All language subtitles for The Making Of The Frighteners ENG

One of the wonderful
things that movies can do

is bring you to places
that obviously you can't see

anywhere else in
the world or reality,

and one of those areas is tales
that come from the other side.

And, uh, that's always
been a mainstay

in our, sort of, movie diet.

And, uh, so my interest has
always been in a lot of that dark stuff

and in a lot of that otherworldly
stuff like in TALES FROM THE CRYPT

and THE FRIGHTENERS is...
ls one step beyond all of that.

When my daughter
Hayley was 18 months old,

we were in our
basement of our building

in New York and we
were doing laundry.

And, uh, in laundry machines.
We weren't, like,

beating it against
like rocks or anything.

And, uh, so we're down
there and she, sort of,

toddled off into
this disused room

and she just...
There was nothing in this room.

I mean, it was literally
just cinder block walls

and a light bulb in the ceiling,

and she just, sort of, pointed
at this wall and said, "Baby!

"Baby!"

And I said, "There's no
baby there, sweetheart.

That's just a wall."
And she looked at me like,

"Baby.

"Baby-II

And my hairs on the back
of my neck went "boing".

And so I said,
"Let's go get Mommy."

So we ran upstairs
and got my wife,

who jumped about
18 inches into the air

and said, "Let's go back down!"

So we ran back
downstairs and, uh,

we put Hayley in the
room and Leslie said,

"Hayley, show Mommy the baby."

And Hayley went over and was
pointing at this thing and it, sort of...

She's, sort of, tracking
it with her finger

and then Leslie said,
"Hayley, can you go kiss the baby?"

And Hayley went over to it and,
sort of, kissed this spot on the wall

and then tracked it with her
eyes a little bit more and then

she just, kind of, stood back and
came over like, "Hmm-hmm. What next?"

I believe that there must be,

something else other than this...
This reality.

We must go somewhere when
we die and I don't know where,

but I definitely believe
and I would love

to see a ghost,
but I've never seen one.

I know Peter's seen one.

It was about 6:30
in the morning.

It was an old apartment
block that we used to be in.

It was only, like, a 100-year-old
building and I was lying in bed.

Fran had just gotten up to
go and make a cup of coffee.

And I was awake, I was certainly
wide awake, I wasn't sleeping,

and the door of the
bedroom was open.

And I was lying there

and suddenly a woman comes
into the bedroom, in through the door.

And my first thought was that,
not that it's a ghost,

my first thought
was she was real.

That was actually
really terrifying because

I thought,
"What's she doing here?"

You know, there was only
Fran and I in the building and

she was also very, very
creepy-looking because she had a face

that was locked into a scream.
Like a frozen scream.

Sort of like...
Like quite a terrifying look.

And so, within a second
or two, I'm taking this in,

I'm thinking,
"it's a real person."

She's got a scream on her face,

making no sound, silent.

And my heart starts thumping and
then after, like, two or three seconds,

because all this
happens very quickly.

After two or three
seconds, I realize

that she's a ghost,
that she's not real.

She's... She's gliding across the floor.
She's not actually walking.

And also, I guess,
she was, like, transparent.

There was a... Sort of a...
It didn't feel solid.

So I realize I'm looking at a
ghost and that's almost a relief.

I mean, it's actually...

You know, it's almost a
relief that it's not a real person

because they are more dangerous,
I'm sure, than ghosts.

And so I'm watching her and she

goes across the floor and
she slowly rises in the air

and my eyes are totally
locked onto this figure

and then she
disappears out of the wall

on the other side
of the bedroom.

And the whole thing took
maybe six or seven seconds

from the doorway across.

And I mean, I was, like, trembling.
It was like...

You know, I felt exactly
the same as you do

if you just have a near miss in
your car or something, you know.

And you just feel kind of
weak and your heart's pounding.

And I called out to Fran
and she came running in.

Now Fran had lived in this
apartment for, like, five years,

you know, prior to this.

And I said to Fran,
"I think I've seen a ghost."

And the first thing that she
said to me, and this is true.

The first thing she
said to me was,

"Was it a woman with
a screaming face?"

And I said,
"Yeah, she had a screaming face."

Fran said that about three
years earlier, she had woken up

in the middle of the night,
she was by herself, and opened her eyes

and at the foot of the bed was
a woman with a screaming face

who was standing at the
foot of the bed, staring at her,

and this was the same room.

And so, you know, that's the
sort of thing that you can't make up.

I mean, Fran had never told me
about that experience that she'd had

and then I saw the same ghost,
you know, three years later.

So, I don't know.

I mean, I've always believed
in that type of thing, I guess

because I just generally
believe in most things.

And, you know, I think
that ghosts do exist.

It's not the reason why we made
THE FRIGHTENERS, however.

And certainly, you know,
THE FRIGHTENERS is supposed to be

a lot more
entertaining and funny

than what that
particular ghost was.

I mean, there's
gotta be some kind

of rational
explanation for all this.

Oh no.

You're next, pal.

Another one gone.

I mean, that's actually
quite a nice shot, though.

Wobble, wobble,
wobble, wobble, and crash!

Cut!

During 1992,
Fran Walsh and I were

working on the script of
HEAVENLY CREATURES.

BRAINDEAD was in
distribution around the world

and we started working
on our next project.

During the course of writing
HEAVENLY CREATURES

we used to take
breaks and go for walks

just to, kind of,
clear our head,

and I remember
one Sunday afternoon

we were taking a walk
along the Seatoun seafront

to the local shops
to buy some milk

and we were talking
about some ideas for films.

And I think because HEAVENLY
CREATURES was so factual based,

it was a true story,
our minds were,

sort of going into
more imaginative areas,

you know, making things up and

we talked about
ghost story ideas

and we came up with the
seed of THE FRIGHTENERS

during that walk to the shops,

which was basically
the idea about

the psychic con man
who runs the scam,

has the ghosts scaring people
and earning money for him.

So that was the
seed of the idea.

We came back and had to carry on
working on HEAVENLY CREATURES,

but we managed to write
a two-page story outline

that was the basis of
our idea at that time.

It doesn't actually bear
a huge resemblance

to the finished movie
when you look at it today.

It has all sorts of things like
the local sheriff was the big villain

and the mayor of the town
was embezzling somebody.

There's a whole
lot of stuff in here

that never made
it into the movie.

So having committed
it all to paper

we send it off to Ken
Kamins at ICM, our agent,

and we forgot about it
for three or four months.

We were busy working on the
HEAVENLY CREATURES script.

And we got a call from
Ken sometime later.

He'd sent the story
idea to Bob Zemeckis.

Now, Bob, at that stage,
was working on

ideas for possible
TALES FROM THE CRYPT feature films.

And, you know, Ken thought this
might be a possible idea for him.

Bob read it.

He liked the idea,
but didn't think

it was suitable for
TALES FROM THE CRYPT.

But he wanted to develop
it as a stand-alone project.

In January, '93,
Fran and I were in Los Angeles.

We had lunch with Bob.
It was the first time we met him.

We sat down and had lunch

and they pitched me this
very intriguing and bizarre story

which I immediately
fell in love with.

You know,
we talked about our ideas

and we, sort of, knocked some
other ideas together at lunch

and basically Bob said,
at the end of that lunch

that he'd really like us to
develop the screenplay.

And this was something
that I was looking

to do, but not make myself,

but I have a real, you know,
affinity toward this type of film

and Peter was at a place where
he wanted to really do something

that would, you know, stretch

the bounds of computer
graphics and storytelling,

which is what this does.

So we were both in the
right place at the right time.

We were about to get lost in HEAVENLY
CREATURES for quite a long time

because shooting was
due to commence very soon

and Bob said,
"That's fine," because he was

doing FORREST GUMP,
I think, that same year.

So nothing much happened
with THE FRIGHTENERS

for the next, you know,
six, seven, eight months.

We were busy shooting
HEAVENLY CREATURES

and just,
you know, lost ourselves

completely in that
project for a while.

By the time HEAVENLY CREATURES
came to the editing process,

which takes several months,

we turned our attention back
to THE FRIGHTENERS now

and started to think about
some more story ideas

and we developed
the script and the story

a lot further than obviously
what's on these two pages here.

The idea of the villains

was very much re-worked.

And, in fact, we incorporated some
themes from HEAVENLY CREATURES

into the villains of THE
FRIGHTENERS at that point.

We liked the idea
of the teenage killers

and we were obviously, you know,

right immersed in
that world at the time.

And so we took it to
its ludicrous extreme,

as it were, with THE FRIGHTENERS

having one of the
teenage killers as dead

and another one is now,
like, 45 years old.

And the dead killer
comes back and

the relationship between
the two continues.

And this was all, sort of, stuff

that we thought would be fun
to carry on exploring, at the time.

We finally wrote the first
draft of THE FRIGHTENERS

and this was, like, a year after our
meeting with Bob, it was early 1994

and I remember we
actually sent our draft away

on the day of the Los Angeles earthquake,
it just sticks in my mind.

I had a call from
Bob shortly after

he'd read the script
and he really liked it.

He wanted us to proceed and
go ahead and make the movie.

This is like nothing I've produced,
but in a strange way

it's everything that I
love in film-making.

It's about ghosts and
murder and mayhem

and action and special
effects and comedy.

It was on that initial
phone call with him

that I remember
bringing up the idea

of shooting the
film in New Zealand.

I mean, New Zealand
is where I'm based.

I didn't particularly want to
go to Los Angeles at that time

and work there for a year.

I wanted to stay at home and Bob
was very relaxed about the idea.

His one concern was,
"Does New Zealand look like the States?"

"And can we make
it look like America?"

THE FRIGHTENERS
is set in a small town

and so we thought,
"Well, there's gotta be

some places in New
Zealand that look like

"Northern California or
something around that area."

So we sent a location
scout around the country

and photographed, I guess,
30 or 40 small New Zealand towns.

And we showed those to Bob and
the studio and they were very happy

about the idea of us
shooting in New Zealand.

Some work developed on the
script over the next month or two

and we finally had, you know,
a script which the studio green-lit.

I mean, again, that initial
script is very different

to what the
finished film is like.

But if anyone's
interested in knowing

what that script actually was

the novelization of
THE FRIGHTENERS.

I remember when I
saw this novelization

just after the film was released

I was in a bookshop and
I had a thumb through it,

and I realized with horror

that it was actually based on one
of our very early drafts of the script.

It doesn't bear much resemblance
to what we ultimately filmed,

but it's, kind of...
It is interesting

because it shows you, you know,

just what THE FRIGHTENERS
was like in its very early stages.

Before we started
shooting any film

I storyboarded the movie with
Christian Rivers, who's a storyboard artist

I've worked with for the
last three or four movies.

The method that we
work is quite simple.

I sit down and I have the script

in my lap and I
just thumb through it

and Christian sits beside me
and I, sort of, describe to him

the shots, you know,
as I imagine them

coming off the script
and he draws them up.

And we can generally get through,
like, 100 drawings a day.

The problem I remember
with THE FRIGHTENERS

is that time caught up with me.
And, uh...

We'd storyboarded
about two-thirds

of the movie, but at that point,

I think actors were arriving
in the country and suddenly

my attention was turned
to a whole lot of other things

and so we went into the
film without story boarding

the climactic scenes at all.

And that was not
so much of a problem

because I don't regard
storyboards as being the bible.

I like to have them
because they are

like the first pass that I
get at directing the movie

and it's the cheapest
way of doing it

because it just involves
pencil and paper.

But I like to keep
an open mind and

if we come up with
better ideas on the set,

better ideas for camera angles or for
the way that the scene is gonna be cut

I certainly like to be
flexible and change things.

With special LaserDisc editions
like this FRIGHTENERS box set,

it's very common, at
the end of the discs,

to have the storyboards
as one-frame, you know,

pictures where you've
gotta use your remote control

and you just sit there and flick

the stepping thing on,
you know, endlessly.

I usually find I'm too
impatient to do that

and I don't usually bother
watching the storyboards.

I thought for this
FRIGHTENERS disc

it might be interesting to
try something a little different.

And that's where we
filmed all the storyboards

with two seconds
or so per picture,

and we, kind of,
just run them down.

It's almost like
seeing a flip book

or an animated
thing or something.

I don't know quite what
it's gonna turn out like,

but we'll have to
have a look at it.

This is gonna run
for about 45 minutes.

So, if anybody doesn't
wanna sit here for

45 minutes watching this,
this is the time

to flick to the next
chapter and to move on,

but, you know,
it will be interesting.

THE FRIGHTENERS evolved a
lot after the storyboards were done

and what you're gonna see now

is not really that similar,
in some respects, to the finished film.

And there's no
dialogue or script

that you're gonna hear,
so it's gonna be

difficult to understand what's going
on in some of the dialogue scenes,

but at least most of
it's visual and I think

it will be interesting
to have a look at it.

So let's run it down.
Here we go.

I'll press the button
and we'll start.

The storyboards begin
pretty much as the film does

with the trek in towards
the Bartlett house

and what we call the
Wallpaper Man sequence,

but the primary difference
between this early form of the scene

is that it's Old Lady Bartlett
who you're seeing here

approaching Patricia's door.
She's hearing noises.

She gets attacked
by Wallpaper Man.

It's not actually Patricia
who gets pursued.

The primary reason why we
changed this is that we decided later

that we wanted to create more
of a red-herring role for Patricia.

We wanted to make people feel that
possibly her mother was behind this.

And so it made much more sense
to have Patricia being the victim

in this scene rather
than the old lady.

Because, in a sense,
our suspicions

would immediately
fall on Patricia

if this was the way the film actually
opened, and we didn't want that.

I always loved this idea,
which was Ceiling Man

grabbing the old
lady round the throat

and kind of hanging
her in the kitchen

and she actually
zaps him with...

Her foot hits the
electrical switch

and the guy sparks
off and drops her,

so I thought that
was quite a neat gag.

And this was another
gag that we never used,

which was the giant fingers

closing around her,
coming out of the carpet.

Here's the first time
we saw Patricia.

And this is where we
pretty much reverted to...

The film reverts back
to the storyboards again

when Patricia gets
overbalanced by Carpet Man

and dragged into her room.

The opening credit
sequence of the film,

and in fact, the
first few scenes

of the storyboards
are pretty much the way

that they were
shot in the movie.

The relationship between these
two characters in the newspaper office,

Magda, the editor,
and young Steve, the journalist

was expanded somewhat in
this original version of the film

as you'll see when we
get to it a little bit later on.

So Frank Bannister
and Ray Lynskey have

their first introduction
with each other

pretty much as we
did in the original film.

And this follows on into Lucy
arriving at the Bartlett house

which, as a sequence, is pretty
much the same as was shot.

The haunting scene ends with a
little gag with the frozen chicken

that we didn't actually put in the
cinema release, although it was filmed

and it's back on the LaserDisc.

This is our first introduction
to Frank Bannister, essentially.

And there was a little
gag shot that I drew

in the storyboards
that we didn't even film

where Frank gets
out of his car here.

And that shot there is like
THE EXORCIST movie poster

which was a sort of
a Story boarding joke

that never made
it into the movie.

Now it's Frank's arriving
home to his house

and the introduction
of the ghosts

where things start to
get radically different

to what we finally
used in the film.

The gag here with
the vomiting ectoplasm

is pretty much as it was.

But once they
get into the house,

I know that we did
make a lot of changes.

I liked the idea of
Frank being able

to grab these guys
and stretch them

and it's like Stuart pings
back against the ground.

We never used that.

The original idea for
when they first arrive home

is that Cyrus wants
to put some music on.

We actually were gonna get the
rights to the theme from SHAFT

and so he's, kind of,
boogying to this music

and he ends up sticking
his head in the speaker

and his body vibrates
with the music,

which I thought was
quite a funny gag.

This is a little different as he
comes out of the head of the shower

rather than through
the plughole.

And this was the
introduction to the ghost

which is a little different to
the way it ends up in the movie

where the ghost Judge is just
like blazing away with his guns

and he's trying to
shoot Rustler, the dog

who's defying gravity,
running around the walls.

The Judge ends
up blasting at Frank.

He nicks a bit off Stuart's ear

'cause we wanted to have that

to prove that the ghosts can
actually get wounded by ghost bullets

which is a plot point
that's important later on.

More gags with
Rustler defying gravity

as Frank pulls him off the
ceiling and crashes to the floor.

And the Judge finally
manages to retrieve his jawbone.

That was a good gag that I liked

of Rustler sitting by
the fireside actually

chewing a bone and
you realize that it's

his own hand, that he's
chewing his own arm.

That bony arm.

I think this Judge by
the fireside scene plays

pretty much the way
that it does in the movie.

We're back to a sequence that's

just pretty much the
way that we shot it.

Where

Frank realizes that
Lucy's husband, Ray

has in fact mysteriously died,
and is now a ghost and

Ray begs Frank to take
him up to his funeral.

So we're into a little sequence
here which I don't think

deviates much
from the finished film.

Arriving at the cemetery,
we're gonna get our

first introduction to the
character of the Gatekeeper.

Now the Gatekeeper is

a figure that never
made it through

into the finished movie.
Here he is.

But he was shot in a form
that's somewhat different to this.

And later on,
in the documentary, we do

cover this Gatekeeper
footage quite extensively, in fact

we play, pretty much,
the scene as it was finally finished.

That never made
it into the movie.

So here we are at
the restaurant scene

with Lucy having dinner with
Frank and her dead husband.

This scene plays pretty
much as it does in the movie.

Not the most interesting thing to
look at when you haven't got dialogue.

So Frank has to get up
and go into the bathroom

where he's...

He has an encounter
with Magda on the way out.

Now this was a little
different because

we wanted to establish
Magda as being

in the restaurant on the night.

We'll see the reason
for that a little bit later.

This scene with the victim in the
toilet plays pretty much as it does.

The Reaper action is a little bit
different because the Reaper was, like

hovering above
one of the toilet stalls

comes straight down
and gets the guy.

He doesn't come
out of the mirror

as he ultimately
does in the film.

The idea for the mirror, I think,
just came about because we

looked at the mirror on
the set and really liked it

and it was just one of those
ideas that we developed

when we were actually
shooting the film.

So Frank walks out of the
toilet and returns to his table.

Now this was a sequence
where we actually shot

the background plates
for this scene, but we never

finished it, never
put the Reaper into it.

Frank sits down at the table,
he's nervous and sweaty,

and suddenly the Reaper
looms into the restaurant.

Now we were playing
this in a way that Frank

can see the Reaper, nobody else can.
But Frank wants to

not let the Reaper know
that he can see him,

not draw attention to himself,
so he's trying to

interact with Lucy,
but all the time

he's seeing this
thing hovering around

in a threatening kind of a way.
It looms up right

behind Lucy.

And then Magda makes
her appearance and she's

a bit drunk and she
starts to abuse Frank

for having dinner with
Ray Lynskey's widow.

And Reaper suddenly rushes
out and Frank hurries after it.

Which was all
designed to obviously

make him look very
suspicious when

they find the body in
the bathroom, later on.

So Frank is watching the
Reaper leaping over rooftops.

And now he's in pursuit.

And this is pretty much the
way that it was in the film.

Now we are at the museum and
this sequence is a little bit different

to what ended up in the film.

We started with a lecture
to a bunch of guests.

And we have the gag,
right up front, of the Judge

being attracted to the mummy,
and jumping into the sarcophagus.

Stuart and Cyrus are there
and they're kind of going,

"Oh, no, Judge,
you're embarrassing us there."

It's that type of thing.

And the Judge, in fact,
gets pulled out by the legs, by Cyrus.

And then the Reaper
makes his appearance.

And goes up to the woman
who was giving the lecture.

And she, in fact, is the
Reaper's victim in the museum.

In the movie,
of course, it's Steve

the young journalist
from the newspaper office.

Now, Cyrus has been
wounded by the Reaper's scythe.

And he slides down the
wall leaving an ectoplasmic

kind of a puddle
as they're attending

to the body of the young woman.

Frank sees the
light and realizes

that something's
on in the museum

and hurries across there.

And he arrives just
in time to find the spirit

of the young woman
going up the tunnel.

As you can see, we adapted this

in a slightly different
way for the finished movie,

making it a different character.

This is the museum curator,
who's asking Frank for help

because he thinks the
museum might be haunted.

But Stuart is calling Frank over

because Cyrus has been wounded.

Of course, the curator looks
and doesn't see anything there.

But they manage to
drag Cyrus away into

the privacy of one of the displays,
which is a tomb,

and then Stuart and Cyrus
have a big talk about the Reaper.

Now this is the body being
carried out of the restaurant.

We're back in the
restaurant now, in a scene

that obviously never
made it in the film.

The deputies are hearing how
Frank Bannister was seen rushing out.

Magda's saying that he was
acting in a very strange way.

Now the body is being taken out

of the museum and Frank realizes

through things he can
hear the Deputy saying,

that he is now a suspect

for these murders.

And we run with
the sarcophagus gag

of Frank hiding in
the sarcophagus

being pushed by the
ghosts, which is again,

something that ended up in the
finished movie, pretty much in this form.

Out in the car park here
things are a little different.

Frank's immediately
accosted by a couple of sheriffs.

But the ghosts help him escape.

The Sheriff's a
jumpy guy, he shoots.

Frank thinks he's gonna get hit,

but then a manhole
cover comes up.

And as Frank runs the
manhole cover floats

in front of him,
deflecting the bullets.

We see it's Stuart
actually carrying it.

I like this idea which was

an unconscious deputy who
Cyrus is, like, puppeteering.

The Judge now joins Frank in
the car as he's making his escape.

And we run with the gags
that we used in the final film

of Cyrus and Stuart trying to pull
the sparkplugs out of the engines

and Stuart getting
sucked into the car.

Now as Frank speeds
away from the museum

he suddenly sees Magda
and Steve in his headlights

and they're, in fact,
outside Magda's house.

He almost hits her and
she's obviously very annoyed

and says that he's a
suspect for these murders,

he should give himself up.

And while she's
raving at him, he looks

and he sees a number,
realizing that

she's indeed the next victim.

So despite the fact that Magda

obviously thinks that Frank's
responsible for these deaths,

Frank knows that he's possibly
gotta go back to her house

and save her, which is a whole
sub-plot that we never shot.

You'll see that
coming up in a minute.

And now we're into the scene
with Milton Dammers arriving.

And this goes on into talking
about the back-story of Frank

and how his wife
died in an accident,

which, I think, is pretty
much as we shot it.

So we'll just
have a look at this.

One difference
with the way it was

originally storyboarded
is instead of

the knife being the murder
weapon, it was gonna be a gun.

And we were gonna
see Frank loading

a gun into the trunk of his car

with his name engraved on it.

And then we were
gonna hear how his wife

was found dead in the
forest with gunshot wounds.

Now this is the young reporter,

Steve Bayliss, who we find is in

Magda's bedroom having
to succumb to her charms.

