nyone who even remembers a no-budget 1971 cheese-fest called Willard recalls three things: It dealt with rats; it marked the cinematic debut of a skinny Bruce Davison; and it spawned a sequel whose only real distinction was a weirdly saccharine Jackson 5 song about a rat named Ben.
Why filmmakers in the 21st century would want to remake the cult movie is a question best left to the moviemakers themselves, genre mainstays James Wong and Glen Morgan (Final Destination, The One). But remake it they have, and they've included all three elements in post-modern guises.
Morgan—who with Wong started in television and wrote for The X-Files, Millennium and Space Above and Beyond—makes his feature-film directorial debut with the new Willard, which he has modeled on Alfred Hitchock's Psycho and The Birds as much as on the original film. Crispin Glover (Back to the Future, Charlie's Angels) takes on the role of the isolated young man tormented by a tyrannical boss and befriended by furballs with pink tails. Laura Elena Harring (Mulholland Drive) plays against type as the clean-cut Cathryn, the girl who reaches out to Willard.
Morgan, Wong, Glover and Harring took a moment last week to speak with Science Fiction Weekly about rats and Willard.
James Wong and Glen Morgan, this is not the movie that first comes to mind for a remake.
Wong: No. In his mind it is [gestures to Morgan].
Morgan: I felt that the story of someone who is alienated or lonely never kind of goes away. It was something that I understood or related to, I guess. It was something that was such a hit back then. It wasn't on cable a lot. It was hard to rent. So it wasn't like really in the public consciousness. But, I mean, people our age kind of remembered it.
So how have you tried to approach it differently?
Wong: We wanted to hit on sort of the same themes as the original, which is, there's the alienation of a person. But also hit it harder, too. That you can't become what you hate. At the end of the movie, Willard is basically set upon by Ben, because he becomes for the rats as his boss was to him. So we wanted to kind of illuminate that more in this version than in the original version.
And we thought that, with the advent of the technology we have available to us now, that we can make the scenes with the rats more horrifying. We can make the movie sort of more realistic in that way, that you can really sense the rats around us, how they would move. The character of Ben we really felt in the original movie wasn't as well defined as this one. It's not like a casting issue, but we actually went to get an African rat that has never been on a movie before. It's a much bigger animal than the original, the Norwegian rats that we know and love. So we really felt that in those ways we can really improve upon the first movie and at the same time help us define the theme better. That's why we felt that we could remake it.
Morgan: Even as a kid, what was interesting to me was, you were rooting for Willard to get the boss. But then you wanted Ben to get him, because he had treated him bad. And it was sort of very much like don't become what you hate, which has some definite resonance. I think a lot of that Freudian stuff is coming from Crispin. But what he brought up that I thought made sense was in the book [Ratman's Notebook by Gilbert Ralston] and the original [film], we made a little attempt to explain where the rats are coming from, but they just kind of appear. And he said he looked at it as a manifestation of his frustration and hate. And if you don't get that in check, it'll literally eat you.
Glen, how did you come to direct this one? [In their last two collaborations, Final Destination and The One, Morgan produced and Wong directed.]
Wong: They were sick of me [laughs].
Morgan: I know things about him that his wife doesn't want to hear [laughs]. No, you know, Jim and I have known each other since ... high school together, down in San Diego, and college together, and we've been doing this pretty much for 20 years. And that was always kind of the plan: He would direct one, then I would direct one. I really appreciated that Jim had a really nice career that he put on hold for a bit. ... Then next film will be his.
Wong: This is an opportunity for us, I think, to both have a professional career and also have a family life. The best scenario for us would be to be able to switch off, producing one and for the other to direct. Not saying that producing is not intensive. But it gives you more an opportunity to be with your family and all that. So hopefully this will be a way for us to live better, not just professionally, but with our families.
Can you talk about working with the rats?
Wong: Rat wrangling. My God. Here's my story. This is how the rats affected me. I shot the second unit for the movie, and we're sitting there on set, and there are 550 rats in cages around me, and they smell like you would expect. ... And you hear the claws. And I'm just sitting there minding my own business, and suddenly I feel like wetness on my lip, and I touch my lip, and there's blood. That's my most intense moments with rats, because they actually caused my nose to bleed just from being around them.
Morgan: I didn't have a rat thing. But there's a scene in the dining room, the kitchen, and there's an island. And then when you've got to go really fast, you're going, "Oh, I need you to stand over there." And you kind of realize that there's hundreds of rats under your arm, you go, "Ugh. Do what you want."
They were never actually free in a sense that they could go anywhere. The stage and the sets were always kind of partitioned so there was only a certain amount of places where they could go. ... Obviously we didn't harm any animals when we did the movie. The rats were actually so well taken care of. Every rat was labeled. They were weighed every day.
Wong: They were given antibiotics before they came, because we shot in Vancouver, and the rats were bred here. So when we crossed the border ... can you imagine the border guards saying, "Well, what do you have in your truck?"
How important was the casting of Crispin?
