Director Wainwright promises his version will be scarier and have a higher body count than the 1980 Carpenter film. Featuring Maggie Grace, Tom Welling ("Smallville") and Selma Blair ("Hellboy"), this 2005 version of "The Fog" follows the same basic premise as the original horror hit, but kicked up a notch or two. Once again the inhabitants of the small town of Antonio Bay are terrorized by a malevolent force cloaked in a thick, eerie fog.
Rupert Wainwright on How Closely He Worked With John Carpenter: “John feels he made a version of ‘The Fog.’ And he’s a director - I mean I didn’t even interview with him to get the job because he didn’t want to be in the position of interviewing directors, as a director himself. So, you know, not that closely, to be honest. I mean, he was supervising the script. He came out to the set, but he really wanted to let us to do our version of the movie and not sort of come out [with his] stamp all over it.”
Rupert Wainwright Explains His Version of “The Fog:” “Well, a friend of mine said something that I thought was quite clever about ‘The Fog.’ He said, ‘The original one, it’s half a brilliant movie,’ and it’s not really supposed to be an insult. I think that one of the things about it is that you finished watching ‘The Fog’ and you’re left with all these questions. And you know there’s the whole ending where Adrienne Barbeau is talking about whatever it was, it came, it went, it disappeared. We have no idea what happened.
In this movie we try and answer some of those questions. So we try, as it were, to get behind the reason why these strange things happened and what was going on. And there’s a whole other story line that is to do with one of the characters [pointing at Maggie Grace] and sort of a strange connection with the past than you wouldn’t expect. So it’s kind of like the development of the original in a way.”
Rupert Wainwright on Creating the Fog in “The Fog:” “I talked to John about that and he was like, ‘I’m sure you’ll do it differently,’ and I’m like, ‘I guess we will.’ We’re still in the middle of doing it and I’ll be totally honest with you – we’ve got a whole bunch of CG just churning through.
…We might be going back. Fog is a very odd thing. It has, like you see a fog bank miles away and it seems kind of solid. Then you get like a cloud and then suddenly you’re going closer and it’s difficult to tell where the edge is. And that’s very difficult for computers to pull off. Computers are very good at doing like, you know, robots and cars and trucks and planets but when they have to create lots and lots of different layers of things, they kind of get bogged down. So it’s quite tricky, fog. I don’t recommend it to any of you in case you’re thinking of starting it.”
Will the Fog Be Mostly CG?: Wainwright said, “Some of it’s CG, a lot of it was practical on the set. Whenever we could, we did that. But, obviously, fog moves whenever it feels like it. We’d get these strange calls from the studio. They’d go, ‘Well we like Take One and we like Take Three, but Take Two – there’s no fog in it.’ I’m like, ‘Mmm-hmm. We just decided to turn off the fog machine. No, actually, we tried to put fog in it – the wind was blowing one way to start off with and then it changed directions.’ So you get a bit bound by natural things.”
Fog Doesn’t Take Direction Well…: Wainwright agreed. “It doesn’t, unlike her [pointing to Maggie Grace]. She takes direction fabulously. She barely even needs direction.”
Smiling at the compliment, Grace said, “I think we all felt that there was a really beautiful ambiance, just with Mr. Carpenter’s involvement. He was very much a presence on the set, especially in the beginning, which was really lovely and to have his support. He gave us, obviously, a wonderful template that’s been kind of an indie film / horror filmmakers ideal forever. And he did the original with like two fog machines and a million dollars. He was very present… I mean he’s an icon. It was lovely to meet him and talk with him about everything surrounding the first one. But I think he was extremely gracious as far as allowing Mr. Wainwright to do it.”
PAGE 2: Casting Maggie Grace and Tom Welling and Creating the Fog in "The Fog"