She heads out to the
kitchen to get herself a drink

and starts to get
freaked out by noises

you know, like, a little
bit of wall paper ripples,

she hears creaks and groans.

The tension is starting
to build in the scene

to the point that she wants
to get out of the house

and she starts to

race towards the front door.

She runs towards the door

thinking she's been
pursued by some unseen evil.

She opens the door, and there's a
big fright, as Frank's standing there.

She, of course, thinks that Frank's
there to do her some sort of harm

and tries to defend herself.
Steve runs away in terror

as Frank says, "No, no,
you've gotta listen to me

"you're gonna be the next victim."
She doesn't.

She just picks up the phone,
but then, suddenly, the Reaper attacks.

Frank manages to push
her away from the Reaper

and we have a little sequence
here where he struggles

to try and save her life.

Of course,
the problem that Frank has

is that he can't make physical
contact with the Reaper.

Every time he tries to grab him,
he just passes through him.

But he can at least
get Magda away

which is what he
tries to do here.

The Judge makes a
heroic last-minute rescue

where he starts blazing
at the Reaper with his guns

and the Reaper gets hit,
and falls backwards.

This is a gag that we used
in the museum in the film,

but originally, this was
the way it was gonna be

which is why we had to
set up the ghost bullets

earlier, of course,
being effective against ghosts.

So Frank and the Judge
take Magda away in the car.

He just now has to
try and get her away,

as far away as he
can from the Reaper

who he knows now is
gonna just pursue her

relentlessly.

The Judge, unfortunately,
gets chopped in half

by the Reaper's scythe as it
comes scooting through the car.

And this was a gag that we
used in the museum, as well,

but then we ultimately cut it out of
the film, but you'll be able to look at

what we did shoot of that
in the documentary later on.

So now, we're into
a sequence which is

reasonably similar
to what is in the movie

of Frank just now having to
drive crazily down this narrow road

with the Reaper on the roof of
the car, the scythe under his chin,

trying to save Magda's life.

So Frank walks into

the Sheriff's office to give
himself up the following morning.

A scene which is pretty much
the same as what's in the movie.

The Judge is licked
awake by Rustler.

He's lying on the road, realizing
that he's been chopped in half

and he says, "You gotta take
me to the cemetery. I'm a goner."

Jumps on Rustler's back.

We cut to the Lynskey house,
and Lucy has just had a shower

and she's doing her hair in
front of the steamed-up mirror

when the letters of her name
are scrawled with an invisible hand.

She's starting to get freaked
out and her husband's face

presses against the shower box.

The windows lock,
the curtains go down.

He sits on the bed
and pats the bed,

so it's, kind of,
pretty freaky for her

and she jumps in the
car and races away

and he is in the
back of the car.

And he's pacing
around the room, saying,

"You know, you gotta
listen to me, Lucy,

"we gotta have a second chance."

This is a scene that
we actually filmed

in a slightly different context

which you'll see in
the special edition.

This interrogation scene is
pretty much as was shot, I believe.

Again, not the most interesting
thing to look at when you

haven't gotten any dialogue.

So Lucy returns to
the Bartlett house

having received an urgent
message on the phone

to come and help Patricia.

This was a scene similar to
what we filmed, where Patricia is

really acting as
if her mother is

the perpetrator
behind all her problems.

She pulls out an
old suitcase out of

behind, under her mother's bed,

and there's a
whole lot of pills in it.

This never made it into the film,

but we had newspaper
clippings in there instead.

But originally there was going to
be pills and Patricia was going to say

she was getting drugged by her
mother and acting like the victim.

They hear the old lady
coming up the stairs

and so Lucy has to go
and race to hide in the closet

just as she does.

In the movie, if you recall,

she finds the knife
with Frank's initials on

and in this version,
it was the gun

that was the murder weapon and
she sees that up on the closet shelf.

So as Lucy comes down the stairs

there's hints of Wallpaper
Man following her.

We filmed this in a
slightly different way.

One of the real
difficult problems

with drawing
storyboards like this

is when this was being drawn

I didn't even know what the
house was gonna look like.

It's one of the
really tricky things.

You don't know
what the set design is

and so it's hard
to design the shots

and often, once you get on
the set, you make modifications.

So Ray's empty carcass
rolls onto the ground

and we cut to
the Sheriff's office.

This was a scene that
we ultimately filmed,

but cut out of the
cinema release.

It is back in the special edition.
If you've already seen it

you'll know what I mean.

The scene where the ghosts
arrive to try and help Frank.

He's now been imprisoned

and they walk through the cells.

But to their shock,
they find that Frank

can't actually see them anymore.

He seems to have lost his
psychic ability temporarily.

The scene with Lucy in the cell

talking to Frank is
very much as filmed.

But you'll see that the
Reaper sequence coming up

where he attacks them inside the cell,
was much, much more elaborate

in its storyboard conception
than what we ultimately filmed.

Frank and Lucy's escape from
their cell is pretty much as we

filmed it with a
few modifications.

So here we are in
the cryogenics lab

and this sequence plays pretty
much as it does in the movie.

We're about to come
to a scene where

the storyboards are much,
much more elaborate

than what got filmed and
this is the whole sequence

of Frank being a ghost.

I had intended this to
be quite a long scene

and as it was, we...
It got cut down for various reasons.

One, was obviously
just the pace of the film.

Secondly, we were running out
of time, we were behind schedule

and we were in danger
of going over budget

if we didn't make some trims.

And so the sequence that runs

with Frank as the spirit,
trying to chase after Lucy

became a little bit more simple.

As Dammers takes Lucy
away in the patrol car

we immediately bring
the Reaper on as a threat.

He starts to pursue the car

and Frank races out
of the medical center

to see them driving away
with the Reaper on their tail.

So he starts running
very, very fast

and realizes they're
about to go onto a freeway.

And this entire freeway scene
never made it into the film.

It was never shot,
although one or two of the gags

survived in a slightly
more truncated way.

So as Frank punches the
Reaper, we see glimpses

of monstrous faces
below the cowl

that just come on
with each punch

just for a flash.

A car sweeps Frank up
into the sky, he, like, has to...

Materializes again and
floats back down to Earth.

I really like the idea
in this fight of playing

with the rubbery
nature of ghosts

with their lightweight forms.

They can float up in the air in
the slipstream of a car or a truck.

And here they are, like, Frank's
sailing down and lands on the road.

And this was a gag that
obviously did end up in the film.

I was determined to keep
some of this in the movie.

It would've been
fun to have shot it all,

but it would've taken us weeks.

This is another gag, where
Frank throws himself on the ground

and gets flattened by
a truck that ended up

in the movie in
a very brief form.

I like the idea of
this fight because it

was a chance to
play with the ability

to run through cars
and through buses.

It was also Frank's opportunity

to actually, physically
fight the Reaper

which he was unable
to do as a human being.

And we really milked it for all
it was worth in this sequence.

This was the end of
the scene where he

pins himself on
the front of a truck,

but pushes the Reaper
away with his feet.

The Reaper, ultimately,
just sails away into the night

and Frank rides on the
truck a little bit further

and picks up the cop car,
driving across the far side of town

towards the cemetery.

So he decides to run to it.
And he runs through houses

through people's dinner tables,
and through roofs

and you can see what's
happening here, going through walls.

And we were going
to have this big, long...

This was a one-shot scene,
where we just follow him

and the camera and him just
passed through all sorts of houses

and buildings, and factories, and this,
kind of, chase to get to this car.

Frank ultimately
arrives at the cemetery,

throwing himself on
the hood of the car

as Dammers drives in
through the gates and parks up.

He looks in horror
as the Reaper is

hitting across the rooftops

only to be grabbed
by the Gatekeeper.

Now this is a scene you'll be able
to look at in the documentary, as well

'cause we did film most of this.

And this is with the
modified Gatekeeper design

which is different
now to how it was

at the beginning
of the storyboards.

The Judge, who, you'll remember

went to the cemetery
on the back of the dog

makes a reappearance in the
graveyard at this point in time.

And we get into this complicated
bit of action with the dog,

with the Judge,
with the Gatekeeper,

with the drill sergeant,
with the Reaper.

It's all kind of happening.

A version of this scene
was actually filmed

and we've kind of reassembled it

as best we could
for the documentary.

Although the order is different,

the scene is pretty much
as shot now, with Dammers

freaking Lucy out by
showing her his scars.

Lucy jumping in the car and driving
away to save Frank from the freezer

and Frank facing

the blobby, gloopy
guy on the tombstone.

Now there's a shot coming
up which I'm really fond of

which is where Frank goes
into a coffin, sees a corpse

and he, kind of,
propels himself through the ground

into a series of coffins.

We actually shot this shot.
It didn't end up in the theatrical version

for pacing reasons, but you
can see it in the documentary

in the deleted scenes section.

He carries on pushing
himself through

the ground and
ends up in the crypt

where he sees the blobs reforming
into Johnny and the Reaper.

And this was another
scene that's in the movie.

It was never as
successful as what I hoped.

I wanted this

sort of blobby texture to
kind of, like, pull Frank in

and encapsulate him,
and we never

got that quite
working well enough.

And that's it, that's as far as
we got with our story boarding.

As we mentioned earlier

we actually ran out of time and
we'd never storyboarded the last

you know, climatic, sort of,
third act of the film.

So that was kind of interesting.
I mean, I have

sort of forgotten half the stuff

that we storyboarded
and some of it

would've been quite
interesting, if we filmed it.

But you know, that,
in a way, is the version

of THE FRIGHTENERS
that never was.

But at least it exists as a
sort of a cartoon, I guess.

Now, when you're
writing a script,

sometimes you have actors in mind
for roles and sometimes you don't.

It just depends. And so, it's useful
for Fran and I if we actually have a face

to one of our characters

because there's two of us writing,
we can imagine the same person,

which kind of makes some sense.

But as it was with
THE FRIGHTENERS,

we didn't really think
too much about casting.

We wrote the character

of Frank Bannister and
of Lucy and the ghosts.

And we wrote them very much to function
within the story that we were creating.

And we didn't actually have

a particularly strong idea
of one actor or another.

But once we had
this film underway

obviously it was the next
problem we had to solve.

So we sat down with Bob

and we talked about
ideas for actors.

And Michael Fox's name came up.

It was an idea that
we liked very much

because Michael
has a very rare ability

of balancing comedy and
comic timing with drama.

You know, he is very good
at both, which is a rare thing.

And Bob was obviously very
useful at that time, because he said,

"Well, I've worked with Michael.
I mean, you know, if you'd like

"I can give Michael a call and
send him a copy of the script."

So I said, "Yeah, okay,

I'll take a look at it, but I'm not
really in a mood to do much."

And then the script came

and, I mean, it was really
good and really compelling.

It was obviously unlike anything
that I had ever been offered before

and ever read before.

And it was clearly the work of a
really degeneratively ill person.

Or people, as it turned out.

And I called Bob up and I said,
"I don't know what to make of this.

"This could either be

"one of the most creative, interesting,
innovative movies I've ever seen

"or it could be just the worst movie I've
ever seen, depending on how it's done."

He said, "Well, you should go
and see HEAVENLY CREATURES."

And at that time, it was
about to play in Toronto

at the Toronto
Film Festival, so...

Which is a short flight
from where I live in Vermont.

So I said, you know, "Okay, great.
I'll do that."

And I went up and I met
Peter prior to seeing the film.

And we had a great conversation.
I really liked Peter.

And I felt bad. I remember being in
the meeting and feeling bad because

I wasn't predisposed
to do the movie

and I thought, "I have met this guy
and I'm gonna go and see his movie

"and then I'm, you know,
probably not going to do his film."

And, you know, who wants that?

You know, who wants
to be in that position?

So then we left and we went
down to the theater to see the movie.

And about 10 minutes into
HEAVENLY CREATURES, I just knew,

whatever he wanted to do.

He basically said,
"Yeah, I'm on board. I'm yours."

Which was great, because, like,
he was the first and only person

that we ever, you know,
spoke to about that role.

And, you know, that big problem was,
like, solved very, very easily.

I'm not sure that Frank Bannister
has anything to do with Michael Fox

as a person.

But I think Michael
has always had that

dark, quirky sense of
humor that he and I share.

And he understood the
character completely.

It was one of my better
acting experiences

and one of the more
challenging ones I've ever had.

And I felt completely
supported by Peter and Fran

to try all kinds of different things.
I mean, right down to the way I looked.

I figured, with Frank, you know,
this is a guy who is essentially dead.

You know, he's dead for
all intents and purposes.

He has no reason to live.

Everyone who is
his friend is dead.

So that for him, the real world,

the world that you or I live in

is something he can't
cope with or deal with.

So he's kind of like a hermit.

So I figured this guy would
either have hair down to his ass

or just cut his own
hair and cut it all off.

It is a very different type of character
than we're used to seeing from Michael.

And so I think that's one of the really
fun things about watching the movie.

I don't know.
They say that sometimes

when you have a
traumatic experience

that it can alter
your perception.

Really, so after that
you could just see spirits?

I mean, what happened?

How about you talk to Ray?

It was important that Lucy
anchors the film in a reality

because there's so much
weird stuff happening around her.

I mean, Frank is going through all
sorts of weird stuff, he can see ghosts.

You know, there's the ghosts
who are like characters in the film.

There's Johnny and Patricia,
who are these psychos.

Everybody, you know, in the story,
Dammers, the FBI guy...

You know, they're all
kind of weird and out there.

And it was critical that we have,
you know, one key character

who is like an anchor for the audience,
someone who grounds the film in reality.

The activity is
currently located where?

Well, I don't know.
It just went quiet about five minutes ago.

Went quiet?

The dining room table spun in
a counterclockwise direction?

I don't think that
one happened, no.

The toilet seat lid
banged up and down?

No.

- Did the bed levitate?
- Yeah. Yeah, with me on it.

We auditioned maybe 30
or 40 actors to play Lucy

and we were starting
to get a bit concerned.

And then we saw a tape

that was sent to us of Trini
Alvarado doing an audition.

And, you know, we really
liked her performance.

We really liked the quality.

It's not just a performance thing.
It's the quality of who she is.

And it kind of, like,
comes across onscreen,

a very rational calm with a,
you know, lovely sense of humor.

So when I went to New Zealand and
I met them, I was a little bit nervous.

But I had seen pictures
of Peter from articles

of his other pictures and stuff,
and I thought he had a very sweet face.

I'm reviving him at 9:00.

Why would we want to do that?

Lucy's character is a
very active character.

And she isn't afraid
of throwing a punch.

And I love that about the way
Peter and Fran developed her.

She's a strong female figure.

And there are a lot of female characters,
strong female characters in this.

And I love that about
THE FRIGHTENERS.

You must think I'm very stupid.

Excuse me.

Trini, besides being a
really talented actress

has this really great ethereal,
kind of haunted look that

really always drew
me in to her as...

Lucy as a character,
and the movie,

and where my character was, and what
he was supposed to be going through.

I could always find the answers
in Trini's eyes and expressions.

Casting the ghosts
was a lot of fun

because with the three ghosts,
with Cyrus, Stuart and the Judge,

we wanted to cast
actors that were gonna

basically help
us with the script.

And because these were
roles that had to be funny,

kind of wise-cracking guys
coming out with good one-liners.

And Fran and I had a go at all this,
you know, in our draft of the script.

But, you know, we're not
great at doing that sort of writing.

And so we thought, if we cast, you know,
like comics or stand up comics

or guys who... You know, actors
who have good comic ability

then we're gonna get a
lot of input into the script

and can hopefully,
you know, make it funnier.

And so we started to look
around for these sorts of guys.

And we found Jim
Fyfe pretty quickly.

I auditioned a couple
of times by myself.

And that was kind of like you
were supposed to stand there

and just basically hallucinate.

'Cause they wanted to see actors who could,
you know, act against a blue screen.

So you had to just
stay there and go, like...

And what we actually
did was, we kept

calling him back in to auditions,
time and time again.

I guess at that point,
they knew that they wanted me

but they couldn't
actually tell me that.

So I just kind of had
to keep coming back

and auditioning with
different guys to play Cyrus.

Victoria Burrows,
our casting director,

had mentioned Chi
McBride's name early

but had said to us that Chi
didn't want to come and audition.

He had read the script

and he didn't particularly like it
or didn't think it was funny enough.

I thought that Cyrus' role
was written a little stereotypical

and it was a
little underwritten.

You know, I wasn't going

all the way over to New
Zealand to do two lines.

So I decided that I
didn't want to do it.

About two or three months later,
I think we were getting really desperate

and, you know, we said to Victoria,
"Look, have you got any more ideas?"

And she says, "Well, there is Chi.
I could try Chi again."

And we said, "Well, just,
you know, reiterate to him

"the fact that we want him
to contribute to the script,

"that if he doesn't think it's funny
enough now, then that's okay

"because it's our intention of getting
as much input from him as we can

"and making it funnier."

Now, once I saw HEAVENLY
CREATURES, I said,

"Maybe I might want
to work with this guy."

So, you know...
But I still was a little worried.

And the only way I agreed
to go into the audition

is if I could go in and do pretty
much whatever I wanted to do.

He was very, very funny.
He was improvising.

He wasn't even
sticking to our script.

Why are you always letting him scare you?
You the ghost.

Look, man, I'm not worried about
going back to the cemetery, okay?

First of all, two reasons.

Death was the best thing to ever
happen to me, 'cause I had bad credit.

Second of all, there's more than
15% more leg room in my casket

than there is in
the trunk of that car.

So you can stay here whining and
complaining and getting mad and stuff.

But I'm getting what I want.
I'm gonna be riding in the front.

And besides, I'm getting ready to
play some music. I need to relax.

I'm gonna tell you, if you
lock me up in that trunk again,

I'm getting some more black ghosts,
and we're gonna march,

we're calling Jesse, we're gonna have
the African American Apparition Coalition.

We can't work under
these conditions.

And you're gonna be in a lot of
trouble with a lot of black ghosts.

There ain't nothing worse
than a bunch of brothers

that's pissed off
and already dead.

So I would advise you that
you just re-upholster your seats

and get some plastic,
do whatever you gonna do.

B! B, is that you?

Benny, my man.

Hey, man, how did
you get busted again?

You know what?
You really need to change your haircut.

You're getting a little
long in the back, Andy.

Why don't you let me trim it?

You know something, Benjamin,
I've been meaning to tell you,

you're going down
a very crooked road.

You don't want to end up another statistic,
another African American male

stuck behind bars,
like Mike Tyson.

You don't want to be sitting back there,
doing 1,000 push ups a day,

and 555 sit-ups a day,

and you know you have to change
your name, 'cause Mike is a Muslim now.

Now it's Mike X.

Peter Jackson once said
that if I didn't get the job

he was just gonna take
everything that I said in the auditions

and just put it in the script.

You dirty bastard.

I never met Chi before,
you know, on the plane down there.

And we just hit
it off immediately.

He's great.
He's really, really a funny guy.

He's a terrific actor, and he's
just got a great philosophy.

We had a blast working together.

- I love you, man!
- Don't touch my leg. Don't touch my leg.

Because people will see this,
and the next thing you know

I'll be, you know, doing those kind
of movies where people are like,

"Well, is he really...
I don't know what he is, but I love him."

"I'm such a big, strong black ghost.
You know what I'm saying?"

A lot of my work with them,
they weren't on camera.

And they didn't do
their work until later.

And yet there wasn't a day when those guys
didn't really bust their humps, you know,

to provide me with an idea of
what this scene was gonna be

and what they were gonna do.

And I always remember being really
moved by that and appreciative of it.

Can Marion Barry help me?

The character of the Judge
was another difficult one to cast.

And it was difficult in a different sense,
because with the Judge, we were using

a lot of prosthetic makeup

that was basically gonna cover his face.
Like, whoever the actor was

was gonna have nothing
visible apart from his eyes

because there was
so much makeup on.

And yet, you know, we wanted
a character and a personality

to project through the rubber.

And, you know, some actors
kind of get buried in that thing

and you don't ever
see them again.

This town is in deep trouble.

One of the problems
with auditioning the Judge

was that we didn't have the makeup
actually ready for them to wear

because it has to be made, you know,
for the actor, the specific actor.

And so we were auditioning
Judges without any makeup on

and having to imagine
what they were like.

John Astin did a really
delightful audition,

where it was clear, you know,
with his incredibly expressive eyes

that no matter what
you put on his face,

you were still gonna get this wonderful
character and personality coming through.

I ain't got no more
hauntings left in me.

Why, hell, I could
hardly rustle up a scare.

I think the Judge

represents a kind of

character that
we're all familiar with

in Western films.

And this...

I think this is a
kind of transplanting

of this kind of character

into, uh.

Into an environment
with which he's completely

unfamiliar, ill at ease.

I don't think he...

I don't think he adjusts
very well to modern life.

We got Rick Baker to design
us the makeup of the Judge.

He was very happy
to work with John Astin

and, you know,
to actually come up with

a look for this character.

And that was all done at
Rick's studio in Los Angeles

and John would go
in for various fittings

and, you know,
developing this makeup.

And Rick would send me
videotapes and photographs

and show me what it was like.

And when John came out
to New Zealand to do the film,

Rick sent Brian Penikas
to apply the makeup

which, at that point in time,
was about a five-hour makeup, I think

for John to have to go through.

He had to have, you know, his head covered
with the Judge's sort of, like, wig,

and the makeup was partly
prosthetics and partly stipple

which is where you apply the
rubber latex to the actual skin

and stretch it and relax it

so it gets wrinkles, you know,
appearing in it.

And so it was a very
time-consuming makeup.

I'd been on stage
thousands of times.

I'd been in many films
and television shows.

And I've done hundreds
of different makeups.

But nothing really
compares to this.

This goes way beyond.

And it wasn't until we did the
first makeup tests that I began

to see and feel exactly
who this character was.

The idea of casting actors
who could contribute to the script

you know,
really paid off for us,

especially during rehearsals.
We rehearsed

for about two weeks
before we started shooting.

We flew down to New
Zealand a couple of weeks

prior to the
beginning of shooting.

And we go over to
Peter and Fran's house.

They have this great
house on the water.

And they have this
room at the back

it's just all videos and, you know,
big, comfortable, fluffy furniture.

They all flake out and
watch movies there.

And all the actors
gathered in there

and we just read through all the
scenes and just improvised things

and made suggestions
and came up with lines.

And in a lot of cases

we had to
re-vernacularize their writing

because they'd written certain
phrases and certain ideas

in Kiwi-speak,

that we, as American actors, knew that
American audiences wouldn't relate to.

Peter and Fran were
really great about

soliciting our ideas.

And Michael, too,

because, you know, in a film like this,
when you're working with a big star,

the big star, you know, kind of gets to
say what's gonna go on to some extent, too.

It was really, like, a lot of fun,
because we were just...

