hen ID4 producers Dean Devlin and
Roland Emmerich set out to make an updated
version of a classic 1950s matinee creature
feature, they knew it would be difficult to strike a
balance between horror and camp. They found
the balance they were looking for in a short film
making the film festival circuit entitled Larger
Than Life. The 13-minute, black-and-white film
depicted a woman fighting off a giant spider in her
house. After viewing the film, the producers knew
they had found the perfect tone for their film, and
convinced Warner Brothers to sign first-time
feature director Ellory Elkayem to the project.
Actors David Arquette and Kari Wuhrer, both big
fans of classic science fiction, quickly signed on
the project as well. Arquette, who has made a
name for himself in comedic roles, was looking
for a chance to play an action hero as well as a
romantic lead. Wuher has been involved in
several SF projects, including a starring role in the
television series Sliders, and was excited
about the possibility of working with Devlin and
Emmerich.
Science Fiction Weekly recently spoke with Devlin,
Arquette and Wuhrer about the challenges of
updating a classic genre film for today's audience
and what it's like working with giant CGI spiders.
First of all, Eight Legged Freaks—can
you talk about where that title came from?
Devlin: Well, the film was originally called
Arac Attack, and there was some
sensitivity after September 11 that it would remind
people of Iraq Attack. And whether or not that's
true, we never for a minute wanted this film to be
anything other than what it is. Even if it reminded
two percent of the population of that, why do it? It's not
necessary.
So the studio had actually re-titled the
movie Attack of the Killer Spiders. And
Roland and I, we understood what they were
trying to do, but we thought you couldn't do it.
Besides the fact that there'd been Attack of the
Killer Tomatoes and Attack of the 50 Fort
Woman, George Lucas was just about to have
Attack of the Clones. So we said, "Look, if
you really want to have some kind of retro title, you
know, take a line out of the movie." I kind of
jokingly said, like, "Call the movie Big Ass
Spiders or Eight Legged Freaks or, you
know, something like, out of the picture."
So
about a week or so went by and they called me
back and said, "We're going with your title." And I
said, "What title?" They said, Eight Legged
Freaks. I said, "Guys, I was kidding! I didn't mean
it!"
What initially drew you to this film?
Devlin: The origin was [producer Roland
Emmerich] actually just walked into my office one
day and asked, "How can we make a movie like
Tarantula viable for an audience today?"
And we had a lot of conversations about it. ...
What we tend to do in Hollywood now is take B
movies and turn them into A movies. The
problem with a lot of B movies is if you did that,
you would destroy the very thing that made them
good. And I think Tarantula is one of those.
You don't want to destroy the very thing that makes
it really cool by trying to make it into a $100 million
picture.
Also, making a $100 million picture has
to appeal to a much broader audience simply
because it costs so much money. And we didn't
want to water down what's fun about a giant
spider movie. So we really were wrestling on how
to do it when we saw Ellory's short film. And
Ellory's film was really a love letter. I mean, it was
shot in black and white. It had this overwrought
score on it. And it was funny but it made you
scared. He really walked that line really well. And
that's when we said, "Okay." The trick is to make it
funny, keep it scary but not compromise on the
special effects, because even in his short film the
effects were wonderful. And we said, you know,
"All right, that's the trick. Can we take the special
effects of a $100 million movie and put it in a $10
million? What happens then?"
Arquette: First off, I knew that Dean Devlin
and Roland Emmerich were involved and I've
wanted to work with Dean since I'd met him on
Stargate. And then I read the script and it's
sort of a heroic character, a kind of heroic action
character, which I don't typically didn't get to play.
And Rick Overton and Doug E. Doug were in the
film, so they would sort of carry the humor element
of the picture and it would allow me to be slightly
subtler, not that I'm completely straight in this
movie.
Then I read the script and I just got really
thrilled by it and saw Ellory Elkayem's short film
and ... he really understood the tone of this film
and how to sort of balance the humor and the
scariness of it. Then I was really at that point I
was like, "I've got to do it." So I called up every
connection I had at Warner Brothers and I was
like virtually begging them for it. I said, "You didn't
let me try out for Scooby-Doo, so you're
going to have to let me do this."
Wuhrer: Dean called me up personally on
my cell phone and told me, "So, you're doing our
movie?" And I was like, "Wait, who is this?" It's
just unbelievable. They were the most incredible
team on Independence Day and The
Patriot and they're able to take the sci-fi genre
and expand it, and make it for a real crossover
market. ... In Independence Day, you
have action and humor and you have drama and
all these elements and I thought, my god. I would
bring Dean Devlin coffee on the set. I would light
Roland Emmerich's cigarettes by rubbing sticks
together.
