Shock survives the Dowdle Bros.’ remake
It was you I did this for. I put the dead bolt on the door. Understand I can’t see you now. Realize it’s not to keep me in but to keep all the sickies out. – “Quarantine,” Phantom Planet
On a 2008 list of the most polluted cities in the U.S., Los Angeles came in at number one for year-round particle pollution. Scratch deeper for more information and one will find the City of Angels doesn’t exactly fair well in similar assessments of squeaky clean metropolises around the country. An outbreak of the viral variety, such as the persistent avian flu or some other dreaded germ, isn’t unlikely. I just never figured it would happen on the Sony Pictures backlot of all places.
Signs of an infection spreading within one of the studio’s soundstages are first apparent in actress Jennifer Carpenter. She bounces in place, breathing heavily. Oh, wait, nope…she’s okay. Just a bit hyper. The lithe actress is merely prepping for her next take. Beside her is Jay Hernandez and compacted into the elevator space they’re sharing is a camera man. On the wall to their right – crimson arterial spray. And it’s still fresh. Hernandez is panic-stricken – we’ve seen him this way before in his prior horror outings Hostel and Hostel: Part II – and this is only feeding Carpenter’s agitated state. They are cats in a cage on the way to be euthanized.
The elevator door slides open. Abysmal darkness beyond. The stuff of nightmares. “Don’t go out there,” Carpenter whimpers. Hernandez tries to adjust his eyes. But it’s too late; a thing – spitting and hissing – leaps into their confined box, this temporary safety zone. It’s a “she” – I can make out that much – and Hernandez punches her in the jaw. There’s a struggle and the camera man is as much in self preservation mode as he is focusing on “getting the shot.” Hernandez, Carpenter and their camera man escape the elevator leaving the she-bitch (one undoubtedly “infected” individual) crumpled up on the floor.
“Cut! Oh, f**k yes!” screams director John Dowdle from his place nearby in video village where he’s been watching the aforementioned scene play out. The crew applauds. A scene caught in a single shot like this, with little to no problems, is cause for celebration. Carpenter and her cast members, out of breath, giggling between gasps of air, join John and his brother Drew by the monitors to re-watch the take. Carpenter responds with a genuine reaction of “Oh…Jesus!” as if she just didn’t live through the ordeal. I’ll admit, what they got on film made me jump.
“This is taxing, but I think it’s going to be a remarkable payoff,” Carpenter sighs, on hiatus from playing Debra Morgan on Showtime’s hit serial killer series Dexter. “I’ve watched more playback on this film than anything else I’ve done. I get scared quite easily. I’m holding my hand up in front of the screen, I don’t know if I’ve acclimated to it all, but now I’m cheering it on, laughing. I hope that’s the reaction the audience has.”
Sony’s Screen Gems is, too, when it releases Quarantine in theaters on October 10th. Based on the absolutely spine-tingling, vicious Spanish horror film directed by Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza, Rec (review), and adapted for the U.S. by John and Drew Dowdle, the story follows eager news gal Angela (Carpenter), her camera man (Steve Harris) and members of a fire department as they answer a medical call in a downtown Los Angeles tenement. The residents, it seems, are afflicted with a hyper strain of rabies and before anyone can escape, government officials quickly lock down the building. No one gets in. No one gets out.
Quarantine, much like its overseas predecessor, is told from the subjective point of view of the news camera.
Vertigo Films’ Roy Lee and Doug Davison believe it’s a remake too good to pass up. Sight unseen, they acquired the American redo rights to Rec with only a translated copy of the script to go on. “We got what the concept was,” Davison tells us near the end of shooting on this December day where all of the action is predominantly taking place in a constructed apartment complex set. “The reality is a vast majority of the American audience isn’t going to watch a movie with subtitles. I will. You will. But Rec would never get a wide theatrical release. This movie is such an awesome concept. I just loved it and wanted to remake it.”
Enter John and Drew Dowdle, brothers hailing from Minnesota who gave audiences the creeps at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival with The Poughkeepsie Tapes, a serial killer’s account of his dirty deeds as told through home movies. “I didn’t want to get some conventional Hollywood director who has never had experience with this style of filmmaking,” adds Davison. “These guys knew the rough and tumble hand-held filmmaking style and that’s what we wanted.”
The brothers had little to go on, much like Lee and Davison, with the exception of the Spanish screenplay and a two-minute promo piece. And when they went in to meet with the Vertigo team, John and Drew, “had storyboards, script ideas, we were ready to shoot this when we showed up,” says John. The bespectacled and very amiable director is taking a rare break with ShockTillYouDrop.com and his sibling while the camera crew sets up for another complicated scene. “This was going to be a low budget thing we were going to shoot in Toronto. But then Vertigo brought it to Screen Gems and now we’re here, loving it.”