We had the chance to be as wild
and over-the-top as we cared to be.

And, you know, he was really stressing
that it was more important for us to go

as far over-the-top as we possibly
could and let him reel us back in,

than for us to just be timid
and scared and trying to be safe.

So we just pretty much
did whatever we wanted

and we just said the first
things that came to our mind

within the context of the scene.

And a lot of the stuff stuck, and Peter
kept it. And they would videotape it,

and then they would go
and write the dialogue,

and the next day,
we'd have new pages.

Like, every day we would
have a different color page,

and we were, like,
running out of colors.

The thing that I remember
that was really odd

was they didn't have a tape recorder.
So what he did was he took his camcorder

and he put it in the
middle of the floor

and used it just
to record sound.

Which I thought was really
funny for a guy who was

pretty much of a, you know,
self-confessed tech weenie

and gadget freak, that he couldn't
come up with a tape recorder.

So let's just have a go.

Okay, so you're
stuck in the wall...

Maybe we'll start with that
line at the top of the page.

"Loosen up, man. Come on, particlize."
Or whatever it is in the end.

And just go through
into the music thing

and we'll try and snatch you a
couple of bits of dialogue if we can.

It would be great
if we just got stuck

and we just stopped

and the argument just continued with
me in the door, making whatever point.

And then he goes. And then I'm
still stuck, and I forget that I'm stuck.

What I'll do actually then is

after this line,
whatever it's gonna be,

"Come on, you could have
swung cupboards around,

"flash a few lights.
Give me something to work with.

"Cause I'm on my way.
Give me something to work with."

"Come on, Stuart.
In or out? In or out, man?"

"That ain't right, man.

"Don't take your
frustrations out on Stuart.

"You know the boy can't help getting stuck.
The guy's anal-retentive."

"I'm very upset.

"Now, can someone
please help me?"

Stuart will think Frank's gone.

- Yeah, he's gone.
- But he should start to really bitch

about the way that Frank's
making you guys work.

That business
partners thing is good.

I mean, that would be the sort of thing
that, you know, Stuart might well say.

And we're supposed to
be his business partners.

What a joke!

Okay, we still have a problem

as to where the second
scene goes, though.

Because at the moment,
we have the mail.

Then we have the
talk about the creditors.

Then we had the ghosts doing,
like, this gag.

- No, no, no.
- We don't have that?

No, we have the talk
about the creditors,

we have the Judge saying he's too old
and he's heading back to the cemetery.

- What happens is this...
- That puts Frank in a reflective mood.

And he ends up in his room

and then the guys burst in
and scare the hell out of him.

So this stuff goes
on in the morning.

Frank goes out to the mailbox.
He gets the thing. He goes...

He's out there with his coffee,
and he gets it and he goes, "Right.

"We've gotta have this
conversation right now."

He goes in and says, "Yo, everybody.
Sit down. Listen.

"These are bills, these are bills.
This is my situation.

"Blah, blah, blah. You got it?"

And then he has a conversation
with the Judge, who is saying,

"You know what?
I can't play this game anymore.

- "That's just too much for me."
- Yeah.

Then I kind of go away,
and I'm having a moment.

And then they do
this thing and I say,

"Fuck you. Don't ever do that."
And they're like, "Touched a button there."

I think we can still

probably play it the
way we've got it is,

we end the moment, and
they go, "Touchy, touchy."

And then we just go
to the dog howling.

It's got a good mood in the
driveway the next morning.

"What's up with Rustler?"
The Judge is heading for the cemetery.

Because I still
like the visual thing

of them sitting in the car,
watching the funeral procession pass by,

which I think is...
"You know who's doing this, Frank."

I mean, I think, we can't
get anything better than that,

of actually seeing the thing...

But that's the point of it,
the point of the compaction

or whatever you're looking for here,
is to find the strongest attitude.

And that's the
strongest attitude to be,

to be there, to have that stuff
happening in the background.

There was another
element of improvisation

that really happened on the set
while we were shooting, as well,

because, often, especially
in the case of Chi McBride,

we'd get to certain lines

when, you know,
we'd have something in the script,

and we'd say to Chi, "Well, have
you got any other ideas for this?

"Just for this line. Anything.
Can you come up with something funnier?"

And he says,

"Yeah, I think I can, but just roll the
camera and we'll see what happens."

And action.

That's it!
You can kiss my ass, Frank!

Ain't gonna be no more hauntings until
we get some gun control in the house!

Action.

You know, one of the
reasons I was glad I was dead

was 'cause I thought I wouldn't have
to worry about getting killed no more!

Action.

You know, you ain't even safe
around this place when you're dead!

You senile old bastard!

Action.

Fuck you, Judge.

You know, if I wanted
to get shot at every day,

I'd move my black
ass to Los Angeles.

They covered me
with a blue, like, cape.

Like a poncho.

I delivered my lines

and it gave the appearance that I
was just appearing from a drain pipe.

Set.

And action.

Yo, Frank! How's it hanging?

- I don't know, Cyrus.
- You tell me.

Yeah, what's 10 inches long and white?
Right. Nothing.

Hey, come on, I told you guys,
get the hell out of my plumbing.

Hey, look, come on, Frank!

Hey, look, we want to call a meeting, man.
We gotta rap.

Hey, Cyrus. I gotta take a leak.
And I'm not getting out of the shower.

Goodbye.

A small town called Lyttelton

which is in the South Island of New
Zealand, just outside of Christchurch

was chosen as a primary location
for Fair water, where our film's set.

And we spent about
five weeks in Lyttelton

in a very, very
wet winter of 1995,

shooting any sequences that were,
like, outside the town

in the High Street
and in the cemetery.

We had to make this small New
Zealand town look like America, of course.

And so we had to
find American vehicles

because we drive on
the other side of the road.

We were lucky that Christchurch,
which was very close by

is the base for Operation Deep Freeze,
the American Antarctic base.

And so there's a lot of
American personnel at the base

who have brought
their cars over.

So we were able to borrow a lot of
their vehicles for the street scenes.

We had to do a lot of
work on the street signs,

you know, just to generally make
this place look like small-town America.

I think the hardest thing is

the logistics of having
a movie being shot

halfway around the
world in New Zealand.

But in a strange way,
it gives the movie

a wonderfully unique look

and a very important
surreal quality

which is appropriate
for the tone of the movie.

But it's very hard to make a
movie when it's all being done,

you know, in a 14-and-a-half-hour
airplane flight away.

- How old are you?
- How old am I? I'm 106.

Well, a hundred... In dog years.
I'll be 34 next week.

Two weeks.

Any other questions? Yeah?

You have to get it right?

You have to do it
over and over again

so they can get the right one?

Yeah, I know.
It's silly, isn't it?

We do it over and over again

because, see, there's
camera guys and sound guys

and there's people who
are in charge of making sure

that every time we
do it, it looks the same.

- You happy now?
- Clock ticking!

And there are people who
are in charge of the lights.

And there are people who are in
charge of the cars and the people.

And so what has to happen in every
take is every single one of those people

has to get their job done right.

And usually it's my fault.
And I don't get my job done right.

But that's what we do.
We do it every time

and every time after it's done we look
and go, "Are you happy? Are you happy?"

And if everybody gets what they
want, then we can do the next thing.

Ready and action!

The location at
Lyttelton was also used

for scenes with Frank Bannister's
house up on the hill above the town.

We built the house so that we
could shoot it inside it and outside it

because the idea
with the house is that

Frank had got halfway through
building it when he was a young architect.

His wife had died, and he had
sort of stopped any further work on it.

So it was, like,
supposed to be a half-finished house.

It meant that we had these
big windows that he had made,

that hadn't got
any glass in them.

We wanted a lot of the outside

to be present when we
were inside the house.

Cigars?

You've been promising
to buy me a box of cigars.

Cyrus, I hate to break
this to you, but you're dead.

Of course, THE FRIGHTENERS
has a lot of special effects,

a huge number of special effects

which is part of the fun for me,
because I just love doing effects.

It's like being a magician. It's like
being a kid in a toy shop, in a way.

I'm very fortunate,
because down here in New Zealand, I have

an involvement in a special
effects company called WETA.

And so I'm able to have,

I guess, a lot more hands-on
involvement in effects

then what a director would
probably be used to overseas.

WETA comprises two departments.

One of them is the creature shop

which makes miniatures and
monsters and various things.

And that's headed
by Richard Taylor.

This is the sculpting room.
We start our designs

by coming up with a number of drawings,
which we show to the director,

then take them a little bit further
into little three-dimensional maquettes

which are small sculptures
that he can then look at and view.

And finally, when we've
got a design that he likes,

we then begin the task of
sculpting it up in clay or Plasticine.

As you follow me around,
you can see a number of examples

of things we've got on
the go at the moment.

Richard and I go back
to MEET THE FEEBLES.

He worked on it,
built some of the puppets for me

and he did a lot of effects on
BRAINDEAD and HEAVENLY CREATURES.

The other half of WETA
is the digital department,

the computer department.

And that really came together
on HEAVENLY CREATURES.

We did about 30 CG, you know,
computer-generated shots, for that movie.

And we only had one
computer at the time.

But at least we got the
hang of how to do the stuff

and we sort of, you know,
solved some of the problems ourselves

and figured out
the basic process.

So, when it came time to
do THE FRIGHTENERS,

I was very keen to do all the
effects down in New Zealand.

It's not just a sort of ego
thing because it's my company

or anything like that.
It's really a practical thing for me

because, as the director of the film,
I have to have such a close contact

with the effects to make sure that
they are done as efficiently as possible.

If you've got over 500 shots,
as we had on THE FRIGHTENERS,

you can't afford for people to be going
off in the wrong direction for too long.

I've always got to look at what's happening
and just steer people the right way

so that we can be as
efficient as possible.

They can get that shot
finished and move on to the next.

I mean, what's he
gonna look like?

Because THE FRIGHTENERS
has so many computer shots,

I think it would be quite good if
we just had a look at that process.

It begins on film.
We shoot the film as we would normally,

you know, with a
35-millimeter camera.

And then that piece of film,
the negative has to go

through the system of being
scanned into a computer.

So, we should probably find
someone who can explain that to us.

Right.
This is where it's really happening.

I'm not sure what the rest
of the people were telling you

but, in point of fact

this facility right here,
the machine room at WETA Digital

is the center of
digital activity here.

There's actually three distinct
processes that you have to go through

when you're working on
digital effects for a film.

The first is the actual digitization
of the scanned elements.

The second is the processing
that happens throughout the facility.

And the third is the recording of
those elements finally out to film.

Normally, what happens is this
unit actually takes filmed elements

that we have received
edited decision lists for,

and digitizes them into a format that is
readable by the machines in the facility.

Typically, a scanned
element at 2K resolution

is about nine megabytes'
worth of information.

In typical Hollywood terms,

a digital effect is considered
about five seconds long,

about five discreet elements,
that might be a background play,

a composited
element on top of that,

a miniature, a computer model,
those kinds of elements.

It typically takes between one and a
half to two gigabytes of storage space

to store those elements.
One shot in this facility

can take as much as 10
gigabytes of storage space.

To address that need, at the
height of THE FRIGHTENERS

when we were really
crunching through the shots,

we had almost 1.6 terabytes of disk
space available throughout the facility.

The last step, after the
actual digital processing,

is the recording of the
final digital images onto film.

That happens here.
This is a Solitaire Cine Ill recorder.

We actually have two
of them in the facility.

It takes about 35 to 36
seconds to actually record

the finished digital
image back out into film.

That happens, it's cued up here by
an operator, shot onto this camera,

we send it off to the lab for processing,
and then check the print.

How's that?

I know that there was
some concern from Universal

as to whether we could actually do
all the visual effects in New Zealand

which was fair enough.
I mean, you know, this is a studio

that's used to dealing with the
very biggest American companies

and were naturally afraid.

So we devised a little
strategy amongst ourselves

that we would finish one of the
ghost scenes as quickly as we could.

And this coincided quite well

with Bob Zemeckis' first
visit down to New Zealand,

which was about two or three
weeks after we began shooting.

We're trying to pick out the
West Coast town that this is.

Shoot, shoot, shoot.

Wait till you hear
the story about...

- It's like a Morro Bay.
- Morro Bay with a little surreal snow.

And a port.

I was wondering if I was
gonna see you or not today.

Jesus Christ.
Does this happen every time?

- How are you?
- Good to see you.

And Bob was gonna come down

just to have a look
and say hi to people

and to see how we were going.

And we thought,
"Wow, wouldn't it be great if we had

"one of the ghost scenes actually
finished to show Bob at that stage?"

Scene 28 was a
good scene to work on

because it really extended
us into all sorts of areas.

It contained a variety of different effects
that we would use later in the film.

Obviously, the ghosts were there,
so we had to develop our whole ghost look.

We would like to cruise
with some style, man.

You know, you guys left
me high and dry tonight.

I get to the house, nothing's happening.
Couldn't believe it.

Hey!

Ultimately,
it was a little hurried

because we were still experimenting
with how the ghost effect would look

over a variety of backgrounds.

We only had two weeks to do it

because we'd only just shot this
footage, and then he was arriving.

So the guys, like, worked around
the clock and they did all the shots.

There's, like, 12 or
14 shots in the scene.

That fellow takes
us totally for granted.

And we're supposed to
be his business partners.

What a joke!

Bob turned up in New Zealand,
and we sat him down to show him Scene 28.

He didn't realize that all the computer
guys had been working for two weeks

with virtually no sleep
to get this scene finished.

But we ran it for him,
and he just watched it quietly

and then, at the end, I remember
he turned to us and he said,

"Well, guys, it looks like we've
got a real movie on our hands."

And I remember that was,
you know, really exciting

because it just told everybody
that he was impressed.

And he is the guy
you want to impress.

THE FRIGHTENERS has a
lot of computer graphic shots.

I mean, more than I've
ever had in any of my movies.

They are...

I mean, it's a movie that is a
computer graphics extravaganza.

You're so tight you can play "Pick
up sticks" with your butt cheeks.

Loosen up. Just particlize.
There you go.

Damn!

The problem at that stage
became not one of, you know,

"Are we gonna do the effects?"

Because I think it was pretty much decided
that we would be doing all the effects.

But the problem was just
the sheer size of the job,

the recruiting of more people,
getting more computers

and making sure that the
facility was able to handle it all.

One of the things that
we decided to do was to

ask Wes Takahashi to join the
team as visual effects supervisor.

He was based in the States

and he'd worked at ILM for,
you know, some 12 or 15 years.

And we thought that
somebody of his experience

was gonna be very important
in guiding us through this

incredibly complex year
that was in front of us.

The one shot that inspired me

for the most part, to come down here,
was one in which Cyrus

walks towards the camera and
his head envelops a light bulb.

You gotta just walk up to Frank,
just look him in the eye and just say,

"Frank, give me what I want
or I'm gonna bust your ass!"

And my whole head was glowing.

And when I spoke, you know,
my eyes were really bulging,

and I was really, really upset,

and I delivered a line and
it came out in light beams.

It was unbelievable. It was fantastic.
And they cut it out of the film.

I can stretch my body out to 30 feet in
length using Hindu breathing techniques.

I really got to say, I think that's
what got me the job, you know?

And then it was cut from the film,
so it was kind of a comedown for me

but I'm glad it's
back in the LaserDisc.

I wanted the ghosts to
look like traditional ghosts

because, you know,
in a movie like this

where you've got so many
shots of ghosts in the film

and they are a fundamental
part of the movie,

they are characters in the film,

I didn't want to have something that
was gonna, like, confuse audiences,

something that didn't
really look ghost-like,

you know, something
kind of weird

and people would be saying,
"Are these ghosts or are they..."

At the same time, I also
didn't want to do a shortcut

where we have the
ghosts appearing solid

so we can, like, film them
in the same room, you know.

I mean, that's fine, and it
demands a leap of imagination,

but I wanted our film to be a little
bit more straightforward than that.

We kind of imagine that
ghosts are transparent

and they have a little
glow around them.

I think, most people have this image
of what a ghost looks like in their mind.

And I wanted just to target
just directly at that image,

so there was no
thinking involved.

You could just listen to the
dialogue they were saying,

and watch the movie,
and follow the story,

and not be confused about who
these guys or what these guys were.

They're ghosts, but they
take on their personality

and their shape
is of their corpse

that is also buried and
rotting in the ground.

They come from different times,
and they have different looks,

and they're a little bit creepy,
but they're a little bit fun.

And, you know, so there is
quite a bit of an edge to them, too.

So you take them really real.

So you're not sitting there
watching anything that's, you know,

100% light.

But at the same time, it's not so
dark that it's repulsive in any way.

So it's a wonderful
blend of that.

And I think that that's
something that's really interesting

about the way the film looks.

What are the physics of a ghost?
Can it pass through objects?

And if it can pass through objects,
how come it can stand on the floor?

And all of these had to
be defined with our ghosts.

And do they have...
Do they cast shadows?

Are shadows cast upon them?

Are they illuminating?

Do they produce their own light?

How much transparency do they have?
Are they three-dimensional?

Should they distort
the backgrounds?

Because they were transparent,

they tended to inherit the
colors of what was behind them.

We could see what
was behind them.

So, if we put one against a dark background
and one against a bright red wall,

we'd see some differences.

But we wanted to keep them
looking the same throughout the movie.

One of the things we
developed with the software here

was the ability to
change their colors.

This is our ghost control program,
called Setspook

that we used to define the look
of the ghosts for every single shot.

We can control various things here,
like the size of his glow,

how strong they were
on the screen, their color,

how much the background
got distorted through them.

In addition to the
standard ghost shot,

where they're just
standing in the room talking,

there's a number of shots where special
things have to happen to the ghosts.

One of the most common
techniques was called rotoscoping,

which is how you make a
ghost pass through a doorway

or fall through the floor.

Basically, the rotoscoper
has to draw a little line

around their body using a mouse

and literally animates them
through the floor, frame by frame.

It's a very time-consuming
and tedious process.

The rotoscoping was
relatively straightforward.

But we occasionally had
some complicated shots

where 3D animation had to be
added to the two-dimensional ghosts.

A good example
of that is the shot

where Stuart has arrived
back at Frank's house

and he's feeling carsick, and his cheeks
are swelling with ectoplasmic vomit.

I built a 3D Stuart head,

and then we projected
the footage onto that.

The catch was that that had to
be match-moved to Stuart's actions,

over the course
of a very long shot.

Ultimately, it was a
match move that had to be,

the angle and position
and size of Stuart's face.

The computer model that I had made
had to be matched to the live action.

Once that was done,
then it was relatively easy

to be able to inflate the
cheeks up and back down again.

The ears were also match-moved

so that, then using a dynamics
program we've got, called Dynamation,

it was easy enough to have
it emit a whole lot of particles

with the characteristics
of puke that,

puke in zero gravity has,
and there was gravity pointing up.

The particles, once they were emitted,
wanted to flock together.

But the catch was that, since
they were coming out so fast,

for every frame of blobs,
we had to actually produce 10 frames

so that we could combine them all
together go give us motion-blurred blobs.

So, ultimately, about 5,000
frames of blobs were rendered

which was the other reason
why that shot took so long.

Occasionally, we had to build
a 3-D model of an entire ghost.

For instance, the scene where Stuart gets
fired out of the exhaust pipe of the car.

That was quite a simple
model that Matt Aitken built.

He was able to animate
the wire-frame models,

sort of like oozing
out of the exhaust pipe

and then take photographic
textures of the actor

and paste that over the
top of the wire frame model.

And with enough motion blur,

you know, you just see this
computer-generated ghost whizzing past.

And we get away with it,
'cause it's so quick.

Another ghost shot which,
you know, needed something extra

is the one where Frank sprays
fly spray into Stuart's face.

I know that my initial idea with
that shot was something very simple

and probably rather boring,
where the fly spray, like, hits his head,

and it just blows his head into the
air in a sort of swarm of particles,

and it just comes back together.

That was kind of,
like, all I could think of.

Peter was a little unsure about exactly
what he wanted to see in this shot.

I had a couple of ideas.
We played around with it for

about a day, I believe.

And at the end of that,
we showed it to him,

and, pretty much, it
was a first-time final.

We both just started getting into
it and got little bit carried away.

And so we decided
to go very gory

because we both figured that
we were working for Peter Jackson

so he would have to like it,
one way or the other.

And it's like a hole blows in
the middle of Stuart's head

and his eyeballs
are hanging off little,

sort of bits of tendons,
and his tongue is flapping.

It was, like, way beyond
anything I ever imagined.

And I just thought,
"Wow, this is great."

And that's what I love about
working with creative people

is that the more of those sort of
ideas that can be thrown into the mix,

that's better than stuff
that I can come up with,

it just makes the
film so much better.

Probably my most
favorite shot in the movie,

in terms of a
special effects shot is

the one in the kitchen
where Michael kills a fly.

There's a fly buzzing
around and he slaps it

and a little dead body of a
fly kind of falls out of his hand.

And that's just Michael miming the
action and doing the thing with his hands.

And then we added a little
CG fly into the shot afterwards.

And it's such a simple shot that people
don't think of being a special effect.

You know, I mean, I'm sure a
lot of people thought we trained

flies to actually, like, you know,
get right into the target zone

that Michael could slap them.

We occasionally used to
have a mix of CG and puppetry.

For instance, where Stuart
gets hit by the reaper's scythe

and he falls to the
floor and collapses.

I wanted, you know,
an effect of Stuart's carcass

just imploding on itself,

as if all the ectoplasmic life
force had suddenly dispersed.

And that was achieved by
starting out with a shot of Jim Fyfe

falling to his knees, and he'd just
drop below the level of the camera.

And then we would pick him up again
as he fell to the floor, we'd tilt down.

But at this stage, we had
switched to a rubber puppet.

We would inflate it
with a vacuum cleaner,

and then on "Action"

quickly put the vacuum
cleaners onto reverse

and suck all the air out,
giving the feeling

that the scythe had
punctured Stuart's head

and squashed the character to the ground,
making him look like a flat pancake.

What we were able to
do was to have, you know,

our computerized, ghosted Stuart

with a CG reaper
hitting the top of his head.

And as the camera tilts down,
we changed to the rubber model

that Richard had made
halfway through the shot

and that's what we see
being sucked down to the floor.

The Judge was a ghost who
did need very special treatment.

Particularly, in the shot where he walks
across the room and we see very clearly

that his torso is missing,
that he just has a skeletal remains,

you know, a spine
and a rib cage.

Frame by frame,
it had to be positioned

and bent to match
the Judge's movement.

And that was probably
the longest part of the shot,

was just locking
that spine in there

as he came towards us,
turned around, and sat down.

It could soon be
time to lay my bones.

No, you're my go-to guy.

Without you, I'm out
of business, Judge.

Frightening.

It is a young man's game, Frank.

