Robert Englund Interview pt.1 (continued)
ARROW: Wow, I'm now officially anxious to see this.
ROBERT: It's great. This is not anything new, the critics are saying this is another way to exploit the franchise and all, but it really goes back to "Batman Vs Superman", "Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein" or the "Wolfman meets Dracula" and all that. This is like an old tried and true, wonderful, fun Hollywood popcorn concept and it isn't anything new. Because of Ronnie Yu, the director who did "Bride of Chucky", and more recently Samuel Jackson's film "Formula 51", I look at this film as a great, state of the art-- almost like a coffee table comic book, just by the way it looks.
Fred Murphy who was the DP on "The Mothman Prophecies" and "October Sky" was the DP on the film and between he and Ronnie, they sort of came up with this beautiful, and yet twisted, look to the film. It's like some gorgeous, twisted, violent Dutch comic book you know-- Asian, Cyber Japanese Cyber Punk, illustrated comic book with Scorsese camera angles, Orson Wells camera angles and film noir style...it's REALLY interesting! There's also lots of different colors plays, kind of like Paul Schrader's style. It's just really a great classy, violent popcorn movie. I've been calling it a gourmet popcorn that's spelled...G-O-R-E (in a scary ass Freddy voice that made me jump).
ARROW: (laughs) It sounds like a freakin' visual treat!
ROBERT: It is, and I think that the audience just has to surrender itself to the comic book mentality of it. I don't mean like comic "funny", I mean like the graphic style. Once the movie starts, there's just a great rhythm to it...it's just cool sequence after cool sequence.
ROBERT: My favorite scene in the movie is a sequence I'm not even in. It's a sequence of Jason at a rave in a cornfield in middle America.
ARROW: OH YEAH! (I got excited there...big time!)
ROBERT: The scene is just phenomenal! When you read it, it has these great rhythms to it and when you see it visually: little rave nerd boys with day glow clothes being piped and speared by Jason and flung across rows and rows of corn glowing like meteors or comets through the night.
ARROW: Wow!
ROBERT: It's cool stuff...really cool stuff.
ARROW: That's like a crowd pleasing Jason scene for the fans.
ROBERT: It's a great Jason scene with Freddy getting in at the end of it. It's just structurally such a wonderful relentless, Jason the mindless shark feeding at a rave scene. It's just the perfect thing. The rhythms, the geometry of the corn field. It's really going to be a famous sequence, I think.
ARROW: Does Freddy get his own famous, crowd-pleasing sequence?
ROBERT: Freddy has a couple of great sequences in the film, but he's kind of like the puppet master in this for a while. What's great about Freddy in this is when he gets to comment and manipulate the back stories and the fears of the characters-- especially with Jason. I'll just give you a hint: Freddy meets baby Jason. Ok...it's great, it's just really sick stuff.
ARROW: I wanted to address this. Being on the Net a lot and hearing all the feedback about "Freddy Vs Jason", I picked up that the younger teens, the newer audience are really, really looking forward to the film...while some of the long time, more hardcore fans are a little afraid that maybe Freddy and Jason are being watered down or "mainstreamed" for today's target audience.
ROBERT: All I can tell you is this: Remember what I told ya before? Gourmet popcorn?
ARROW: Yeah.
ROBERT: There's more violence, Freddy is less funny and more violent...
ARROW: Nice! (fanboy body rush happened here)
ROBERT: Freddy is a little older here, Freddy is not uber-Freddy like he was in "Wes Craven's New Nightmare", he's not a jokester either. He's a little slower, he gets yanked in reality, gets an ass kicking. Freddy is also a little more afraid and his powers are a little diminished. But he has an agenda and there's more violence and more twisted shit in this film than in the last 4 Freddy movies.
ARROW: Well, that's very good news! Would you say that the film is more axed towards the fantastic, the gore or a little bit of both?
ROBERT: I think it's a meld of both. The film is really stylish but it's also really violent. It's got lots of effects and lots and lots of good gore. Sometimes it gets a little "Monty Python" gore, but that's intentional because it's dream world shit. So you get both values out of it.
ARROW: Now I want to address this. Lots of fans, me included, are pissed that Kane Hodder is not Jason and...
ROBERT: Let me tell you what I know about this.
ARROW: Shoot.
ROBERT: It was never meant as an insult to Kane except for the reality that Kane is not in it, which you can perceive, as an insult because Kane was certainly responsible for the popularity of Jason in the last 10 years. Director Ronny Yu, who has lots of strong stuff out there, I mean we loved "Bride of Chucky"...well, Ronny had this image of Jason. Now I'm not sure if it derived from a Friday the 13th movie as much as from an illustration, a comic book what-not, but he always presumed that Jason was gigantically big and because it's "Freddy Vs Jason", he always thought that in this comic book style that he was going to exploit, Jason would be larger than life, almost basketball player-like. He's just absolutely huge in this movie!
(Arrow Note: Ken Kirzinger, who plays Jason in FVJ, is 6"5 and Kane Hodder is 6"3...
they should've given Kane elevator shoes for those 2 inches. COME ON!)
I always serve the writer first because I'm English trained, even though I'm American. I don't protect my own ass, I protect the writer's ass first. That's where it all starts: writer knows best and the writer is my first god, then I serve the director, then I serve myself. Actually Jason's mother has this piece of dialogue I've been using as an image. I always get inspiration from whatever characters say about my character. So I use this piece of Jason's mother's dialogue where she calls him a "big stupid dog". I've been thinking of Jason as a huge stupid dog and Freddy as just like a little yap-yap junkyard dog.
ARROW: (laughs) That's hilarious.
ROBERT: That's the imagery I used for the whole movie. And there's a little bit of sympathy for Jason in the movie even though he's a relentless killer, because his back-story is more sympathetic. So I played into that, I made Freddy a real asshole in this movie, even more so than usual. He's that little yappy dog that you want to see get his and Jason is like the big stupid dog with a little bit of sympathy in him. Now you can quote me on that, but that might be a trap, don't print this as the result of the battle necessarily, as I like to say Freddy takes a licking...but he keeps on ticking.
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