One Tree Hill star Sophia Bush spent her hiatus from the show working on The Hitcher, a remake of the 1986 horror film which starred Rutger Hauer. In this new version, Bush is terrorized by a killer played by Sean Bean.
Tackling Her Second Horror Movie: Bush wasn’t hesitant about doing another horror film. “No, because Stay Alive is a horror movie and was very much based in that sort of license of movie magic realm. A horror film with, I don’t want to say sci-fi, but definitely an out of reality context to it. This movie, granted it is a remake of a horror, but we’re really approaching it from the angle of a thriller. Horror fans are going to be happy. The scares are big and the blood they’re going to get is great. But this movie is very psychological and at the same time, in addition to being a thriller, it’s very much a character story. Most of these movies aren’t.
When you go and see a scary movie, you don’t generally get to know your characters. We’ve taken a lot of painstaking steps to make sure that we’ve developed Jim and Grace, developed their relationship, their chemistry, the sort of quirks about their relationship that come with having been with someone for eight months to a year, sort of in that time period. I think there’s a lot more elements than fit into just a genre film. We’ve taken things from all aspects of filmmaking and really tried to put them into this movie to ground it in reality and make it feel more believable, and make it something that an audience can get much more invested in than simply going to see it just for the gore.”
Sophia Bush on the Physical Demands of The Hitcher: “It’s great for me. It’s my dream to sit and get to blow up cars and shoot people and make an action movie. Being on set with helicopters and car chases and stunts every day is amazing. That’s the tomboy side of me, the action junkie, the adrenaline junkie that wants to do all of those things. It’s been great because our stunt team is so great, so amazing. They’ve given me the opportunity to do everything that liability-wise I can’t. They didn’t let me jump through the 10 foot wall of fire. I asked to. I was like, ‘Put the burn cream on.’ And they’re all kind of like, ‘No, no, no. You don’t get it.’ But they did allow me to be in the car when it was on fire and kick the doors off and flames were coming in. That’s a pretty big rush, and it’s a lot of license that you’re not normally given on a set. It’s been really great for me to get to do all those things. It’s what I like to do.”
Loading Up on Dirt and Blood: Bush said it took a while to get all the dirt and blood and other assorted grime in place every day. “Our makeup time has doubled since the beginning of the movie because they’ve got to get us all ready and then they’ve sort of got to trash us. It’s just a lot of matching, a lot of continuity. They photograph everything, every bruise, every day. And we’ve had to obviously, with us being out in the desert, we are exposed to sun. I am an incredibly pale person so I’ve had to be coated in tanner and then coated in an illustrator blood and alcohol mix that sort of creates a sunburn and that goes on heavier and heavier every day to copy the elements, bruise from handcuffs and car crashes - all sorts of exciting things. It’s quite a bit.”
Bush even played a joke on the producers while covered in her fake bruises and blood. “I lifted my shirt and showed them my stomach and everyone ran. But some of my bruises are real. I got a pretty good burn on the back of my leg from shooting some fire stuff. A lot of cuts and bumps and bruises, but it’s exciting. I’m just happy because they’re letting me do a lot of my own stunt stuff, so I take the bruises and burns with open arms.”
Stunts are Great But Bugs are a Different Matter: Bush readily admits she wasn’t so eager to work with the bugs. “You know, scorpions are great. They fascinate me. That’s the sort of thing that keeps me watching the Discovery Channel, watching Shark Week and watching Dirty Jobs. That stuff’s cool and exciting. Spiders on the other hand, they are in my home. They are things that upset me. The spider that they have is the size of an appendage. They want it crawling on my face and that I don’t feel so great about. But, you know, if we need to do it, I’m going to do it. I’ll suck it up. I will suck it up and do it, but that will probably be the only moment in this movie where I am not drawing on anything, where I’m really just freaking when that spider touches my face. No question.”
The Differences Between This New Version and the 1986 Film: “…What is very different from the first movie, my character is not Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character in any way. It’s different from the beginning with the relationship between Jim and Grace. We’re together. There’s major investment there, so seeing a couple at risk I think is a lot more upsetting than seeing two strangers who sort of met by happenstance.
Grace is not your whiny sidekick in any way. She’s definitely the heroine and that was what attracted me to it in the first place. There’s not a lot of roles for females to really get to be the hero and to really get to kick some ass. And it’s really fun for me to get to do that. Zach [Knighton] and I have just had such a great time shooting all of these scenes and doing all of this together. It’s been very exciting.”
That relationship between the two central characters was lacking in the original. “That was something that I think bothered everybody about the first movie. Why do you care about the two of them together? They don’t really have a reason to care about each other. With Zach and myself, you enter the movie in the midst of a relationship that is ongoing. It’s great because we spent the majority of our week of rehearsal out here before we started shooting just figuring out the relationship, figuring out the chemistry, figuring out the ways to not have to give any boring exposition. To just be able to show through the scenes and the way that we speak to each other and the looks that we throw and what’s going on between the two of us, to show the history of the relationship and the length of the relationship and to make you really enjoy how much fun these two are together."