I ain't got no more
hauntings left in me.

I mean, that's a great shot, but it
did take a hell of a lot of time to do.

And perceptive
members of the audience

may notice that the Judge
has his coat buttoned up

throughout the rest of the film.

So we didn't need to have to
do that every time we saw him.

Every time we have a ghost scene

where we have, like,
Michael J. Fox, for instance,

you know, talking with the ghosts,
which happens a lot in the movie,

we had to shoot Michael
and the ghosts separately.

You know, Michael
on the stage by himself,

and then the ghosts in front
of a blue screen by themselves.

That takes, you know, twice as
long as a normal scene to shoot

because you've got
two different bits to do

before you can actually
put them both together.

And then, what also
increases the time

is the fact that, if you
want to move the camera,

if you want to do anything
where the camera's moving around

with the actors during the
course of these ghost scenes,

you have to have it controlled
by a motion-control unit

which is, like,
something you mount the camera on,

this big, robotic
machine, basically,

that moves the camera,
pans it, tilts it

and tracks it along and
cranes it up and down.

And those camera moves
are recorded by a computer.

So if you tracked along
and panned with Michael,

then, two or three months later,
you set up the same rig again

in front of a blue screen and
you pan and track with the ghosts,

and the camera moves at exactly
the same speed. It doesn't alter at all.

And so, you can then put
the two pieces of film together

and they stay locked together.

$15,000, guys. I need it quick.

When we did the
BACK TO THE FUTURE ones,

we had to do all of those
elements on the same day.

So whatever it was that we shot,

whether it was, in BACK TO
THE FUTURE Ill, for example,

it was me as three different
people in the same scene.

So I'd do it in makeup
and all that stuff

and I'd do one character and
then I'd go away and change,

and I'd come back and I'd do
it again as another character,

go away and change, come back.

And it made for long, excruciatingly
uncomfortable days sometimes.

But they couldn't take a chance

that there'd be a earthquake or something
that would bump or jar the camera.

But by the time that we
did THE FRIGHTENERS,

the technology had
improved to the point where

you could do it months later.
It would remember exactly what to do.

For me it was real helpful,
because I could sense when it was moving,

when the camera was
moving independently

and I could hear it

and sometimes see it peripherally,
and knew that, that was then a cue

that the action had progressed,

and so I knew from rehearsal
what was now happening.

If the camera is starting to go this way,
I think, "Okay, now, this is where

"the ghosts start to
go across the room."

It's amazing.
It's amazing technology.

We were very lucky
with motion control

because these big, cumbersome
bits of machinery are so slow to use,

and I know that in the
States, it's quite common

that you can only get one
or two shots a day done.

And we were lucky.

We could usually get six or
seven motion-control shots in a day

because we were using
a rig that was invented

by a New Zealand grip
called Harry Harrison.

And his rig was based
on a regular dolly

that he'd converted and he'd
added motion-control motors to it,

all these drive belts,

and he'd sort of built this thing himself,
basically, in his workshop.

That fellow takes
us totally for granted.

So motion control was essential,

'cause I obviously wanted
to move the camera a lot.

This time-consuming process

meant that we had to have
seven months to shoot the film.

It was as simple as that.

Occasionally, it was difficult
to shoot the ghost actors

against blue screen in the studio

because sometimes our shots were

shots of a ghost
walking up difficult terrain,

like in the cemetery
in Lyttelton, especially

where we wanted to see the
feet contacting with the ground.

Good, good. Slow down.

The way we overcame that was to

shoot the ghosts against
blue screen on the location.

Of course, this added
another complication to the mix,

because now, you know,
the guys carrying the blue screen

had to race around behind the actor,
and sometimes it got kind of difficult.

I remember there was
a couple of moments,

where they collided
with a shop frontages

in Lyttelton High Street.

I think the most difficult aspect
of the whole motion control

blue screen side of things
for the actors was the timing.

Especially the ghost actors.
They had it worse

because when we
were shooting Michael,

we would be following
him around the room,

he'd be doing his actions

and we would be recording the
camera movement with a computer.

And then, when it came
time to shoot the ghosts,

what they were acting to was
a prerecorded camera move.

Eyeline change.

You, there, go over.
Now, mister!

YOU! Hey!

So, you as an actor,
now, all of a sudden...

The camera's not
following your moves

but you're trying to make it
look like it's following your moves

because it's on a preset thing.

So, if you're early
or late to your mark,

you know, it's,
"Okay, we got to try it again."

So, that's how you get
into stuff like take 42.

I want to kill her now, Patty.
That will give us 41.

That's eight clear of Gacy.

Another nine,
and I won't be able to...

It's difficult for the actors
to shoot this type of scene

because, of course,
what they're used to doing on a set

is to basically have
each other to bounce off.

And, you know, actors feed off each other
to get energy for their own performance.

And so, you know, when you
have interplay between characters,

it's like, you know, it's obviously
great if everybody's in the same room

doing it together,
because they are helping each other.

In the case of THE FRIGHTENERS,
we had to take all the ghosts away,

and Michael had to do this himself,
and had to keep his energy levels up.

And he had to absolutely be
performing as if they were right there.

And then the ghosts
had to do the same thing.

They didn't have
Michael in the blue screen.

They had to act to little sticks
and pieces of tape, as well.

- Come on, let's go, man.
- Frank, Frank.

- Frank, did you hear what I said?
- Frank, snap out of it, man.

Wait, wait, wait.

I mean, people often ask me,
you know, "It must have been

"really difficult for the actors
without having each other there."

I think to a certain extent
it is, but on the other hand,

you know, actors are
used to pretending.

I mean, that's what they are paid to do.
They are professional pretenders.

Pretending that
there is a ghost here

or pretending that things are
happening around me that aren't,

it's just another...
It's just an extension of acting.

One of the difficult things...

I think the worst thing I could
say about acting to ghosts,

or acting to things that aren't there is
that a lot of times, I get bad headaches

because you'd be focusing
on a piece of space.

You're not looking
at a still object

or an animate object.

You're looking at
a place in space.

And it's not like
you can just turn

in the direction of, let's say

that wall over there,
and look at that

because when the
final print is done,

it will look like you're looking
through that person or past that person,

instead of at that person.
So you have to focus on nothing,

like right here, and you feel
like you're going cross-eyed.

I mean, many days I would go
home with a migraine headache

because, you know, I've been
focusing on nothing all day.

To me, that was
not that difficult

because it's just going back to

a very basic level of play.

You know,
like my little girl does.

You know, when you say
"dragon," she sees a dragon.

Doesn't have to be a dragon there.
It could be a tree, it could be nothing.

And you just go back to
that level of pure pretend.

I mean, it's when you have actual
things and people that you have to react to

that you run into problems.

Compared to what Trini
had to do, it was fairly easy,

because what
Trini had to do was,

she had to interact
with somebody

who's interacting with
things that weren't there

and she was not aware
of what wasn't there.

So, it's even more of a
suspension of disbelief

and even more of a challenge.

She had the most difficult,
I think, role in the film.

It was also challenging
to be attacked

by ghosts and things that weren't
there when they really weren't there.

I was being choked
by a computer graphic.

And just reacting to that,
just choking myself, basically.

Lucy!

Release!

I always felt like the
crew was laughing at me.

And I think they were.

Doing cameos in my
movies is just a fun thing I do.

It's like the old Hitchcock

you know, gag of being
in your own movies.

It also just makes the day

a fun day for the crew as well

to have the director walking
around in some stupid costume.

And in THE FRIGHTENERS,
it was on Lyttleton High Street

and I was this heavy-metal
biker guy, and I had these fake

rings that we made
out of a bit of bent wire

that had been snipped with wire cutters,
and they were really sharp.

I had to stick them in my lips,
and it was quite painful.

Had to spend most of
the day dressed like this

because I have to get into my
costume at the beginning of the day

and that's it for
the rest of the day.

It just happened
to be the one day

in the whole movie that the
production had also decided

to bring TV crews onto the set.
I didn't realize this.

And so...

They were filming, you know,

me directing the movie and
this is the way I was dressed.

A couple of the TV
items that went out

didn't actually mention that
this was my costume, and so

I was thinking, "Oh no,
what are my parents going to think?

"They're gonna see this on TV and
think that their son has gone weird."

And it was kind of embarrassing.

How am I supposed to take the director
seriously when he's dressed like that?

When it came time to cut
the movie for the cinemas

I just looked at it and I thought, "Well,
this is just a little bit self-indulgent."

So, I was, you know, man enough

to cut myself out of the film.

Certainly cut the close-up
out of the film, anyway.

Asshole.

Actually, I'm not the only Jackson
who appears in THE FRIGHTENERS.

The scene with the flying babies

was a scene that we
shot a few weeks later.

And we were trying to
find a little, smiley baby.

The key baby who's
hanging up from the bouncer

and he had to be
a happy little chap.

Fran and I did the only thing
we could possibly think of

which was to cast our own son,
Billy Jackson, in the role.

Billy was about three-and-a-half-months
old when we shot the film.

Fran, see... Turn to the camera.

Big kiss.

All right, kid, quit jumping
around and acting like a baby.

This is serious.

Now, we're gonna scare the
living daylights out of your parents.

- So, come on, kid, you gonna help us out?
- Are you with us?

See? He gets it.
The kids always get it.

It didn't always go that smoothly,
I remember, with the filming.

There was one moment where we
were ready to shoot a close-up of Billy

and he was nowhere to be found,
and we realized that he was asleep.

You know, it was his nap time.

Me, being the father, I was given the job
of having to go and sort of wake him up.

He didn't like that at all.

And we shot footage of him,
but it was not particularly successful.

He was not a happy guy, getting
woken out of his little morning nap.

Because this is supposed
to take place in America

and we're down
there in New Zealand.

They needed every American
they could get their hands on.

Because all Kiwis think that
they could do American accents.

"Oh, I can do an
American accent.

"'Give me a cheeseburger."

And you just laugh.

Just like when I would
try to do my Kiwi accent

they would just fall down laughing,
like uncontrollably.

So, they needed anybody.

So, my wife is an actress.

So, I said, "Hey, how about,
you know, Leslie being in it?"

And so, she's the screaming maid

in the Mrs. Water house sequence

featuring superstar
actor Billy Jackson.

Mrs. Water house.

Mrs. Water house!

Damn. Here, man.
This one did le poo-poo.

Billy even got to do
special-effect shots

because we had to shoot some
stuff of him in front of the blue screen.

And the poor little guy
was in his little bouncer

suspended on wires in
front of the blue-screen stage.

I think he was there for so long
that he'd occasionally fall asleep.

You're asking me
about my experiences

working with three-month-old
superstar, Billy Jackson?

The finest actor it's ever
been my pleasure to work with?

It was an honor.

He was so great in the film,
he has incredible charisma.

I was really happy

that he made his
debut in our movie.

I had a lot of good
times with Billy

when I'd go over to Peter and
Fran's house and just hang out.

I mean, I remember going one day,
and I missed my kids so much

there was nothing
for me to just go...

And I picked up Billy one day

and he... I could tell he...

He needed a change of a...
He needed his diaper changed.

And I just, without even
thinking, just started to...

Fran must have thought
I was a gift from God

because I just started
changing his diaper.

Because I was
just so used to it.

It's something I'd
been doing for years.

So besides being, you know,
having a chance to work with Billy...

Billy was like, in some ways,
my surrogate kid, you know,

when I was over there,
and it was really sweet.

He's probably like
in college by now.

It's kind of interesting
to show him the shots

of himself when he was
three-and-a-half months.

Because I don't think
he really knows who it is.

Gosh, you didn't have very
much hair then, did you?

Who's that?

You? Was that... Is that you?

No, you didn't have much hair.

Where the special effects
got tricky is where they...

The real actors,
like Frank Bannister,

had to actually
interact with the ghosts.

It's one thing to have
them talking to each other

and looking at each other
and getting the eye lines right.

But when they actually have to touch
each other or pass through each other

that was where things
got a little tricky, and

I remember one particularly
difficult little scene was

in Frank's house

where Michael Fox has to grab
the tail of a dog, a ghost dog, Rustler.

And Rustler is racing
out along the floor

and leaps out of the wall and
dragging Frank behind him.

And of course, Frank can't go
through the wall like Rustler can.

So, Frank slams against the
wall and sort of lets go of his tail.

This was done by basically
giving Michael a little piece of wire

that he had to
grab and hold on to.

And we had guys outside
the house pulling on the wire.

The great thing about
working with Michael Fox

is, you know, his eagerness to do
as many of his own stunts as he could.

Which is great for a director
because you can really sell

the idea that it's the actor who's,
you know, going through this.

I like to do as much
of that stuff as I can do

because I think it's important to
be able to tie my face to the action.

And for the audience to see,
to know that it's me.

And there are things that look
more dangerous than they are.

I mean, getting hit by the car.

I was walking by the car
and I felt the hood of it.

I just happened to put
my hand on the hood a bit.

And I think I was talking to Peter,
and I noticed how smooth it was.

I said, "This is really cool. This would
be great to slide across the top of this."

And that's a stunt that
I'd done in a few things,

where you run and you
slide across the hood of a car.

And then it just
evolved into, you know,

"It would be great.
The car can come through

"the crosswalk and
just stop short of me

"and I'll throw myself back
over it, and slide right off it."

And then the next thing you know,
they say "Okay, rolling," so you go...

"What did I just do?

"What did I suggest?
What the hell am I doing?"

We got it all in one shot.

And, you know, really,
you can see that it's him, you know,

getting whacked by this car.

And it really...
That sort of thing helps the film so much.

You know, I love that stuff.

It was ironic that after doing
so many of his own stunts,

Michael finally does
injure himself quite badly

doing something that you
wouldn't even describe as a stunt.

It was just one of
those freak accidents

that none of us could
have really predicted.

No.

No.

I just stepped in a place
that I hadn't stepped before

and there was a hole
in the floor of the forest.

And just, you know,
kind of twisted my ankle

and popped some tendons,
broke a couple of bones

in the bottom of my foot.
Hurt like hell.

We had two or three shots left
to do that night, and Michael says,

"Look, don't worry.
We'll get this done.

"We'll get this scene finished."

You know, and I could tell
that his foot was hurting like hell.

In fact the last shot
that we did that night

you know, he had
to run along the trees.

And you can see very clearly
in the movie that he's limping.

Ready, and action.

The next day Michael's foot had
swollen up, and he was barely able to walk.

We shot the scene
in the restaurant

where he's sitting at the
table with Lucy, having dinner.

You know, that was
being filmed with his foot

in incredibly painful condition.
He could barely walk on it.

He had a stick. But he was
at least able to sit at the table

and, you know, do that scene.

But we basically ran out of things
that we could shoot with Michael

with him running around.

And it was clear to us that he
just had to get his foot better again

before we could carry on
with any of his scenes. So,

the basic thing that happened was
the shoot was shut down for a week.

I got a couple of days off.

I got a couple of weeks off.

As much as it may
sound mercenary of me

I think that Michael hurting his foot in
that way really helped us with the film

because it gave us a
little bit of breathing space.

We were able to do some
more work on the script.

I was able to out together
some of the footage we'd shot.

And I think we ended up with a better
movie, ironically, because that happened.

I'm sure Michael probably
wouldn't agree quite with me.

But I have to be mercenary.
I'm the director, and these things do...

Sometimes are
blessing in disguises.

Stand by,

and action.

Starts wobbling.
Wobble, wobble and over it goes.

- Crash.
- Oh!

Okay, let's set up
for a take, guys.

- Just a couple of people standing.
- Lee.

And action.

And wobble!

And cut.

Take 2. Tail slate. Camera B.

Very good.

Yeah, why not? Might as well.

It was good.

Shocking.

I think you could just do
a little bit more for us here.

Okay.

- I mean, yeah, just a...
- Just a touch.

Oh, my!

Almost like you're
about to burst into tears.

I don't know, something that's not too
over-the-top, something slightly comic.

- You know.
- I get it.

These are dickybirds
stuck back on.

Oh, yes.

Where did that one come from?

Just inside, all right.

And wobble and crash!

And bending over it, Stuart.

Okay, cut.

All right.

Cut.

It looked all right, didn't it?
We'll just go check...

Just come right down.

Yeah. Just pan.

Down to here.

Yep.

Yep.

And spin around at them,
and it's like, you know...

And then it's just,
"Whoa, bang, bang," you know?

And by that stage,
Michael's gone across.

So it's like, "Oh," bang.
So he's kind of like

just starts shooting
into the fright of it.

I think it's better if it's
the guy with the gun.

Now, what we want to do is...
The first shot we do

we'll do it without
any shooting and stuff.

Okay.

We'll do it with two cameras.

So we have a camera over
here which will be inside the cot.

But if you can throw the
statue past the camera

and then we've got
a camera down here.

Behind Sue. Sue?

A camera down there
which will then just pick up

a run across and a leap down.

- Okay.
- Hold it.

- One little bit of...
- No.

- Sudden reaction...
- Okay.

You suddenly spin around, you know,
'cause you got kind of nervous.

- "What the hell's that?" Okay?
- Okay.

Thanks, guys.

Okay, here we go.

Just a little, push it, Richard,

Michael's reaction to the judge.

Quiet, please.

And roll.

Rolling.

813. Take 1.
Camera A. Head slate.

And action.

And the Judge jumps.

Crash.

You stay right there.

Heads up!

Bang, crash!

Cut.

I think we're compromising
unnecessarily.

- I would...
- Okay.

So...

I mean, that's actually
quite a nice shot.

That's a nice shot of him in the
foreground with the cops behind him.

That's enough?

Obviously not.

Need more. Got any more pads?

- Stand on one leg.
- Right.

And now bend it. Fold it.

- That's what you wanna do. Just faster.
- That's what I did.

Wasn't that what I was doing?

No, you went like
this and then fell back.

- Like that.
- Yeah.

And...

And action.

And crash.

We're tight here.

Is that not working for you?

No, no, that'll be okay.

We'll shoot them together as a reverse,
so that we'd get the action of...

Action.

Easy.

And crash!

You stay right there.

On, shit.

Hey, hey, Stop!

Still looks a
little light to me.

Yeah, it needs
just a little bit...

Oh, he did. Yeah.

Okay, that's all right.
Talk to Stuart about that.

Okay, it's worth one more going

just to get it right. Yep. Okay.

I'll just give you makeup.
You touch him up.

What's going to happen now

on "Action," is that
you'll hit the ground...

Okay.

...and fire off the
first shot immediately.

You don't start firing
until he does that first shot.

You're standing there, and it's
almost like have your gun down

and when you hear the first bang,
"bang," go straight into "bang,"

fire straightaways.

Rehearsals on the guns.

So you should leave, you should
start around with these guys instead of...

Testing the gun!

Okay. Gun firing!

Okay, gun firing.

Ready, and action.

Cut.

Quiet, please.

Did he find the CD?

Pretty manic,
pretty manic stuff, but it's good.

It's very unusual you
know, to hear guns blazing

in Wellington, New Zealand.

But we're Americans,
so we feel right at home.

Oh, yeah.
We felt totally comfortable.

We was like, "More guns. Louder.

"Louder.
People are not going to believe this."

In fact, we brought
with us, you know, tapes,

relaxation tapes,
from the States.

- Of, just, you know...
- Gun fire.

- Gunfire, 2:00, 3:00 in the morning.
- Yeah.

Chicago, Philadelphia, just gun fire,
you know, to help you go to sleep.

You know, when you're here for a while,
that's... The only reason I'm homesick

is because after two, three months
of peace and quiet and no pollution,

beautiful weather and beautiful scenery,
you need some crime and mayhem

and all the other things
that make our country great.

As soon as it
blows, you'll know.

Shooting, quiet.

And roll.

It shunted, didn't it?

I mean, the only thing you
can do if you're really brave

is to get the first one and then
just tilt up to get the second one.

I think I'll do that because it doesn't
matter if I miss the second one

then I miss the second one,
but at least I got the first one.

All right, so you're gonna tilt?

Roll cameras.

And rolling.

814. Take 2.
Camera A. Head slate.

And action.

- Cut.
- Need more slate.

Cool.

- You got that?
- Yeah, I think you missed something.

That's good, and you just
paused there at the right time, too.

Just to see it happening behind.
It's good.

Okay.

Okay.

Thanks a lot.
Yeah, we'll print those ones as well.

Well, even when
the front one's going

you've still got a
second, probably

before this one
actually starts to...

See, the problem...

ls there any way you can
run your leads over here?

The problem is that I have to...
When I first go down,

I have to sort of smash my face.

I have to use my hands,
then I can cover up.

Action.

Bang'. Bang!

Bang, bang, bang!

- Here we go. Ready.
- And action.

Oh, shit!

Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.

Okay. Good. Good.

I'm might give it
more of that and that.

On the day, Mike, depending
on what happens in the house...

- Okay, set up for a take.
- We're shooting.

Eight on C.

Mark.

And action!

Holy shit!

Up.

Cut.

Nice.

It's great!

There's been a few bumps
and a few bruises, but...

Like Bob Zemeckis
and I used to say,

"Pain is temporary,
film is forever."

You get through it.

Okay, let's lose it.

- Looks good and it'll...
- Yeah.

That is excellent.

I'm impressed by that.

That's great.

Excellent stuff.

Bang!

Do you need more on that side?

Have you got a
cable basher for this?

Camera's on here, and
you and Mike are charging.

And here, you're in front.

I'm going all the way back.

On this rehearsal, John,

spin around, shoot at Jim. And at the
point you are when you are shooting at Jim,

the best thing you can do is to
take reference of what's behind him.

- Okay?
- Yeah.

So let's...
So if you just start here...

We're going to
shoot it once in place.

What we'll do in rehearsal
is start up on stage.

And just rehearse with
everybody doing it then.

Would this be the
mark back here, Peter?

Are you guys
unionizing or something?

Is that what this is all about?

Oh, come on, Frank.
You know it's not about that.

What is it about?

- It's about other things.
- Okay, give the man complaints.

- Cigars.
- Cigars?

You been promising to buy me a box
of cigars since I don't know how long.

I hate to break it to
you but you're dead.

You knew I had a
pollen intolerance.

Why would anyone blow
the smoke in my face?

I would blow my
lunch in your face.

Now, see, that's just
the kind of talk that...

Darn it, Frank! You give us what
we want or I'm gonna bust your ass!

Talking about the little wine-soaked
things with the plastic clip-ens?

You've been watching too many SHAFT movies.
I'm talking about some Cubans.

- That's right.
- Yeah. That's bullshit.

- So, Ricky Ricardo and some people...
- Get down!

Turn over.

Action.

Here we go.

Positions, please.

Hold this mark. Okay, roll.

Tail slate.

- Ready, set...
- Set.

And action.

We got to go. Go!

- Cut.
- Tail slate.

Edit.

Trini, this is...
Camera's over here

and you're like in charge over here.
You're in front.