Morgan: Frankly, I wrote it with a friend in mind, Doug Hutchison, who was the sadistic guy in The Green Mile. And he did an X-Files for us [as Eugene Tooms in "Squeeze"]. And for whatever reason, New Line said no. And they were going after a little more handsome leading-men types.
Wong: It was kind of the usual-suspects kind of casting. ... We'd always had kind of three guys we thought of. Doug, obviously, ... and then Crispin, of course, and then Jeremy Davies [Solaris]. We thought those three guys, any one of them could be Willard [and] perfect for this movie. And I think after New Line decided that Doug was not the right person, everyone thought that Crispin was the right person, including us. Crispin has a reputation that is probably not deserved.
Morgan: People told us you'll never get the film done.
Wong: Because he's known to be eccentric, or even worse than eccentric. But what we found is that it's totally false. ... He's nothing but professional. He has the film in mind. If he had questions or feelings about what he should be doing, it's not because of ego or what he thinks his character should be. It's really about the movie as a whole, which is really interesting to find for an actor. Usually actors are more interested in their roles and nothing else.
Morgan: So what happened was, they were kind of running out of handsome guys. And we said, "Well, we like Crispin Glover." And they didn't really respond to that. So an executive at New Line was calling an agent in regards to another actor, and the executive said, "Well, the guys like Crispin." And that agent, I don't know who it is, said, "Oh, my God. If he played that part, I'd want to see that movie 75 times and still not be satisfied." So, of course, the studio hears that. "Get that guy."
And he came in and said, "Hello." And I thought, "Oh, Jesus." ... That was just my nightmare, to work with a difficult lunatic. And then within a couple of minutes, we just hit it off.
Why did you choose Laura?
Morgan: Again, I kind of had my wife, Kristin [Cloke], in mind. And then she became pregnant, and then we had to wait for Kristin. And you start getting names of actresses who are really good, but sometimes they had been associated with more B caliber [work]. And I thought Laura was great in Mulholland Drive, and it would kind of make a statement. She sort of made a statement to the kind of movie we were trying to do, because you could get a lot of people. But she's classy and a really good actress and really seemed to be able to represent what Willard could have had if he had chosen that. And we worked hard to get her.
How consciously Hitchcockian did you make it? That scene where the rats were lining up on the couch looked a lot like The Birds.
Morgan: I love that scene. Tippi Hedren. ... It's humbling. ... To try to capture that rhythm in an era when the audience doesn't search the screen.
What about balancing comedy and horror?
Wong: That's what we wanted to do. We didn't want to set out to make a slasher/horror/animal creature movie. I think Glen did an incredible job in making the audience feel one way and then another.
Working with the rats, did anyone get bit?
Wong: No. The rats were aggressive to each other. The incredible thing was, the big Ben rats, the Gambian rat, could not be in the same vicinity as the other rats, the regular rats. ... Even though I think Glen did a great job of not showing that, they were never next to each other where they could harm each other.
Did you shoot this gorier than it ended up?
Morgan: We cut it because New Line asked us to do a cut for PG-13. And in doing so, there were actually scenes that we shot when I was on the set I was grossed out by.
[WARNING: Possible spoilers ahead.]
When Mr. Martin [R. Lee Ermey] gets killed, there were scenes where the rats are burrowing into his body, and there were really disturbing things. But as I was shooting it I really felt, "Oh my God, what am I doing? This is really bothering me." But when we showed the movie and New Line decided that we wanted to go for PG-13, all those things had to go.
Why did you name the cat Scully and kill it?
Morgan: I didn't think about that until after. I thought that character would have a cat named Scully. And we always have inside jokes. I didn't really think about it until after I did it. There's one shot, it's a scene, but there's a shot that had to be cut out. Right after the cat is attacked, it's Crispin and Socrates, and he's going, "Scully, where are you?" And then he goes to look under the bed, and the camera went down. He says, "Socrates, I can't find Scully." And then they come back up, and Ben is on the bed. And the first screening, and he goes, "Scully, where are you?" And some guy in the audience goes, "She's looking for Mulder." It's inescapable.
Crispin Glover, why did you want to do Willard?
Glover: I was working on another film when the script came. First, my agents called me and asked if I'd be interested, that there was interest in me for this, and would I be interested? And initially it sounded interesting to me. And then I got the script, and I read it, and it was a great character, and I really liked it. So I immediately said, "Yes, I'd like to," and the negotiations started for it. I had never seen the film before that. I was aware of it. I knew kind of what it was about, but I'd never seen it. And then I watched it after the negotiations had started for it. But I had already had an idea in my head of what it's supposed to be, so it seemed different to me.
How do you come up with the physical bits?
Glover: There's different ways that I'll go about doing things. ... In this particular film, there was a lot of emotional stuff that I had in the film. ... I'm not a particularly lachrymal person in my real life, I'm not tearful, really—but it was written in the script that there was a lot of tearfulness. And sometimes, when I read that, I think it's not good writing, and it doesn't necessarily psychologically make sense for the character. But I did think it made sense for this. But I talked to Glen about it, because I think there can be something bad about that writing for actors when it's written that way, because it can make for a forced kind of thing. And I really don't like that. So I said to Glen, "I'd rather that there was a little bit of real emotion than a lot of fake emotion." And he said he totally agreed with that. ... That was hard work, actually. That takes a lot of concentration, and I did work hard on that stuff, and I am proud of that stuff. That's one of the reasons I'm really wanting to promote the film is I'm excited about it. I feel good about the performance.
