hen Tales from the Crypt producers Joel Silver and Robert Zemeckis formed Dark Castle Entertainment in 1999, their mission statement was simple—to produce quality low-budget horror films in the spirit of the late William Castle. Ghost Ship, which opens Oct. 25, follows the formula previously established by the company's previous two releases, with one major exception. Unlike House on Haunted Hill and Thirteen Ghosts, Ghost Ship is the first film to be released under the Dark Castle banner that was not based on a film by William Castle.
Joel Silver is a name easily recognizable to fans of action films, as he has produced some of the most successful franchises of the last few decades, including 48 Hours, Lethal Weapon, Die Hard and The Matrix. With the Dark Castle brand, he has chosen to embrace the horror genre, with the intention of producing a film to be released over Halloween weekend each year.
For last year's Halloween offering, Thirteen Ghosts, Silver recruited visual-effects supervisor and first-time feature director Steve Beck to update the haunted-house motif. Beck is back once again at the helm of Ghost Ship, a story which features a haunted ocean liner and employs a now-standard one-set formula and supernatural themes.
In casting the role of the female salvage worker who leads her team through the chaos, the filmmakers were looking for an actress in the mold of Sigourney Weaver's character, Ripley, from the Alien series—someone who could be believably tough and sensitive at the same time. They found those qualities in Julianna Margulies. Since leaving NBC's ER in 2000, Margulies has taken a wide variety of roles in television and film, but Ghost Ship marks her first foray into the world of horror and suspense.
Margulies, Beck and Silver took a moment to speak with Science Fiction Weekly about their takes on the state of the horror genre and their experiences making Ghost Ship.
People are going to be talking about the opening scene of this film. Where did that come from?
Silver: In Thirteen Ghosts, we had this really great scene, where this guy just got cut in half. These kind of glass doors came in and just sliced him in half, and the audience really liked it. So we were saying, "What could we do more than that?" ... But we had this notion of opening the movie not so much in the '60s but in a '60s movie. So you're looking at the pink type and the great kind of long dollies, and the style is really not the kind of movies we make. And [we] lull the audience into thinking that here we are we're watching a movie in 1962 with Rock Hudson or James Garner, and then all of a sudden it's not that way anymore. And we felt at that point that we had to do something that would let them know the kind of movie we were making, and that's what we did.
Margulies: What I loved about the opening scene is, when I watched it, it was like, "This is a Doris Day movie. What's going on?" You know? ... I thought that was really great. ... And then, you know, look, it's violence. It's gory. I don't see gory movies. It was unbelievably gory. And I thought it was pretty effective.
Beck: The intention there also was to create a set of contrasts that play against each other wonderfully, and it certainly seemed to be a nice opening to the film. Made you go, "What in the hell am I watching?" And then we've gotcha.
Do you know what makes a good horror film?
Beck: I would like to say yes, like I'm an aficionado. I'm not. I'm still learning quite a bit. But it seems to be the situation in any human experience. You go this way, then all of a sudden you look that way, and when you look around in the other direction, that's when you're frightened. And then you come back over here to laugh about it. That seems to be the most effective way to entertain people in this genre. Entertain being the issue, as opposed to shock. Some movies are very, very effective at shocking people. This was a Halloween party. That's what these movies are all about. They're Halloween parties, you know? Instead of a Christmas-fest, this is a Halloween-fest. In the Dark Castle vein, this is what a Halloween party should be like.
Silver: My partner, Bob Zemeckis, always says that horror films are the most cinematic of any real genre, because it really is all about the filmmaking. It's all about the camera. It's all about the sound effects. It's all about the music. It's all about all those elements together to make the audience uncomfortable so they react a certain way, which they like. ... I mean, we add to them by having them be fun, having them be funny and having a good time. We don't take ourselves seriously on this picture.
Margulies: I've never seen The Exorcist, I've never seen Jaws, because I don't want to not go in the water. I've never seen any of the Halloween [movies] or Freddy or Friday the 13th. I've never seen Scream 1, 2 or 3 and I'm sure they're funny. I just get [scared]. I know that I'm going to be home alone and I'll hear something and I'll immediately go to whatever scary movie I just saw and I'll freak out.
