DreamWorks Pictures revisits the world of the 1985 horror comedy Fright Night with a 2011 version that's completely different in tone. The 2011 remake of Fright Night finds Colin Farrell playing the vampire named Jerry as a detached, bored with humanity creature, totally different from Chris Sarandon's Jerry in the original film. This Jerry's not a romantic figure by any stretch of the imagination. Instead, he's a ruthless creature who kills whoever, wherever, and and whenever he wants.
In our interview in support of the film's August 19th release in theaters, director Craig Gillespie and Colin Farrell talk about what sets this film apart from the original, finding Jerry's voice, and developing a backstory for the 400 year old vampire.
Colin Farrell and Craig Gillespie Fright Night Interview
Colin, you've said before that you were a fan of the first movie, and fans of the first movie have said they really hoped this remake wouldn't ruin it.
Colin Farrell: "I said the same thing. That was my initial reaction to it was, 'Oh no, Hollywood unoriginality strikes again.'"
Craig Gillespie: "I said the same thing as well, but to Colin, that he's going to ruin it." [laughing]
Colin Farrell: "He said, 'I'm going to end my career. Why don't you join me and end yours?' And I said, 'But I've tried to end mine so many times and it's just...'"
"I was really worried...well not really worried, that's an exaggeration...but I was kind of nonplussed about the notion of being involved, number one, in a remake because guess what? The ego doesn't want to be involved in remakes. The people go, 'Remake - that's unoriginal and that's uncool,' and I don't want to make myself as easy a target, make myself as un-obvious a target as possible. And then a remake of something that I knew was as loved and held in such nostalgic esteem as Fright Night. When I saw it for the first time when I was 10, 11, or 12, I loved it. I've seen it anywhere between 10 and 20 times. I read the script and you know what? From page one it was a really fun read, a really fun read. And I was looking to do something that was a little bit lighter than the dramatic films that I done, whether it was Triage or Ondine or In Bruges or Pride and Glory. They were so much fun but I wanted...there were a couple of them in there, like Ondine was a very important film in there for me personally, but I just wanted to go and have a bit of crack and not be constrained by the emotional or psychological background or any of those things, you know? Anton? Sure, in this film, but I knew I was being thought of for Jerry so I was like when I read it, it was like, 'God, it's so much fun.' I knew he was doing it [pointing at Craig] and I'd seen Lars and the Real Girl, and he was a really cool choice for this film. So it all fell on who's the director. It's like, 'Okay, this is dangerous to visit this material.'"
Craig Gillespie: "It's an odd choice."
Colin Farrell: [Laughing] "Did I say that?"
Craig Gillespie: "No, no, I said, 'Yeah, it is.'"
Colin Farrell: "I thought it. I gave it to you; telepathically you took that. I loved the original and hopefully the fans... I mean, whatever it is it's not a $30 or $40 million exercise in nostalgia. I do hope that those who like the original like this film. I really do."
How important was it to change the tone and separate the two films?
Craig Gillespie: "The tone was in Marti's script. There were a couple of traces there, with this great mix of horror and the thriller and the action set pieces, but there's humor tucked in there. But from the beginning I always said to the studio, 'You know, I want this to be scary first, and then we'll have humor secondary.'"
Colin Farrell: "This is a studio picture?"
Craig Gillespie: Y"ou didn't know that? So it was always that that was the dominant thing, and then from there we would use humor just to give it a break, to defuse the situation and then take you right back into it. Just having that opportunity to mix that tone was what was fun for me."
Christopher Mintz-Plasse told me earlier that after you were done with your takes, in between takes you would do the voice a little differently - almost a Dracula thing.
Colin Farrell: "Right."
Craig Gillespie: "When I let him run with it."
Colin Farrell: "Heir Dictator over here, Tyrant Gillespie as the crew called him."
Craig Gillespie: "'Do the Dracula thing. Do that Transylvanian sh-t you did.'"
Colin Farrell: [Laughing] "Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whether it was the Count in Sesame Street or Gary Oldman in Coppola's Dracula, or whatever it was - Bela Lugosi - I had this idea of a sound hard-wired into my head and I would bring it in to the takes, and it was wrong. So I kind of had to get it out of my system. Before or after a take I'd just riff a couple of lines in kind of a mock Transylvanian, 'Aww, aww, aww,' very much to kind of get it out. I was kind of like a four year old doing it, like, 'No, do it this way!' Like, 'No, you can't do that little guy.' So before or after the take I would do that a bit."
So are those going to be put together as an extra on the DVD?
Colin Farrell: "I hope not. There were a few."
Craig Gillespie: "Honestly, you were really generous as an actor that he, Colin's creating a character and you're trying to figure out where the tone of that character is and so he would give a range of performances that we would explore. We just kept narrowing it down as we went through the first couple of weeks until where we ended up, which was that balance of that truly terrifying but charismatic predator."
