n The Mothman Prophecies, Richard Gere stars as journalist John Kline, who is drawn into a profound mystery when he and his wife, Mary (Debra Messing), have a tragic accident that disrupts Kline's orderly life. Based on true events in the small town of Pt. Pleasant, W. Va., Mothman follows Kline and police Sgt. Connie Parker (Gere's Primal Fear co-star, Laura Linney) as they investigate a series of odd occurrences that may or may not be connected to each other and to Kline's accident years before.
Mark Pellington (Arlington Road) directed the film, written by Richard Hatem, based on paranormal journalist John Keel's book of the same name, about events surrounding the 1967 collapse of the Silver Bridge in Pt. Pleasant. Gere, Pellington and Linney took a moment recently to speak with Science Fiction Weekly about the movie, which opens Jan. 25.
Richard Gere, had you heard of Mothman before you started the movie?
Gere: No, I hadn't, no. ... The original [script had] just a really good narrative drive. What happens next? Like Pulp Fiction. Hey, where are we going? What happens? Which is great to have that kind of energy in a story. And there was enough kind of metaphysical stuff going on around the edges that I could see there was something to work on here. ... We didn't want it to be a B-movie, a monster movie. We wanted to emphasize the adult aspects of the story, the psychological and emotional and metaphysical side of it. ... Through many different writers and different drafts it wasn't quite coming together, to tell you the truth. And I was kind of pulling back from the project. And Mark Pellington came in and did his version, kind of pulling things from all these different drafts that had been done. And it just seemed to work. ... It's kind of a balance, that narrative drive, but hopefully an adult story as well that has true emotion, will open metaphysics that resonate larger than monster movies.
Talk about your character, John Kline.
Gere: He functions in the story as the empiricist. He's the guy who's the reporter, gets the facts. Measures things, wants to know the truth. ... You see him essentially go through a Job story. You see the guy in the beginning who's got the wife, they're deeply in love, the job is great, they're buying a new house, talking about babies, and literally in a huge laugh of just the wonder of how good their lives are, she has this accident and dies. He's in a total malaise, and based on the fact that he can't get his life together, gets in a car in the middle of the night and somehow travels 600 miles without knowing how he got there. And that sets the story in motion. By the end, he's not the empiricist at all. He's just this wet rag of emotion in his house.
Was there any discussion about why your character had to be the hero?
Gere: Well, no, it just seemed natural. ... That's the guy that leaves the empiricist behind. He's not the empiricist anymore. He just dives [in].
Is there a moment when Kline decides there is something there for him to go back to?
Gere: Yeah, but still there's more: literally, a bridge to cross. He's got to let go of ego even more. That's basically the hero's voyage here.
What was it like for you to work with Laura again? These were such different roles from your parts in Primal Fear.
Gere: Well, there's a comfort level. We don't have to watch our backs with each other. We're very good friends, have been since we made the movie Primal Fear. So I was delighted when she said yes to this. I knew she was going to elevate that character, do something with it. ... You don't fight. You know, in tai chi, there's a push-hands thing, where you push, the other person gives. And it kind of creates a dance of energy. Good acting is like that. You trust each other. Someone has an impulse and goes like that, and you can take that energy and do something else with it. Block it. And with someone like Laura and Will [Patton], you know, it's very easy to work.
Do you find a spiritual connection between what's happening to the people in Mothman?
Gere: I wasn't really interested in it. It didn't help me to know the reality of what happened ... on that bridge to those people. ... I was more interested in finding the psychological and truly metaphysical truth of this that would work for this piece, the relevancy of exactly what happened that night. ... There were some people in our production that had been there at the bridge. They didn't talk about it much. It was just something that happened to them. ... There's a scene where I'm coming to the bridge at the end of the film. And the traffic's backed up. I get out of the car and ask the guy in front of me who gets out of his truck to see what's going on. He says, "The traffic light's down." That guy was on the original bridge.
Did you have any interest in the myth of the Mothman?
Gere: I had no interest in it.
Really? None at all?
Gere: No. No. I'd be interested in the Loch Ness monster. That piques my interest. But this doesn't, really. No, I'm more interested in the mechanism of projection. I have no problem that ... there's an infinite number of things that are cohabiting this time and space with us. I have no problem with that whatsoever. I am interested in the mind that projects belief on certain things and rejects others. Why do we do that? Why do we project monsters? Why do we project benevolent deities? What is the mechanism of us that creates reality? That's interesting to me.
Mark Pellington, what was it about The Mothman Prophecies that attracted you to telling the story?
Pellington: The script, the first draft that I read of Richard Hatem's, which was his third draft. ... You read a script, and ... you're either kind of sucked into it or not. And I read it, and I kept on turning the page and was like, "This is weird." And it made me feel uncomfortable, and ... I didn't know what was going on. So it made me want to keep turning the page, and it had an adrenaline to it as [I'm] turning it. ... The fact you just keep plowing through it right away to get to the end is usually a great first sign. Then you read it again with an eye towards directing it, and say, "OK. This is emotional. It's visual. There's something unknown. It plays with ambiguity. It's not cookie-cutter. I don't know exactly what's going to happen." Those were like the major things that drew me to it.
The movie itself is very ambiguous about whether or not the Mothman truly exists. What's your opinion on the matter?