“When we read the script, it was more supernatural than the [original] final film ended up being,” explains Drew, co-writer and producer on this venture. “[Balagueró and Plaza] did an amazing job and once everyone saw the final film, we all said, ‘Let’s keep it close to this.’ We went with an ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ mentality.”
Rec‘s short running time (roughly 70 minutes) presented John and Drew some breathing room to add a few new scenes of their own. Characters were also refitted and “Americanized.” Says Drew, “We added more threats, not just regarding the infection. Plus, we really wanted to keep it grounded in reality. The original was a bit more supernatural.”
“We had rewritten the ending,” chuckles John. “And [Balagueró and Plaza] wound up rewriting their ending very similarly in production, which is funny.”
Walking through the two-story set (building exteriors were lensed in a Korea Town neighborhood), I’m struck dumbfounded by how faithful it is to the doomed apartment complex of Rec right down to the lobby layout, floor tiles, walls stippled with earth tones and the staircase. The elevator is a new addition, one of the Dowdles’ ways to invent new scare gags, as we have seen. Above, a skylight, where a floodlight oscillates above the iron framing to simulate the effect of a police helicopter hovering above the building. Its beam cascades through the center of the set highlighting various grotesqueries of violence that have already occurred.
Every apartment here is furnished. I’m guided into a residence once inhabited by an elderly woman where spilled blood is the best door matt the place offers. This is where the first attack occurs, where it all begins and story spirals out of control. The decor can best be described as “Cat Fancy” chic as feline accoutrements litter the dimly lit living room. If one looks out the window, they’ll notice plastic sheeting outside covering the glass – a precautionary measure by the authorities during the quarantine process. In speaking to the cast, all agree the entire set is very much a character in and of itself. “It’s one of our biggest enemies,” says Carpenter. “Whatever hurtles it puts in front of us, we overcome.”
For the actors, the challenges are manifold: From the infected to the scrupulous planning that goes into shooting a film with a subject camera approach to the extended takes (5 or six minutes each) that come with a single shot. It’s a delicate dance that provokes the actors to dig deep into their emotional reservoirs.
It has been a funny exercise,” Carpenter offers. “The thing about the first film…when I saw it, I loved it. It was really thrilling, but I thought it ramped up to a 100 miles per hour and stayed there. As an audience member, I was a bit numb to it by a certain point. Here, I think we found places where it can ramp up. So, now we’re at the end [of shooting], it’s harder to find places where you get into character. It’s more ‘What can I do to wake up every part of my body?’ Sometimes, it’s as simple as going one, two, three and go! Or, playing the loudest song I can think of in my head.”
The actress attests her role is the hardest thing she has done, moreso than The Exorcism of Emily Rose, a vigorous performance in which she played a possessed young woman. The only research to be done for her latest part was watching a lot of MTV and The Food Network to capture the broadcast journalist vibe – a very tough, patience-testing feat indeed. “You saw today’s scene, when Jay is bolting at me, I was genuinely scared. I was out protecting myself. So, I’m finding I’m having a hard time on this one. I don’t think I’m alone, though.”
She’s right. When we find co-star Columbus Short, who plays Officer Wilensky, he regales us with one sequence that haunted him all the way home after a day’s work. “I had to shoot this lady. I did it a lot of times. And when I closed my eyes, the gun is going off and she’s got squibs exploding all over her. It was crazy. I was like, ‘I shot someone today.’ To go there and mentally be the guy to shoot someone for the first time was great,” he ends with a smile. Morose, Columbus, very morose.
The former Stomp the Yard star continues with another anecdote, clearly relishing his part: “I remember on the first rehearsal, we were outside of a door and they didn’t tell us this lady was going to be standing in there. We opened the door and I was like, ‘Holy shit!’ It’s real emotion and real action.” Still, it’s good to be African American in this film and not be the first guy to get killed right? “You see what we’re doing? I don’t die first, it’s crazy! And my name is…Wilensky.”
In the film, Wilensky is joined by Fletcher (Johnathon Schaech) and Jake (Hernandez), two firemen thrown into a different sort of hot zone. Schaech sports a mean ’70s porno mustache and when we call him on it, he defends that he “wanted to make this as real as possible. [Screen Gems’] Clint Culpepper said that he wanted this as real as possible so people could enjoy the experience and not know that line between what’s real and what’s not. That’s why I grew the ‘stache, so no one could recognize me,” he laughs. “I went into the fire station and 50% of the guys had mustaches like this. But I spent time there picking up their nuances and the things they do nightly to bring as much realism to the piece as possible.”
“This is a completely different style of storytelling,” Schaech posits when asked how this experience is different than his time on Prom Night, another Screen Gems effort released earlier this year. “This is absolutely frightening because it’s based in reality. The Dowdles are exciting and really smart. The Poughkeepsie Tapes is a scary bending of reality, this stuff could be real. Tobe Hooper did that way back in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre but it wasn’t shot with a video camera. It broke new ground in horror. These guys are doing the same.”
