Dapper Dan
<i>Just A<br>D R E A M E R</i>
The Exorcism of Emily Rose Preview Pt. 1
Source: Edward Douglas
July 13, 2005
Earlier this year, ComingSoon.net went to rainy Vancouver, British Columbia during some of the worst weather the city has seen in many years. That wasn't to deter us from our goal, which was to learn as much as we could about Screen Gems' new thriller The Exorcism of Emily Rose. The film stars Laura Linney as a defense attorney hired to defend a priest (Tom Wilkinson) accused of murdering a teen coed named Emily Rose. The priest's testimony is that the girl was possessed by a demon, and that the death occurred during an exorcism gone awry, but the prosecutor on the case, played by indie favorite Campbell Scott (Roger Dodger, The Secret Lives of Dentists), doesn't believe it for one second.
Unlike The Exorcist and its various spin-offs and prequels, the thriller is a combination of a courtroom drama interspersed with flashbacks of the actual exorcism told from various witnesses and those involved. Because of the Oscar caliber cast, it's likely to be more about the drama and the characters, but there also should be a good mix of the gore and scares that horror fans expect from a movie about exorcisms.
In the first part of our preview of this intriguing new thriller, we talked to director Scott Derrickson, who previously was involved with sequels to Urban Legends and Hellraiser. He took a break from shooting a dramatic courtroom scene to talk to us about the movie and how it fits into the horror genre.
CS!: Given your credits writing Urban Legends: Final Cut and directing Hellraiser:Inferno, how do you make the transition into doing this sort of intellectual thriller?
Scott Derrickson: Write a good script. [Paul Boardman and I] just wrote the script and developed it with Beau Flynn and Tripp Vinson outside the studio system. A lot of it had to do with the fact that the script wasn't a studio concept before it became a screenplay. We wrote it pretty much on our own and did it the way we wanted to do it, and then, it just found the right home with Screen Gems and Lakeshore. They just understood it. There was a lot of interest around the project as soon as it became available to the studios, and we ended up where we did, because we felt like that was a place where they were going to let us make it the way that it was. It's very satisfying, because I love the genre, and this isn't even purely a horror film. It's a courtroom movie as well and it's got very dramatic character. I certainly don't have anything but really positive feelings about the horror genre in general, but I do think there are sort of two tiers to it, and this one's going to that second tier, which is great. So far, that's the movie we've been shooting.
CS!: Is it safe to assume that your previous projects didn't turn out as well as hope this one is going to be?
Derrickson: They were both sequels and they were movies that were green-lit before there was ever a script. They had their constraints and their limitations, and they were there to serve a very narrow purpose. When you're in that kind of situation and in the case of "Urban Legends," there were a lot of producers and a lot of different input. I think that project belongs to a lot of different people, you know, and whenever that happens you end up with something that sort of can lose its way a bit. That didn't happen on this at all, but I'm very happy to have worked on those other films, because they were a great place to start.
CS!: Of course, the movie this is going to be compared to most is the original Exorcist, which has become such a large part of pop culture that it's often spoofed. How are you approaching the writing and direction to make your movie different from The Exorcist?
Derrickson: I am a big fan of that picture, but I think if you're going to make an exorcism movie of any kind, you have a certain burden to carry and a hurdle to get over with that film. The subject matter is profoundly compelling, and I think that everybody knows it is a real phenomenon out in the world whether you believe there's anything spiritual to it or not. It happens. People get exorcisms. There are lots of stories of cases, and that fact alone makes it interesting. What I wanted to do was approach the subject matter in a less exploitive way, because you can't out-exorcist "The Exorcist". You have to almost go under it in a sense. I certainly want the film to be scary and I want it to be compelling to watch, but in some ways, to really frighten a contemporary audience you just can't do that with special effects and sound and camera tricks. They are manipulative tricks of the trade that were implemented that were extraordinary at the time, but now that same sort of approach has been used in a million different horror films. With this one, certainly my intention was for the effectiveness of the horror elements and the exorcism itself to be rooted in the reality of these real characters, portrayed by great actors, and for the phenomenon that you watch to be very counter-intuitive, but not over the top. For me, the result is that it's effective and it's really frightening. It really puts your head in a space of thinking about whether or not you believe that this sort of thing can happen. What we're trying to do is make a movie that's a little bit more of an exploration of what does [an exorcism] really look like, what's the range of possibilities there and what can it mean? That what we're trying to do.
