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From HouseofHorrors.com Interviews Second in the series of interviews we were able to take part in on The Hills Have Eyes press day was one with two of the film’s stars: the lovely Vinessa Shaw (Lynne Bukowski) and Dan Byrd (Bobby Carter.)
Q: Vinessa, working with Stanley Kubrick, tell us about that.
Vinessa: Well, it kind of changed my life in terms of my work as an actor. I’d been doing kind of younger movies at that point, you know, Disney movies and the like, so that was my first adult role really, and he was very much a mentor to me. He kind of pulled me aside one day and said, “You know you’re very good.” I said, “No Stanley, but-” and he said, “Quiet! No, you’re very good and I hope you continue.” Because at that point I wasn’t sure I wanted to continue acting, I thought I’ll just go to school and find something else because I’d just started as a kid and thought it was a hobby, but this time around with him became a real passion for me and so he’s very influential.
Q: You always hear that on films like this, when there’s so much intense stuff going on in front of the camera the atmosphere around the set has to be a lot more loose and humor based. Was that the case on this, or were you guys just freaked out the entire time?
(laughs)
Vinessa: We were definitely humor based.
(laughs)
Vinessa: We had too many songs in our head, too many dance parties on the side.
Dan: Yeah, yeah, I think you have to be humor based, especially in this kind of movie, just because everything is just so monumentally heavy, that you know every moment, that if you’re not dead, you have to be pretending you could die at any moment. So, you know you gotta bring some lightness to all that.
Vinessa: And plus when you’re really hot you kind of become delirious, you start talking nonsense, you know, it’s very silly. It was fun that way.
Q: You were sort of lucky since it’s, what, 120 degrees, you’re in a bathing suit and shorts half the time, were you wondering why all the guys had to be in pants in the desert?
(Vinessa laughs loudly, Dan grumbles and laughs)
Dan: Yeah, that, I’m trying to think, that’s something that we thought about in the beginning, I don’t know why they decided to put us- yeah, yeah, there’s no way I could (wear shorts), my legs are about this thick. This Red Bull can, that’s about the size of my calves. (laughs) There’s no way I could have pulled off wearing shorts, it just would have been a huge distraction throughout the entire movie. But yeah, it did get… it was also good because it protected us from the sun, which was just really intense out there, and it was probably an average of about 120 degrees a day, or sandstorms and lots of debris, so it was good to have that sort of protection.
Q: What kind of preparation do you do for a role like this? Did either of you see the first one before this, and did that help?
Vinessa: I saw the first one, and I saw Alex and Greg’s first movie High Tension, because I’d seen both of them back to back just to make sure where I was coming from and where I was going. The first one is a cult classic, it’s hard to know what to do to do it differently, and I hoped that it was going to be a distinction. So when I saw High Tension, I was like, OK, now I know where the directors are going to go with this, it’s going to be very beautiful shots of gore, it’s so weird. They really have this amazing ability to combine the both of them together in this artful way, so that kind of pushed me into looking into it further, because it was just going to be the same movie all over with people running around in the hills, you know you just want to make sure, ‘Are the hill people going to be the same’ or ‘What’s the Carter family going to be like?’, mainly how are they going to modernize it? So that was what my question was.
Dan: I didn’t see the movie. I would love to see the movie. That’s another thing we did, and Wes Craven sort of called me out on it, said it was bullshit, and it is kind of bullshit. (laughs) But I said that I didn’t want to go in with any kind of preconceived notions of what it was, or characters or anything. And it’s half true, I don’t think it would have thrown me off too much, and now that I’ve seen what we’ve done, I would love to see the original to compare it to. Actually I’ve tried to rent it, but it’s not very easy to rent.
Q: Vinessa, directed against your character, you breastfeed the monster, get shot in the head, how hard was all that stuff for you?
Vinessa: Oh my gosh, I have had blood in other movies, I’ve died before, but this was just tantamount to all of that. It was horrific with the breastfeeding, and you know there was so much blood that I was sticking to the floor, and my arm got stuck on the floor and I actually pulled away some skin because I had to lie there for a long time during the scene where Aaron finds me. So finally when I got up, my hair was matted to the ground and my arm, so there was a lot going on in that scene just makeup-wise. Then, you know, you feel exhausted after a while, I mean, they don’t show it, but I fell down from like this, right when he shoots me in the head I fell, and I’m falling and falling and they don’t show this for fear of the NC-17. So, that was hard on my body as well, and screaming and crying, everyone’s screaming and crying including the baby is screaming and crying, and you know, Robert Joy’s breath (laughs) and everything, like breathing was tense. It was a day and a half of that, it was chaos most of the time.
Q: What was the effect of being in Morocco towards this shoot; how strange and other-worldly was that?
Dan: I think it was good for a couple different reasons. One, because I think anytime you’re shooting on a remote location, throw a group of people into those circumstances where they’re forced upon each other and I think we all did that and we all became much closer than we would have if it were shot on a soundstage in Los Angeles. Two, you’re dealing with the elements your characters are supposed to be dealing. It is 120 degrees outside there, there’s stuff blowing in your face, you can barely breath half the time, there’s a lot of factors you just don’t have to play because that’s the reality of the situation, so it definitely made it harder at times, but I think in the long run the overall look of the film was elevated because of it.
