we go?” It wouldn’t be quite dark enough yet and I’d be like, “Come on, mom. Can we go? Can we go? There’s other kids out there!” After dinner, I had to go. There’s a feeling that comes with watching TRICK ‘R TREAT that makes me so fucking happy when I see it.”

HATCHET 2 is available on DVD and Blu-Ray on February 1st, 2011.