That investment in the characters you mention, part of that comes from the patience of the movie, the way it’s gradually paced. It’s quite a while into the film before we see the first actual death, because you spend a lot of time grounding the relationships and developing the eerie atmosphere of this ghost town.
JCS: I think that credit goes to the Hayes brothers, who wrote the script. That was already in there. Joel and Susan, they do these huge, massive movies with great success. So they know very well how to tell a story, and they guided me into that long setup to make sure that we knew everybody. That’s the only opportunity we have to create the mood, to set the rules and understand the motivations of the bad guys and all of that stuff. We also had the luxury of being in a real town. If this had been a visual-effects world, then you’re trying to not spend money on visual effects, and you have to pull back on all of that. But because we built the entire town, the street, the church, the House of Wax, all of that, then let’s use it! So, we could see them wandering over here and there, and it wasn’t expensive. Once it’s all built, then you can follow these characters and have all these long walk-and-talks.
That set is one of the best I’ve ever seen in a film, and you of course had the extremely unfortunate moment with it burning down during shooting. Stephen, what was going through your head as that was happening?
SFW: It all happened so quickly, and it was genuinely such a scary moment. It was the end of a week, so everybody was ready to have the weekend off and come back on Monday. I remember that we all left the stage, and by that time the ceiling was on fire, and all sorts of craziness was happening. There were gas cylinders inside the stage that were the propane fuel for the set. I remember that all the heads of departments had to do a head count, so you’ve got your iPhone 3 out and you’re ringing everyone in your crew who left for the day, but of course no one’s answering because they’ve gone off for the weekend.
So, there was that initial scary first few hours until everybody was accounted for. Thankfully, no one was hurt. Of course, that’s the most important thing. But the film shifted. We had to shut down for a few weeks. I remember we had a second unit who had to stop filming for a while because they had nothing they could do. Jaume and all our crew from the first unit had to become a reduced unit until things were figured out and sets were rebuilt.
JCS: Stephen was operating the camera, so he was holding the camera when it all happened.
SFW: We all left the stage with everything on fire. There was all the camera equipment, camera cranes, video and sound equipment. There were millions and millions of dollars damaged, let alone the building itself which was completely destroyed. It was the largest soundstage in the Southern Hemisphere at the time. It was relatively new as well.
Jaume, especially with this being your first feature, what was going through your head in the days following that?
JCS: In the moment, obviously the same as Stephen’s saying, you really want to make sure that everybody’s safe. I remember getting incredible support from Joel and Herb immediately. In that moment, you learn the value of a good leader, and it teaches you a valuable lesson because they basically said, “Everybody’s safe. Don’t worry, we will rebuild, we will continue shooting. We will obviously make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
