Writer/director/editor Mark Young’s horror film Tooth and Nail is one of After Dark Horrorfest’s 8 Films to Die For. Horrorfest runs from November 9 – 18, 2007 on screens in over 350 theaters across the United States, reaching horror fans in cities including Fairbanks, Alaska, Jackson, Florida, San Diego, California, and Albany, New York. Young’s Tooth and Nail stars Rider Strong, Vinnie Jones, Michael Madsen, and Robert Carradine and is set in post-apocalyptic Philadelphia. A band of misfits have taken refugee in a hospital where they’re trying to rebuild society while fighting off marauding cannibals.
Interview with Mark Young
The premise sounds interesting. How did you come up with the idea for the film?
“This was one of those situations where a lot of the parameters were kind of set. I had done a movie with my producers previously. They had a project slated to go in the fall and there were some legal issues and that dropped out. One of the producers called me and said, ‘Listen, if you can come up with a good story that fits these parameters, we’d like to consider doing it.’ The parameters were that it had to be shot in this hospital, it had to utilize some of the actors from the previous film, and they would like it to sort of fall squarely in the horror genre. So that kind of dictated a lot of the story line.”
When you’re presented with that sort of opportunity, is easier for you as a writer to come up with a story or would it have been less difficult if you’d gone in with a blank slate?
“It’s backwards for me. I typically land on a theme or a topical issue that interests me, and then it kind of grows organically out of that. This kind of worked backwards because all these things, when you threw them into the pot and simmered, kind of suggested a storyline. Then after the fact I kind of became interested in some thematic issues that kind of played out. In the end, it worked out really well. But, yeah, it’s not normally the way I generate a storyline.”
So this wasn’t a storyline brewing in our head that all of a sudden you were able to just plop into a hospital setting? You had to come up with something new to fit the parameters?
“Yeah, and like I said, it was kind of fun. Obviously a large driving force was the physical location. The hospital itself is this really outdated, incredibly - I guess beautiful depending on your sense of esthetics - hospital that sits on a hill in Philadelphia. It’s in a deteriorated state so to me that kind of suggested the whole post-apocalyptic theme. And once I started down that path, and started visualizing what was happening, it kind of dovetailed into my interest in what’s going on in world events right now with the war, with the high price of gasoline, and just where things potentially could go. And at that point everything clicked and it just made sense.”
How close was your original vision and your original draft of the script to what you ended up shooting?
“It was unbelievably close. Well, there was another driving force – this was a great opportunity for me, however one of the other caveats was that we only had a couple weeks to write the script and pre-produce the movie. I wrote the first draft in two weeks and then we immediately went into pre-production for a couple of weeks, and then we were shooting. So there wasn’t a whole lot of time to write drafts. And I’m terrible. I will re-draft even through shooting. That’s just the way I operate. That was not an option on this project.”
Do you think the particular project benefited from that in that you were forced to go with your first instincts about the story?
“You know, it doesn’t drill down as deep as I typically do. I love for films to operate on multiple levels. On one level, it’s just purely entertaining. On another level, I’m dealing with some sort of issue or topic that I think is important to speak about. Then on a third level, just on a sub-textual level, there’s things as an artist that you are trying to accomplish. This film, just by nature of the timeline, couldn’t be overly complex so it’s a relatively simple plot line. What was fun though was we had really, really good actors and so I got to really, really drill down on characterization. That was really the best part of the whole project. So yeah, in the end, I think it was good that it sort of went the way that it went.”
You knew who your actors were going to be, so was that something where you could tailor each role to a specific actor?
“Normally I like to meet with actors and talk with them, get their feedback, see what they think and then do rewrites so that their voices, the actors’ voices, match the voices of the characters. In this, it was a situation where we needed the cast close to what I felt the each character was, or my perception of what I thought the actor would bring to the table. In some cases I was right, and in some cases I was wrong. But what’s neat in the end is we ended up with this great, very eclectic cast and every actor kind of approximated the character and it was wonderful. It was a lot of fun.”
