This weekend, horror fans and wrestling fans can both rejoice as the two mediums slam together in Lionsgate’s latest horror film, See No Evil. Their first collaboration with the World Wrestling Federation’s new movie department, WWE Films, it stars wrestling superstar Kane as a hulking psychopath living in an abandoned hotel, invaded by a group of teen convicts cleaning the place up for community service.
Helming the slaughter is the diabolical Gregory Dark, whose background includes a thriving career as an adult film director, as well as numerous low-budget direct-to-video horror movies. Even scarier is the fact that Dark directed a number of Britney Spears music videos, and for the most part, the world of music video is where Dark has made his living in recent years. Until now.
ComingSoon.net had a chance to talk with Dark the week before his first high profile big budget horror movie was unleashed on horror fans.
ComingSoon.net: How did you get involved with this movie?
Gregory Dark: I was a director-for-hire, and I came in after the fact ’cause I didn’t develop the screenplay. My agency set me up on a meeting, and I came in and talked about some of the things I would do with it visually… and how violent I would make it.
CS: Was this already a vehicle for Kane when you came on board?
Dark:Yeah, it was a vehicle for Kane that Vince McMahon and the WWE had been designing for quite a while, I think. I had to leave for Australia to work on the movie within a week and a half after they hired me.
CS: So you shot the whole movie in Australia. Was it done on a soundstage or did you find a house?
Dark: The whole thing was a build. They built this relatively large hotel, and it was a very interesting build, which I think came off very well. There were some exterior scenes and what not in the movie. A county jail scene, and a house. There are a few scenes that were outside.
CS: I was pretty impressed when I found out you’ve been making movies for over twenty years and with the number of movies you’ve made in that time.
Dark: Yeah, I’ve been doing all kinds of stuff.
CS: Is this the biggest budget you’ve worked with on a movie before?
Dark: It is, yeah.
CS: Was it easier to make a movie, having a bigger budget?
Dark: Well, it’s funny because the music video budgets I’ve had have been really large, a lot of them, so if you think about a 3 1/2 or 4 minute music video, a lot of times I’ve had budgets that were 2 million dollar. This budget was around 8 million. So was it a big budget compared to what I was used to working with? That’s a good question. If a 4-minute video costs close to $2 million, what would a movie be of that kind? $100 million movie? I would work with huge crews and huge lighting packages. That was larger. As a movie goes, this was the largest movie I’ve made, ’cause I made mostly low budget movies. The biggest movie I’ve made was a million dollar movie.
CS: When I spoke with Kane, he said that you wanted to make the movie seem like it was real. Could you talk about what you did to achieve that?
Dark: I like the ’70s horror movies like the original “Friday the 13th” and “Halloween,” and I wanted to make it feel like these were county jail inmates and they were trapped in this place, and how were they going to get out? I wanted Kane to be completely filthy, as he would be. His backstory was such that his mother put him in a cage. That’s how he grew up, and he never bathed. He was socialized into psychosis, as it were, so we take the story from this point in time and we see flashbacks of that.
CS: Obviously, the WWE was involved before you came on board, but how involved were they in the other stages of making the movie either on set or in editing?
Dark: They left me pretty much alone in editing. Inherently, you react to comments that the studio wants to change this or that.
CS: And how was Kane as a first-time actor?
Dark: Kane was great. There was so much truth in the character for him, that he literally became the character when the cameras came on. Once in a while, he would have trouble removing himself from being that character.
CS: Is his WWE persona taken into account when making a movie like this?
Dark: I’ve seen wrestling, but I don’t watch it a lot. I knew who Kane was, of course, and I’m a big fan of the wrestlers that are evil people or villains, as it were. That’s what interested me about this, and I loved Kane. He’s like a 7-foot tall brutal man, who is completely into the character, does all of his own stunts and everything else. He was kind of amazing.
CS: Does he have a lot of lines in the movie?
Dark: No, he had a couple of lines, but he so acts the part. It’s almost like, if you think of silent movies, you would know his emotions, everything he’s doing, he’s great! Kane was phenomenal. It’s very difficult acting without being able to speak.
CS: Did you end up putting a lot of make-up on him to make him look even scarier than he normally is?
Dark: Yeah, he was completely filthy in the whole movie, but we kind of left his face the way it was. I added a few bits and pieces, and changed his brow a little bit and the back of his head, shaved the hair. And obviously, made him completely filthy.
CS: Were there any stunts that he wasn’t able to do or you didn’t want him doing?
Dark: He can handle anything we had him doing, and also, what kind of stunt double would you find for Kane? There’s not so many people that can be a good stunt double for him. I had him do everything, and he was able to do everything. He’s a very coordinated, skilled person that way, not unlike a stunt man, if you think about it. He understands all kinds of rigging really well. We were so lucky to have him, because he was able to do it all.