CS: Do you know who is going to be doing the effects, and what kind of budget will you have for them?
Derrickson: To be honest with you, I don't know exactly what the budget is on it. Captive Audience is doing it. I talked to a number of people about special effects and there were two reasons why I chose Captive Audience. They did all the effects on "The Passion of The Christ"--both makeup and digital effects--and so much of that was dealing with the human body, and there was a seamlessness to a lot of the effects in that in terms of blending of makeup and digital effects. There was a realism to it that I thought was very effective. They were also the company that I think best understood the aesthetic of the movie, and they seemed really excited about making something that was intelligent. They recognized that it was very important, given the quality of the actress that they would be mostly working with to stay out of her way and rely on her performance, it rather than distract from it. As they've been getting underway, I've been really happy with them so far.
CS!: Are you deliberately playing the movie in an ambiguous way, so audiences have to decide for themselves whether Emily was really possessed or not? How did you present the exorcism scenes in a way to leave them open for interpretation?
Derrickson: Yeah, it's a real tightrope walk that balance, and again, I don't know how well we've achieved that. I do know that it hasn't been terribly difficult, because there was so much rigor put into that in the screenplay. Our actress who plays Emily Rose, Jennifer Carpenter, she's so extraordinary in the role that it actually took a lot of that weight off of me. I really reconceived how to do the entire movie at her call-back audition, because she was so frightening. It was so surreal to just her in a room full of guys behind a desk -- what she can do with her body and the realism to it. I had this terrible sense of how am I going to make these possession and exorcism scenes frightening? What camera tricks can I use and how far can I go? And then when I saw her I was like "Well, you've just gotta turn the camera on and point it at her." She is doing things that are more representative of mental illness and something that's not so supernatural that it's equally disturbing. She took a lot of the burden off me in that respect. From a story point of view, there is a good amount of paranormal things, so you're always trying to remember who's telling this story. In that respect, it was very influenced by "Rashomon". That's a phrase that gets thrown out a lot, when there's a same event that is being remembered different ways or being thought of as different realities being presented. Memory does warp history in some regard, so you get a certain range of freedom when you're telling a story like that too because you can go a certain distance. It certainly is different in its ultimate intention. In "Rashomon", the intention is really to communicate the idea that you never really can know the truth of history, and things were left so opaque. I don't think this movie's quite that opaque, but I can't really go any farther than that without giving things away that probably shouldn't.
CS!: Horror films probably create the most rabid expectations. How do you view the genre in its current state, and how do you think your film will contribute to it?
Derrickson: I think the greatest misconception about horror fans is that they just love gore, but actually, they love the things that horror cinema can do that they can't get anywhere else, not in horror novels or graphic novels, and not in anything else. I think that it's a very exciting time to be working with this genre, because it's beginning to branch out, and I really feel this is a genre that historically hasn't gotten the respect that it deserves. If you look back at history and the history of theater, the macabre and the horrific and the gothic are things that were so integral in all of the great arts. In Europe, the cathedrals have gargoyles on them, but the churches nowadays don't have horrific things in them like they did back then. There's something about cinema this century that, as it went on and special effects developed, it began to pander a little bit to the lower common denominator. It's almost like now people are realizing wow, you can really branch out with this genre. You can really get into ideas and characters and situations that are as provocative as anything you're going to find in any movie. I look at the great recent movies like "The Others" or "The Sixth Sense" or "The Ring". These are all movies that have started to open up the possibilities of the genre, and I think that you can even be more frightening than those films and still have great characters. The seventies gave the promise of that with "Rosemary's Baby" and "The Omen". Those are my favorite horror films and certainly, "The Exorcist". I'd love to think that this is gonna fall in that line, but that would be presumptuous to think that until it's done.
Look for more on The Exorcism of Emily Rose, which opens on September 9, in the next few weeks, as we talk to the cast, the film's co-writer Paul Harris Boardman and look at the sets used for the film.
