At the press conference for the horror film 30 Days of Night producer Sam Raimi said that the goal of his Ghost House Pictures production company is to try and find that next great script or great story. Raimi was attracted to Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith’s 30 Days of Night graphic novel because it was gripping and powerful, and because it was something he hadn’t read before. Starring Josh Hartnett, Melissa George and Danny Huston, 30 Days of Night focuses on an Alaskan town under siege by a pack of bloodthirsty vampires.
Sam Raimi Press Conference
What interested you about the 30 Days of Night story?
“It seemed like it should've been thought of before because it's so obviously great, that you go up to a place like Barrow, Alaska, where night falls for 30 days and you've got to survive that time period with vampires at your throat. Nevertheless, I'd never heard of it before. It was original. Maybe that's how great ideas are. They just seem like someone should've thought of them before, but I had never heard anything like it. So I was struck by the originality of it, what a great concept it was, the great visuals, but…the thing that really connected me to it were the two characters at the center – Eben and Stella – and their love story.
At Ghost House, we always want to find something that's new. Recently we've been looking in the Far East and their filmmakers and the newer visions that they can bring to films. This was a homegrown picture though, which was very exciting, a homegrown idea. The thing that connected me to it more than all those concepts and cool ideas were those characters that Steve Niles wrote about. I really liked the fact that they were having problems, that they loved each other, that they were real human beings and that it was a love story at its heart. I loved the bookends of how it began with the sunset and ended with the sunrise with the two of them and the journey that they had taken throughout the course of this one long night. Those were the things that I thought made it really new, the attention to the detail of character.”
Can you talk about hiring David Slade? What were your initial impressions when you first saw Hardy Candy and what did you see in that film that made you think this guy had the chops for something like this?
“Well, I thought the acting was great in Hard Candy. The strength that I wanted to be realized in 30 Days of Night was the characters of Eben and Stella and their love story, that relationship at the center of the piece that Steve Niles had written about. I didn't know if I was in love with David's directing or the young actress in Hard Candy, but something there worked really, really well for the length of the picture. I thought, 'That's what I want to have work in our picture.' The heart of the thing was working in a way it's hard to explain. But I just felt that things had been thought out. It led me from one point to the next to the next in a real exciting way. I thought that would drive this machine, even if he didn't have the experience with production design or FX and it turned out that he did.
When I got to know him a little bit I found out he had this great commercial background and he knew about production design, which was my very next interest. I wanted the look of the graphic novel to be preserved and fortunately that was David's desire, too. I never put that on him. I just hoped the director would have that desire and he did.”
How did you oversee this film? Were you on the set a lot?
“No. All I did was choose the material and beg Sony and Ghost House Pictures to buy it for me and then chose Josh Hartnett, basically, and begged him to meet with David Slade. I chose the director with my partners and the New Zealand location that we had been shooting in before. Then I didn't have anything to do with it except that when the dailies came back from it, I would give notes and editing notes and screen notes and sound design notes. But other than that, nothing.”
What did Stuart Beattie do on the script? Did he just clean it up a bit?
“Stuart did a lot of new character insights. 'What about this character? What about these interactions with these characters? How about following this subplot more?' And all of them were helpful. They just emphasized different aspects of the stories and different focuses. And then when David came aboard, I think that he took some of each of the drafts and worked with his new writer and brought the final script to fruition in pretty much, I think, a combination of all that had gone before.”
How malleable are the conventions of the horror genre? For instance, vampires, do you tinker with the basic vampire formula at your own risk because audiences come with certain expectations? In this case they have to have darkness and so you accept that as the vampire rule. But we've had so many variations now in vampire films that it makes you wonder if anything goes, or is there a rule book to follow to keep fans happy?
“That's a good question and maybe more fitted for the writer than myself. But I think that Steve Niles gave us such a good mythology and so clearly defined his own version of the rules that he liked and the choices that he made, he created a realistic world for these characters to come out of. I think what we tried to do was stick to that. Stick to the fact that they did not survive the sun. I don't think the cross meant anything to these particular vampires. I mean, he chose certain aspects of the lore and I think lived within that.”
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