Marcus Nispel Talks Exeter, Remakes, and More!
Matt Boiselle
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Slice it any way you want – call him someone who latched onto former great ideas and polished them up for an entirely new regime of fans or a guy who made the leap from advertising to putting his love for the movies out there for all to see, but either way you look at it, Marcus Nispel has forged his way into the horror genre. While some fractions of the masses might not enjoy his offerings, he’s worked his tail off regardless.
We here at Dread Central had the pleasure of chatting it up with him for a few about a bunch of topics, from the release of his new film, Exeter (review), to his worries about tossing remakes to the lions, and what he’s got in store for Charles Manson and the family, so sit back and read on!
DC: For the people who might not be in the know about the film, can you give us a little description as to what it’s all about?
MN: Let me give you a little background as to how we arrived at the story first: Steven Schneider called me after his incredible successes, and he asked me if I wanted to do a movie for nothing, and if you do, you can do whatever you’d like. I knew a couple of things – that it wasn’t going to be a found-footage movie, and it’s not going to be a remake – I just thought it was about time we’d both done something different. For the longest time, I’d thought that The Exorcist had been the final word on possession movies, and that I’d never dared to either remake one of them or try to attempt anything like it, but so many have been made, and it would be interesting to make one that could be looked at with fresh eyes. Exorcisms happen to some select households or families – senators, movie stars – they always seem to be very kind of special, and I wondered how it would be if it happened to one of the young people who would go and watch these movies. So the group in this movie tries all of the stuff that they’ve seen in movies on one of their friend’s younger brother who’s just been possessed, so we essentially arrive at the “do-it-yourself exorcism.”
DC: The title of the movie was originally called Backmask, then it got changed to The Asylum, then finally settling in as Exeter – were you approving of all of these changes, or did you get to a point where you stepped in and said, “Ok, enough’s enough?“
MN: This was like a heat-seeking missile (laughs) – you know, it took more than one thing to convince me, and after the initial screening, a lot of people didn’t know what “backmasking” really meant, but to me that was never really the term, because I never knew what “Apocalypse Now” meant, but I still stood in line for it. I think you can give people question marks, and we have such a media-world where everything is spelled out for everyone so early on so that they know exactly what movie they’re going to watch. The other thing that happened was, we have an extremely long first act in this film, and taking the whole backmasking McGuffin out, we came up with the title as it stands now.
DC: With this story being created from the ground up, what did you see as the biggest difference between an original creation and the shooting of a remake?
MN: Good question for somebody like me, right? In many ways, it was like dropping a weight. If you do a remake, you’re a dog of many masters, and you’re holding up a torch for not just the people who own the property, but also for the fans who feel very strongly about what that should be. You have to try something new, and maybe to a fault, I try to do something new to my remakes, and they don’t really have to do a whole lot with the original outside of some of the original DNA, but that’s a difficult task, and you just ride and shoot your rocks off – it’s both very liberating and fun. Even though we weren’t doing a remake with this, we were still having fun – in some ways it was the same, but in others it was very liberating. I’m a former advertising guy, and doing remakes has more to do with advertising than it does arriving with an authentic movie, because there are so many rulebooks that you have to abide by.
DC: When you took on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 2003, and then Friday the 13th in 2009, were you at all worried about the fans of the originals not wanting to make the transition over to the new looks and ideas?
