David S. Goyer Talks The Forest; Exclusive New Stills
Staci Layne Wilson
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Shortly after attending the first-ever press screening for The Forest, a supernatural thriller about a young woman (Natalie Dormer) who fears her twin sister may have committed suicide, we got a chance to sit down with producer David S. Goyer to ask him about the experience of making this uniquely-set horror film.
Dread Central: It was good to see you introduce the film at the screening – seems you’re proud of it, which is great. Had you seen it with an audience before last night?
David S. Goyer: We did test screenings. I’ve seen it maybe three times with an audience now. But what I haven’t experienced yet is the finished color work and sound mix, and you know – sound is so critical to horror. The reaction has been very positive. The audiences love Natalie, they really like Taylor [Kinney], but the most overwhelming response has been to the setting and the mythology of the forest itself. They find that refreshingly different and exotic, and they wanted even more of it. That is a win, at least from my perspective.
DC: The director of The Forest, Jason Zada, had never done a feature before this… so what was the tipping point in his hire?
DSG: I’d seen Jason’s commercial work and I’d seen a short piece he did called “Take This Lollipop,” and I really liked it. The way I came on to The Forest is I was writing Man of Steel and I had to research for that; and as it happens, through a series of circuitous events, I found an article about the “suicide forest” on Wikipedia – I just donated money to Wikipedia, by the way; everybody should – and I’d just never heard of it before. Which is [something] because I am fairly well-versed in supernatural writing and films and what not, and I just couldn’t believe I’d never heard of this place and this kind of mythology, especially with all the J-horror films that have been made. I just couldn’t believe no one had ever made a movie about it. So, I’d made a movie with David Linde [producer] of Lava Bear, and we wanted to work together again. When he asked, “Do you have any ideas?,” I said, “Actually, I do!” And so I wrote up a little 2-pager about the suicide forest and he and his partner Tory [Metzger] really liked it and so we developed the script. I had access to a lot of young, upcoming writers and a lot of them are writers I had worked with in television who are super-talented but haven’t yet worked in features. Nick Antosca was one of them. So once the script was finished, we brought Jason on board.
DC: What did Jason bring to the table, specifically?
DSG: I think that the biggest thing was how we wanted this film to harken back to horror of the 70s, you know, like a Polanski film or Dario Argento, something like that. Don’t Look Now is one of my favorites, and Jason also has a love for those kind of movies. That’s what we really bonded over: We both wanted The Forest to look like a 1970s horror film. That extended through the cinematography and the score. I pulled in some of the people I’m used to working with. Bear McCreary, he won an Emmy for scoring my show “Da Vinci’s Demons,” and [so on].
DC: And this is really the only movie ever made about Japan’s suicide forest? I know there’s a bestselling book, but wow…
DSG: To our shock, once production began, we heard that someone else was making a suicide forest movie! So, no one had ever made a film about it, and now two productions are sort of gunning at the same time. But fortunately, ours is coming out first. We won that race.
DC: Thanks to old Hollywood movie clichés, most people tend to think film producers just sit behind a desk counting stacks of cash and checking box office numbers. But that’s not you – the story you told last night about the mosquito attack in the forest was… itchy. So you really got your hands dirty, huh?
DSG: As producer [I love to get my hands dirty]. I was helping with shooting inserts and things like that; I was right there in the forest. We did a couple days reshoots at the end in London because Natalie was there filming “Game of Thrones” and we only had a limited amount of time with her, so I was standing at Jason’s side through every step of that. But yeah, every producer is different. I think it’s more collaborative when a producer has a writing and directing background [as I do]. I tend to be pretty involved. I was with Jason every step of the way during post-production, in the editing room, special effects shots, [etc].
DC: How much time did you spend in Japan and on location?
DSG: We weren’t allowed to shoot in the actual forest, and shooting in Japan on this scale of budget can get expensive. But we did shoot [in a nearby forest] in Japan for about five days, which I think gives it a texture and makes it feel different from your average, run-of-the-mill horror film.
DC: Yeah, I agree: When you see that particular forest, you don’t expect to see Jason Voorhees with a machete. There’s something kind of mystical about it. For one thing, it’s so lush and green.
DSG: It wasn’t filmed in Vancouver, you know? You can tell. Not taking anything away from Vancouver, but we filmed it in Japan and Serbia, and not a lot of movies do that.
DC: You said you were going for a vintage 70s horror feel… so why do CGI ghosts and enhanced “gotchas”?
DSG: We wanted to do as much as we could practically and in-camera, but also… we’ve got jump-scares in the film, but we were determined the scares in the film would be about sound, they would be about suspense and dread and uneasiness. The [studio] was really great about embracing that. Having said that, there are probably a lot more digital effects in the film than people realize. There are over 300. It’s just that most of them are invisible, which for me is the best kind of digital effect. There’s a lot of composites, there’s a lot of shots where we filmed a portion of the frame in Serbia, and we filmed background plates in Japan near Mount Fuji and things like that and fused them together.
DC: Well, your actors are totally organic. I liked Taylor Kinney, especially. Tell me about working with him.
DSG: Yeah, Natalie is amazing, and we expected that. Taylor, for me, was a real revelation. To be honest, we actually had someone else cast who fell out about three weeks before we started shooting – luckily Taylor was available. We were blown away by Taylor. He completely holds his own with Natalie, and he’s got a really difficult role to play because he has to vibrate between being likable and kind of untrustworthy. Up until the very end. In fact, some people are still not sure if he was a good guy or a bad guy, and that’s exactly what we wanted. I think Taylor is going to be a huge movie star. He’s just got that “it” factor – he’s also an awesome guy, great, fun to hang out with.
DC: Please tell us about your upcoming werewolf series, “Brooklyn Animal Control” for USA network. Is it a comedy? The title is funny.
DSG: We finish filming next week, and we hope to hear about the series pick-up in the end of January. If all goes well, it should be premiering in the fall of next year. The tone is serious. It’s very serious! We’ve been jokingly referring to it as a cross between “The Wire” and a werewolf film. It’s cool. I think it’s going to surprise people. [It’s based on JT Petty’s original comic, published by IDW.]
Starring Natalie Dormer (“Game of Thrones,” The Hunger Games), Taylor Kinney (“Chicago Fire”), Eoin Macken (The Night Shift), and Yukiyoshi Ozawa, director Jason Zada’s The Forest hits theaters nationwide from Gramercy Pictures on January 8th and in the UK on February 26th. Dig on our exclusive stills below.
Natalie Dormer stars as Sara Price in Jason Zada’s THE FOREST, a Gramercy Pictures release.
Credit : James Dittiger / Gramercy Pictures
Natalie Dormer stars as Sara Price in Jason Zada’s THE FOREST, a Gramercy Pictures release.
Credit : James Dittiger / Gramercy Pictures
Natalie Dormer stars as Sara Price in Jason Zada’s THE FOREST, a Gramercy Pictures release.
Credit : James Dittiger / Gramercy Pictures
Synopsis:
Rising with terrifying grandeur at the base of Mt. Fuji in Japan, the legendary real-life Aokigahara Forest is the suspense-filled setting of the supernatural thriller. A young American woman, Sara (Natalie Dormer), journeys there in search of her twin sister, who has mysteriously disappeared. In the company of expatriate Aiden (Taylor Kinney), Sara enters the forest having been well warned to “stay on the path.” Determined to discover the truth about her sister’s fate, Sara will have to face the angry and tormented souls of the dead that prey on anyone who dares come near them. These malevolent spirits lying in wait for Sara at every turn will plunge her into a frightening darkness from which she must fight to save herself.
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