The Appeal of Pulse: “I thought it was smarter than a lot of the other [horror scripts] I read. I thought that it was actually using something that is very real and very tangible to all of us, because everyone is always hooked up to their cell phone or always grabbing some sort of PDA or something. As opposed to just dealing with ‘the murderer is out there somewhere’ or ‘the ghost is in the closet’. It was a much different plot line than I was used to hearing, and I liked to do something different.”
Kristen Bell Describes Her Character in Pulse: “Maddie is a college student who is very independent and very driven and also very guarded. I think that she’s tough, but she has a lot of walls put up. The movie starts off with her boyfriend committing suicide and he must have been the only one she was ever vulnerable with, which is why she has to absolutely find out why he did it. And that’s sort of what drives her throughout the whole movie.”
Is Technology Taking Over?: Bell answered, “I think it’s already taken over. I mean, we keep talking about it. It’s certainly not something I think about on a daily basis, but because of all the questions surrounding it today, I think what I’ve come up with is that all these things that are supposed to bring us closer together - like text messaging and E-mails - are actually pulling us further apart. We’re all becoming more reclusive. We end up sitting on the Internet for [hours] and you’re like, ‘Oh, it’s 4am. What have I been doing for the last nine hours?’ The idea of writing a letter has become ancient, and that’s only happened over the last five years. I think we’ve come farther in the last five years than we have in the last 50.”
The American Version vs. the Japanese: “I didn’t see Kairo until I had already booked Pulse. But when I saw it, I loved it. I thought it was really smart and really eerie. I think in Americanizing it they chose to condense a lot of the characters. Americans look at that kind of film and they look at it as more of a series of vignettes, because there are so many more characters, and I think Americans are used to following the story of one person a little easier. So, to just sort of Americanize it, it’s not that they simplified the storyline by any means, they just condensed it.”
The American version is also a bit more explicit than the Japanese film. “Which I also think is the difference between filmmaking in Japan and filmmaking in America,” offered Bell. “I think a lot of the horror movies are so great over there, but also a bit more of what Americans would consider the independent film side because they take a few more risks or they do things differently. I think when going commercial with the movie, obviously, a smart business move for Dimension to do was to say, ‘What are Americans used to seeing? What’s going to not take them out of their comfort zone too much and still make a good film?’”
The Scene with the Hands: Bell’s character’s inundated by hands (see the picture included with this article) and the actress says the scene was an interesting one to film. “It’s against a green screen and all the hands that are touching me are real, which means there is a lot of hand choreography involved. ‘Everybody sanitize!’ They were really respectful about it. I get really claustrophobic in general, so I was a little nervous about doing it. But it was up against a green screen and they slipped holes for everyone’s arms. There were 12 guys back there and they did the choreography of where they would do it, and then everybody sanitized their hands and the camera was dead on. I started to scream and then they grabbed and pulled me back - and I also pulled myself back, too.”
The Success of Veronica Mars: Bell was kept extremely busy during the first season of Veronica Mars but says now it’s gotten slightly less hectic. “It’s gotten a bit better, because they have a lot of new characters and a lot of characters have plotlines that don’t necessarily completely involve Veronica. It’s still really hard. I still don’t know that I’d recommend for anyone to be the main character on a one-hour drama ever unless they are planning on giving up their whole life.”
Bell knows what to expect now and is more prepared than she was the first year. “I wasn’t prepared for this the first year at all so I was just really caught off guard when my life was taken away from me, and all of a sudden I was having to do all these requirements I didn’t know where requirements. It’s gotten a little easier, but it’s still a one-hour drama and it’s a tough ship.”