CS: He mentioned that being on live television every week makes it important to get things on the first take. Did you end up doing multiple takes anyway?
Dark: Yeah, we did a few takes, but he could hit it in one or two takes, that’s the point. I mean, he’d rehearse it, rehearse it, and then he’d hit it. It was very rare that he couldn’t hit it. Kane didn’t mess up much.
CS: As far as the tone of the movie, is there any of the humor we see in movies like “Nightmare on Elm Street”?
Dark: There’s a little bit of that to offset the violence, but it’s really a rollercoaster ride of violence and raising the ante and bar on that kind of violence. There is humor to offset it in moments and some of the characters are kind of funny or quirky, but I didn’t want to make it a humorous movie like “Slither,” for example. I was very aware of not wanting to make a movie of that kind.
CS: What are your thoughts about doing practically on set or doing it CG? Did you mix it together?
Dark: I mix everything, so I’ve done as much stuff practically, and there’s a lot of CG enhancement, and there’s a lot of CG, too. It has all of the above.
CS: Do you decide that beforehand or do you do stuff on the set and then add in post-production?
Dark: Sometimes, you decide that beforehand, sometimes it’s all practical, and sometimes you have to add to that. Inherently, there’s a lot of wire removal and 2-D matte painting no matter what you do, because there’s a lot of effects in this movie. A great deal of [green screen], and then how to make that as real as you can make it, that’s the real trick.
CS: When did you finish shooting in Australian and start working on the post-production stuff?
Dark: I started working on post-production, gee, a year ago. Some of the shots took 40 and 50 times to redo. There was so much green screen in this movie and so much visual effects work, and doing music videos, I’ve done a great many visual effects videos, so I’m like the visual effects house’s worst nightmare, because I really understand how to get it right. They work with a lot of directors that haven’t had that kind of experience before. I’ve just done so many visual effects projects.
CS: I was going to ask you what you were able to bring to this from the music video world and that of low budget horror.
Dark: I have so much visual effects and stylistic experience and odd camera work experiences. I’ve done over 200 music videos, so I’ve done every camera trick in the book and every kind of rig that’s existed and rigs that people haven’t even seen. In places like Australia, they never saw some of the stuff I did. They’d never seen such a thing, so I’d show them examples of it.
CS: As far as upping the gore in this, is there anything you’re particular proud of that no one has seen before?
Dark: I think the end scene, nobody has ever seen anything like that before. The very end scene is just f**king out there, and there are some scenes that are pretty far gone, but I don’t think there’s a better end scene in any horror movie in history.
CS: That’s quite a bold statement! Have you had any problems with the MPAA in that regard?
Dark: No, it went back a lot of times. It went back about 7 or 8 times maybe. I convinced them to give it an R-rating, which they finally did. They didn’t want to give it an R-rating by any standards… they didn’t even know where to start! Because the tone of the movie and the religious aspects of evil and this and that. I finally talked them into an R-rating. I think I cut like 15 frames out of the movie.
CS: Did you try to take them into account while you were filming the movie by shooting different versions with more or less gore and blood?
Dark: No, I knew where I could cut around, given the coverage that I was doing, if I needed to. Obviously, the idea is to push the envelope as much as you can, so that the fans get to see things they haven’t seen before.
CS: Did anyone on the set get grossed out or freaked out by anything?
Dark: Yeah, they were kind of disgusted, because some of the rooms in the hotel were disgusting, like Jacob’s lair in the movie was dirty with blood everywhere, rats running around…
CS: You mentioned the religious aspects of the movie. Are you worried about it going up against “The Da Vinci Code”?
Dark: Extremely different audience! This is extreme right wing religion pushing somebody into a psychopathology, which is very different than “The Da Vinci Code” being about the Knights Templar and what not. This has nothing to do with “The Da Vinci Code.” I don’t think anybody who is going to want to see Tom Hanks would want to see this movie, necessarily, and vice versa. It’s such a different audience.
CS: Will your movie anger Christians, too?
Dark: I’m not sure. It’s a different kind of movie, but it’s a really grotesque horror movie. Look, it’s for the people that like to play the video game “Vice City,” it’s that audience. It’s just a f**king insane ride.
CS: How do you feel about the decision by movie studios not to screen movies like this for critics?
Dark: Inherently, and this is all supposition because I’m not involved in any of this, but if my market is I suppose people who watch M2 and play games like “Vice City,” “San Andreas,” things like that. Do you think Roger Ebert plays those games? If he liked a movie, I probably wouldn’t want to go see it, if that’s the kind of movie I want. If it got a good review from a critic like that, and taking nothing away from [Ebert] ’cause I think he’s a great critic, but I think that in certain types of genres, I don’t know if it matters. I don’t know if that audience reads those reviews. Again, I have nothing to do with any of this. It’s just my conjecture.