Source: Edward Douglas
July 13, 2005
Earlier this year, ComingSoon.net went to rainy Vancouver, British Columbia during some of the worst weather the city has seen in many years. That wasn't to deter us from our goal, which was to learn as much as we could about Screen Gems' new thriller The Exorcism of Emily Rose. The film stars Laura Linney as a defense attorney hired to defend a priest (Tom Wilkinson) accused of murdering a teen coed named Emily Rose. The priest's testimony is that the girl was possessed by a demon, and that the death occurred during an exorcism gone awry, but the prosecutor on the case, played by indie favorite Campbell Scott (Roger Dodger, The Secret Lives of Dentists), doesn't believe it for one second.
Unlike The Exorcist and its various spin-offs and prequels, the thriller is a combination of a courtroom drama interspersed with flashbacks of the actual exorcism told from various witnesses and those involved. Because of the Oscar caliber cast, it's likely to be more about the drama and the characters, but there also should be a good mix of the gore and scares that horror fans expect from a movie about exorcisms.
In the first part of our preview of this intriguing new thriller, we talked to director Scott Derrickson, who previously was involved with sequels to Urban Legends and Hellraiser. He took a break from shooting a dramatic courtroom scene to talk to us about the movie and how it fits into the horror genre.
CS!: Given your credits writing Urban Legends: Final Cut and directing Hellraiser:Inferno, how do you make the transition into doing this sort of intellectual thriller?
Scott Derrickson: Write a good script. [Paul Boardman and I] just wrote the script and developed it with Beau Flynn and Tripp Vinson outside the studio system. A lot of it had to do with the fact that the script wasn't a studio concept before it became a screenplay. We wrote it pretty much on our own and did it the way we wanted to do it, and then, it just found the right home with Screen Gems and Lakeshore. They just understood it. There was a lot of interest around the project as soon as it became available to the studios, and we ended up where we did, because we felt like that was a place where they were going to let us make it the way that it was. It's very satisfying, because I love the genre, and this isn't even purely a horror film. It's a courtroom movie as well and it's got very dramatic character. I certainly don't have anything but really positive feelings about the horror genre in general, but I do think there are sort of two tiers to it, and this one's going to that second tier, which is great. So far, that's the movie we've been shooting.
CS!: Is it safe to assume that your previous projects didn't turn out as well as hope this one is going to be?
Derrickson: They were both sequels and they were movies that were green-lit before there was ever a script. They had their constraints and their limitations, and they were there to serve a very narrow purpose. When you're in that kind of situation and in the case of "Urban Legends," there were a lot of producers and a lot of different input. I think that project belongs to a lot of different people, you know, and whenever that happens you end up with something that sort of can lose its way a bit. That didn't happen on this at all, but I'm very happy to have worked on those other films, because they were a great place to start.
CS!: Of course, the movie this is going to be compared to most is the original Exorcist, which has become such a large part of pop culture that it's often spoofed. How are you approaching the writing and direction to make your movie different from The Exorcist?
Derrickson: I am a big fan of that picture, but I think if you're going to make an exorcism movie of any kind, you have a certain burden to carry and a hurdle to get over with that film. The subject matter is profoundly compelling, and I think that everybody knows it is a real phenomenon out in the world whether you believe there's anything spiritual to it or not. It happens. People get exorcisms. There are lots of stories of cases, and that fact alone makes it interesting. What I wanted to do was approach the subject matter in a less exploitive way, because you can't out-exorcist "The Exorcist". You have to almost go under it in a sense. I certainly want the film to be scary and I want it to be compelling to watch, but in some ways, to really frighten a contemporary audience you just can't do that with special effects and sound and camera tricks. They are manipulative tricks of the trade that were implemented that were extraordinary at the time, but now that same sort of approach has been used in a million different horror films. With this one, certainly my intention was for the effectiveness of the horror elements and the exorcism itself to be rooted in the reality of these real characters, portrayed by great actors, and for the phenomenon that you watch to be very counter-intuitive, but not over the top. For me, the result is that it's effective and it's really frightening. It really puts your head in a space of thinking about whether or not you believe that this sort of thing can happen. What we're trying to do is make a movie that's a little bit more of an exploration of what does [an exorcism] really look like, what's the range of possibilities there and what can it mean? That what we're trying to do.