Hernandez, whipped from the exertion of fending off the infected while carrying the weight of his uniform, has played a firefighter once before in Ladder 49, so no Stanislavski-esque preparations needed to be had to get him into character. Instead, he set his mind to not screwing up the long takes. A sentiment echoed by many of the actors involved. Their day begins going through an exhaustive rehearsal process which is followed by downtime as the Dowdles and company – who have chosen to shoot the film in sequence – work out the technical aspects of the shots. Then, in costume, it’s back to the set for more rehearsals. Often, these will be filmed in the event the director likes what he sees.
“If we can get it the scene in the first couple of takes, it’s a big deal,” says Hernandez. “Energy drops after a while because they are so long and physical. Especially with what we’re doing today. It’s pretty hard, so when we nail it, it’s a good moment for everybody.”
Same goes for the production’s camera operator, Joseph Aguirre, who shoulders the brunt of actor Steve Hall’s role as the news photo journalist. A thankless job that gets Aguirre just as bruised and beaten as the talent. “I’ve been manhandling him,” admits Short. “they’ve had to put pads behind him, because I’m jamming him against walls. It’s fun and physical.”
That might explain one costly production mishap Carpenter is happy to recount like a girl tattling on her brother. “We dropped [the camera],” she says. “Yep, that was that great! It kept running so we keep asking if they are going to use the footage. They said they would. Those cameras are ridiculously expensive, so it was fun to watch. They broke an eye piece that cost, like, $15 thousand to fix. That happened 12 days into the shoot. I’m surprised it didn’t happen earlier. There have been a lot of freaky things.” Like what? “On the first day the stage caught on fire. We kept smelling smoke. We were just about to shoot when I said, ‘You know what? I’m going to leave.’ Because I was pretty certain something was on fire. And it was! Someone threw a cigarette butt and it caught on fire underneath the stage.”
Switching gears… To comment on the fictional, visceral disasters that befall the characters of Quarantine we turn to Robert Hall of Almost Human FX who’s quick to point out the attackers in this film are “not zombies. We are really just playing off of a super deadly strain of rabies and pushing that to the furthest end of the spectrum that we can go. There are a lot of dead people in this film, but they don’t get back up.”
“Part of trying to find something that doesn’t involve zombies was finding a disease that mimics a zombie-like state,” clarifies John. A heartbreaking and chilling YouTube video of a small child with rabies served as a grim inspiration for the infected seen in the film. “It’s a horrible thing. Your mouth starts to foam, your tear ducts start running and you lose your ability to swallow. That’s why animals start attacking when they have rabies. The drool keeps coming and they just start going crazy and going after what’s in front of them.”
Drew adds: “Humans lose their ability to speak, they get nerve damage, so they don’t feel pain. Everything we wanted in our film. All good stuff.” John repeats happily, “All good stuff.”
In the wake of 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later, Hall explains the way to overcome comparisons to the infected in this film to the maniacal nightmares Danny Boyle created is to go back to nature. “I got videos of some people with rabies from the CDC and while they don’t exactly manifest the same symptoms that we do in Quarantine, like clawing their faces apart, there is a lot there you can pull from. Their skin gets discolored and blotchy, a little bit blue from the lack of oxygen.”
“We also went off on a slightly different note and did some fun stuff with teeth because we thought, if you had this inability to speak or swallow you would gnashing your teeth a lot,” he continues. “They would get chipped and that would cause lacerations and abrasions on your lips. So, before I did this, I was thinking how do we make these guys really disgusting and terrifying, but try to base it all in nature?”
Hall’s infected evolve through three stages, the first being very subtle. The second includes the aforementioned teeth and lip damage with hemorrhaged spots appearing on the eyes. Cuts cover their body as if they’ve been clawing at themselves. Stage three, “their eyes are solid, full of blood. John sent this picture of a boxer to me where it looked like his eye was full of blood, so we based the extreme level off of that photo.”
And what about creating the foaming mouth? “That is a really old school version of Alka-Seltzer – they don’t even make it anymore except in a few places,” Hall reveals. “It’s called Bromo Seltzer and most people under 40 don’t know it. It fizzes like five or six times more than Alka Seltzer. So you put a bunch of that and a bunch of water in the actor’s mouth with the blood. What’s great is Stacy Chbosky, who plays Elise, actually ordered her own from some pharmacy and was playing with it for weeks. When she came in and met me the second time, she was like, ‘Look what I can do!’ She was an expert. That’s method acting for you, she was practicing drool at home.”
The appearance of a dead dog and more infected filtering onto the set tells us the contagion on this stage is spreading. We take this as our cue to flee. See a doctor. Get a check-up. Then head home to seal up the windows and doors with plastic wrap. The horrors happening on the Sony lot are too far along for a quarantine to do any good.
Source: Ryan Rotten