What did you come up with as Jerry's backstory?
Colin Farrell: "When you're human, you get in a fight at night, or even in the workplace it might seem that passive competition is everywhere and people are one-upping each other, and there's a whole load of human emotions. But as this guy's a vampire, he seems to kind of have this disdainful opinion of human beings and their gross kind of passivity and how they move through life, and the way they fall into these very obvious structures. And Jerry was just kind of bored, I think, just bored with being 400 years old."
"But it kind of got funky because you try and write a backstory for a character like Jerry and it's like 400 years. Okay, so he was born in the Mediterranean in 1643 and then he went to France when? When did he go up to the north to Romania? Maybe he met with some bards there and he was drinking in the taverns with goblets. Which boat did he take to America? When did he go to America first and how many languages does he speak? And yada, yada, yada. His accent, even, what was his accent? He's 400 years old, what kind of accent does this guy have? He's from f--king Macedonia, do you know what I mean? You can really do a number on yourself. So there was one take where I got all of that in there. It was too much!"
Craig Gillespie: [Laughing] "I just felt like I put him through so much to get that."
Colin Farrell: "So we messed around with the backstory and it just kind of took us to a place where he probably was, at this stage, a little bit bored and so he was pushing the envelope, which explains certain behaviors that I found it hard to rationalize - the motorbike, the blowing up of the house, the drawing of attention. But then his preternatural skill would allow him to get out of any jam, even if the f--king National Guard descends. He could be up in the air and you know sitting in a cave in Venezuela in the space of a couple of hours. It's really unbound; you're really unbound by this modern, cotillion logic that we all live in. But it did allow us to go, 'This guy is pretty bored with the tedium of life.' He really sees Charlie as a challenge. He's enjoying the game. He's like a cat with a ball of wool, more so than the initial character."
Craig Gillespie: "Because even some of the set pieces in the movie would inform his motivation, his backstory. Why would he blow up the house? Why would he take that chance?"
Colin Farrell: "Absolutely."
Craig Gillespie: "And that gives you all that backstory. All the other stuff too that we were working on early on with the whole seduction of a woman, which we see upstairs in his house. And some of that primal stuff that happens, like you need to trigger your primal need."
Colin Farrell: "Absolutely. The adrenaline junkie, the scent of somebody else's fear that Jerry needed to literally physically work himself up. It wasn't just a matter of biting. For the fangs to even appear, there had to be some kind of rage - not in human form, but in vampire form - some kind of sense of arousal."
"It was fun. You try and respect the conventions that are in place as much as possible, and then write your own conventions around it."
How much fun was it to do the scene with Chris Sarandon?
Colin Farrell: "Loads of fun. I mean it was just a cool benediction, at least that's the way I took it - his appearance on the set. It was really nice that he had read the script and he liked the script. He thought that Marti [Noxon] did a really good job of taking it a new direction because his experience, Chris, I know from talking to him on the original Fright Night, was something that he still holds very dear to himself. He's still in touch with the original actors from it. He still goes to Fright Night festivals. It's played a very big part in his life, so he had a vested interest in what we were going to do. So having him there and playing that scene, I wish I had the guts to do more with him...but, anyway."
With the comedy in Horrible Bosses, being menacing in this, and doing the action thing in Total Recall, what is it that interests you now? Your career is so eclectic.
Colin Farrell: "I was going to say that: eclecticism. Like, genuinely it's really fun to experience, even in an imaginary way or a pseudo structure, other people's lives. Whether it's historical figures or everyday folks that we know and encounter in our workplaces, or whether it's somebody like a vampire or someone like a Doug Quaid character [in Total Recall], it's just a lot of fun to mix it up. I really don't want to repeat myself, not so much because I want to keep people guessing and sh-t, but because I want to keep myself guessing. It offers up, this job that I do, offers up such an opportunity to experience through the imagination and the physical body as an instrument, different realities a little bit. At the end of the day I get to go home to a hotel room, don't get me wrong, I'm not going and experiencing the realities of hardship that sometimes my characters are living in - I'm not saying that; I'm very cautious about that. But you do get to ask questions and you do get to put yourself in certain situations that even mentally that you wouldn't usually, and that's loads of fun."
Why go from vampires to zombies for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies?
Craig Gillespie: "It was just the script. I always just respond to the script, personally. I wasn't looking to do that. It got sent to me and I kind of reluctantly picked it up. I just like mixing tones. It's got humor and sort of horror, but it's a completely different style of humor than this in Pride and Prejudice."
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Fright Night opens in theaters on August 19, 2011.
More Fright Night Interviews:
Exclusive Christopher Mintz-Plasse interview / Anton Yelchin and Imogen Poots interview