CS: Do you know who is going to be doing the effects, and what kind of budget will you have for them?
Derrickson: To be honest with you, I don't know exactly what the budget is on it. Captive Audience is doing it. I talked to a number of people about special effects and there were two reasons why I chose Captive Audience. They did all the effects on "The Passion of The Christ"--both makeup and digital effects--and so much of that was dealing with the human body, and there was a seamlessness to a lot of the effects in that in terms of blending of makeup and digital effects. There was a realism to it that I thought was very effective. They were also the company that I think best understood the aesthetic of the movie, and they seemed really excited about making something that was intelligent. They recognized that it was very important, given the quality of the actress that they would be mostly working with to stay out of her way and rely on her performance, it rather than distract from it. As they've been getting underway, I've been really happy with them so far.
CS!: Are you deliberately playing the movie in an ambiguous way, so audiences have to decide for themselves whether Emily was really possessed or not? How did you present the exorcism scenes in a way to leave them open for interpretation?
Derrickson: Yeah, it's a real tightrope walk that balance, and again, I don't know how well we've achieved that. I do know that it hasn't been terribly difficult, because there was so much rigor put into that in the screenplay. Our actress who plays Emily Rose, Jennifer Carpenter, she's so extraordinary in the role that it actually took a lot of that weight off of me. I really reconceived how to do the entire movie at her call-back audition, because she was so frightening. It was so surreal to just her in a room full of guys behind a desk -- what she can do with her body and the realism to it. I had this terrible sense of how am I going to make these possession and exorcism scenes frightening? What camera tricks can I use and how far can I go? And then when I saw her I was like "Well, you've just gotta turn the camera on and point it at her." She is doing things that are more representative of mental illness and something that's not so supernatural that it's equally disturbing. She took a lot of the burden off me in that respect. From a story point of view, there is a good amount of paranormal things, so you're always trying to remember who's telling this story. In that respect, it was very influenced by "Rashomon". That's a phrase that gets thrown out a lot, when there's a same event that is being remembered different ways or being thought of as different realities being presented. Memory does warp history in some regard, so you get a certain range of freedom when you're telling a story like that too because you can go a certain distance. It certainly is different in its ultimate intention. In "Rashomon", the intention is really to communicate the idea that you never really can know the truth of history, and things were left so opaque. I don't think this movie's quite that opaque, but I can't really go any farther than that without giving things away that probably shouldn't.
CS!: Horror films probably create the most rabid expectations. How do you view the genre in its current state, and how do you think your film will contribute to it?
Derrickson: I think the greatest misconception about horror fans is that they just love gore, but actually, they love the things that horror cinema can do that they can't get anywhere else, not in horror novels or graphic novels, and not in anything else. I think that it's a very exciting time to be working with this genre, because it's beginning to branch out, and I really feel this is a genre that historically hasn't gotten the respect that it deserves. If you look back at history and the history of theater, the macabre and the horrific and the gothic are things that were so integral in all of the great arts. In Europe, the cathedrals have gargoyles on them, but the churches nowadays don't have horrific things in them like they did back then. There's something about cinema this century that, as it went on and special effects developed, it began to pander a little bit to the lower common denominator. It's almost like now people are realizing wow, you can really branch out with this genre. You can really get into ideas and characters and situations that are as provocative as anything you're going to find in any movie. I look at the great recent movies like "The Others" or "The Sixth Sense" or "The Ring". These are all movies that have started to open up the possibilities of the genre, and I think that you can even be more frightening than those films and still have great characters. The seventies gave the promise of that with "Rosemary's Baby" and "The Omen". Those are my favorite horror films and certainly, "The Exorcist". I'd love to think that this is gonna fall in that line, but that would be presumptuous to think that until it's done.
Look for more on The Exorcism of Emily Rose, which opens on September 9, in the next few weeks, as we talk to the cast, the film's co-writer Paul Harris Boardman and look at the sets used for the film.