Urban Legends: Final Cut
(2000)
John's Thoughts
Read John's exclusive "On-Set" Diary!
Looking throughout this site or in interviews you'll find snippets of my thoughts about Urban Legends: Final Cut, how it came to be, the process, etc. This entry is actually the last I'll make regarding the experience. Appropriately, just before writing this, I happened to pop in a video cassette Sony had sent me to approve. The cassette contained all the behind-the-scenes footage and actors/producers interviews that I had never seen before. It was strange after all this time suddenly watching the process of filming. It was very magical in a way to view this cassette, to go back in time a few months to the bitter cold of Toronto. Only now, finally being able to step back and take a deep breath can I finally see just what a special experience it all was. You can get so close to a project (especially when taking on so many roles) that it's hard to rise above the trees, as it were, to see the whole forest. I can now do that, and finally feel a good sense of accomplishment no matter the outcome. What a ride it was.
Reflections:
There's not one thing a director does not get his hands into. No stone is left unturned, and when you're a control-freak, you've got to have your finger in every department's pie to avoid surprises later. Every shoe lace on an actor's shoe is approved. And this starts far far before shooting. Pre-production is where it all begins.
In the general sense, directing is the fine art of finding ways to basically get what you want. Techniques differ from director to director. Some yell and scream, others don't do enough, etc. Diplomacy is, or course, the best method. Genetically I don't really have the yelling gene, but this comes in very handy as a secret weapon, however: Meaning, if no one is used to you losing your temper, when you really actually end of going ballistic, it has tremendous impact! But this is a last resort. Directing is being a prosecutor or defense attorney talking to the jury and constantly making an impassioned case that's iron clad. The more impervious your argument, the more outcome you can expect. That's half of directing. Another imperitive is to choose your battles wisely. It's crucial to the film that you know ahead of time the wars you can afford to lose, and those you absolutely must fight to the death on. These wars for me were mainly waged in pre-production and into shooting regarding our ever-changing script. I decided early on the items that, in my opinion, would make or break the film. The most important was the cast. As a new director the casting debates could have gotten bloodier than they ever got; I was so obsessed with my actors that many nights were spent sleepless in fear that the studio would forbid me to cast certain members. There were touch and go moments, and heart-stopping phone calls regarding this, but thankfully, in the end (to skip a lot of details!), I was trusted with the cast that I wanted. We actually did a screen test mixing and matching potential cast members so I could present to the studio an unbiased combination of candidates. But it was crystal clear to me that the chemistry of Jennifer Morrison and Matt Davis was impossible to beat. If you are not at peace with your cast as a director, the process can be miserable. I loved my cast. It was a joy to work with enthusiastic non-jaded actors who often wanted to do their own stunts; the best part is they all had tremendous wisdom and a great film-making sense. I loved collaborating with them.
But long before the casting process, an ongoing task that lasted throughout the production was altering the script, coming up with new scenes, changing characters, storylines, etc. The early script was not as thriller-like as I wanted. So with the cooperation of the writers, we set out to mold it to the vision of how I wanted the film to feel. I knew I wanted there to be a bell tower in the film and that it had to be an image that whet the audience's interest. There had to be a climactic scene in it. Atmospherically the idea just excited me and inspired other ideas. (The hard part, as we would find out later, would be to build the damn thing! We didn't use and miniatures because I wanted many angles of it looming and the ability to approach it.) The film's opening was another challenge. The first draft of the script had the first scene in a graveyard with hands pulling victims in graves. This felt too horror-like to me and I wanted something bigger/grander. So I asked the writers if I would write a little treatement they could take and run with. The first incarnation was a sort of Ten Little Indians scenario where, in Agatha Christy style, dinner guests horrifically dissapear at a dinner in a castle. But then I watched my favorite episode of The Twilight Zone Movie, "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet." This was the helter-skelter, on-edge feel I wanted the film to open with. So I wrote a rough idea and placed the scene aboard a ship at sea (not on a plane) on a stormy night, where a maniacal captain is killing the passengers. So Paul and Scott (the writers) wrote a scene in this vein. It was wild, with water flooding the set, and had a great gag ending. Then I went to Toronto to begin scouting locations. How, with a limited budget, were we to shoot this scene? We began looking at olympic sized pools we could built a ship set into. I started to see the dollar signs -- and we still had to potentialy build a tower and a tunnel of terror set. Then one fateful day in Toronto as we were looking for stage space, I was passing by one soundstage and peeked in: There it was -- a full jumbo jet mock up complete with cockpit. Done. All we would have to do is rent it and modify it a bit. They had just used it for Pushing Tin. So the original plane-inspired scene ended up changing back from the boat to the plane. As was par for the course on this film, the actual events in the plane sequence stayed nebulous perilously close to shooting. Finding the Tunnel of Terror was another feat, and the scene really could not be written until we found the location. When we finally did, we sent photos to LA and mulled over ideas on implementing a ride we found (The Wilderness Ride) into our story.
