The Ring Movie Preview

If you want a scare ignore Gore Verbinski's Pirates of the Caribbean and take a look at another of his movies that made two of our fully-grown adult staff members feel like terrified little kids. The Ring is out on DVD from September and Future Movies awards The Ring the scariest movie this year, proving yet again that a BBCF classification of 18 and lots of blood and guts is not needed to make a very scary movie.

Gore Verbinski Interview

Q: What was the biggest challenge directing a thriller?
A: To make it scary, definitely. Today's audience is very jaded – they walk into the theatre saying, “Scare me”. It puts up a wall and you have to try to penetrate through it.

Q: How much struggle was there with the visual elements, to keep the suspense escalating
A: There are two choices; you can play to the genre, which you have to do a little bit and if you do it completely, those are the movies where you are able to dismiss them and you can try to get under their skin. The way to do that, because there are so many horror movies that have been made and re-made, is to access some contemporary issues and try to keep it real, as real as you can.

Q: What made you think of Naomi Watts for the lead
A: I saw Mulholland Drive, she was fantastic in it and the turns she makes in that movie. It's a very difficult part in this movie. We introduce a single parent who's not a good mum. She’s not a likeable character. That's what we wanted from this character; you don't immediately latch on to her. I think in all of her movies, in Mulholland Drive especially she has guts. She earns it as the movie goes on. She doesn't come on the screen for you see that she is scared, she gets to you. There's something about that process of, earning it within an audience, that takes the audience into the screen a little more. You get this uncomfortable proximity.

Q: What about Martin, he's from New Zealand. Was that just a coincidence?
A: They're both good. Martin was a dark horse. We were scouting in Seattle and I got sent a tape at the last minute from the casting director. He came in ready and he was very calm and a really wonderful anchor in this film, in terms of simplicity of his character; being sceptical and playing against the more honest aspects of Naomi's character.

Q: Did you have any nightmares making this, because it was very scary to watch
A: No, it becomes very mechanical from early on, like watching the original movie and deciding which are the really great parts, and you don't want to mess up. Then it's figuring out what's disturbing to me, and how do I find those images and put them on to the tape that has to serve multiple functions.

Q: How much did you change the original
A: I think we changed up to 50% of it. The basic premise is intact, the story is intact, the ghost story, the story of Samara, the child. There was a decision to get rid of certain aspect of the story, the volcano, and wonderfully elusive dream logic that I think for the American audience has a requirement for venerierity. Somehow because death is the only resolution in life, we seem to put it as the resolution in all our movies. And I think that the Japanese film had a much more liberating approach to the story. But then the problems we had when we watched it was the fact that it seemed convenient that the characters had ESP and you were bumping into somebody and you were able to get information randomly. So one of the choices was to earn it through the tape itself, by investigating it and then to use that as a viral aspect that somehow at day three it's different than day four. As you progress it affects the performance.

Q: What about remaking the sequels, like in Japan
A: I have to knock on wood. But the studio owns the rights. I don't think they're going to make another movie if it's not successful.

Q: Are we supposed to find out the origin of the tape, does it come clear inthe movie
A: It's very similar to the original movie and it took me three times to figure it out. When we had finished laying in the images of the chair and the TV, the idea that television, the interviews and the things have done a lot more, to feel like the video was behind and involved in her life when she was alive. The basic origins of the tapes are; she's in the well and those kids are recording a tape right above the well in that room and that day with that VCR. That's what the kids are talking about in the beginning of the movie, so it's there.

Q: Do you like to watch horror movies
A: I'm a fan of the genre, but I think it is a tricky genre because it's always an Indian burial ground, or my child is the devil, or you die if you watch the videotape. The premise is always very silly. The only execution is that you take the audience to a place. The innocence of The Shining, Rosemary's
Baby, Roman Polanski's movies and The Exorcist are the ones that haunt me.
The riveting classics put it in the place where it textualizes the horror and you watch it, eat your popcorn and get scared and go have your dinner afterwards and try not to think about the movie. If we've achieved anything, I hope that it's that you don't want to have dinner. The movies that scare me are the ones where you are still thinking about a particular aspect of it three days later.

Q: Will there be more clues to the mystery on the DVD, i.e. in the form of extra scenes
A: It's a very fine line, and I think we're going to get trashed from people who want more information, and trashed from people who say we put too much in. Because in the Japanese original, there are logic problems. There is wonderful prequel and sequel stuff and you can't deal with all the aspects of this thing. There's a Grimm's fairy tale; they wanted a child more than anything, she tried and tried two dozen times, they ran away, they adopted a child but they shouldn't have. That sort of iconic language for horror is there, but we didn't go and explain that. It's like; they wanted a child, they got one, so be careful what you wish for.
There's a whole prequel story and a sequel story, what is she going to do now to save her own child…

Q: Are there any deleted scenes?
A: There were some things that the movie just couldn't hold, with Martin Henderson's character going back to the cabin and finding the inn keeper dead and things like that. There is also another ending that we shot. There was a moral ambiguity issue that was discussed early on, and a scene was written to address that and we shot it but we never cut it in the movie. Because as soon as we put the film together, we were happy to feel that the strongest thing about it was leaving that question unanswered.

