Fourth in the series of interviews we were able to take part in during The Hills Have Eyes press day was with none other than the film’s director and co-writer Alexandre Aja.
Q: First question is, you co-wrote the script?
Alexandre: Yes.
Q: Were you a big fan of the original?
Alexandre: I’m a huge fan of the original. I grew up watching Wes Craven’s films. I grew up watching Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes of course, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, all those films of the 70’s were movies that influenced me. I grew up in the 90’s, and I was really kind of frustrated with the movies that you could find at the time in theaters. They were really not scary, and all my cinematic pleasure came from all the movies I could find in video clubs, and all the movies from the 70’s and early 80’s. That was really good.
Q: From what I’ve seen of your movies, you have a very beautiful visual style, more like Dario Argento I would say, yet your influences seem to have a more spare, gritty, not so beautiful style.
Alexandre: I think The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was just amazingly beautiful. It had great shots, and the filming is just, I mean right now with DVD we have the chance to rediscover movies that were made back in the time, and, I don’t know, my style, of course Dario Argento was also a big influence for me, but not for the style, more for the way of noting the sexual element and love.
Q: I was kind of surprised to see that you had a rape scene in this movie, I mean most people would have probably cut that out these days. Was it difficult to get that past the censors?
Alexandre: For me the attack on the trailer was perhaps the best scene in the original film, and I really wanted to be strong with that, even try to go further with the breastfeeding scene. That was the challenge, and I had a chance to have Wes Craven backing me up and protecting me from everyone, and letting us write the script that we wanted to write and most of us making what we really wanted to see.
Q: There are so many horror remakes going on right now, could you have remade this movie without Wes’ blessing? Could you personally have done that?
Alexandre: That wasn’t possible to do it without his blessing. I think if someone came, and even Wes came to me about making Last House on the Left, I would not accept. The same for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, many movies, you know like the last two years they have proposed all the remakes possible. I mean you can name me a title and I’m sure they’re making it. The Hills Have Eyes was different, because we are all fans of the original film I think for different reasons than we are fans of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or some other film. It’s not because it’s the most scary film ever made, it’s more because of Michael Berryman or the look of the villain and the acting and the 70’s feeling. It’s kind of all that kitsch that makes the film cult and why I love the movie. So it was even more possible with the blessing of Wes to redo that movie, to reinvent that movie in a more scary, brutal, violent way, to bring that movie more in the direction of Deliverance or Straw Dogs than doing just the same film.
Q: It was ripped off by Wrong Turn which stole the mutants and the premise. Did the failure of Wrong Turn or the overall quality of it scare you even temporarily?
Alexandre: I read a lot of people talking about Wrong Turn, and I mean it is true Wrong Turn is a rip off of Just Before Dawn, but I think our movie was like standing alone, not like a reference to Wrong Turn. I think the worst wasn’t that, but The Texas Chainsaw Massacre ripped off the idea of the baby. There is no baby in the original film, they really took that from The Hills Have Eyes. We were thinking at one point, since they didn’t have it in the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a scene around the table eating dinner, we were thinking about maybe ripping that off. (laughs)
Q: Your passion for the genre has been questioned, are you committed to being a horror director? Would you branch out and try other things?
Alexandre: You know, I’m 27, I have a chance to make exactly what I’ve dreamed since I was ten, so right now I think there is many subject and many story I would like to tell and you know I think there is many way to express fear and to search how to make that the most scary, but I don’t want to find myself 25 years from now finding that I did ten times the same film. I want to find some others. You know, when you repeat yourself you just lose the excitement, the challenge of doing something new.
Q: The ending of High Tension was really controversial with the way you turned everything around, do you find a lot of people are happy about it or mad about it?
Alexandre: It’s very shared. I would say maybe a little more mad. (laughs) Maybe I’m also a little mad because the real story behind this is that was just a final twist ending. The movie was told from the video, like she was telling her story and at the end the killer was the killer, and you came back in the hospital room and she was finishing up her story and the doctor came in with a VCR and the tape and showed her the video tape of the gas station where she killed the attendant, so she realizes everything was a vision and that the truth was another story. Our producer asked us to develop that final scene into the final 25 minutes, that brought all the logical problems and issues. It’s funny because after that I met people who were really mad and understand when I explain how it was supposed to be and people that really like the fact that she is (the killer), they like the fact that there is some logical problems.
Q: So you shot that other footage?
Alexandre: No, I rewrote that. I regret that I did not have the opportunity to put two endings in.
Q: Wes (Craven) was telling us that often when you go to the MPAA they tell you to make this scene less intense and that’s all they tell you. Obviously you got that kind of note , how do you make things less intense?
Alexandre: I think we submitted the movie like four or five times before we got it out, and you try. First you try to cut like five frames here, six frames there, two frames there, and of course it’s not enough, but you have to be more passionate than they are and at one point they give up. At the end we cut like two minutes. I think they’re naïve to think that by cutting two minutes we change the intensity of the movie.
Q: On the same subject I was saying this to Wes when I saw the NC-17 cut of this, and compared to Hostel, I thought Hostel was far worse and it got an R, did you find yourself scratching your head?
Alexandre: Yeah, I really felt that was unfair compared to ours. But, the same time I find out something which is funny, when your acting is bad, really bad, you can really go as far as you want because they’re feeling that it’s like a joke. If you’re a very realistic approach to acting, and I think it’s as good as you can with The Hills Have Eyes, it’s much more tricky to have them like, with you.
Q: So the realer it gets, the less they let slide?