It's a tremendous hardship on a crew (and director) attempting to prepare logistically how to shoot the film when the script keeps changing. Usually a director hopes that most of the script can be battoned down so he can begin storyboarding, etc. But UL2 went into production as we were still rewriting. The ending sequence was one of contention up to the day of shooting it. It had incarnations ranging from super-fire infernos rivaling an Alien film to machette fights. (I kept saying, the killer is a person, not some supernatural being! I wanted to avoid the cliche of the killer being "dead", then up with a surprise again. That was just too tired for me, as we were not making a spoof. Fortunately what we came up with worked very well, but with very little breathing room. In one climactic scene regarding guns, for the first time I think my cast had thought I had lost it. I was hoping the idea would prove to be quirky and exciting, but when I was asked by the cast, "You want us to do what??", I began having doubts as well! This "winging-it" aspect was one of the most difficult and draining challenges of the project, especially for one who likes to plan ahead and see the big picture mentally. - And when there are only 45 days to shoot so many scenes, you better have your shit together. Many lessons were learned, as they always are, and each supplies you with an experience and ammunition to draw upon the next time around as to why or why not something should be done.
Location scouting is also a make-or-break situation. No matter how good your DP is, if your location looks like crap, your film is going to look like crap. That's why I was so thrilled with the severely designed archtecture of Trent University and the modern/creepy feel it gave. But as you're shooting there are other locations which are still not locked down, and this is when a scene can be compromised. We desperately dressed an old diner to be the college hang-out, and it worked fine, but it wasn't the look and feel I really wanted. I was trying at all costs to avoid any "Saved By The Bell" look to the film. My production designer (Mark Zuelzke) found a great mural to place on one wall of the place which helped immensely. Reese's security office was a good find by converting a TV editing room to a security office, but I wish we could have darkened the walls in the room to be more in line with the darker look of the film. But we weren't allowed to paint the walls; that's low-budget for you! Other than that, I was happy with our locations, and think they gave the film a fresh signature, a world of its own and a bigger budget feel. I wanted Amy to get wet at some point and be running as she was freezing, so it worked well to have the school on the edge of the water. The trick was matching the water's edge at a different location than Trent when we actually shot the scene of her in the water weeks later. (It would be too expensive to stay out at Trent to shoot ALL the exteriors.) We ended up finding a park way the hell outside of Toronto, but the shoreline was so shallow we had to build a peer out over the water so that Amy actually had enough water to fall into! These location scouts take place the days you're NOT shooting, and then comes the planning of how to make the scene work and altering it as such. While were at this location we economized by using a side road for a scene with Toby driving away from the school and planned simply to super-impose the campus and ever-familiar bell tower behind the trees as if we were there. A road-side forest was also nearby to maximize the location for Amy's forest-run with the ability to shine arc lamps from road-side trucks through the trees for side light. At the time it was a great idea, until your film comes out after forest chases get spoofed by Scary Movie and such. You can't predict what will spring into theaters before your film ever gets out there. Now, any night chase in a forest will always be spoofy. The number of actual locations used in a scene can be surprising. In one scene, Amy runs out of the university scoring stage (an actual scoring stage in Toronto), then we placed a mock-up of the exterior of the university on the lawn next to the forest at the park 1 hour away where she bursts out the "exterior door" of the stage. Yet another location was the water she falls in. Then Amy hides under a grate with steam coming under it, but the grate at the lake location was just a mock-up with ground a foot below it. We shot Amy looking up from under the grate at a stairwell in a train station in Toronto by placing the grate over the stairs above her. But her POV of the killer on top of the grate above her was shot in a soundstage with the celiing blacked out to be the night sky. Intercut you'd never know.
I remember our last shot we filmed in late December '99 was about 3AM where Jennifer screamed at the top of her lungs in the tower set .. and that was it. It was a little weird. You looked around realizing that the moment you say you don't need another take, the filming is over. The relief is always a bit bittersweet as the awkward goodbyes ensue. But for me, it was all just the beginning of the next phase...