How did you go about casting the lead
roles?
Devlin: Kari actually had the most difficult
role in the picture because on the one hand, she's
a very modern female action hero. She's the one
who's driving the action in the picture. She's with
the shotgun. She's the sheriff. She's a tough
character. On the other hand, she's the classic
babe of the movie, you know. And then add a third
dimension, she has to be a believable mother.
And there were very few actors who could come in
and really do all three things. And I thought she
really struck the balance between all of that and
maintained a sense of humor though the whole
thing. I thought she did an enormous job.
And
then David Arquette, you know, he's our male
lead, but he's not the action hero, which again, I
think helps redefine it for today's audience. David
made a very conscious effort not to be the kind of
buffoon that he'd become famous to do, the
outrageous clown. He really said to me from day
one, "I want to do something different, I want to
play this as a romantic lead." And at first we were
scared of that, because this is a movie that needs
a great deal of humor. But to his credit he never
let being a straight lead interfere with his comic
timing. So he was able to stay very funny and yet
give us a performance that we'd never see him do
before. And I'm really proud of what he did.
Kari, how do you feel about having the most
difficult role in the film?
Wuher: Well, thank God he didn't say that
to me as we were shooting because it would have
made me totally nervous. I was a little nervous
about playing a mom. I think that was my biggest
challenge. I don't have kids, let alone teenage
kids, and I was just worried that the relationship
was going to work, that I was going to be available
enough to it, that I was going to be convincing.
David, how do you approach being an action
hero?
Arquette: It's as close as I've come, but I
think I still could go further with my action
qualities. Personally, I just think of, like ... you kind
of act cooler. You want to think nothing really
shakes you. You just kind of put on a calm
exterior. Although this character obviously had
different quirks so it wasn't sort of the most action-packed guy.
Are you afraid of spiders?
Arquette: I actually didn't have any scenes
with the real spiders. But I've held them a couple
of times. They were on the set once. I didn't think
I was really afraid of spiders until I like had this
big tarantula climbing up my arm and it kind of ...
threw up its legs and I was like, "Take it off me.
Take it off me." So at that point my calm exterior
crumbled. But I'm not really afraid of spiders.
Wuhrer: I have a normal, healthy, primal
human fear of spiders. No phobia or anything.
Definitely, if I ran into a tarantula in the wild, I'm
going to run the other way. But in a controlled
environment with a wrangler and everything, it's a
piece of cake.
Were the spiders in the film based on real
spiders?
Devlin: Ellory was really strict on wanting
all the spiders to actually come from nature and to
look and behave as they do in nature. So the way
they attack, their body structures, all of that is
absolutely 100% accurate.
Wuhrer: I had to learn about what the
different spiders do. There's the trap-door spider,
who pops up from the ground and snatches his
prey. There's the orb weaver, who shoots and
spins the webs to attract the spider. There's the
jumping spider, which I think is the coolest of all.
And you've just got to imagine, too, you've got a
little tiny spider this big and he can jump like 25
feet away. That's a really strong creature, so
imagine that really strong creature the size of an
Astro minivan and he's gonna get all that strength
and power. I thought about that and that's kinda
scary and freaky.
What are you reacting to when you're in
scenes with the CGI spiders?
Arquette: There's nothing. There's not
even like a tennis ball or anything. It's down to
such a science. The process they used on our
film, the didn't even need like a blue screen. So
we just react to nothing, really.
Wuhrer: Yes, the itsy-bitsy invisible
spiders. We got to see what the effects team was
building with the spiders before we started filming,
and they had a sequence, sort of a temp
sequence with the motocross action. We saw the
jumping spiders attacking the guys on the bikes
and thought, "Wow, this is really cool" and they
were nowhere near the finished product.
Arquette: They had this big sort of
hard-shelled spider. A spider got killed or
something and they needed it to sort of sit in the
corner. They put the real spider there just to tie in
reality with these computer-generated images.
So that was cool because we'd see like, the
actual size of them. Like big dogs. And sort of
give you a sense as if there was a real spider
there. And then other times you just sort of have
to imagine it, really. And you have to sort of fool
yourself into thinking, if you were in that situation
how would you feel, get in touch with how your
heart rate would be and your breathing and your
adrenaline and then just kind of depend on Dean
and Roland and Ellory to bring all those elements
together that would make it believable to the
audience.
The spiders all seem to have these funny little
personalities, was that in the script?