Pellington: I believe it exists. It is true to the people who believe in it and think they saw it. You know, it's kind of like the whole point? It's like, "Did you see it?" ... William Burroughs says, "If you see it, then it's true to you. If you hear it, then it means something to you." It's all about that subjective, perceptual truth. So Will Patton believes that he saw it or believes he had that dream. So it was true to him. Even if I chose not to believe it, ... I believe that everybody who thinks they saw something really did. ... But I personally would have to see a photo of it before I would believe.
In Keel's book, the bridge ... came down, and all of the sightings and all of these strange things just stopped. ... It was a retroactive, ... "Wait, that was the Mothman that caused that. That was the ... forerunner of death or the foreshadowing of death." ... For several years, there were no more sightings, no strange, dead dogs drained of blood, no mysterious phone calls, no electronic interference. So I think it was after the fact that people said, "Wait, that was somehow the Mothman or whatever this entity is." ... Is it ... a man, a voice, a light, a monster? ... To me, that's what the Mothman is, this one version of this entity that was plaguing this town and the world in general.
You had trouble with your electricity with this shoot?
Pellington: Oh, god, tons. Lights would blow, and it was just terrible.
So what do you think it was?
Pellington: Well, we said ... Mothman was around. ... Because a community of the film ... believed, or there was enough of a consensus [that] something's out there, that you would ... attribute it to that. Again, that's a perfect, tangible example of what I'm talking about: where one community's belief systems would get so infected by the possibility of something causing any of these annoyance or occurrences.
Can you talk about what went into the special effects on the bridge?
Pellington: Do you have an hour? [laughs] ... It was a very, very elaborate process of ... first deciding how do you get any one shot and balancing basically art and commerce. And my imagination would say, "I want this to happen, this to happen, this to happen." And the budget would say, "You can have half of that, a third of that." So it was really coming up with creative solutions to bring the bridge down. ... At one of the test screenings, I was sitting just next to this girl who was watching it, and as it started to go down, she just went [covers mouth], "Oh my!" [and] was getting really upset. I was like, "Great." That's what I wanted them to feel. ... I wanted to let the nastiness and aggression of the sequence come out.
What was the black painting on Gordon's barn?
Pellington: Ah! Very good! That is the bridge, the shape. It's Gordon's kind of weird foreshadowing of what was happening on the bridge. It's like the two towers with the hole in the middle and then it was all painted up.
By the way, who did the voice?
Pellington: "Hello, John Kline." Me. I did it on the recording. I did it on the shoot, ... because it's like, all right, I knew the character and what he should say. And then we ... [tried] manipulating it, and we brought in all these people to recreate it and try computer voices, and ... we never liked it better then when I did it.
Laura Linney, what attracted you to The Mothman Prophecies?
Linney: Richard, number one. And two, it's a genre I've never done before. And it's a type of movie I've never done before. And so I wanted the experience of working on a technical, creepy movie. Where I knew, ... because of Mark, it was going to be a whole different game. And so that's really what I wanted to do.
Can you tell us a little bit about your character?
Linney: I play a small-town police officer named Connie Parker, who works in the town where she grew up, which is Pt. Pleasant, W. Va. ... While my character is not based on one particular person, ... in the movie she's responsible for her town and her community, [which] she feels very strongly about. ... Paranormal activity Ö is going [on] around her town, that people are claiming is happening. And while she has to be open to what is going on, she doesn't want to add to any potential hysteria. So she is sort of caught between being afraid herself and trying to figure out what is happening, but also being ... emotionally mature and keeping everyone steady and focused and not letting things sort of spiral out of control.
Did you speak to any of the people who actually saw the Mothman?
Linney: I wasn't able to speak to anyone who actually had a sighting. But I did do a lot of reading and read as much as I possibly could and spoke with some people from Pt. Pleasant when they came to Kittanning, Pa., which is where we were filming.
Can you talk about working with Richard Gere again? Is it helpful having worked with someone before?
Linney: Sure. Particularly if you like them [laughs]! That's the ... one thing that's sort of important. And I love Richard. ... When we finished Primal Fear, I was always hoping we'd get to work with each other again. But you know that doesn't happen very often in films. So I was really thrilled when they asked me to come on board with this one, primarily so that I could be around my friend for a while. ... We laugh a lot. And he's been extremely supportive, and I always know that if I'm ever ... in deep trouble somewhere and I called Richard, he would be right there.
What was it like to work in the water like this?
Linney: Well, originally I was very excited about the tank work. I thought, "Ooh! Tank work!" And so I made sure I was prepared, and I was swimming, and I took scuba diving lessons in the local college in the pool, and I was revved up and ready to go. And those two days in that tank almost killed me. It was really hard and frightening for me. It was night, ... so you're in dark water. I have never done that kind of work before. I was in a car, 20 feet under the water. You'd be down there with a little bit of air. ... They'd bring you down, then take out the scuba stuff, and then you're in this car. Alone. And I didn't like it! [laughs] I really didn't like it. So it was really challenging. I'm glad I had the experience. ... I'd be more than happy to do just like nice pre-swimming sequences again, but I don't know about the special effects under the water at night. Scary.
What is your personal opinion of the Mothman phenomena?
Linney: I had never heard of this before this movie came into my life. ... It just sounds so ridiculous, the Mothman. It's just weird in the mouth. It's just strange. So I read the script, and then I started reading about the events that led up to the collapse of the Silver Bridge. And what happened in Chernobyl, and what happened in Mexico, and all the various sightings that the Mothman has supposedly been involved with over time. And I don't know what this is. But something's happening. I don't know what it is. But something is going on! ... I have no answers about it. I don't know what to do with this information [laughs].
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