MN: In the case of Texas Chainsaw, I was one of the people who thought it shouldn’t be remade, and Daniel Pearl, who DP’d the original one and was a long-time DP of my music videos and commercials, actually talked me into doing the remake. He said that if I did it, he’d work on it with me, and he’d have worked on the same movie twice, essentially – once at the beginning of his career, and then again at the end of his career. So I thought that was good enough reason to get Daniel into the Guinness Book of World Records. Then you see the actors, and they’re acting out the guts and the blood, sweat, and tears that goes along with the work, and I’ve got to write this well, and then you get very obsessive, and then you read the onslaught of the fans: the expectations, and their feelings, and you say “oh my god, what have I gotten myself into?” Getting back into the genre is always a good redemption after a flop, and one thing is true – when you deal with a franchise, they’ve got a lot of love from marketing teams and big release companies, so when you try to make something out of nothing, such as the case with Exeter, it’s much harder because it’s not based on something that people can readily agree on. I went through a year of potential compromise where a lot of people said to tone down the comedy – go for the blood and gore, whereas others wanted comedy to override the violence, and this is the same stuff that Sam Raimi heard when he was making The Evil Dead. You’ve got to stick to your guns, and with this I felt the obligation to, and we came up with a release model that I’m very excited about, and thanks to DirecTV, we got a chance that we wouldn’t normally have had to do this in an uncompromised way – it’s a very quirky movie – almost like three movies in one, and it’s deliberately done this way – you’ve got a party movie, then something paranormal goes on, and then people get seriously hurt ! (laughs) I love that surprise factor where you can lull someone into thinking they’re watching one type of film, and then they’re forced to shift gears constantly. I always try to defy the way of making a movie fit into one specific slot, and sometimes it’s to a fault, like let’s put Indians and Vikings into the same movie – so now the people are saying “we gave you a perfectly good genre, and you fucked it up!”
DC: After the release of this film, what can we expect to see from you in the future?
MN: I almost hate to say this in this context because people could say “here’s this slasher dude back to his old tricks!” – but my approach to this movie is very, very different. I’ve been fascinated for a long time by Charles Manson and the family, and it looks like we’re getting very close to telling the story of Linda Kasabian, but what makes it so different from what you normally get to see when you see TV movies, which never do the story true justice because you can’t really tell it by taking sex and drugs out of the equation, and a lot of people saw him as a hermit that lived in Topanga Canyon, but how much he was in the entertainment industry, and how he developed scripts for Steve McQueen, and he also did b-side records for The Beach Boys, and he also wanted to be one of The Monkees. When I read this, I saw it as an ironic look at the star and celebrity obsessed culture that has become – everything is about fame, and when you really read the details of this whole story, it’s almost like Boogie Nights, where everybody does something for the first time, even if it is a cult. So hopefully that will be coming out next!
Exeter Release Details:
Viva Pictures and DIRECTV have acquired U.S. rights to EXETER, a feature film from the director of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Friday the 13th and the producers of Paranormal Activity and Insidious. The film will debut exclusively on DIRECTV on July 2 followed by a theatrical release by Viva Pictures later this year.
EXETER was directed by Marcus Nispel and written by Kirsten McCallion. The film was executive produced by Jason Blum and Steven Schneider.
After an all-night party at an abandoned asylum known for its horrific treatment of its patients, a group of ordinary teens decide to tinker with the occult, leading to a possession, a paranormal mystery, and into a bloody nightmare that no one could predict.
“I am thrilled to have our film EXETER premiere exclusively on DIRECTV, a premium platform that is also supported with massive P&A,” commented Nispel. “Horror fans can now enjoy my work ‘uncompromised.’ The marketing teams at Viva Pictures, BLKBX Creative Group, and DIRECTV have some serious treats in store to make this a true event and change the way of how movies will be mainlined.”
“The pedigree of Nispel and the producers made this an obvious choice for distribution,” says Viva Pictures’ President Victor Elizalde. “From the opening sequence to the end credits, audiences will be horrified in ways never before seen.”
“EXETER is an undeniably frightening and scary film. DIRECTV is thrilled to be working with Viva Pictures to bring EXETER to our subscribers before it hits theaters,” said Hanny Patel, senior director of Marketing, DIRECTV.
EXETER is the first film in the newly-formed partnership between Viva Pictures and DIRECTV to release films exclusively on DIRECTV during a 30-day window prior to their theatrical debut. This unique union provides national exposure for filmmakers with exceptional motion pictures to DIRECTV’s 20 million customers.
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