Alexandre: Yeah, because according to them it’s getting more violent. You know, I tried to explain to them that there’s two kinds of violence: the one that’s very attractive and the one that’s repulsive. In The Hills Have Eyes you’re always on the side of the Carter’s, you’re always on the side of the victim, so you have a pretty good idea what their violence is, they’re trying to protect, they’re not trying to sing about it.
Q: There’s a scene in the movie I thought was kind of controversial when the dog jumps in to save the hero and the hero doesn’t back the dog up, he just barricades himself in the bathroom. Where’d that come from?
Alexandre: That’s real. I mean, who is going to come back and help the dog to survive? You are just here to save the baby. You are here to bring back the baby, so you don’t have time to go and save the dog. We had this conversation with people, the producers, where they wanted to save the dog and I said that it’s not real. So we tried to keep that realistic approach, even if we are doing a radioactive mutant cannibal movie.
Q: The Bomb House is great, it’s not in the original, where’d you come up with that?
Alexandre: Wes asked us to find an idea and an approach for the material. We came back a few days after with my writing partner Greg Levasseur and we came back with this idea of the nuclear testing background, and the idea if a village refused to evacuate and hide in the mines for years and get the radioactive fallout for the next generation. So after that everything came easy, the look of the people from the hills, the test village, the mannequins, everything was real. All the houses, all the mannequins, all the furniture inside, all the people in the hills are based on real events. The children born after Chernobyl, Hiroshima, the effects of Agent Orange during Vietnam on babies. Everything is based on real. In the opening titles you can see the real mannequins, the real houses, the real babies born by nuclear fallout, that was just to say OK, we’re doing a radioactive mutant fallout movie, but we’re trying to do it in the realistic approach.
Q: I was surprised also, that you killed the most sympathetic mutant in the movie, Ruby, was that a decision early on?
Alexandre: First of all, I’m not killing her, she’s killing herself. (laughs) In a way she’s a redemption of all the others. I really fought to have that scene because I think it’s strong for one of them sacrificing herself for the others.
Q: A question on Michael Berryman, I talked to him a couple weeks ago and he was disappointed he didn’t get to cameo, was that a conscious decision to not self-referential to the original?
Alexandre: So, one of the character’s, Cyst, was written for Michael Berryman, but it was a production decision not to use him.
Q: So the amazing shots of the explosions, was that in the original script or was that during the production?
Alexandre: You know, in the original film they’re driving through what’s a military base, but it’s not, like, it’s said on the map that they’re in a nuclear testing zone, but it’s not explained at all. Even the look of the people, Michael Berryman it’s more like cross-family, how do you say that?
Q: Inbreeding.
Alexandre: And so we bring that whole new layer of nuclear testing into the movie, and, you know the criteria is valid, because after atmospheric testing they started underground testing which provoked mutation.
Q: In the ending of the movie now, was that how it was originally written? Is that how they liked it, like there’s a sequel down the road?
Alexandre: It’s been there since the first draft, and it’s not, for me that’s not a shot that says we’re doing a sequel, that shot is there to say they are not going to escape. I mean, OK they survive, but they are still in the desert, there is no water, no food, no car, how are they going to manage to get out if there are some other people in the hills? So it’s more that we have a triumphal ending and I wanted to get that by so it’s not so happy.
Q: So if this film opens to $30 million and that inevitable moment comes when FOX comes to you and says, “Let’s make a sequel!”, what do you do?
Alexandre: They’re already playing that if the film is a success. I mean, for myself, to do a good sequel you don’t need to have a good film, I mean in the commercial point of view unfortunately. Myself, I won’t be involved in the sequel, you know I’d have to find a real good approach, a good concept, and not like a butchered sequel. Just talking as myself, I think if the movie is a success and they want to do like a sequel, with like the army coming and stuff like that, we can do it.
Q: Wes Craven already made a sequel, would it go off of that or come off of this?
Alexandre: I think Wes is not very happy with the sequel. (laughs)
Q: What about the shot of the mutant eating the mother? Because instead of using her as bait it’s such an unnerving scene of the movie, and cutting off the hero’s fingers, with all these unnerving images when most movies forget about that. What brought all that up?
Alexandre: I mean it’s like, we wanted Jupiter, who is less exploited than in the original film, we have one scene that we kept because we realized that the more they (the hill people) were talking together the less they were scary. We wanted him to be like, the real obvious cannibal, and we wanted a scene of him being a cannibal, so that scene was really played like that. I’m really glad we got to keep that until the end, like the flag, because I was sure they were going to cut the finger, they were going to cut the flag, and we managed to keep it all.
Q: How do you like people to interpret the flag? Outside of you being a European director of course.
Alexandre: (laughs) I have a lot of love for the imagery of the Carter family world, and I don’t have a specific image, it’s not like I’m saying something with the flag, it’s more about like I said facing your own monsters. The people living in the hills are not the villains, they are also victims, they are trying their way to survive. So the Carter family they are also not victims, they are directly guilty for what’s happened to these people, so, we put a lot of things being used both ways, like the Magnum that Big Bob is using at the beginning being used to kills his wife and daughter. The shotgun that the gas attendant is using is going to be the one to kill one of his family at the end. The same for the American flag, it’s something Big Bob was very proud of. And then it was in his forehead. (laughs) But then that flag became the way to save Doug when he fights, so there is like a lot of stuff like that. I was really interested in how Doug Bukowski was going to become the lead protagonist, from the wimpy democrat guy in the beginning to becoming the beast, like them.
Checkout our reviews (Review #1, Review #2) of new The Hills Have Eyes
Checkout our exclusive interview with Alexandre Aja
Checkout The Rev's interviews with Wes Craven, Vinessa Shaw and Dan Byrd
Checkout our exclusive interview with Ezra Buzzington (Goggles)