And skidding right here and...

We should ascertain if you're
going to go high or low first

just so the guys know.

Well, what I thought was, because it's
there, I thought I'd knock out that stuff.

That'd be my natural thing...
I look at that and see if I can widen it.

And then I'd go,
"Yeah, it's widening. Great."

- Then would you go high or low?
- I'd probably go up in here.

Okay, so we should
go like there, there,

- and then I guess you're gonna go down.
- Yeah.

It would be quite good if it
would stop at a certain point

that you just drop that and maybe
both of you swing the last couple of times.

The last two or
three with your hands.

Yeah. Well, that'll be one of
those things that'll be like...

'Cause you'd only do this till it looked
like somebody could get through.

You're like,
"Can you get through now?"

Then, you might be just using your
shoulders or elbows to go through...

- I use elbow.
- Elbows.

I suggest elbow.

What we should do is just to walk around
in the other room and see what's there.

So that at least you guys know
when you get on the other side.

There's nothing there.

You nosey little bastards.
I said, "Go home."

What's this?

Scottie's gonna be down...
Show us where you're gonna be, Scottie.

Here's the camera.

There's the camera.

- He said, where are you?
- And there he is.

I'm going to do a bit of
various until he comes through.

- A bit of various. Now...
- Yeah.

There's a fire extinguisher
coming through.

These things are gonna
fly, Scottie, so just be...

Are they real?

No, but they're heavy.
Are you sure?

- They're fake, but they're solid.
- Yeah.

And I don't waive the possibility that,
that might fly out of my hand.

I mean, I don't think it will.
But just be aware that that's.

The thing that you're revving...

Fire extinguisher,
which is about this long...

So we'll rehearse the
opening Steadicam bit.

Just up until the
point of impact.

What I'll do is I'll smash
it a couple of times.

And then you like kind of...

I'll smash it twice. I'll smash it three
times and then I'll stop for a second.

And then you like
go and start quailing,

then I'll get to test what
we'll do, and then smash it

once or twice and say, "Okay," and then
you clear out a little bit. Hit a couple.

Until we got a big enough hole.
And then I'll say, "Can you get through?"

And you say, "Yes."

- Say, "No, I ate too much food for lunch."
- No.

- You know what...
- "I'm having a fat day."

And action.

Tail slate. Camera B.

Cut.

1410. Take 1.
Camera B. Tail slate.

So if we had one in the
mag but not in the barrel

and then Dee can just do that.

Because you're just seeing him

like, you know, just running

- down the set...
- Down there they don't have anything that

- they can hurt me with, right?
- No.

- You're just...
- I wouldn't be carefully coming around

- the corner or anything.
- No, this is a racing... This is running.

And the sum...

I mean what's...
It's just trying to capture

a real scary feeling of being
pursued in a dark building

narrow corridors, kind of
screaming and just snarling,

just be kind of totally,
you know, just be really scary.

- I see them?
- You see them straight through there...

Boom, straightaway, bang.

Ready, and action.

Okay. Here we go.

Good.

We're just waiting for the camera
to come back, and we're right to go.

Good to rock and roll.

Do you need more on that side?

- Rolling.
- 1412. Take 1. Cameras A and B.

- Set?
- Set.

And action.

Cut.

- Okay.
- We did...

- Stanley's tools are everywhere.
- Can't get in?

Well, yeah, I think
that'll do for the day.

- Go home and sleep.
- How are you doing?

I'm just going to
go sleep in this.

Well, on you go, back to sleep.

Thank you very much.
Go in and get over your flight.

- Set.
- And action.

- Cut.
- Cut.

- Cool.
- You do really react to the neighbor.

Well, let's look
at Tony play it.

I just think it's gonna be good.

Just do the bit at the end,
when Denise comes running in again.

You come up here and feel
the torchlight'll swing onto you.

And just...
We'll have to get a position up here.

An accurate position of you,
just to tuck yourself down.

And there's a camera
around the corner here that'll

get you, and that'll
pop from the back wall.

- Okay.
- Action.

Tail slate, camera B.

Okay. Good.

- Sorry.
- 1406. Take 1. Camera B. Tail slate.

No, I got you.
No, you were there.

We're good.

I ducked out, then came back.

You came back on it.
But you did come back.

- I can also do this. I can also go here...
- Yeah.

- ...and come back.
- Actually that's the one, and we use that.

- Yeah, that's stronger.
- You come around here.

- That's stronger.
- And I come back

- and then I'm like this.
- Yeah. That's...

- Yeah.
- Great.

It feels right,
we can use all that.

- Yeah.
- That's good.

Action.

Listen.

Lucy.

Oh, this is great.

Shit.

Once more's enough.

Okay, one more,
please, one more.

We got that one.

Just pick it up and say, "Frank."
You just gotta grab it. "Frank."

- Okay, fine. So that sounds good.
- Great.

No worries. Okay, so...

- Statue of Liberty on three.
- Yeah.

- Yeah.
- Statue of Liberty.

That's really good, and

we've just got Mike on
the stairs, so what we'll

have to do in terms of our reference
is to get the height of a couple of stairs.

And so when we're on the blue-screen stage,
that's the level that Mike...

Well, I tell you what,
Mike just jumps on the floor

and we just lower our camera

by that amount

when we're on the stage.

One of those shots,
Mike, is gonna...

It's almost gonna be like you just
take over the frame, that's like...

If you just time it with K.C.,
that will say "Check," and then it's like

you know, that movement,
rather than just being still

and just doing
it with your face.

It will be nice to
get that sort of...

- That fluid body movement or two.
- Got it.

I can do that.

- Without... Don't get too close to this.
- I shan't.

Still on the floor, please.

Excuse me, Doctor.

We're looking for ward 12.

Oh, right.
Go up the stairs to the fourth floor

on the corridor to your
right just opposite the chapel.

I'll get somebody to help you.
Orderly.

Orderly, are you deaf?

I said, are you deaf, orderly?

Hey, moron.

Gun swings up.

K.C. backing away, and cut.

Not bad. We'll go again.

Just play it back
a little bit for Mike.

- Busy hallway.
- Yeah.

It was good.

I think that I might've caught a piece
of his coat. The arm thing is great.

I noticed that the lock down... I don't
know how much of it's in the cinema.

Orderly, are you deaf?

Does it stick on paper?
ls all I'm saying.

No.

- Did that slip?
- No, it's just slipping at the same place.

And consistent, deliberately.

Try not to do it if you can...

- Yeah, I'll try not to do that.
- If you can avoid that.

- And fire.
- Bang.

Okay. Good.

I think we should be careful, K.C.
If you double up too much like that...

Yeah, I can see that.

It's a good shot though.

And what was it that
happened with K.C.'s tie here?

Are you gonna get
it chopped off there?

It'll blow out.

Okay, well that was...
Shall we rehearse again

or just shoot?

No, we've found it.

Here we go.

It was in his pocket.

Thermo control.

- Yes, sir.
- Thank you.

And okay.

Stand by and roll. Action.

And fire.

Cut.

It's not real, is it?

- Now listen, he's a traveler.
- This is open, isn't it, Trini?

- No, I'll open it on the way out.
- I'll just leave it there?

A trail of syringes, Band-Aids.

Yeah.

Okay, here we go.
Ready for clearance.

Hey, where are we going?

She's up there, right?

- We're doing our best.
- Take the lead. It's fairly subtle.

This is private property.

Mrs. Bradley. Hi, I'm Dr. Lynskey.
I work at the Medical Center.

No, you don't.

I know everyone who works there.

- Cut.
- Good.

We'll just try one more,
but that was great, Trini.

Maybe you shouldn't offer
your hand quite so early.

Maybe it should be like,
you know, "I'm Dr. Lynskey."

Because you're still quite
a long way away from here.

- Right. Yeah.
- It's just the fact that you're...

When maybe you just, you
know, say your name and step up.

Just put a little "trust me"
a little early.

We're gonna lose the sun completely
for the day, aren't we, very soon?

I think the most difficult character
in the film to conceptualize and

imagine was the
grim reaper figure.

The grim reaper is, you
know, our most classical image

of the death figure,
of the soul collector

coming to harvest the
souls and take them away.

And so, you know,
it was important that

we use this image, but

I didn't want it to be totally boring,
and I wanted something to be

original and
funky about it, so...

I didn't know quite what it was,

and we threw around
various ideas, and

Christian drew some drawings of
what he imagined the reaper to be like.

One of the first ones I did was

this one here

which is a very sort of

animalesque

creature with high shoulders
and long, long arms.

But it was still going with the fact
that there's a creature under there

which is why I've still got the
hand coming out from under a cuff.

I wanted him to be the reaper. I wanted
him to have the scythe, I wanted him

to be the figure of
death, because the whole

thing at this stage of the movie is
that death has come to this town, and

it has to be a recognizable figure.
If it was a totally fantastical monster

something we'd never
seen before, then it wouldn't...

We wouldn't be thinking "death" all
the time. We'd be thinking "monster."

I did this illustration here,

which

because I put the
hands back into shadow,

it's not very well defined,
but Pete saw this and

took that to be...

That the hands were actually part of the
cloth. It was just a gnarled piece of cloth

draping off the end

that formed a hand, and
he really liked that idea.

So I think that was, you know, the first
breakthrough that we had with the reaper,

was the concept that there's
nothing actually underneath the cloak.

There's no creature actually in there.
What it is, is it's

the cloth itself is the living creature.
And what...

The hands are caused

by the corners of the cloth
sort of ripped into strips

and they're the fingers.

If, like, the wind
blew the cape up,

there wouldn't be anything under there.
There's no feet.

It's just moving around like there's
an invisible demon inside the cloth.

And at that point,
you know, I really felt we had,

you know, a predator that
was going to be interesting.

The biggest decision that we
had to do with the reaper was,

trying to figure out how we
were going to achieve the figure.

And initially we
thought that we'd

mix it up with a
variety of techniques.

We explored the idea
of making a rod puppet.

We started to think
about him as a predatorial,

stealthy moving, almost
spider-like character.

We needed this thing to
move believably like a human,

but unfortunately due
to the forward-slung head

it was not of human proportions.

We even designed a combination

of a guy in a
costume and a puppet.

Someone came up
with a very good idea of

allowing the actor's head to
protrude through the shoulders.

He would wear a helmet
and then off his helmet would

be a drive rod down to
the head of the reaper.

We even tried to mount a
full-size reaper on the top of the car

for some shots where the car's
driving down the road at night and

we would only get
brief glimpses of him

in the darkness,
and we thought we would

get away with having, you know, like a
dummy on top of the car, and we did some

tests with that technique.

We took the idea of the
suit a little further and we

designed something that a
stunt performer could wear

for the scene where

the two ghosts are
fighting the reaper

through the...

Frank's prison cell and
all around the prison cell.

That scene was originally a lot more
elaborate than what ended up in the movie.

What we'll do here is, is we
have a sort of a bit of a struggle

through the foreground from
one side of the cell to the other,

and then back again.

Whichever way you wanna do it.
Just keep it kind of free-flowing.

We thought that by using the guy in
the reaper suit, we could probably get

those little flashes of shots,
like one or two seconds long

that we'd get away with, because
we knew that it didn't look that good.

We basically ended up shooting
Jim Fyfe and Chi McBride

fighting with this
guy for, I don't know...

We spent about two days fighting
with this guy in this weird getup.

It was really unfair to him.

It was like fighting a
blind guy, because he

didn't know where we were,
and we would jump all over him and

have complete disregard
for his physical well-being.

They would take the
suit off him and say,

"You all right?" And he'd be

sweating, and
he'd be, like, all red,

and you can practically
hear his heart beating

on stage, and he'd go,
"Yeah, I'm fine."

"Let's do it again." And so they put
the suit back on him, and we tortured

the poor guy, I mean,
he ended up going to hospital.

Was he hospitalized? Seriously?

Oh, yeah.
He definitely went to hospital.

I think his shoulder was actually,
like, put out of joint.

Oh, God. I sure hope not.

We came to realize that

in shooting something
that's made up of cloth,

whether it's a puppet
or a guy in a suit,

you can blow fans on it, you can
shoot it at different camera speeds, but

in the end of the day, you
really don't get anything

different than
what it actually is,

which is cloth blowing

and moving around, and

it didn't really...
We wanted the reaper to be something new

something that we hadn't

really seen before, and we
didn't think we were achieving it.

So we turned to the computer

department for a
possible solution.

Early on in the
production there was...

There were some tests which we
accomplished of the grim reaper,

to try an ascertain
whether doing

him on a computer was a feasible

option.

We've seen dinosaur skins and
metal men and various other sort of

things have been achieved, but

having material that
sways with gravity

and if the figure spins, the material spins
around like cloth or a cape would spin.

And all that whole
dynamic kind of energy

of material, and the
way it folds and creases.

You know, all this was sort of
highly technical computer stuff that

we were not sure how much
success we were going to have with it.

I really liked the very
first test that we did.

For the first time, I think, the reaper
came across as a genuinely menacing figure.

We were still working on the reaper,
and we had started shooting the movie,

which was a little
bit of a concern.

We were filming scenes
when we didn't quite

know how we were gonna
finally achieve this effect.

So we handed Gray some footage
of the scene where the reaper

first appears out of
the bathroom mirror,

sticks his hand in the guy's
chest and lowers him to the floor.

And we said to Gray, "Here's the footage.
You know, there's no reaper here.

"The guy's being
lowered on wires.

"So see what you can do.
Surprise us."

And Gray went away and
worked on the sequence for a while.

And the results that he came back
with were incredibly encouraging.

It was his way, I think, of proving to
us that this was an achievable effect.

The test was well-received,
and this influenced the decision to...

Greatly, to make him completely
as a computer-generated character.

We ultimately redid this scene

once we refined the
reaper a little bit further.

But that initial test
is very representative

of what we finally
ended up with.

As in the case of most
creative processes,

it's much easier

to define what you don't like
once you see it, rather than

molding what you like. And I remember
when I first got here, we devoted

a couple of weeks to defining what
that reaper was supposed to be, and

it was Gray's assigned duties to

come up with different looks,
and we were just trying

everything possible,
from a character that had

a positive shadow to a
negative shadow on him.

He was refracting
his background, he was...

He was chrome,
he was a TERMINATOR reaper.

He, at one stage, became
completely transparent.

Kind of a PREDATOR reaper.

Specular reaper.
You can only see him by his highlights.

He was a smoky reaper,

continually emitting
particles when he moved.

Kinetic reaper, you could only see him,
parts of him that were moving.

I think there was probably
one that was like a...

Gray's breakdown
reaper at one point.

I'll be spending

$10,000 and six months to
explain it all to a psychotherapist.

Now that we'd achieved a look
for the reaper that we really liked,

his performance and his character
became the most critical thing.

And since we were no longer having
a guy in a suit who I could sort of

yell directions at from
the side of the stage,

it was very much handed over to
the animators, because the reaper

was basically animated in the
traditional frame-by-frame manner.

The only thing that's different

about computer
animation, opposed to

traditional animation,
are the tools.

The tools are the
only things that

continue to change and evolve.

But the principles of animation
have always remained the same, and

you've got to keep that in mind when
you're sitting down at the computer

'cause the computer's not
going to do the work for you. It's

just another tool. It's like a

more complicated
type of a pencil.

My tools for animating
the reaper here...

I'm taking these colored chains,
and when I select them,

I'm able to put various rotations
and translations on them.

This is the way that I can
manipulate him into a pose that I like.

It is like a puppet that
exists inside the computer.

You use the mouse
and the keyboard

to touch the puppet and
to manipulate it that way.

You could make a nice pose

and save key frames for it, like

basically tell the computer, "Remember
this pose at this particular frame."

And then you could go to
the next pose at another frame

and save that key,
and then you could watch how

it's moving from one key
to next, and then you kind of

gotta baby-sit the
computer and make sure it's

doing it in a natural
way, because it tends to

have this really

almost too-fluid
look to it if you don't.

This is a shaded,
more solid view

to give me an idea of
what it's going to look like

when it's closer to
the end product on film.

He's got such a strong shape.

Between his long
fingers and the sharp

angles in his shoulders and the way
his cowl comes out. You know, it's...

It was really easy to find nice
poses with that, because it's...

By default, he is so
menacing-looking already.

This thing was supposed to
be a predatory animal, and...

So we started applying
laws of predatory nature.

He's got these fantastic
shoulders which,

when he's walking, you can really
play with, to roll them like a tiger would.

One of the difficult things
with animating the reaper was

that he doesn't have a face,

so you can't look at his face and
read his attitude based on that.

And in this shot where he's
walking through the museum,

the thing that I found was easiest to play
with was his hands, rolling the fingers

as he's approaching camera.

Right, so this is the reaper
shot at the cemetery?

Right. Just checking out the
reaper with the scythe and the blade.

Making sure everything looks
and feels correct in proportion.

Yeah.

Such that...

It was a little
nerve-racking for me

trying to direct the animation of the
reaper, because what I get to look at

was these very early renders
that were of a stiff, sort of rigid

figure that didn't have the
swirling cloak, and it was

hard to imagine what he was ultimately
going to look like because it wasn't

until he got put through a
process called dynamation

where the gravity was applied to
his cloak, that he really came to life.

I wanted the reaper shots
to be as dynamic as I could.

With a lot of energy, a lot of panning,
a lot of moving camera.

And that tended to make the
shots a lot more difficult to achieve.

For instance, like a shot
where he lands on top of the car.

That was difficult because you don't
want him to look as if he's floating in

the air and not physically
grabbing something, so

you have to build a model
of the car within the computer,

then that has to be motion-tracked
frame by frame to exactly lock on to the

car that was shot
on the location.

If he's jumping off a fence that
we shot from a moving vehicle,

that becomes difficult, because a
model of the fence has to be made

and then that has to be

motion-tracked within the
computer in three dimensions to

follow exactly what
our camera was doing

on the night we filmed
the background plate.

This stuff just makes shots
a lot more difficult. Instead of

you know, doing them in one week, it takes
three weeks to do the same sort of shot.

Our ghost dog,
Rustler, started out as a

puppet. We were

thinking that we could use a
puppet for 60%, 70% of the shots

and then use CG for
some of the wider shots.

We very, very quickly resolved in our minds
that we wanted to go with the bloodhound.

The classic Western
American dog.

The sort of droopy character
of the bloodhound made for

a great sculpting challenge
and a great piece of design.

We came up with some
very serious design decisions

on the way that
Rustler would look.

He would have no eyes,
which was a very interesting one.

We took the eyes
totally out of the sockets

and by articulating the
edges of the sockets,

we could create the
feeling of an eye line.

We made the decision, hopefully
for time-saving on the day

to set off doing Rustler
as an animatronic puppet.

Once the movie was
cut together and we saw

what Rustler shots
had survived the cut,

it was clear that it was

going to be easier to achieve him,
I think, with a CG model than a puppet.

Because a lot of the shots
involved walking and running around,

things that are generally
difficult for any puppet to achieve.

The CG dog was such a
perfect copy of the real dog.

And it was so beautifully built that
it would survive quite close scrutiny.

So in that sense

the reason to go physical
slowly became less and less.

The main reason
to go physical was

to get interactions
with humans, which

if you're shooting a ghost dog

you don't need anyway, because
you have to shoot them separately.

And also to get all the details
you can't get into a computer model.

Whereas the computer
model was so detailed that,

that wasn't the case.

Ultimately, it was a
logical decision to make,

to replace the
physical altogether.

My favorite scene with Rustler
never made it into the movie and

didn't even make it into the special
edition, which is incredibly tragic.

It involved a scene that got

cut out of the movie very early,
and we'd never even

begun the effects shots for it,
so there's nothing to show.

It was where Frank goes to his mail
box and the mailman was walking away.

I wanted this one shot
to have the ghost dog,

Rustler, snapping at
the mailman crazily,

like dogs do.
And the closest we ever got to

completing the scene was a
reference shot that we did of me

running around
with this rubber dog.

So I don't think we should
really cut that shot into the movie.

I don't think it
would work that well.

There was another Rustler
shot that was quite funny

which followed the
fly spray in the kitchen.

It was a shot where we had
the Judge chasing him around

the house, trying to get
his jawbone back, and

for a few seconds,
Rustler defies gravity.

Hey, are you guys unionizing?
Is that what all this is about?

You know, once again, a lot
of this work that had been done

building these puppets sort
of hit the cutting room floor.

So, I hope those
guys forgive me.

In our script, we had a character
called the Gatekeeper, who was

the guardian of the cemetery.

He was supposed
to be like a big bully,

thuggish, sidekick to
Hiles, the drill sergeant.

Initial ideas were
some sort of an ogre

or a demonic-looking
creature who was

sort of guarding the gate,
guarding the way into the cemetery.

We played around
with various sketches

and more maquettes,
doing a huge number of

little sculptures, trying to figure
out what sort of look he'd have.

Now, fortunately or
unfortunately, I'm not sure still

I proceeded to do one as a

hugely overweight,
baby-like cherub.

I really liked the idea of the Gatekeeper
being a cherub. I thought that was fun.

The idea of doing
a totally naked

flying baby with flapping wings,

fully talking face,
wobbling flesh,

was daunting, to say the least.

Richard Taylor's guys
built a very elaborate suit

for a performer to wear,
and it had a radio-controlled face

and motorized wings that would
flap up and down like a little cupid.

I think there is something funny
about a character whose wings

flapping desperately hard
but it's never ever going to

actually lift him
off the ground.

All I knew was this big, rubber
baby with this little voice would say,

"I can't see, Charlie.
Charlie, I need to come down now."

And it was bizarre, and I don't
know if I ever met that person.

But I had this
relationship with her.

I felt like I had to take care of her,
'cause a lot of times she

couldn't speak and couldn't
get her ideas across, but

she's this big,
rubber-baby person.

And her name was Alice.

And I never met her.

Jeff Combs was someone who I had
known from the RE-ANIMATOR movies.

I'd never met him, but I was a
big RE-ANIMATOR fan. Still am.

You know, these films are about
10 years old, and I hadn't seen him

doing any movies
in recent times,

and I wondered, you know,
"Where's the RE-ANIMATOR guy now?

"He'd be someone who was interesting," and
I mentioned his name to Victoria Burrows.

And she tracked him down and
asked him to come in to audition for us.

I remember the first time that
Jeff walked into the audition room,

he ran up to me and he shook my hand,
and he says... His first words were,

"Do you know you and I are
both in the Fangoria Hall of Fame?"

This is very rare.
He met me before I auditioned.

He wanted to just meet me and say,
"This is sort of what I'm looking for.

"NOW...

go away and come back in
10 minutes, and we'll do it."

He proceeded to do a really,
you know, great audition.

We put him through the hoops. I remember
he wanted to audition with his glasses on.

He had an idea that this
character wore glasses.