So this is your first role in a horror film?
Margulies: I'd never attempted it, because I'd never gone to see them. So it was so exciting. And I love action, and I love doing all the physical stuff. I've always been very athletic. And on Mists of Avalon, I had had so much fun being able to ride again. That I thought, how fun. I get paid and get a trainer and learn how to lift weights and rappel down the thing. That to me is the challenge.
Your character is very action-oriented, from the very first scene.
Margulies: I knew that was establishing shot. So I thought, if they can see that, then they know what's underneath it all, and we'll be fine. I hope. That was actually a lot of fun. I have to say, that was my funnest day on the set, was hooking up to that [zip line] and going out on it. I didn't get to go all the way across, insurance purposes, but I did have the most amazing stunt woman, Gillian, who's known as one of the best in the world.
What was your worst day on the set?
Margulies: That laundry-room scene. When she opens the thing and all that water comes out. That took us about three days, [though it] looks like five seconds on screen. We're wading through that water, and that water, they were filtering it out as best they could, and it was an amazing crew, but you know ... it's my face in the water. It was really filthy. The water came out, you've got the dead bodies. It was disgusting. I hated every minute of it. That's where I got very girly. Gabriel [Byrne] and Ron [Eldard] kept looking at me going, "You're a hero. You're a hero." We could have wetsuit bottoms under our pants, but we couldn't have any wetsuit tops.
Since you're not a horror fan, what attracted you to the role?
Margulies: I loved her. I've never seen a Hollywood, Warner Brothers, big studio movie where the lead is a woman who's real. And that they were offering it to me, I was like, "Wow, OK, they really want someone real who can make this as believable as possible." And knowing Gabriel Byrne was doing it and they wanted Ron Eldard, I was like, "These are actors I want to act with in a genre I don't know anything about." So it was an experience I really wanted to take on. And we had a ball.
How did you go about casting Julianna, the lead role for this film?
Beck: When we started casting for Epps, we wanted to find somebody, again, in the Ripley sort of mode. Someone that could just swear the skin off your back and then hold you afterwards and make you feel good about yourself. And we talked to a lot of people, and, frankly, she brings that reality to that character. She could cuss you up and down but at the same time she could outrun you down the hall. She had that natural ability to be believable as a dock worker, as a boat person, as somebody who on a tug, not even like the Love Boat, on a tug who could hold her own against five people. Julianna had that presence, and you didn't question it. We talked to some very, very talented actresses, but it was like, no. And we didn't think of Julianna to begin with, but when we got done with the meeting, the producer and I were like, "Oh my God. Epps just walked out the door." It was that quick and that easy to understand.
What did you learn about directing on Thirteen Ghosts that you applied to this film?
Beck: I think from Thirteen Ghosts, the one thing that I learned, more importantly than anything else, is endurance. Making a film, it's a very hard thing to do, from all directions. You sit in the chair all day staring at a little monitor. That's exhausting. But from every department's perspective, it's a lot of work. Everybody is always fighting against one singular enemy, and that's time. Everybody wants more time. The actors want more time. The D.P. wants more time. Everybody wants more time, including myself. You don't get it. And so you have this entire army fighting one simple force, and that's time.
How do you rely on visual effects without having them overwhelm the film?
Beck: In the case of Ghost Ship, we tried to stay with the human story, as much as the human story was telling us the story. Of course, we had to rely on special effects, because we couldn't afford a ship, believe it or not. We found one. It was in Greece. It would have taken us six months to get it to Australia, and that wasn't going to work for anybody. So we had to come up with a different way of getting the ship. That's the long and short of that effects story. But essentially, hopefully, this is more about people's illusions to life and their acceptance of greed and the acceptance of warnings, or avoiding warnings and moving on anyway. And hopefully, that shines through a lot more than the visual effects, because I think it's the human story that makes Ghost Ship a wonderful story. It sets Epps apart as just being some gun-toting knucklehead and actually being somebody who's got heart and somebody who's got a sense of right and wrong to herself. Somebody who cares about her crew. Somebody who really kind of walks on the edge to make sure they're successful. You know, Epps sticks her neck out time and time again, as is natural to Epps. And that's not a visual effect.