Arquette: I think it was sort of understood
that they'd have these personalities, but I think
they drew a lot. A lot of these computer
animators, the artists, have really great senses of
humor and senses of sort of sci-fi and they're sort
of quirky in their own way. So they definitely
incorporated a lot of that. But also, I mean, even
when I read it, it read a lot like a sort of
Gremlins kind of movie and they sort of
have that persona at times. They get into trouble
and they fall off something they'll shake it off and
giggle at things. And supposedly, like, Ellory has
told me that there's spiders doing things that you'll
miss in just watching the movie. It'll take getting
the DVD and slowing it down. It was like two
spiders pulling on a body or something weird, you
know, in the background of something. One's like
kind of dancing. You just won't see until later.
Devlin: That's where you went from the
real to the unreal, where suddenly we have to
make them either dizzy or drunk or angry or
pissed off. And that's where the animators then
took everything that they had learned and threw it
out the window and so, like, had one knock its
head and go, "Brrrrrr." Because we didn't want to
get the humor out of cheesy effects. We wanted
the effects to look as good as anything we'd seen
before. But to let the humor come out of the
behavior of those well-made effects.
Did they incorporate any of your actions into
the animation?
Arquette: I did notice that, like, in a scene
where you run out and look to the right and they'd
say, "There's spiders everywhere." That's, like,
your direction. Okay, so you run out and you just
look around and then these great artists would
just incorporate where you look and put a spider
there and a spider there and just, like, incorporate
what was really there. And they had this great
method because Dean is such a pro at doing this.
He knows how to combine all these elements
and part of it that really sells it is when you
combine realistic objects, things that are actually
there in the scene, with this computer-generated
image.
So, in the scene where a spider walks
into Scarlett's room they attached, like, fishing
string to the windows, and there's a bunch of
stuffed animals and they attached fishing string to
about three stuffed animals. They'd slowly pull
the windows open and then pull one stuffed
animal down and then another. And then when
the artists get back there they tie it all in by putting
the spider's leg as if it's kicking these things and it
just makes it seem so much more realistic.
Are you a big fan of the old monster
movies?
Wuhrer: I loved Them and I
remember seeing it as a kid, but then getting
reacquainted with it again before we started
shooting. When I was a kid, it was always really
scary, you know. But now, as an adult, you can
see the campy quality to it and the cheesy special
effects, but as a kid it's really scary but not scary to
the point where you'd have nightmares. You flick
on the lights and monsters disappear.
Devlin: I am a big fan of them. I was born
in 1962, so I didn't see them in the theaters. I saw
them on the Sunday afternoon creature features
and that's where I fell in love with them. But my
strongest memory was that when my friends and I
would watch these creature features we would
mock them, we would make fun of them, but then
that night none of us could sleep because we
were scared of them. And that was always, I think,
the brilliance of it. On one hand, it's kind of silly
and fun, but on another level it actually does
frighten you. And so when we sat down to
reinvent the genre we said, "How do we make it
viable today?" And so the trick was really walking
that line between the comedy and the scares.
And I think Ellory did a fantastic job on creating
that balance.
How did you go about maintaining that
balance throughout the film?
Devlin: You just put your finger on the
single biggest problem of the movie. Because
again, I think if something is too funny then it's not
scary anymore, and if it's too scary you know, you
can't have that kind of funny. You can have
nervous laughs but you can't laugh at the movie at
the same time. So that was the constant
problem. And I think that that's something we
wrestled with every single day of writing it, of
shooting it, of making it. And it's the thing that I
want to give Ellory the most credit on. I mean, he
really found that balance. And it was a thing that
you easily could have screwed up. I mean, if it
was a little bit sillier than it is now, I think that you
wouldn't have jumped or been scared by anything.
Wuhrer: It was hard, ultimately, to get the
tone set right, it was a delicate balance between
humor and horror. If we had too much humor in
the wrong places, it was going to be campy. And
we really had to maintain the fear factor of the
spiders. I was really impressed at the final result
of the film to see how we actually did do that
successfully. That's why kids and adults are really
enjoying it, because it's not a campy mess. It's
only an homage to these B horror films of the
'50s. It's not a remake.
Is it more fun to do something like this or a
bigger film like ID4?
Devlin: Oh, it's much more fun to do a
bigger, larger, easier shoot. You can breathe.
You can actually sleep on the weekends. The joy
for me of this movie was actually when we were
done shooting. Honestly, not that it was a bad
experience. It was just so much work. I've literally
never worked that hard in my life. From the
moment you were awake until you fell asleep you
were shooting something. You didn't even have
time to plan anything. And then, when the 40 days
were over, we all kind of just took this big sigh and
went, "I can't believe we got this finished." I had
never worked that fast in my life.
How do you expect audiences to react to this
film?
Devlin: Let's put it this way. I think if you
willingly pay money to see a movie called Eight
Legged Freaks, you get your money's worth.
Also in this issue: The cast and crew of Reign of Fire.
