Elisha, were you a fan of horror films coming into this project?
ELISHA CUTHBERT: Yeah, I was. I mean, there [are] people that are really experts on the genre and they get it. I have just seen a few and like the idea of going into a movie theater and feeling like it’s going to take you somewhere and make you feel really scared. I liked the idea of it, but I had no idea how intense it was going to be to actually film it. I was going into it going, “Ahh, it will be another movie. It’ll be great.” Jaume was like, “Get ready for all these sequences.” I was like, “It’ll be fine. I can do this. I’ve dealt with ’24.’ I know how to do this stuff.” But I got there and had no idea it was so physically challenging and demanding. But it was great. It was really cool.
Are the scares taken out of it while you’re actually working?
ELISHA CUTHBERT: You think they’re going to [be]. You think it’s going to diminish the scare for you because you’re there and you’re partaking in everything. You read the script and you know what’s happening. But then the cast got to see some of the stuff at the studio, and for it to be put together in a way that Jaume has created this sort of film, is not what I remember on the page. It’s so frightening. A lot of the kids in the movie are kind of separated. We do our own thing so I wasn’t there for shooting a lot of the stuff, and you jump. We all jumped. I remember thinking there was no way. I was like, “I’m going to go in there and I’m going to be so cool and prepared.” No, it was like hit the roof! All of us completely jumped. I had no idea. So yeah, you get just as frightened as everyone else.
What were the high and low points of filming “House of Wax?”
ELISHA CUTHBERT: It was always high energy because the movie, once it hits a certain point in the first act, you’re gone. You’re totally into the film and there’s so many things boom, boom, boom, happening one after the other. So to kind of get in there and do some of my sequence stuff was really high energy. We had a lot of stunt stuff going on. We had a lot of things happening and fire and wax. Lots of crazy prosthetics and things, so that was the exciting part.
The low part was we had a little bit of a fire mishap on the set, which kind of was a high point because it was kind of cool, actually (laughing). I was like, “Wow, I get to witness this studio up in flames.” But it was a low point because we had to stop for about four or five days. It kind of put a little dent in it, but then we kept going, which was good.
Joel, how did you keep everybody calm after the fire incident?
JOEL SILVER: Nobody got hurt so that’s the most important thing. We didn’t plan on the place burning down, but we took precautions in case something did happen. We had built two sets of the House of Wax set. We built one on one stage that was kind of a non-effects stage, where it was the full-on set. And then one was designed as the effects stage. It was elevated so that they could get underneath it. It was all designed and rigged for the fire gags. But you know, it just got out of hand. There was too much stuff.
Again, it’s the thing I always said on “The Matrix.” When Larry was saying to me, “I want the actors to come in for four months and train to be able to fight.” I said, “When you paint your house, you don’t hire an actor to be a painter. You hire a painter. Let’s hire stuntmen.” And Larry would say, “No. I want the actors to look like they can do what they’re doing.” It’s the same thing in this. You know what I mean? You don’t really want to use real fire. You are telling a story. You are making a movie about it. But fire is fire and it just got away from us.
ELISHA CUTHBERT: Once you put aside that no one got hurt, you got to realize that we were shooting this MTV series in conjunction with the actual shooting of the film and how brilliant it was for this episode (laughing). Because it was like all of a sudden people are going to be watching the show and go, “Oh my God!” They’re witnessing this huge stage get completely demolished. It’s like great television, too. So it was like perfect.