And I couldn't imagine
Dammers in glasses,

so I asked him to take his
glasses off after the first take.

Now, you have to imagine,
I'm blind.

I can't see. I've got pages.

Fortunately, I had it memorized,
but I always have that crutch, and I...

So I had to basically
take my glasses off and

act with Michael J.
Fox as a blur before me.

It was pretty weird.

I have a blurry memory of
what the audition was like.

We created this character

who was like this FBI agent
who the government have sent in

to, you know, to break
and to bust cults and sects.

And he's been doing
this for like 15 years

and he's the guy
that always just gets

sent in to go undercover for six months
before they crack the case, you know.

And the problem with
Dammers is that they've...

They haven't de-programmed
him in between missions.

They have given him no therapy
whatsoever in the last 15 years

and the poor guy has just, like,

sacrificed his, sort of, like,
his personality for his country.

If you take
nationalism that far,

it really turns into

fervent fascism.

So that's sort of, like,
where the haircut came in.

Jeff turns up in New
Zealand and comes up to me

and he's got a library book.
He'd been to the library.

The Wellington Public Library,
and I got out some books

on Hitler. Pictorial books.

And I found photos
of young Hitler.

And he says,

"I think Dammers should
have this sort of haircut,"

and it was the sort of Hitler haircut,
where he's, like, shaved himself around...

Just above his ears.

And he says, "I think this will be
a really great look for Dammers."

And I thought,
"Yeah, that's gonna be great."

So Jeff went off and
got like this haircut.

And then he comes back,

and without me knowing,
he goes and he visits Richard Taylor.

He wanted us to make
him little, tiny appliances

that would fit behind his
ears and force them forward.

The idea was that it would make him
look slightly geeky or a bit awkward.

The last touch was

the idea that we had of putting
black contact lenses on him.

He had this image and
this vision of this man

having these dark,
dark, black, beady,

billiard balls of
eyes that, like,

were alive and yet dead.

So I'm on the set,
working on the film

and I get this, sort of,
tap on my shoulder.

I turn around, and
it's Jeff standing there.

He's got the Hitler haircut
and he's got these things

glued behind his ears that are
making his ears stick out, and he says,

"What do you think,
what do you think?"

I get all the fruity cases,
Mrs. Lynskey.

For God's sake,
come in and sit down.

Another area that Jeff
Combs had input into,

in terms of Dammers'
character was this

chest tattooing or scarring
thing that was made for him.

And I know that he worked very
hard with Richard Taylor to create a,

you know, the perfect
combination of sort of

cultish-type tattoos and
carvings on his chest.

He was very particular in the sort of
symbols that he wanted to be on there.

What was really great about it was
Richard Taylor and all those guys

involved me in the
design of this thing.

They came to me with sketches
and they said, "This is what we have."

And... Which was really phenomenal.
And they said, "But what do you think?"

I mean, almost to the point
they said, "You draw one.

"Go home, and take some of this.

"Here's everything that we have,
and you come back."

Well, I went home
and I drew one, and...

It was so wonderfully
collaborative.

Just like every aspect,
for me, on this movie,

was a wonderful
collaborative effort.

My body is a road map of pain.

1974...

Children of Lucifer.

Three years undercover

drinking goat's blood.

The old butt ring,
another one of...

Another one of
Peter's ideas, actually.

And he brought it
up fairly early on,

but it never quite got
written into the script.

You have to figure Milton,

Special Agent Dammers,
having been

in all of these
hideous cults and sects

that some pretty damaging
things have happened to him,

despite the fact that he's also just,
kind of, an uptight sort of fellow.

He would have kind of
a hemorrhoidal condition,

a chronic
hemorrhoidal condition.

In fact... No.

And so, you know, he
needs a little protection.

And, uh, so.

So Peter had this idea
of this butt ring, and...

So they went to a store

where you can get these things.

What do you call
this kind of a store?

Like a medical equipment store,

you know? "We want a walker," or, "We want
an |V," or, you know, "a butt ring."

And they brought
it back and, yeah,

it was a butt ring,
but it was kind of big

and...

So it couldn't be portable.

It would look ridiculous,
pulling this big thing out.

So the prop guys,

brilliant guys that they are,
they go, "Okay."

And they run off, and they come
back and they go, "How's this?"

And it was perfect.

Great little...
Tiny little thing, about like that,

perfect size.

I said, "Where
did you get this?"

And they said, "it's...

"it's an inner tube
for a wheelbarrow."

No one would know. it just
looks like a little mini butt donut.

In the movie, there's a number of
shots where I wanted the camera

to be traveling at
a very high speed.

For instance, when we're
traveling through the cemetery,

with the Reaper's point of view,
and we're racing past tombstones.

Or we're traveling down
the hillside, over the rooftops,

when Michael's
gliding down as a ghost.

It's not exactly practical
to use a helicopter

to fly like three feet over people's
rooftops or through a cemetery,

so, you know,
you build a big model

and suddenly the whole thing
becomes easy and containable.

But you don't want people to
realize that they're miniatures, so...

You know, fortunately, Richard
Taylor's team did a wonderful job,

you know, at recreating a lot of
these miniature environments.

So these rushing
POVs were achieved

by using a snorkel lens mounted
on a motion-control camera

which would fly
over a miniature.

Because of the depth
of field requirements

so that everything in
the miniature was sharp,

from the foreground right
the way to the background,

we had to use very long
exposures on each frame.

So we'd shoot maybe one
or two frames a second.

Just like a 10-second shot would
maybe take 30 minutes to shoot.

Another one of my favorite
special effects shots in the film

is a very simple one again, but I
just like it because it's kind of like...

To me, it's really
a simple trick

that's totally believable,

and it's the shot where the
camera's racing through the cemetery

and goes right up to the cop car,
and we see Lucy in the back of the car.

We did a shot on location in the cemetery,
where we had, you know, the camera

on a motorcycle, and it was
racing through the graveyard

and going up to the car, and
it wasn't really fast enough,

and it wasn't, sort of, a
spectacular enough shot.

It didn't feel Reaper-like

because it's the Reaper's
POV as he's rushing towards her.

We ended up shooting a lot of footage
with a model cemetery for other shots.

And so I decided we'd have another
go at doing this shot with the miniatures.

So that shot's actually
a totally model shot

with a computerized,
you know, Trini stuck into the car.

I think there's probably quite a
few shots in THE FRIGHTENERS

that people have never
realized are actually model shots.

You have to take great reward

in the fact that the audience

don't realize that they're miniatures,
because in doing so,

you have been
totally successful.

But at the end of the day,
it leaves you a little bit hollow

'cause you're wondering
if people actually realized

the incredible workload that's
gone into some of the shots.

It's a lot of fun to cast
the villains in any movie

because, you know, it's one thing
for an actor to come into an audition

and be nice and
sweet and gentle,

but it's a lot more fun when
they have to play pure evil.

And I remember Jake Busey

really impressed us
with his eyes, primarily,

the manic intensity that he can
generate with his eyes, and...

You know, when you are
genuinely freaked out in an audition,

you know you've definitely
gotta cast this guy in the movie.

I guess that makes
you number one.

When you see a role
like Johnny Bartlett

and, you know,
it's a character who is

portraying himself
within the film

to be the Grim Reaper,
and that's death itself,

this guy considers himself
to be a pretty evil guy.

You know,
you drive from reading it,

so I figured,
"Okay, this character is

"as evil as you can possibly get,
with no remorse."

Now, shut up.

That Russian cannibal creep's
running around saying he did 50 plus.

That reflects badly on
the both of us, Patty.

This record should be
held by an American.

I quite agree.

The role of Patricia
was a role that

in the context of the film, is like...
It's a red herring role.

This is a person that we
absolutely wanted the people to like.

Well not.
They didn't have to love her

but we wanted people to
sympathize with her, so that...

She's a victim, and
it's like this poor woman

who's, you know, had this
terrible, unfortunate past,

but really, her mother
is the problem now,

and she really deserves to have a break,
and she's not evil anymore.

We wanted this whole, sort of, like,
victim thing to come across and then

wait until the third act of the
movie to suddenly reveal her

as the genuine, you know,
evil villain of the film.

And so the red-herring role
demands, you know, careful casting.

Because if you cast someone
who we're used to seeing as a villain

then it's going to give
the game away too soon.

And we went the opposite direction.
We wanted to cast somebody

who we're used to thinking
of as a sympathetic person

and, you know, who better
than the mom from E.T.?

I had a ball with
this character.

First of all, it's an actress's dream,
because you start out

as the poor, simpy, weak victim,
and make this whole arc

over to the strong murderess.

She had a lot of fun. She had a lot
of fun, I think, dredging up the evil,

that's probably all the stuff
she's stored up ever since E.T.

that she finally
got to put onscreen.

I think they came up with an
amazing transition that you bought,

you know,
because there were layers.

As... The more she got more involved
with Johnny again, the layers came off.

And Fran, actually,
was very instrumental in helping us

design and find the
look for this character.

And the boots, the boots which,

I must say,

that I fought a little bit and she
insisted on, just ended up totally

representing what she became
at the end of the film to me.

When they said they wanted to
put a long black wig with gray in it,

I went, "Oh, do we
have to go there?"

But it really, so totally
worked for the character.

Frank!

Basically, I think,
Patricia was one messed-up broad.

And she was a sicko.

You know, what can I say,
she went around murdering people

when she was 16,
14, whatever it was.

And I don't think she ever recovered
from that, and just got more immersed

and more immersed,
and this whole character

that she is at the beginning
of the film is a facade.

It's a great acting gig
that she's got going

so she can live this
double life, you know,

and keep this love
affair going with Johnny.

There's a knife-stabbing
scene in the kitchen

where you don't really
know what's happening,

and she pulls out this knife
and she's gonna go kill Trini,

but then we get sidetracked,
and she starts stabbing me with it.

But I'm a ghost and she's not.

So it's kind of strange,
but it's like this...

With each stab, it's like this sexual
thing that's very eerie and weird.

I had to go back and do
this scene without Jake,

hit the marks, hit the timing.

Like, for instance, when I'm
stabbing and hit where his chest...

One time we did it,
Peter kept saying,

"No, that's his
belly button, Dee.

"Do it a little higher."
And you have to stay in character

while you're
listening to all this.

It was an R-rated movie,
and they still cut this scene.

It was like one of
my favorite scenes.

It was just done in a way that

was very sexy and fun and funny.

And it didn't survive. So if it goes
back in the LaserDisc, I'll be very happy.

We started brainstorming
with Peter and everything,

and stuff started evolving

and just becoming more sick
and twisted on a daily basis.

You're next, pal.

Take him out, baby.

There is the
chasing-young-Patricia-around-the-morgue.

I'm chasing her,
and that's how you see

that these two
enjoy the thrill of.

It's like being little kids and running
around and playing tag and whatnot

except it's with cutlery.

So I'm chasing her around
this thing and grab her

and we start
kissing and all that,

and this whole love
scene type of thing,

except that I put her up on the,

whatever you call it,
the dissection table

where there's all these

steel rungs, and it's
all covered with blood,

and so we're kissing and everything,
and the camera's going around us

and we're wiping blood
on each other by accident.

And so I spent the entire day covered
in blood, kissing this girl on this table.

It was weird, but we
laughed about it at the end

and I'd like to see
this scene cut together.

I haven't yet.
I'd be interested to see it.

I always managed to get hurt,
one way or another.

I got some of the biggest bruises
I've ever had in my entire life

on this movie, and

the make-up artist took pictures
of them for future reference.

Trini would come in,
like, the following morning

and she'd pull up her sleeve
and she'd show me all the bruises

that had, like, developed
during the night.

And sort of make
me feel really guilty.

And... Although she wasn't
complaining and she kept on going.

I was really worried about

pushing her around a
little bit, boy, but she...

She gave as well as she took.
So she was really a trouper about that.

And I really appreciated it.
I mean, she would just say, "Do it.

"Do it, do it harder."

The biggest fright
that I had with Trini was

the fight in the bedroom

where she has to run
across the bedroom,

pull the key out of the door

and slam the door shut,
just as Patricia is pushing it shut.

And on this one particular take,
Trini ran across the bedroom and

the key got stuck.

And she just got it out
as the door slammed shut,

and it would've probably broken her
fingers if she'd been like a second slower.

- You all right?
- Yeah.

- Oh, my...
- Cut.

The fight with Dee Wallace
Stone was really, really fun.

She really got
into it, and so did I.

It was kind of scary,
because most of the time

she had a huge
knife in her hands.

You really have
to trust somebody.

We were working with
real knives part of the time.

I was really depressed
after we were done,

because I just thought, "Oh, man,
we have to go back to dialogue.

"This was so much fun."

When it was over with,
she looked at me

and I looked at her and went...

Oh.

You know, we didn't want...

We liked doing that.

We liked being strong women

in the film, and

holding our own and
working together like that.

The scene in the movie where the Reaper
is finally revealed to be Johnny Bartlett

was a very difficult one.

I wanted to have the Reaper
shot with a machine gun

and then to have
this blob of slime

hit the gravestone and
turn into Johnny's face,

and have the face
slide down the grave.

The idea is that his
face has been sliced off

with a machine gun

just in front of his ears.

A tricky effect.

And to achieve this, we initially thought
we'd do it with a gelatin appliance,

and then, using a
blue screen board

that was attached firmly to a
helmet cast of Jake's head shape,

we could, with fine filaments

give the feeling that
his face was moving

and undulating, as if
writhing over the stones.

The technique worked
like 60% successfully.

But it certainly wasn't
good enough for the movie.

It was originally conceived
to be a simple comp

that we'd shoot the actor in
a prosthetic on blue screen

and then composite
that over the background.

The whole thing would
be shot in motion control.

It was obvious early on that it wasn't
really going to come together like that.

We were supposed to do a morph.

He comes down and
goes around the corner.

We were supposed to cover
that corner piece with a morph.

But it just didn't seem to work

when I sat down to do it.

So ultimately I had to do

the whole thing in 3-D, which was good,
'cause I wanted to do it that way anyway.

The Johnny face
involved building a head,

and then projecting the
footage onto that head.

And then basically taking

everything outside the face area

and making it big and blobby,
so that it could flow down the grave

and leave blobs of
black ectoplasm behind.

Good work. Got me to score a 40.

That sequence was, you know,
difficult enough to achieve,

but it led to an even
more difficult sequence,

which is what happens to this
slimy, gooey face under the ground.

The idea was that different
slimy pieces of the Reaper

are scuttling together
and forming into Johnny,

and Frank Bannister
jumps on top of him

and fights with him, and all the time
the slime is joining on to the creature

and it's gripping around Frank

and trying to encapsulate him.

I imagined it to be like fighting a guy
who's made up of sticky chewing gum,

so that you get these
tendrils of slime coming off

and you're punching it, and
your hand's getting stuck...

We drew some quite nice
drawings to illustrate all this.

That whole scene was like, you know,
really a nightmarish scene to work on.

It was technically much more difficult
than what I actually imagined it to be.

Since I'd spent so
long on the face shot,

I was turning into an
expert on Blobman.

So I had pretty clear ideas

on how, technically, the crypt
sequence should be done.

Since it was shot in
quite a general way,

Michael fighting a
blue-screen stunt double,

we had a lot of latitude in
what technique we could use.

It was a little different than just
interacting with a ghost that isn't there.

I actually had a
physical interaction,

physical confrontations
with this thing,

and it had to be able
to put me in positions

that I couldn't
manufacture, you know.

So we got Charlie,
my stunt guy, who's my size,

and we put him just completely in a
blue suit. He was just like a blue thing.

And I fought with him.

I was doing everything
within my power to try to curtail

Peter Jackson's imagination.

I mean, this whole
idea of the arms getting

sunken into this blob,

and pulling out and leaving...

Leaving these big chewing
gum-type attachments to the arm...

I'm just thinking logistically,
you know,

the clock is ticking. The money,
cash register, things are going off

and I'm just thinking, you know,

"Are we trying to get this in for the
sequel of the movie or this movie?"

The computer guys were very nervous
about whether this could be achievable,

and I don't understand the techniques,
but, apparently, it involves

some very complicated code writing
that they had to do at the last minute.

Something about
textured met a balls.

I don't really understand it.

There was a very specific
texture and surface property

that had to be applied to that,
and met a balls don't usually texture at all,

because what happens is

you take the shape that
you want to be blobby

and basically for every
frame of the animation,

it's mathematically
dipped in blobs.

So that a skin is
built for every frame.

And because a skin
is built for every frame,

it's like changing your clothes
24 times a second, you know,

you can't usually
have a pattern on there

unless the character swims
through the pattern, like,

like a whale swimming
underneath the surface of the water

and you can see
water caustics on it.

Whereas what we wanted to
do was to have the same pattern

stay on the blobbed person,

even though the surface is
constantly changing and evolving.

So that was the big
technical challenge.

And that's why the
decision was made,

with a rapidly approaching deadline,
to try and write some custom code for it.

And it was really down to

Steve Regelous'
confidence in his own abilities

to be able to pull
that off in time.

Me and John were just sitting, having
cup of tea out on the roof one day,

and it came to me, and I sort of

said to John,
"Why don't we do this?"

And he said, "All right, yes, sounds
like a good idea, we'll give it a go."

So I roughed out the process
using existing software,

which was
incredibly inefficient,

and needed a little bit of
custom stuff here and there,

and then I was able to see if it
was heading in the right direction

and then spent a couple of weeks

putting together the code that
would actually do the texfield process.

There was two things
in there that were

considered technically
impossible at that stage,

and one of those was
blending the polygonal

shape of the blob guy
himself into the blobs

which were coming into his body.

The other was sticking the textures,
which are like the image details

onto his body so
that they'd stick

in their right places,
because he was partly made of blobs.

Sticking textures onto blobs
had never been done before.

So I still don't understand it,
it's all gobbledygook to me.

The sequence works fine in the movie.
I mean, it does the job for the film,

but it certainly didn't, you know, get
quite as good as what I hoped it would be.

It wasn't quite like the
stretching chewing gum.

I know that the computer
guys were as frustrated as well.

I was quite looking
forward to seeing all of this

when it finally got onto film.

And at the premiere, I was
eagerly awaiting this shot,

or the shots with
the blob guy in it, and

when I saw it there, I realized,

well, we could have got away
with just using cheap tricks

instead of going through all that hassle,
because it wasn't really all that obvious.

While it's good and courageous
to attempt that sort of thing

quite late in the piece, you really
should get it out of the way early,

so that you can spend
all the time that we spent

debugging the code,

refining the whole
thing and getting in,

you know, the final 10%,
the final 20% of the shot that you want.

I think there's something

fundamentally
creepy about the idea

of this Wall paper man character
who ripples under the wallpaper,

or Car pet man, he's called
when he goes under the carpet.

What was important with,
I think, the Wall paper man animation

was to give us this
sense of, you know,

a predator scuttling along.

So I know that I
was really looking for

that type of feeling
in the animation.

Someone scuttling is just
a creepy concept in itself.

And to have him scuttling
under the wallpaper,

it's kind of like they're
in there, trying to get out.

The starting point for
all the shots in this scene

is the plates that
were shot on set.

This is an example
of one of these.

This is a plate of Patricia
running up the stairs.

Also, I'd be
replacing the carpet

that she's running on in this shot
entirely with computer-generated carpet.

The figure would
be animated, say,

scuttling up the stairs.

And this is done in a
package called Softimage

by our character animators.
Christian Rivers did this shot.

And what you can see stepping
through here, not in real time,

is the figure of Car pet man
climbing up the stairs.

And the view in the top right
of the screen, this view here,

has been set up to
match the camera view.

And it would be animated so that it
would just look like a human figure

running up the staircase.

Then this piece of software
that I wrote was used

to wrap a surface over
the top of that figure

with the tinting and webbing,

to look like it was
actually a piece of carpet

that had been dropped
over the top of that figure.

We then take the series of
databases that are created

and set them up

with a lighting scheme that
matches the lighting that was used

to light the background plate,
on the set shoot.

The whole sequence
is composited together

to give the final shot.

There's a couple of
other things I've added,

computer graphics
brass stair rods,

which ping off the stairs

and I've also added, after the
composite, a 2-D camera move.

One of the most
difficult aspects

of the Wall paper man
sequence at the beginning

was when Patricia is being
dragged along the floor

by Car pet man.

The way that we did that was to
have a guy dressed up in a blue suit,

who just basically
grabs Dee's wrists

and pulls her along the floor,

so we get, you know, the sense
of her being dragged by somebody.

He was very sweet.

Very... Every...
New Zealand men are very gentle

with the women.

They're very masculine,
but they're very gentle.

And it was always,

"You all right? Are you okay?
Am I too rough?" You know.

He was very sweet. It was cute,

but it was a little weird being
hysterical with a blueberry.

We could have done this by,
perhaps, rigging her on wires

and using the wires
to drag her along,

but we felt we might
not get the actual look of,

as if she was being held
by the wrists and dragged.

It was then a case of removing
him entirely from the plate

so that we were just left with Patricia,
and we could add Car pet man.

We then applied very
traditional computer graphics

texture-mapping
techniques to the surface

to create the
look of the carpet.

One of the challenges with
animating the Portrait man shot

was

there was a lot of interaction

with the main character, which is
Michael J. Fox's character, Frank.

Because they're actually engaged

in a very close, tightly-framed
grapple with each other.

The plate I got to animate was just
Michael J. Fox with a picture frame.

And Michael's performance
basically gave me a lot to work with

in the way that he flinched
and moved his head.

It gave me a lot of ideas.

You could sort of see when a
punch was supposed to connect

because he would react
by throwing his head back.

And there were a
couple of other nice things

that, you know, sometimes you sort
of think you wouldn't have thought of.

I think one of the advantages
with all this effects stuff, you know,

and this whole idea of
me being in New Zealand

is I'd be able to give the guys,
sort of, constant feedback.

And certainly working through

scenes like this Wall paper man
scene or the Reaper scene,

it was critical that
they knew exactly,

you know, what they were
doing every step of the way

and they didn't go off on a
tangent, or in a wrong direction.

- ...straight back off, and he's...
- Yeah.

It was very good that

our director was able to

not only be on-site and
answer my questions

but he can go from workstation to
workstation and work with every individual.

And that certainly saves
a lot of time and money

when you can get it straight
from the horse's mouth

as to which direction a
particular effect should take.

One of the problems with the whole
visual effects side of THE FRIGHTENERS

is that we never knew exactly how
many shots there were in the movie.

This was partly
because of the fact

we didn't have everything absolutely
storyboarded throughout the film,

partly because we were developing
the script and the story on the set

with the actors,

and partly because,
once we started to edit the film,

we were taking some scenes out,
and changing some other scenes,

and so we never had
this figure locked down.

And we were really thrown
for a loop when it was decided

to bring the release
date of the film forward.