Q: How hard was it Dan playing a character who has a gun and would run in the wrong direction every time your sister or father or anyone was in trouble?
Dan: (laughs) Yeah, not all the time. I don’t really have much of a choice obviously, it’s sort of the script. I just run where they tell me to run and do what they tell me to do and try to make it as hopefully believable as possible. You know, there were things like that that came up, but you know Alex, he just definitely had a gameplan, he had pretty much everything he wanted to see in his mind far before we became involved in this, so I think for the most part we just tried to trust him and let him guide us. I believe it worked out well.
Q: Vinessa, are you going to let your parents see this movie?
Vinessa: My dad saw a screening of it. I swear, I thought I was afraid of horror movies, but every five seconds he was like AAAH, EEEH, UUUH!!! He was like, “Can you please tell me when the next thing is going to come up?” My dad, it’s so funny, he’s a therapist that deals with trauma, and so he just, after the movie he was dazed, he was like, “OK, I just somehow gotta get this off, out of my system.” So, yes, my dad has seen it, my mother will see it, my grandmother’s coming, my aunt is coming, and they’re all frightened of horror movies. I was saying, “Guys, you don’t know what you’re getting into!” I mean, my dad could barely sit through it!
Q: Did your father know your character’s fate in the movie beforehand? Did it come as a surprise to him?
Vinessa: No, it came as a surprise to him, yeah.
Q: What was his reaction to that?
Vinessa: He held my hand and went, “Awww.” (laughs) It was very sad. He’s a great moviegoer, he’s like the common audience, like, he’s very much involved in the movie, so, he’s affected.
Q: So what scares you guys in real life? What freaks you guys out?
Dan: Ummm… Vinessa?
Vinessa: I scare you? (laughs)
Dan: No no no, there’s lots of things, I’m just trying to think of ones worth mentioning, ummm, E. Coli? I don’t know. (laughs) I don’t know, I’m not one of those people, like, I’m not afraid of the dark, I live by myself, that doesn’t bother me. You know little things here and there, none off the top of my head though.
Vinessa: I know it’s going to sound really cheesy, but it’s horror movies. I really am afraid of horror movies, I cannot watch them, I avoid them.
Q: So this is your first one then, right?
Vinessa: In a while. When I was a kid I just, including Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, I just could not watch those movies. The Exorcist, no way. I’d just run out of the room, it’s too real for me. I get just, frightened.
Q: But now that you’ve made one, you know how they’re done so you probably won’t be as scared of them in the future, right?
Vinessa: I probably won’t. I still know what’s coming when I’m doing the movie, so if someone could tell me what’s happening in a horror movie maybe I’d feel better.
Dan: Bungee jumping. I could never do that.
Q: Any thoughts on Salem’s Lot Dan?
Dan: Yeah, I thought it turned out pretty solid. I thought they did a good job, Mikael (Salomon, director) did a really good job of putting all that together, it was like four hours total, it was a tight package with a really tight pace to it, it moved well, again I thought they picked all the right people to play those parts, yeah, so I was glad to be a part of that.
Q: Well Vinessa, for you specifically, if you dislike horror movies, I could imagine many of the scripts coming your way these days are horror movies, if given what the industry is making money off of these days. So, why was this the one out of all the horror scripts in the last five years that you said, “I want to do this.”?
Vinessa: I think it’s really because of Alex and Greg. I have never seen a horror movie like High Tension before, it has that… I was surprised, because I saw it in the middle of the day with the lights on. I was, “Here I am, I’m going to watch it, I’m not going to be scared, I’m just going to watch it for it’s work.” I was really drawn in, I wasn’t that… it wasn’t to the point where I couldn’t watch it anymore because of the characters and because of how their relationships were pretty established and they were able to, by the end, really feel sad. It’s heartbreaking, and that’s what I feel they bring to this movie too. It’s not just setup, setup, KILL! It’s real people that you connect to, feeling like you’re part of this family by the time they start getting killed, I could see that quality when I saw High Tension and so, yeah, when I read the script I said that this is exact beat-for-beat of The Hills Have Eyes, so I was wondering, what are they going to do different? It’s hard to do anything, to do a remake of a cult classic. You have to make it different, you have to modernize it, I think it was because of the characters, the family, and especially mine, I really liked her, I really thought she was very sweet, what happens to her in a matter of moments she has to be very heroic and like ten million things go on in that one scene before she dies, and I just liked that. It’s very tragic that she dies, you think she’s the hero, you think she may live in that moment, so I was moved by that, and it was more than just like, eye candy or a popcorn movie, there’s something going on there by the time my character dies.
Q: Have you gotten used to seeing your face on gigantic billboards all over the place?
Vinessa: (laughs) No, I have not gotten used to it. It’s really cool. My dad wanted to take a photo of me in front of the one at FOX Studios.
Q: Did you hear about the controversy about that one?
Vinessa: No.
Q: People in the neighborhood are asking for that one to be taken down because it’s too scary. (Note from The Rev: The poster in question is massive, taking up a good portion of the wall of a soundstage at FOX Studios. Having driven by it I can attest that it is large, it can be seen from quite a distance, and is still creepy as hell.)
Vinessa: Oh my gosh! Well, it is a really beautiful, sweet neighborhood. © Copyright by HouseofHorrors.com |