How did you go about creating the boat?
Beck: Of course, all the interiors were a set. Up on the upper deck ... that was built in the middle of a cow pasture. The bow of the ship, when you had the tug against it, we built the bow about 100 feet actual size of the ship and floated that on a barge and shot that in a small inlet bay on the Gold Coast in Australia. And that's really all the ship we had. Everything else was either visual effects or a large miniature.
Silver: There's a line in The Matrix where they say, "There is no spoon." And in this movie there is no boat. There is no boat. There's sets of a boat, there's a piece of the foredeck, but there is no boat. And you couldn't do this without that. I mean, knowing that we're not going to have a boat. We didn't need to shoot on the Queen Mary for a few weeks, we didn't need to have rent [a boat]. It's just all done with visual effects. So the idea [is] freeing your mind to build these movies, which essentially are one-set pictures. We make these movies at Dark Castle as one-set movies. And we start outside, we go inside, and then once we're in there and we lock our people into a place that they're unable to leave from, then we have the connection to shake it all up and make everybody feel what we want them to feel.
What do you think makes horror such an enduring genre?
Beck: We have a fascination with our own mortality. And I think that's people's fascination with the supernatural. We all want to know if we can phone home after we die or phone back. And I think that's what ghost stories are all about. There's sort of this reassurance that wink, wink, nod, nod, there's a possibility that we can still sort of like maintain contact. And I think that's all of our fascination with life. So I think that's the fascination also with these types of stories, ghost stories in particular.
How do you make something new and original in a genre which has reinvented itself so many times?
Beck: That's a really difficult question because, frankly, what you're having to do is convince a group of people that you're going to do something that they're not used to seeing. And oftentimes it's genius and oftentimes it's a complete flop. It just depends on the [director's] ability to convey what his vision is and make that succeed. In trying something new in this genre, I think the only thing new that can be applied is just keep going back to the human story. What's the human story involved? What's the arc? Where's the character depth? What makes the scare effective is what happens to the humans involved. And I think this picture works a lot on that level. There's some gross-out moments we went for because we figured, you know what, guys? This is entertainment. It's entertainment, and it's a party, and let's just have fun with it, and that's what we tried to do.
Do you still have fun making movies?
Silver: The process is great. I mean, I love the process. It changes. ... When we made Die Hard 2, which was 1990, we were devastated we couldn't find snow. I mean, it wouldn't even be a five-minute discussion today. In 10 years, the biggest problem in that movie wouldn't even be an issue. It's like there's more changes. There are things in The Matrix that are just things that people will have no way to deal with. They'll just lose their minds. It's just the blending of what we can do, from what's possible and what you can accomplish, [that] is just unbelievable now. And I think that it makes the process exciting and interesting. We're learning and experimenting every picture. It's not the same old thing. It's always something new and different.
What was the budget on this film?
Silver: This was the very low 20's. This is the catering budget on The Matrix. These movies are designed as a business plan—to make a movie that is affordable that we can do. This is, again, why they're one-set pictures. And to find some way to get great characters and really great actors in a confined story and a confined place, using visual effects the best we can.
What is it that appeals to you about the William Castle model of filmmaking?
Silver: The reason we love Bill Castle is because, I mean, his movies were notoriously inexpensive, but they were just based on one cool idea, and they were ghost movies. He loved the ghost movies. And we're doing the same thing.
Beck: What we're trying to make with these Dark Castle pictures, and this was an intention by Joel and the studio, make them more sophisticated, make them smarter, make them a little more complex. Like I said, it's not two hours of a guy chasing you around the house with a knife. It wants to have some depth to it, add some humor to it. I think that's what these are all about.
Also in this issue:
Frank Kelly Freas.