Q: What was the idea behind the fly
A: What I tried to do with things like the fly, is the inside-outside aspect of 'when does that world enter this world'. I tried to do that in a very subtle way. I think that to make something scary we have to feel like it could happen in real life. There is a sort of theatricality to a lot of horror that keeps you on the side of the screen. You watch it, it was manufactured, it doesn't feel like it could happen to you. I think today with 9/11 there's a real fear, our most contemporary fear, that we don't articulate very much – it’s the transferable nature of fear. You do something to me, I somehow justify the ability to take it out on you and vice versa. There's a feeling like that watching this tape; I didn't do anything to this kid, why am I going to die? And in order to save my child, who are we going to show that tape to next? There's a chain letter aspect to that. It's quite terrifying because even if the fear is not articulated, you get to sense that aspect of it, as opposed to bumps in the night, creaky beds or ghosts moving in the hallway. There's a very contemporary fear that we all have right now.

Q: So the idea is that if you don't show someone the tape you will be killed
A: Yes, she basically wants to spread it. She's always intended for it to go on and she is praying upon them. We are drawn to taboos; parental advisory stickers on CD’s sell more records. You're going to die if you watch the tape, well, what are you going to do? You are going to watch the tape.

Q: Were there horses in the Japanese movie?
A: The horses are new. In the Japanese film, there was a whole back story about the mother having ESP. The reporter is interviewing her, there is a killer lurking in the volcano, and in one of the meetings we talked about what if Anna and Richard Morgan were horse ranchers. Then one of the images I was working on at the same time as the tape was the dead horse washed up on the beach. There is just something about the suicidal aspect of horses. Then I had to work it with the writer, Ehren Kruger, how to put this image in the movie and how to use it. There was the idea that whatever the mother was sensing, the horses were sensing as well. There's a frequency to her transmission that was driving them crazy. And that lead to the fact that we had to have a sequence where the horse knows that Rachel has watched the tape.

Q Did you choose Hans Zimmer or does he come with every DreamWorks movie
A: No, no. We chose him and we're lucky to have him. Hans is head of the film music department at DreamWorks. Usually I talk to Hans about composers I want to use, like in this case I showed Hans the movie, and he paused and said, "What about me?" He's never done that for any of my other movies, he had just had twins and he was supposed to be off for 6 months. But he really responded to it and wanted to do it.

Q: Are there purposely some references to other horror movies in this one or did it just look like that?
A: There aren't any direct references, there's a little bit of Rear Window when she is watching it, and other people are watching TV, and there's the guy in a wheelchair. That isn't really a reference, but it's hard to direct the genre without feeling like it's so steeped in the language of all those other movies that inevitably you catch yourself lensing up the door knob shot. It's unavoidable. There is a feeling that you have to celebrate the genre, yet you look into the opportunities where you can deconstruct it or pervert the audience's expectations. It's really hard to do something new with it. The biggest thing I tried to do was to keep it minimal, to stay back and not try to over-stylise it.

Q: What do you think makes Naomi such an unusual actress
A: We worked her 18 hours a day and she is such a hard worker. When we work 18 hours a day, she works 20 because of the hair and make-up. They started to tell her that she couldn't have that little turnaround time and they actually complained about it, but she never did. What makes her special is that she's got guts; she's not afraid. The scene where she's choking in the string was something I had always hoped to shoot, but it was never in the script. Two weeks before we shot it I pitched it to her, and most actors would say 'it sounds great' and then you'd get a phone call from the agent saying that "no way in hell they are doing that sequence, she'd look ugly" and so on. But not with Naomi. She was not worried about her image. Only the performance matters, she's great.

Q: Do you think that she lacks vanity because at this point she's not that famous yet
A: I constantly talked to her about it, and I’m hoping that she doesn't change.

Q: What was the most challenging scene to shoot
A: The horse on the ferry and on the water. It took a while. The horse is fine, it was scared to jump, so we had a computer generated horse in the water. You can't do what Sam Peckinpah did anymore.

Q: What goodies are going to be on the DVD
A: There will be some deleted scenes, there will be some easter eggs, some hidden things. There was quite a bit of internet work because it is a difficult story to tell, there's so much. We used a lot of newspaper articles and props to create depth to the story that you really don't see in the movie and you'll catch those things on the DVD. So the menu section will be quite elaborate.

Q: Will there be more clues to help the audience figure the story out
A: There's much more depth. If you are interested there's a lot more in there.

Reviewer Score: 8/10