The film was always made as a
Halloween release for October '96,

and

I think it was like
the end of '95,

November or December '95,
we thought we had 10 months left

and we had a lot of complex,
you know, computer shots still to go,

like, maybe, 400 shots that
we hadn't even started yet.

And Universal decided they
wanted to release the film in summer

instead, in July, which gave us,

basically, you know, four months less
time to do the same amount of work.

And that really, you know,
threw everybody into a panic.

I know that it led

to a huge recruitment
of extra people

in order to get the
work done faster.

We looked around the world, in England,
and France, and Australia, and the States,

to try and find the
computer artists

that could come over and
help us get the film finished.

In my experience,
in recruiting drives,

it's usually very cutthroat.

As far as, you know, you
go behind closed doors

and work in shadows
and try to yank people

from their

from the womb of
their CG studios.

Well, in this case,

everybody knew we were in dire straits,
as far as trying to finish this film,

and

it was very nice that a
lot of the film community

came together to help us out.

We just went through their
front door and asked them,

"Hey, do you happen to
have anybody to spare?"

What we were engaged in,
essentially, was corporate raiding,

and we were doing it right in the
middle of a time, which still exists today,

which is essentially a
feeding frenzy on digital artists.

We were working 60 hours
from the very beginning

and that was our starting point.
We were moving up to 70, 80 hours.

We had some of our artists
working 110, 120 hours a week

in order to complete the
shots in the given time frame.

I know the words that
Charlie used was "shit fight."

It was a shit fight.

It was certainly a leap.

And, you know,

maybe it was a
little bit of foolishness

and overconfidence
at the time, and...

But we did get away with it. I think
we've, you know, done some okay shots

and they were done
down here in New Zealand.

The only serious disagreement that
Fran Walsh and I had over the script

was the Worm.

I thought that having
this tunnel of light,

you know, transforming
into the stomach of a worm

would be kind of
a cool thing to do,

and I really liked the idea.
And Fran was very much against it.

I remember that she thought
it was too Freddy Krueger-like.

I don't think... She's probably
never seen a Freddy Krueger film,

but, however, she didn't think it was
in keeping with the style of the film.

So, this debate raged,

and it raged all the way through
the shooting of the movie, in fact.

"Do we keep the Worm,
do we throw the Worm out?"

I was the founding member of
the "Save the Worm Society",

which had a membership of one.

It got to the point that
we were filming the actors

against blue screen,
reacting to something,

and I, you know, was determined
it was going to be the Worm.

Other people thought we were
going to change it to something else,

but we had to still
shoot the actors reacting.

Screaming,

from above,

swallow,

watching,

down.

The express bus to hell.

No lines, no waiting.

And we didn't really know,
even at that point,

exactly what they were going
to be looking at in the final movie.

And that was...
The Worm, in a way,

because we were all scared to confront
it and have this big argument about it,

I think it got left to
the very last minute.

It was probably the money
shot in the entire film.

And we only had about three weeks to
go from conception to final on that shot.

It was handed over to Gray

to try and whip something
together for us at the very last minute.

He created this, like,
this disgusting, slimy creature.

Getting the textures, and the
shading, and the rendering right for this

required a lot of photo
reference of real life.

If we were going to achieve
computer-generated gore,

we had to go to a slaughterhouse.
We had to take some pictures,

to get hand to
hand in some offal

and just get a feel for
what these things are like.

We had photographs taken

of everything which possibly looked
icky and gory and nasty and bloody.

From these photographs,
we created a huge digital image montage.

This was then projected as a texmap
onto the inside of the 3-D surface.

The whole result of
having these real textures,

you know, as part
of the CG figure...

It gives you a sense of realism
and a sort of organic reality

that doesn't look like
a CG shot, necessarily,

but it looks kind of disgusting.

You are seeing real-life gore.
You're seeing the insides of cows.

Bye, Frank!

Johnny. Johnny!

We were hanging on wires

and pretending that we were surrounded
by these things, and Peter would be like,

"Okay, watch the worms, they're coming
from the left, the right, be very scared."

"Now they're coming
from underneath.

"And now, the
sides are coming in.

"Look to the sides,
they're coming in.

"Now they're going back out again,
but now everything's enclosing on you."

You know, it's just...

That's what I mean. Half of you

has to be somewhere connected
down here, to hear all that

and the other half of you
has to be totally in La-La Land.

And hopefully the two
of them come together.

When we first cut
the movie together,

once the shooting had finished,

I think we were, like,
looking at a two-and-a-half-hour movie.

Which was too long,
and it felt too long.

You know, there were bits that were slow,
bits that we clearly didn't need,

and we had to be tough.

And that's part of the
process of film making.

Making movies is not about keeping
every second that you've filmed in there,

it's about making something
that works for an audience.

And generally you've
go to, you know,

start to attack things
that you're quite fond of

and the easiest way to
do this shortening process

is often to remove characters,

or to remove entire subplots.

Because if you go in there

and you start trimming little
bits and pieces off all the scenes,

the film can become
very bitsy and rough

and it doesn't, you know...
It doesn't really work

to do it that way.

The first victim of this
process was the gatekeeper.

Two things were apparent.

One was that, generally,

the stuff with the gatekeeper
was not essential to the movie.

Like, we could take
the gatekeeper out

and still have pretty much
exactly the same story.

And secondly, the gatekeeper
seemed a little strange to us

when we looked at
the finished movie,

because he is the only
character in the film,

the only ghostly character that we
had who was, kind of, not human.

You know, we had this rule
that you die, you become a ghost,

you end up in the cemetery
or in Frank's house or whatever

but you're there,
as a dead person.

And, you know, what
was the gatekeeper?

He was like a funny idea that we had,
but it didn't kind of make a lot of sense.

And, so, he was targeted

for the ruthless
process of elimination.

And that's what happened to him.

We should have a look at some
of the gatekeeper scenes now.

The important
thing to remember is

that I don't think any of these
shots were actually finished.

They were not
completed for the film.

They exist only as temp shots,
which are very rough,

crude effect shots that we put
together just so we could cut the film.

So, with that in mind,
let's have a look at some of the stuff.

There were two sequences
with the gatekeeper.

One, when Frank and Ray
first come into the cemetery

and they've just left Frank's car
and they're walking up the path,

and suddenly the gatekeeper
jumps out to intercept them.

Wait. God damn it!

Hey, what did I
just tell you, huh?

Stop!

State your business.

- Yeah, he's with me.
- You are not welcome here, Bannister.

Come on, it's the guy's funeral.
It'll be 10 minutes tops. Give him a break.

Come back.

So that was just the
introduction to the gatekeeper,

and his big sequence
happened later in the movie

when Frank has now become a ghost
and returns to the cemetery at night.

This scene was originally
conceived a little differently

to how it exists
in the final film.

So it's interesting to look
at it from that point of view.

It starts out

with Frank actually looking at
the cop car from high in a tree.

He's a ghost, he's
arrived at the cemetery,

and he's keeping a eye
on Lucy, who's in the car.

Whoa!

Frank.

Frank! Is that you?

I'm doing this? I'm doing this!

I'm making the car move
with the power of my mind!

Yes!

No.

Wait!

State your business.

It's me! Damn it!
It's Bannister.

Holy Jesus!
Who have we got here?

Listen to me, Hiles.
I haven't got time for this crap.

There's an evil spirit coming down that
hill right now, and I think he's pissed.

Shut up, you subhuman emanation.

You will not speak
unless spoken to.

You unorganized, grabasstic
gob of teleplasmic shit.

If there was an evil
spirit loose in this town

I would be negligent
in my duties.

Are you accusing me of
professional incompetence?

Are you saying that I am one
prize piece of anus breath?

Put this stinking piece of spook
goop back in the goddamn ground.

No, that's not my grave.

Jesus H. Christ!

Who in the hell are you?

Sound off like
you've got a pair.

A similar fate
unfortunately happened

to the character of
the Judge as well.

I mean, the Judge is a
wonderful character in the film

and we had a lot of fun
shooting his sequences,

but it became apparent when
we looked at the final cut of the film

that the.

You know, that there was a lot of
stuff that was happening with him

that was really not part of
the narrative drive of the film.

And, even though it gave
us a lot of pain to do so,

we went through a process
of trimming his scenes out.

It's kind of interesting
to look at the film,

you know, in a sense,
the film that never was,

by going through some
of the Judge footage.

In fact, the first time that he
appears in the film is different.

At the moment, he comes
racing into the living room,

firing his pistols.

We see that his jaw is missing.
You know, the dog has his jaw.

And that was originally going to
be the second time we saw him.

The first time was when Frank
was on his way to the shower.

The shots of the dog were never
finished in these scenes, either.

Oh, man!

Morning, Judge.
The dog's got your jaw bone.

After that introduction,

the Judge was pretty much
in the movie, as he is now.

We meet him, he talks
to Frank by the fireside,

and then,

I remember there was a little piece that's
missing from the film that I always liked,

where he's in the
car with the ghosts

after they've encountered
the Reaper for the first time.

That was not an emanation.
That was some sort of a spirit.

A dark spirit!

Dark spirit, my ass!

That was the Grim Reaper, son.

The specter of Death.

That little piece of dialogue was just,
you know, taken out for pacing reasons.

The action then goes to the museum,
and we have it pretty much the way it is

with the Judge coming and shooting
the Reaper, and enabling Frank to escape.

The sequence,
however, did not finish

with the Judge being
chopped in half, as it does now.

It actually carried
on a little bit further.

Judge!

Judge!

God damn it!
I've lost my vitals!

Let's get outta here.

Bastard!

We quite liked the
idea that the Judge,

even though he's
chopped in half, is still alive

because he is
a ghost, after all.

However, being a half guy is
probably a bit of a handicap,

and so the Judge
heads off to the cemetery.

We don't see any
of that, we just...

He lets us know that he...
It's time to head back to the coffin.

And he was due to make
a surprise appearance

in the cemetery
later on in the movie.

That begins when Frank
Bannister is thrown into the ground

by the gatekeeper.

-Judge!
- Will you get the hell out of my grave?

Judge, God damn it!
Listen to me.

Take your filthy fingers out
of the lady's blouse, Mister.

God damn it!

Evening.

There were a couple of
interesting little shots with the Judge

towards the end of the
cemetery scene, as well

when Frank is talking to
the Johnny Bartlett face.

I gotta hand it to you, Frank.

You've taken out Death himself.

This ain't Death.

Who are you?

It was kind of difficult to actually
shoot those shots with John Astin.

In a way that, you know, it was believable
that he was just walking on his hands.

And we made quite a
complicated blue screen rig,

which involved John swinging
from a little, sort of, a crane

so that his weight
would be floating

and he was able just to use his hands
to be lifting himself off the ground with.

It was quite ingenious.

It would have worked quite well if
we had actually finished all the shots.

And the Judge's final
appearance in the film

was gonna be in the denouement,

where, in addition to having
Frank's house being torn down

and the sheriff turning
up to say farewell,

there was going to be a
sort of an emotional farewell,

a touching little moment
between Frank and the Judge.

I always said you'd never
finish that house, Frank.

I'll be right back.
Come on. Back, back.

I'd call it finished, Judge.

This is goodbye, son.

I'm hitting the
trail with Rustler.

Aren't you gonna need your legs?

Well.

Me and my vitals have
come to a parting of the ways.

They're going east and I'm
heading west with Rustler.

Rustler.

I'm really glad that John
Astin's lovely work as the Judge

can be seen, finally, you
know, on this LaserDisc.

The editing process
didn't stop with the cut

that we were doing
in New Zealand.

We had to take the film to the
States for the dreaded previews.

Now, we had Bob
Zemeckis there, and

I found the process
very interesting

because, you know, you don't

spend two years designing a car

and then put it on the
market without a test drive.

You know, it makes sense to
actually find out if there's any faults,

to find out whether the
audience is responding

in the way that you
want them to respond,

because you certainly lose objectivity when
you've been working on a film for so long.

And the previews
didn't really cause us

any great concern.

One interesting
thing that did develop

was this whole
issue of the swastika

that was on the palm
of Dammers' hand.

Milton Dammers has
a swastika on his hand.

Right here.
Little, crudely made...

Mansonesque swastika.

And there was...
Actually, in this special edition,

there is a little more
explanation of it,

I hold it up...

to have her stop yelling,
and she sees in the rearview mirror

as well as the audience,
that I have a swastika there.

And I explain that
my first undercover

assignment was

being part of the Manson
family at Spahn Ranch, 1969.

I was the family's sex slave

for six months.

Six months.

In the service of my country.

Disguised as a filthy hippie.

It was interesting,
because when they tested

this movie,
audiences didn't get it.

They misunderstood.

They thought I was a Nazi.

Because I had a swastika.

And maybe because of the hair,

it sort of went
right along with it.

All they saw was the visual,
and they didn't get the verbal explanation.

So it was taken out.

But I guess it's back in.

Not all the scenes that
we trimmed out of the film

are quite as exciting

as the gatekeeper, or even
the Dammers' swastika stuff.

Some of them are a lot more mild,
and you just simply don't need them.

A really good example of that
was a very brief scene with Lucy

as she arrives at
the police station.

Now, when you're writing a script, you
always get bogged down on the logistics.

And we thought, "Well, she's not going
to be able to run into the police station

"and go straight to Frank's cell,
because they wouldn't allow her to."

So we've got to explain how
she actually gets to the cell

and so we shot
this little scene.

Dr. Lynskey.

I need to speak to
Frank Bannister, now.

Agent Dammers says
he's to have no visitors.

Look, I'm his doctor.

Sorry, ma'am.

Agent Dammers will
be back in 40 minutes.

You could take a
seat and wait for him.

Are you trying to deny
me access to my patient?

Frank!

But when you see the movie playing,
you just realize no one cares.

This is a really good
example of the difference

between screenwriting and trying
to theorize everything in the story

with actually watching a movie.

You just don't care. So you can
easily just lift that type of stuff out.

"The mystery heart
condition that has killed

over 30 people in
less than four years

"has claimed another victim.

"Doctors are baffled as to why

"seemingly fit and healthy people
are suffering massive heart attacks.

"Many of Fair water's residents are
claiming that the shadow of Death

"has once again
descended on the town."

What's this shadow of Death stuff?
I don't like it.

It's what they're saying,
Miss Rees-Jones.

There's a lot of scared
people out there.

By now, most people
have probably seen,

you know, this extended
version of the film,

which we included in this
special edition LaserDisc, and,

you know, those were all
scenes that we took out originally,

like the...
Frank with the letter from the bank

and the false Reaper gag
that the ghosts pull on him.

And the driving with the Judge

and speeding up through
the funeral procession.

They were lifts that
we did simply for pace.

You know, they were scenes that
we didn't think were necessary, and,

I certainly think, theatrically,

the film is better
without those scenes in.

But it was fun to sort of
include them in this LaserDisc,

because in themselves,
they're quite fun.

And I think the medium of a
LaserDisc, of watching a film on TV,

and especially a film that
you've presumably already seen

and you can now see a slightly different
version of it, is part of the fun.

And, you know,
while the theatrical

version is still like the
director's cut of the film,

I'm really happy
that some of the stuff,

you know, we were able to include
here, because it was kind of fun.

HEAVENLY CREATURES was
my favorite film the year it came out.

And, in fact,
it became one of those

benchmark things that,

if you're talking with people
and you want to judge their tastes,

you know, you say, "By the way,
did you see HEAVENLY CREATURES?"

And if they said, "Yeah,
I saw it, I thought it was terrible",

I'd know that they had no taste

and there was no point in
talking any further with them.

Because if we thought at all alike,
they'd go, "Oh, yes, fantastic film.

"I just loved that film,
it was great."

And, I kind of

told my agent, I think

that whoever this guy is, I don't
know who he is, but whoever he is,

I'd love to work with him

on anything, any day.

And, it was one of those
situations where I got a call,

asking if I was interested in working
with Peter Jackson on his next film.

They told me a
little bit about it

and I said, "I don't
even care what it is.

"Yes. The answer is yes."

I was really delighted that Danny Elf man
wanted to do the music for the film because

I think more than just about
any composer you could name

he has a real affinity
for the tone of our movie.

I mean, if there is one
guy that understands

this delicate balance
between comedy

and horror,
it's got to be Danny.

When I first saw the first
cut of FRIGHTENERS

which was at Peter and
Fran's house in New Zealand,

and it was pretty wild, because I
flew out there from Los Angeles for

17 hours on the ground and
flew back, basically to see the movie.

So I got there and
I was really kind of

a little floaty,

but it was really fun, I went
to their house and I met them

and I just adored them both.

And they showed me
the movie on video.

And I realized,
right there when I saw it,

that I had my work cut
out for me, that it was...

It was going to be a
difficult, time-intensive film.

But I was also very excited,
because I like challenges

and I knew that it just was not
going to be an easy, you know,

I-could-just-whip-through-this
kind of score,

that it meant really kind of nailing
it and changing the directions a lot

and shifting from
one tone to another

and trying to make it clearer for
the audience what type of movie it is

that they are getting
into, right at the top.

I wanted to make sure that the
music tied the film together tonally

that the music acknowledged
the film for what it was

and that it helped the
audience go along for the ride.

What film music does is
consciously or unconsciously

lead the audience down the
path you want them to be led.

And in every movie,

and within every movie, that's
completely different. Sometimes,

the problem is

you really want them to know
that it's okay to laugh at something.

Or sometimes,
you specifically don't want them to,

or sometimes, you
want to mislead them.

In other words, the music can...
You could be watching a woman

washing the
dishes in her kitchen

and whistling, or kind of
humming along to herself.

And nothing particular is happening,
but the music can tell you that

something horrible is
about to happen to her,

or give us the impression that
nothing horrible is about to happen

and that this is a very,
very normal moment

to take us off guard

for something horrible that
does happen all of a sudden.

So we have quite
a bit of ability.

Or it can tell us

that there is something really
crazy going on in her head

that she is thinking
of something

tied to another piece of
music that we've heard

earlier in the story, that even though
we just see her washing the dishes,

she's thinking of
somebody or something.

So it has this strange ability
to lead us down many paths

while watching the
same bit of footage.

It can make a violent scene more violent,
it can make a funny scene funnier.

Or, what's very
important in a movie

with a very
difficult or odd tone,

it could let one know, in THE FRIGHTENERS
this was the case at the beginning

of the movie, people aren't quite sure
what type of movie they're getting into.

In the movie TO DIE FOR
it was certainly the case,

and many of Tim
Burton's movies were.

You're trying to simply
let the audience know.

What type of movie
are they getting into?

Thank you,
Bannister, you can go.

What the hell you staring at?

- What's with the number?
- What number?

Look, if you're trying to freak
me out, it's not gonna work, okay?

You know, he's trying to get more
money out of us, is what he's trying to do.

Get your shit.
Get the hell out of my house.

- Come on, move.
- Ray, just...

I always hope

that something I work on isn't going
to sound just like something else.

But there are genres and
it's impossible to avoid.

Obviously, a dark comedy,
like THE FRIGHTENERS,

I can't totally, 100% get away
from other dark comedies,

let's say of Tim
Burton, that I have done

where there is going
to be some crossover.

But whether it be BEETLEJUICE or
THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS

or DARKMAN, or NIGHTBREED,

there's going to be some
amount of crossover.

But I always go, "That's okay.
I am the same composer."

When I grew up, I used to
listen to Bernard Herrmann scores

and I would be able to tell
that it was the same composer

in all the science fiction
films in the '60s of his

that I grew up on.

So, on the one hand, I don't
want them to sound too similar.

On the other hand,

I can't make them sound like they're all
completely from separate people because

I don't have more than two or
three people living inside here.

So, you know, I wish
I had 10, but I don't.

I have only two or three that have to get
along and they usually divide up the work

depending on what type of film it is,
and what type of score it's going to be.

Frank, watch out!

Fran and I were in Los Angeles for some of
the post production of THE FRIGHTENERS,

and we went round
to Danny's house

and basically sat down and watched
the entire movie with him, and figured out

where the bits of music should go,
and what type of music it should be.

You have a thing called the
spotting session with the director

very early on in the process,
and you go scene by scene,

and the director will go,

"I think there should be mood
music here, maybe starting with this,

"going through here
and playing this element

"and let's make it emotional
or big or funny or small."

You talk about what
you're playing in the scene,

or what you're not
playing in the scene.

And then occasionally,

I'll go, "You know,
maybe there shouldn't be music here,

"or maybe there
should be some here,"

and the director would go,
"Yeah, that's a good idea."

You just kind of talk it through,
and you explain to each other

why there should or shouldn't
be music, in your opinions.

For some reason,
I don't know why

we ended up with a lot of
music in THE FRIGHTENERS.

Particularly a lot of
"starts," they call it,

which are just the
individual cues.

I guess it's something to do with
the pace or the momentum of the film.

I make up this huge board, and on
this board is all the names of all the cues

with a box next to it.

And then there is
the dates on the top,

and the number of days
left to the scoring date.

And it becomes like a countdown.

And so, here's the
cue, how long the cue is,

and a box that I'll
check off as I finish them.

And here is the number of days,
so at the end of each night,

I check off another square, and I count...
"27 days left."

And then I'll go, "Okay, I've
done this much music, and this is...

"These are the empty boxes, there's
this much left," and I'll either go,

"Oh, my God, I am totally off
schedule," or I'll go, "Okay, okay,

"I'm barely on it.
If I skip one day, I'm screwed.

"But if I stay on this pace,
I'll make it."

And it's just a way
to pace myself.

And to have the confidence
that I am going to finish on time.

Or do I have to, like, stay up all night?
Or do I have to adjust to it?

So she delivered the board
the first day with all the cues.

And I just said,
"Shit, I've never seen one like that.

"This is, like, 50 starts."
And there was no particular reason,

it was just...
That's just the way it was, you know?

One of the most exciting things,
I think, on THE FRIGHTENERS

was the recording of the music,

which we did at the
Sony recording stage,

and I think it was like the actual
stage that was used for BEN-HUR,

and, I don't know,
THE WIZARD OF OZ,

I think somebody
said, back in the '30s.

And so it had this history
and this atmosphere,

and we had a really big orchestra,
I don't know, 100, 110-piece orchestra.

That was really a lot of fun, and it
was about five or six days' worth of work

and I just found it
incredibly entertaining.

It's like, you know, your own
private sort of concert, I guess.

We gotta get mezzo piano.

We then took the finished music
recordings back to New Zealand

because the final mixing
and dubbing of the film

actually happened down
here in New Zealand.

And I remember Danny
was really generous,

because the last
thing he said to me

before I left with, like,
all these tapes of his music was,

you know, "When you're mixing, don't
worry if you wanna drop any of the music."

Because I think he's very aware

that a film can be too full-on in terms
of the music, it can be too intense.

The reality, in the end,
was that only one

of Danny's music tracks was
actually dropped in the final mix.