How did you maintain that level of intensity? Did you stay in character during the shoot?
Glover: People talk about method acting and staying in character, and it's kind of an easy media shorthand for something. ... I do think one of the best ways of getting stuff is so-called staying in character. But ... there can also be a difficulty with that, too, [because] you need to communicate with people, and you need to deal with people on a very straightforward basis. And ... if I felt like I was being offensive to somebody, it would distract me from the concentration of what I needed to be dealing with at hand in the scene. ... I stayed to myself a lot and concentrated on that stuff.
What about working with the rats?
Glover: The rats were great, actually. I really liked them. They were so well trained. I was really impressed with that, because there's a cat and a dog in the film as well, and those are actually much more difficult to work with than the rats. ... With the food rewards, they were able to make the rats go in specific patterns up and down my arm to a certain point, into a coffin. And these were during very emotional scenes for me. And ... the trainers were sensitive to that kind of thing. And these rats did it perfectly every time.
If you could command rats, who would you kill?
Glover: I probably wouldn't. ... But in the fantasy element, I shouldn't say, but it would probably be somebody in the film industry. But I won't say who.
They said you came up with the Freudian undertones of this?
Glover: Glen said that? I did think that, but I thought that was in the writing. I don't remember if I had talked to him. I think he said that that was on his mind. ... There are certain things that I think were very clear about correlations between Ben [and] the father, the mother [and] Socrates. ... I'm still, like, curious as to what the reaction to the film is going to be.
Can you talk about working with Laura?
Glover: What I thought was important for that character was that there was an empathy for Willard. And she has that quality about her. So I thought that was really good. And she was very helpful and nice to work with. Both her and Lee Ermey were helpful to me for the character. They're both great to work with.
Laura Elena Harring, this is a strange follow-up to Mulholland Drive.
Harring: Well, Mulholland Drive was very scary, too. ... There's such a fascination right now ... about testing ourselves and facing our fears, and I love that about being an actor, ... that you get a chance to do that. And certainly working with rats was testing my capacity for not being frightened.
You didn't have to do too much rat stuff?
Harring: No, I didn't. There was only that one scene. But I was around them. And I held Socrates one time. ... It was fine. He was actually quite cute. Ben was a little bit bigger. He was really scary and creepy. Have you seen the show Fear Factor? I mean, there's a real fascination with watching people test themselves.
You were not gorgeous in this film.
Harring: Thank you. That's good. That's wonderful.
You're not used to that.
Harring: No. I like that, I really do. They don't give me enough chance to do that. But I enjoy that very much. In fact, many times they say "too glamorous" for a certain big Hollywood picture or whatever. And after Mulholland Drive, people see me in that old-world type of way. So I am trying. And I am glad. That's why I said thank you. It was sincere. It's a wonderful thing that you notice that I'm trying. And I'm even going to go further with that.
Did you have a background story for your character?
Harring: Oh, yes. I feel that Cathryn was a lost soul. And managed somehow to put her feet on the ground and kind of found who she was a little bit, found her soul a little bit, and therefore was able to reach out to Willard. [She's] just all compassion, can see through Willard's eyes, the pain that he's going through, which is actually the reason that I was attracted to the film. When I was reading it, I felt Willard's pain. So much so that the script made me react. I had watery eyes when I read it.
What is Crispin like to work with?
Harring: Wonderful. Really wonderful. It's an amazing thing that people always ask me what it's like to work with strange actors or strange directors, and I'm beginning to think that I'm the one that's strange or weird, because I see nothing strange about them, a David Lynch or a Crispin Glover. And it was an amazing journey to work with Crispin. He's very intense. He's a method actor. And there was a moment where I was in his dressing room, and it was very dark, very dark. And we had had a conversation earlier that he had said that he had wanted to maybe experiment a little bit and not work in that way, which is method. But when I went to his dressing room it was all very dark. ... I grew and learned from him, and we supported each other. ... I didn't see one difficult situation. There was not one. So it's kind of disappointing, because everybody wants to hear all the juicy stories, but there really are none. He's amazing.
Did you have any nightmares?
Harring: I really, honesty, overcame my fear during filming. But I saw Ben ... as a little girl, I was horrified. I had [bad] dreams, and I remember, we talked about it. ... I think since Willard I had ... two rat dreams.
When you were working in India as a social worker, you encountered rats?
Harring: I was watching a movie [in] a huge theater, and it was very dark, very black. You couldn't see anything, but you could hear this crickling sound. Crickle crickle crickle. And I kept saying, "What is that?" ... And finally I put my feet up. ... And then intermission came, and this huge rat, this size, was crawling down across the ... screen, and I walked. I could not see the end of the film.
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The cast and crew of Enterprise
