Question: Other than the obvious reference to the Raimi original, I’m wondering what else you drew from in order to bring your vision to the screen. And you talked a little bit about it, but I’m wondering if you could draw again on what you did—how conscious were you of making this your own work rather than something that’s simply derivative of the original?
Fede Alvarez: Well, Sam was really pushy with the fact that he wanted me to make my own film. Even when I was trying to bring more elements from the original film, he was very insistent with that idea. He was like, “Fede, I want you to make your film. This has to be your film. You don’t need us. You don’t want to depend on us and all that.”
He was really, really pushy, which was awesome. He really wanted me to have my own film, so he really gave us all the freedom to do it, he never forced me to do something that I didn’t want.
He never really forced me to put something in that I didn’t want to. They never made me shoot something I didn’t believe in, so they were the best producers you could ask for because they gave me all that freedom.
But back to your question, we took a lot from The Exorcist. I think it’s just a quintessential possession movie and it has the best ideas. It’s kind of the Bible of the possession movie, right, so there’s a mythology from that movie that’s in every possession movie, so we took a lot from there.
I think The Omen was also a good reference for me when it came to how you make the audience believe in the supernatural. You know, you have a character, Mr. Thorn, that doesn’t believe in anything, that is a politician, that would never believe in the occult; and at the end you have a guy ready to kill his son, so that was a great example of storytelling and how do you make somebody believe in the supernatural when they don’t believe in anything.
Question: How much did Diablo Cody contribute to the screenplay? Because I noticed at the end of the film, there wasn’t a screen credit for her.
Fede Alvarez: When I finished my last draft, I asked for an American writer to come in just to pass some dialog, because we thought there was no way we were ever going to create realistic American dialog just because it’s not our first language. So she was a big help at that time and she came on board to do that. And she did polish some dialog a little bit, but without changing the scenes, without really changing any of the characters or the plot. And just naturally I think at the end we ended up using very little of it, so the WGA, you know, they have a jury and they kind of decided on that and she didn’t get a credit. We just didn’t use enough of her work.
Question: Early reviews have praised this as being one of the goriest films in a long time and maybe even of all time. Can you talk a little bit about if your troubles with the MPAA?
Fede Alvarez: Yes, it was hard and sometimes they can drive you crazy by not telling you why the movie is getting a bad rating or the rating you don’t want. With us though they were very precise. They gave us like five notes on the first cut, and thank God we didn’t have to get rid of those. We just had to get rid of five frames, ten frames in some moments.
And honestly, I think they helped us to make a better movie too because when they tell you, “okay, you can show this for 25 frames,” you as a director want to make sure that those 25 frames you see are the best ones you have. So they end up wanting us to have a sharper cut in a way, right, so I don’t think the movie bleeds at all for the cut-down. It’s still the same movie that we had before.
Question: When you first took the job, who were you more scared of impressing, Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell or the horror community as a whole?
Fede Alvarez: I would say neither, I would say myself. I’m pretty demanding with myself and my work and I always put a lot of pressure on myself. I try to do the best job I can every time. I’m quite obsessive with my work as a director, as a writer and everything, so during the whole process I was the toughest one to please on many levels. Even when I had the first draft done, they loved it. And Sam was in love with the first draft too, but I still didn’t think it wasn’t 100% ready and it wasn’t good enough.
When I finished my first cut, I hated it and I showed it to Sam and he loved it. I think the hardest person to please was myself and it’s just the way I work, I guess.
So at the end of the day I knew that if I was pleasing myself, if I was making a movie that I would love, I knew people out there were going to love it. That was something that was one of the best pieces of advice that Sam gave me in the beginning. He said “Fede, you have to make the movie you want to see in the theatres. Don’t try to make the movie you think I want to see. Don’t try to make the movie that you think the audience wants to see. You have to make the movie you want to go and see in a theatre.”
That’s the only way, because your instinct is the only thing you’ll always have, and I know it’s so right and it’s so true. You have to do it kind of for yourself. You cannot do something to please somebody. That just sounds like failure.
Question: I know you guys shot on a ridiculously like grueling schedule and you did practical effects, so I’m just curious what was the most difficult scene you had to shoot and why, if you could explain without any spoilers.
Fede Alvarez: There were lot of things that were so tough in this movie. I would say everything in the cellar with Natalie and Mia on top of her, the kind of the tongue, the blocked kiss, all the things, they were so tough for the actors and also you know as the director, you try to convince everybody that the way you want to do this is the right way, right?
And that was one of those days where my idea of going 100% tactical was kind of falling apart a little bit because what we were shooting was looking so bad. I remember that the first time we did a the first shot with the tongue coming out, we were puppeteering the fake tongue and everything, it looked embarrassing on the set.
And then you have to be courageous and keep going because everybody is complaining, saying “I told you, we should have gone with the CG tongue,” but you have to believe in your vision. Thank God we managed to pull it off though.
That concludes our interview with Mr. Alvarez but we’d like to thank him for taking the time to talk with us. Be sure to check out Evil Dead when it hits theatres on April 5th.