It's the scene where Lucy finds
the knife in Old Lady Bradley's closet.

You know, it was one of those situations
where we tried the scene with music

and we tried it without.

And keeping in mind what had just
gone before and what was about to happen

in the film, we just thought it was
possibly gonna be more effective

without any music at all.

Mother.

Coffee's ready.

It would be fun now, just for
the completists in the audience

of this LaserDisc, just to
play that cue where the music

is not heard in the finished movie,
we could play it here

and have a listen to that track.

I'll make you some
coffee, mother.

Mother.

Coffee's ready.

Lucy, go.

I don't think there should ever be a
conflict between sound effects and music

because the two have
different things to offer the film.

I always find that music connects
directly with your emotions,

with the emotions of the viewer.
It helps to

accompany you on this
journey through the film

and to suggest things that you should
be feeling, and to help enhance that.

I find that sound
effects, to me,

have an emotional
connection as well,

but it's, like, one step
removed from the music.

I look at the scene and I just go,
"This music will work for this scene."

What else they put in it,
I have no control over.

And I just kind of hope
it all works itself out.

You know, as I say, at the same
time I am working on a scene

and devising this music, that I think
to me, makes the scene come alive,

there's a whole other team,
simultaneously working on many tracks

of sound effects, that to them,
is making the scene come alive.

So for me, it works
best with just music.

For them, it'll work best
with just sound effects.

And both of us have
to live with the fact

that they're all gonna
get put together.

And scene by scene,
moment to moment,

one will survive
and the other will,

you know, not survive,
to various degrees.

And you just hope that

there is a good set of ears
balancing it all out at the end.

But that's kind of the way it works.
There really isn't the time

on most films

to really let one finish, and then
the other one start, or vice-versa.

We're all...

The way movies are, it's...

Everybody's like, jamming at the
end, there, we're working really hard

and just trying to make our deadlines.
And that's the reality of movie making.

The "tunnel of light" scene is a good
example, where music and effects

were deliberately
designed to work together.

We were very lucky
in having Randy Thom

do the sound design for
us on THE FRIGHTENERS.

And he came up with the idea of

keeping the tunnel down at
the lower end of the spectrum.

The bass rumbles, the vibrations
of the power of the tunnel

and the cracking open of, like,
the fabric of the atmosphere.

With that in mind, Danny designed
the music to be at the higher end.

So it was the
strings and the choir.

And so you have
separation between the two,

the two are not
muddying each other up.

I think that's a very
good example of how,

with a little bit of
thought beforehand,

the music and effects
can work very well together.

There was an effect,
for example,

that was played for the
sound of the Grim Reaper.

But, when you're
working with an orchestra,

there's not much you can do. You know,
the orchestra takes up a certain range

and it's hard to kind
of play around effects.

If you know that it's going
to be, really, a low effect,

you know, you might try to avoid
low instruments, or something,

or if you know it's going
to be a very high effect.

But, very often, we just have to

plow ahead,
do the best job we can

and just hope that in the dub at
the end, that it all gets sorted out.

Something that would be quite
fun to do, I think, and it kind of,

you know, might illustrate some of
the stuff we've just been talking about,

is if we played a scene in the
movie with just the sound effects

and then we played it
again with just the music.

It's kind of an
interesting comparison.

And it sort of,
I guess, illustrates the...

The difficulty of trying to make
everything work and everything balance.

And a good scene to use is the opening
scene, where there's a thunderstorm

and there's the Wallpaper Man,
and the stuff crashing in the kitchen

and there's a hell of a lot of noise.
Which you need.

I mean, it looks dumb if
something falls and you don't hear it.

It doesn't seem right.
You've got to have the sound effects

and they've got
to be working well.

At same time, it's
the opening of the film

and we wanted a big, grand
operatic feel to the music.

But let's have a look at it first with the,
just with the sound effects track.

No music at all.

Get off me.

Oh, please!

Please, don't hurt me!

It's wrong! She's too young.

The sins of the
flesh will ruin her.

Please, don't hurt me. Please!

The wicked will be punished.

And now let's have a look
at it with just the music track.

And with no sound effects.

Get off me.

Oh, please!

Please, don't hurt me!

It's wrong! She's too young.

The sins of the
flesh will ruin her.

Please, don't hurt me. Please!

The wicked will be punished.

I thought, at the end
of the day, it was really,

you know, well
mixed by Randy Thom

and you know, I think
it really does the job.

Get off me.

Oh, please.

Please, don't hurt me!

It's wrong! She's too young.

The sins of the
flesh will ruin her.

Please, don't hurt me. Please!

The wicked will be punished.

Why us?
I mean, why are they in our house?

Why us? Why us?

I hear it all the time,
Mrs. Lynskey, I tell you...

Usually emanations
are confined to the...

Keep going.

Usually emanations are confined
to the cemetery, but they do escape.

I see them on this...
You see... Your young ones.

I see them on the street,

in people's gardens.

In people's gardens...
I see them at Farley's Thrifty Mart.

Farley's?

I mean Granger's.

- Farley's?
- Farley Granger.

- Sorry.
- I see them at Granger's Thrifty Mart.

- Granger's?
- Yeah.

Saturday night, you see them
huddled around the pet food department.

I can't figure them out.

Frank, you should disarm...
Hairball.

Come on now, Lucy.
I don't know why you keep shutting me out.

I mean, I still have a lot to...

- Keep rolling. Keep going.
- Still rolling.

You know nothing
of my situation!

We got a lot of gutless, we got a lot of...
Shit.

Lot of lives.

All right.
Back, back, back, back, back, back,

back, back, back,
back, back, back, back.

Why can...

Okay.

It wasn't funny.

Fuck me, sorry.

I think one of the funniest

bloopers that...

that happened in
THE FRIGHTENERS,

and it happened a couple
of times, was when...

Was when Michael
forgot what film he was in.

We were doing this scene with

the Judge, and I'm supposed
to call out to him, and I just kept

saying, "Doc"

from BACK TO THE FUTURE.
It was like some weird out-of-body thing.

A little quicker than the
Pony Express, huh, Doc?

Whoa! I called him Doc.

I'd just go, "Doc! Judge, shit."

Hey. boys! Freeze up!

Doc!

Doc. I did it again.

I know, I know, it's the way I look.
It's this

damn ectoplasm stuff.

It turns you off, doesn't it?

Come on, Lucy, you're
not listening to me!

Look, baby, you know we have
a great relationship. It's just that

lately, I don't feel that
you've been giving it 100%.

I guess a blowjob's
out of the question.

And action!

"Here's Johnny."
I had to just do one, sorry.

Yeah, all right?

Hi. Now I'm acting.

Action.

And action!

Frank! Frank, listen to me.
I found your knife.

It was hidden in
Old Lady Bradley's...

Oh, I'm sorry.

I had to get hit
by this skeleton.

The special effects guys
had this skeleton, and they...

They were on top of it.
They padded the skeleton

so that when it hit me,

it wouldn't hurt me.

But they padded it, like,

too low, or something.
So when this thing came,

it was like being hit in the
head with a baseball bat.

Stuart can't take
much more of this.

I think he's gonna blow!

I did it.

I did it.

I heard shooting,

I forgot my line, of all things.
Sorry.

Hey! Hey, partner!

Hope you're having fun...
No, no, one more.

Here we go. Keep rolling.

All right, kid, quit jumping
around and acting like a baby.

This is serious.

You should go and
stand over there, Charlie.

Quick, jump over
there with Noddy.

Who's this?

Who's this?

Up high, up hi, Noddy.
Up high.

That's it. Big smile!

Let him bounce, let him bounce.
That's good.

Jump. Jump. Start to jump.

See, you've been watching too
many SHAFT movies. That's it...

No. I'm talking about...
Oh, fuck.

I hate that. I'm sorry.

I remember the close-ups on

the mouth and the eyes.

Peter,

to do that scene,
he wanted to get all these

different perspectives
of Dammers

and, you know, close-ups of the eyes,
and close-ups of the mouth and...

And strange points of view,
and hand-held, shaky, bizarre,

disconcerting stuff. But,

you know, he'd do these set-ups

and like, he a did a real
tight set-up of Jeffrey's mouth.

And it was so ridiculously funny

that Peter kept laughing
and wrecking the takes.

Well, I started to giggle and I've never
told anybody why I started to giggle.

The reason was, as I was watching
the close-up of the mouth on the monitor

and I suddenly became
aware of a little dribble of saliva

that was forming
on Jeff's lower lip.

And I suddenly

wasn't listening to
the dialogue anymore.

I was just watching
the progress of this

little drip of saliva as it made
it's way down from his lip

to his chin.

And I started to wonder whether
Jeff had noticed it was there.

Or if he could feel it.
It was just going. And I was

starting to suppress a giggle.
I could feel it coming.

And then, I think,

it got worse, because he suddenly
wiped it away with his finger.

And from that point on,

I was just fighting,
trying not to laugh.

But I couldn't make it to
the end of the take. I'm sorry.

Why are you shaking?

Michael Fox turned to
me at one point and said,

"You know, I've never been on
a set where the director's giggling

"has made the actors
crack up before."

And so, then he got it under control,
and then Michael,

Michael went off.

And so, I lost it on that.
He had to take a walk.

And I could even hear him, like,

way over on the other side of the
sound stage, sort of muffling a laugh.

But what about
the guy in the toilet?

I know...

Keep rolling. Do it again.

And action.

We know you didn't like her.

So we finally got
the mouth shot.

But things didn't get any better,
because we moved on to the eyes.

And I was in this totally
vaporous kind of mood.

And I suddenly started to notice,
as we were filming,

that Jeff's eyes were
moving up and down

in sync with his voice.
So they were acting like little mouths.

Twenty-eight cases
involve crushed hearts,

arteries choked
until they burst.

Those started in 1990 with your

beautiful wife, Debra.

So I'm watching these
little eyes going like mouths

and I'm trying to
suppress a giggle.

I mean, Jeff is trying
not to laugh, as well.

I can see that. And that's making
me laugh even harder. And so,

again, that one
ended in disaster.

Why are you shaking?

You're doing it now.

You're looking a little pale.

There's a gas station.
You gotta take a leak? I do.

Judge, just rest your bones.

Cut.

Hello, Billy.

Billy.

Billy.

Hello.

Hi.

He smiles.

Smile.

Hi, Billy.

Hi, Billy! Billy! Hi!

Hello!

Smile.

- What a beautiful boy!
- I think he's gorgeous.

He's gorgeous.

He's a beautiful boy.

Yes. Who's a lovely boy?

- Billy.
- Hi.

They'll never stay, man.

Dad, can we write his credit?

In most of the films that I've made,
we've generally had one day

during the shoot which was
kind of like, "the silly day."

On HEAVENLY CREATURES, it was
when all the crew dressed up in drag.

The men dressed up as women
and the women dressed up as men.

And it was kind of fun.
And we've got some good footage of that

for the HEAVENLY
CREATURES LaserDisc.

THE FRIGHTENERS,
it happened on a...

On a day where we were
shooting a serious scene, where

Johnny Bartlett's being taken to court and
the massacre has happened in this hospital.

It's the black-and-white
flashback to the '60s, and

we wanted quite a few extras
to play policemen and journalists,

and cameramen,
and we used the crew.

So, it's always funny
for us to watch it

because we're actually looking
at a lot of the crew, you know,

wearing the wardrobe and
the costume and the make-up.

And they're actually
quite good actors.

Find a blanket.

Get me a blanket, someone!

- Any comments, Johnny?
- I got me a score of 12.

That's one more
than Stark weather.

Guess that makes me
Public Enemy Number One.

Get these people away!
Get these people away!

Can you tell us
anything whatsoever?

Keep these people back.

Oh, for heaven's
sake, we're reporters.

For God's sake,
we're supposed to get the news.

- Into the car, go on.
- Follow the car.

FBI guys, back in the car.

I think one of the biggest
causes of frustration

in the whole movie
for Dee Wallace-Stone

was the pump-action
shotgun that she had to use.

Well, let's start with,
"Dee doesn't like guns."

Okay?

And every role I get,
I have to use a bloody gun.

I don't know what that's about.

Well

don't like guns,
and this was a big gun.

And they put some
really loud rounds in it.

And I had about 30 minutes
to work with the darn thing

before I used it, right?

You know, you get into these scenes,
you have to go to La-La Land.

To go from who I am, to who
Patricia was in this scene, it's like...

So,

I'm in and I'm doing this
and I turn around and I...

It goes...

Oh fuck.

I think there were a few four-letter
words flying around at that moment.

And we tried it two or three ways
and you had to just, you had to

really pull the whole
thing out for it to work.

You know, but I would get
into the momentum of the scene

and I would want
to do it so fast

and so professionally, you know,
and that I would never

throw it quite as
far as I had to.

So, by the time we
really got it, I was...

I was Patricia.
I was so pissed off at this gun.

Sound off like you...

Will you get a load of this?

He set us up, Lucy.

The man set us up!

This is our house.

I'm sorry. Shit.

Oh, shit!

- You okay?
- Yes.

Lucy! Lucy!

I don't know what's going on.
Why did the elevator stop?

Lucy had, like, one costume
throughout the movie.

So it felt, because,

that pink jacket,

I wore it pretty much for
the whole seven months,

and so, after a while
the crew was like,

"Oh, is that a new sweater?
Oh, you look good today," you know.

And it became a bit of a
joke amongst the crew that,

you know, she'd turn up for work and
she'd have to just wear the same clothes

every single day for like
four months at a time and

on the very last day that
she was working on the film,

the costume department
presented her with a present,

which was this
little Barbie doll.

And they had made a costume,
a perfect miniature costume

of this pink jacket and they
had dressed the Barbie doll up.

I was lining up her
last shot in the movie

which was just a close-up of
her in the back of the cop car.

And so I, you know,
was looking at Trini and...

She had to duck out of the frame
and then come up into the frame, so

we got ready to shoot
it and I called, "Action."

Action!

And, relax!

REY'

honey.

I need to know

where you invested my money.

That $16,000 that I had saved.

The attorneys can't
find it anywhere.

Oh, shit!

I blew it on a bad investment.
But, oh, don't tell her that.

Tell her everything's gonna be...
Fuck, my line. God damn it.

Fuck, I looked at the wrong place.
I'm sorry.

In New Zealand, we have an ice
cream company called Mr. Whippy

who drive around in little vans

and they sell ice creams
at the side of the road and

they play...

They play a tune
called "Greensleeves"

which was actually composed by Henry VIII.,
for those of you that need to know.

And anyway, that's the
signature tune of Mr. Whippy.

Any time I was doing...
Or they were doing, a close-up of me,

this truck would go by and make,

I forgot what noise it was.
Some ridiculous noise.

I really need to know where
you invested my money. The...

The $16,000 that I'd saved.
I mean, the attorneys...

- I'm sorry.
- What the fuck was that?

The truck seemed to follow
Trini everywhere she went.

No!

I'm sorry.

That fucking truck follows me.

That was my curse on
THE FRIGHTENERS.

Right from the very beginning,
I'd set out to make

THE FRIGHTENERS as a PG-13.

I mean, you know, I've shot
R-rated films in the past. And so, I felt

I had a reasonably good
idea of how to shoot a PG-13.

I was deliberately
avoiding any explicit gore,

any explicit violence.

But at the same time,
I wanted the film to be as intense

as it could be

with those restrictions,
and so...

We, you know, we did
things that were non-explicit.

To try and crank up the tension,
and try and, you know, create scares,

I guess. To make it frightening.

When we screened
it for the MPAA,

we began this very

long and drawn-out process
of trying to get a PG-13.

Because at first viewing, they said,
"There's no way, this is an R-rated film."

The most ludicrous thing is,

we had to cut out the
shotgun blasts in the door.

They said, "There's too many shotgun
blasts in the door. This is R-rated."

And it's the first time in
my life I'd even known that

blowing holes in a door
was an R-rated activity.

In fact, we should stop showing
these shots because this LaserDisc

will be NC-17 if we carry on.

I know Bob went crazy,

and it was just

so obvious to us that there was no
way that we were gonna get a PG-13

version of THE FRIGHTENERS. Certainly
not a film that we were gonna be proud of.

The rating system is
very arbitrary in America.

It seems to be applied with

double, triple standards,
all the time.

I was shocked that the movie...
Well, let me put it this way.

I knew that they were
making a PG-13 film.

But I also knew enough, from having
worked on as many films as I have,

that they were gonna have a problem,
because there's these elements. Now,

they ended up getting an R-rating and I
know Peter was very frustrated by that,

because as he said, "if I was
gonna make an R-rated film

"I would have made
an R-rated film."

It would definitely have
been more interesting

to make an R-rated
version from the beginning.

Of course, at this point, we
had no time to change anything.

The only thing that we
did do, after we learned

that we now had an R-rated release,
rather than a PG-13 release,

is we re-did

the shot of Dammers
getting killed.

Originally, he was just gonna

be shot by a shotgun.
And we weren't gonna see anything

other than just him being
blasted back through the doors.

And now we had an R-rated film,
I thought, well, you know,

"Damn it. Let's just do something a little
bit more interesting for Dammers' death."

And we had a few weeks left before
we had to deliver our last effects shot.

So we engineered a shot which was
never a part of the original planning

where Dammers' head gets
blown apart by the shotgun blast.

And that is definitely a result of
us suddenly getting an R-rating

and being able to do that.

My 11-year-old daughter went with me
to the opening of THE FRIGHTENERS.

And she said, "Oh, it's R-rated.
ls there... If there's a section,

"I really shouldn't see,
tell me."

And I said, "Well, if there is,
I don't know which one it is.

"There's a couple of
things which are kind of...

"Get a little
violent, and stuff..."

"But I don't think it's anything
that's gonna disturb you."

And she asked me,

at the end of the movie, "What was
it in there they didn't want me to see?

"Nothing disturbed me."

She liked the movie a lot.

And I said, "Molly, I can never
begin to try to second-guess

"what adults think that
young adults get harmed by."

Because, the problem is,
most adults forgot what it's like

to be a child or a young adult.

They've developed some concept
of what it's like over the years

that has nothing to do with
what young people are really like.

So, in fact,

in my mind, in my
daughter's mind,

there was nothing
in there that was, like,

over the top, that was gonna harm her.
But that's not the way

the rating boards looked at it.

So it's kind of a shame,
because, it did kind of cut out

a chunk of audience that I think
really would have liked the film.

I would have really loved that
film when I was 13 years old.

I mean, that was like, just the perfect
13-year-old Danny Elf man movie.

And I'm glad that I grew up in an
era where we didn't have ratings.

Because, I wouldn't have been
able to see half the stuff that I loved.

Hollywood didn't...

They didn't understand
the film, because it starts out

like this kind of wacky
comedy and then it goes...

And the story line turns to this
very dark and twisted kind of thriller.

What a lot of people don't understand
is those are Peter's two favorite genres.

The issue of the
tone of the film

also upset a few people
when they saw the movie.

I mean, I read reviews where
the reviewer would say, you know,

"This film doesn't know whether
it's a comedy or a horror film,

"and it sort of changes
halfway through."

That seemed to annoy
quite a few people.

The way that they
said that the film

suddenly changes tone.

I never really thought
of it quite like that.

THE FRIGHTENERS, to me,

is similar to HEAVENLY CREATURES
in the structure of its tone.

In both HEAVENLY CREATURES
and THE FRIGHTENERS,

we get to meet our characters
with some humorous scenes.

We have, you know, comedy, basically.
We have,

you know, stuff where
they're having some fun

and we learn who they are.
We get all that information early.

And then, gradually,
the screws start to tighten in the story.

I don't think that's sudden.
I just think it's gradual.

Over a period of time,
the stakes go up.

This becomes a
situation of life and death.

Frank Bannister has to stop
the Reaper killing people.

You know, people are dying.

The town is getting panicky.
He gets arrested. Dammers turns up.

And the mood is slowly
becoming one which is...

Which is much less jokey.

But I think that's an honest transition,
because there's nothing

in the movie, at that point,
to laugh at.

That the stakes within the
film itself are actually going up.

He has a great ability to
combine a thriller movie

with comedic action.
And that's what THE FRIGHTENERS was.

That was one of the
reasons that I loved it.

And I didn't understand why people
were confused, looking at it because

that's a real narrow mind,
when you look at a film and you say,

"Oh, well, it wasn't
comedy from start to finish."

Or, "Oh, well, it wasn't
thriller from start to finish.

"It actually, you know,
gave me more of a...

"An experience to watch it.
So, therefore, I don't like it."

That's strange to me.
I don't understand that way of thinking.

I loved THE FRIGHTENERS.

And I loved the fact

that we were able to have fun
and do silly, wacky, funny stuff,

but at the same time, have this
backdrop of complete manic insanity.

I am very proud of this movie.

And I think it's brilliant. And

I just think it was

a pyramid of misfortunes...

and bad timing and...

Which will all be resolved,
I believe, when it comes out on video.

Because, I think people will then
discover this movie for what it is.

This movie is very

wet and atmospheric,
and it has just a, kind of...

Kind of a feel about it that's

autumnal.

One of the really great memories
of THE FRIGHTENERS for me is,

you know, working with Bob
Zemeckis and Steve Starkey,

who were both

incredibly supportive of what Fran
and I were doing. They were very

respectful, I guess you'd say,
of us wanting to make our film.

I guess Bob, being a director
himself, was particularly conscious of

his role in the film,

I guess, as executive producer.
And he was almost painfully,

you know, aware of not wanting
to step on my toes, at times, but

he was also an amazingly
knowledgeable resource

when we were cutting the movie.

And Bob sat in with us to
look at the cut, you know,

and I paused for a moment and I thought,
"Wow, you know, here's Bob Zemeckis

"actually giving me ideas for my movie."
And that was really

that sort of input
was just so helpful.

And those guys, you know, who worked
very, very hard and were very supportive

of us right the way
through to the end.

And, you know, I'll always
be incredibly grateful

and have wonderful
memories of their collaboration.

At the end of the day,

the one critic that I
want to please is myself.

I want to always make a film that
if I was gonna watch it tomorrow

it was somebody else's movie, I was
paying my money, I was gonna sit down

and see this film called
THE FRIGHTENERS,

you know, I know that
I would really enjoy it.

I mean, that's
the film I've made.

Something I would really
enjoy if I went to see it.

With that in mind,
you know, the box office

doesn't really mean
that much to me.

It's lovely to have people
say that they enjoyed it.

But at the end of the day,

the biggest tragedy would be

for me to make a film that I
didn't feel personally proud of.

That would be where,
I think, you know,

I've really gone wrong, and...

And THE FRIGHTENERS, you know,
I'd love THE FRIGHTENERS if I saw it.

I would really, really enjoy it
if it was somebody else's film.

So for me, you know,
it's a film I'm proud of,

and that's the most
important thing.