No matter what Joshua Jackson does in his career, he’ll probably always be known to many fans as Pacey from Dawson’s Creek. But Jackson's character in the horror/thriller Shutter is definitely a world apart from Pacey. Jackson stars as a newly married photographer who packs up his wife (Rachael Taylor) and heads to Japan for a fashion shoot. Once there, strange images start popping up in his photos, images that could quite possibly be of the dead trying to reach out and communicate with the living.
After two decades of films, television, and working around photographers, Jackson said he had no problem playing a professional photographer in the American remake of the Thai film. “The process of developing film I'm pretty comfortable with given that I've worked in film for 20 now. Obviously doing it one frame per second and 24 frames per second is a little bit different, but working in film and light is my job. The particularities of loading film and all of that stuff, all the boring technical stuff, was just a few days work.”
And speaking of photography, Jackson shared his take on spirit photography at the film’s Los Angeles press junket. “I don't really work on absolutes. I think it's impossible to say absolutely yes or no to just about anything. So it's like my take on faith. I'm not a man of faith. I have a real hard time when people of faith tell me that something is absolutely correct, but then it would be hypocritical for me to say that something is absolutely incorrect. I've never had a ghost moment. I've never had a ghost in the machine, but I don't deny that it's possible.”
Jackson was drawn to Shutter because of his character’s arc. “Personally what attracted me to the character was that if you're playing a straight-ahead drama, generally the transition that a character goes through, while it might be internally severe, is from sort of A to hopefully Z, but usually is from A to H or I. When you're doing a horror film, you have the potential of doing something much broader and much more shocking of a shift. So for me to be able to start here and then end up as somebody totally different is fun for me.”
Not only did Jackson have to work in Japan for 3 ½ months, dealing with cultural differences and the language barrier on a daily basis, but the film’s director, Masayuki Ochiai, also didn’t speak English. That added an extra layer of difficulty to working on Shutter. “…When we'd get into the meat of a language-heavy scene, a dialogue-based scene, I'm sure that it was difficult for him to follow along,” said Jackson. “He understands a little bit English, but when it starts going fast, fast, fast, I don't think his English is that strong. But in terms of communicating with the actors or the rest of the Westerners on set, there was a woman who was a phenomenal translator. She was able to translate not only the words, but had lived in the States and could contextualize what it was we were saying. It's like, 'This is not what I'm saying, but it's how I'm saying it that's important.' She was able to do that in the reverse because there are some really strong and fundamental culture differences between the West and Japan and we were trying to find a touchstone, an entry point into a conversation. Often it was really difficult, but once you could find the touchstone, then you could go forward.”
“It was silly little things like taking your shoes off. There's a sequence in the film where my friend is about to commit suicide. We don't know that walking in, but obviously something is not right. We probably talked for two hours about whether or not the characters would take their shoes off, because in Japan everybody does it. It's unconscious and they don't think about it. But for a Westerner, it's an absurd idea. It's like, 'My God, my friend is about to kill himself! Hold on one second, let me get the laces…,’ and then you'd continue in. That's a silly version of it, but things like that. That's where the West versus East miscommunications would come from.”
Jackson summed up his overall experience of being in Japan by saying he’d never been in a culture so foreign from his own. “Even traveling in the Middle East, traveling in Africa – I'm not educated or a smart enough man to know why, but there seems to be a sort of shared cultural background or assumption that even though we might not have a hell of a lot in common, when I'm in Dubai they sort of still understand the way that you interact with people - though they might not agree with it. When I was in Japan, the culture is so fundamentally different, just the basic level of human interaction is based on different ideas and ideals that that was probably the hardest part, learning the, like I said, cultural touchstones.”
Up next for Jackson is a return to series TV. He’ll be starring J.J. Abrams’ new show, Fringe. “It's a sci-fi show that is, say that if Shutter is just on the far side of the paranormal boundary, than this would be just on this side,” explained Jackson. “It's the science part of science fiction. Does that make sense? In The X-Files, the explanation is always that it could be real or it could be some other thing when they're dealing with like the vampire episode or the werewolf episode. It's an X-File and so it might possibly be that they're just werewolves. But ours comes at it from the perspective that there's a scientific explanation, [that] there's so much more happening in our own physical world than what we're seeing.”
Jackson was lured back to TV because of the chance to work with Abrams, although he admits the idea of doing a weekly show again is daunting. “The joys of working in television, when it is joyful, is that you get to tell a story over a long period of time. The joys of working in sci-fi is that you get to tell any story that you can possibly imagine. So you put those two things together and if you get extremely lucky, you end up with something extraordinary like Lost. The difficulties of working on television is that it's 80 hour work weeks for nine and a half months out of every year and that is tough. So knowing what I know now, it had to be something that I really, really wanted to do and this was something that I really, really wanted to do,” explained Jackson.
