Exclusive: Barbara Crampton and Abner Pastoll Talk Road Games
Staci Layne Wilson
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Road Games follows hapless Jack, an Englishman backpacking through the rural French countryside, who finds himself trying to get home with nothing to his name but his passport and his thumb. Along the way Jack joins forces with another hitchhiker, a beautiful French girl, Véronique. Eventually they find a ride… but it’s not what they had in mind.
Holed up in a huge provincial manor house for the night, they begin to wonder if the residents – Grizard (Frédéric Pierrot) and his wife (Barbara Crampton) – might not be as hospitable as they seem.
We caught up with writer-director Abner Pastoll and actress Barbara Crampton at the Los Angeles press junket for the film, and here’s what they had to say about Road Games (review).
Dread Central: First of all, I’m curious to know if naming your movie after the 1980s Australian cult classic gave you any pause.
Abner Pastoll: No, not really. It’s a different film that uses the same title; there are so many movies that use shared titles. I think a lot of people are maybe getting a little bit confused thinking it’s a remake, but you know, once you get past that hurdle, people realize it is what it is.
DC: Some people are calling Road Games “Hitchcockian” – what do you have to say about that?
AP: I would say a lot of my inspiration is actually from music, other music scores. It’s really hard to pinpoint other specific films, but I think a lot of different filmmakers… we were actually talking about this last night. Sure, Hitchcock was a huge influence, but who did he not influence in a way as a filmmaker? One of the people we were talking about last night was Paul Verhoeven, who is also a huge influence. It’s really like subtle details… like I like all of Paul Verhoeven’s movies and I’m really excited that he made another one with Isabelle Huppert that’s coming out soon but yeah, my influences are really everywhere. Anything that I see, and I try to watch as much as I can… there’s always like one or two details from every movie that I get inspired by.
DC: All filmmakers have inspirations and aspirations, but sometimes what emerges is different. Once the DP adds his or her touches, locations are found, and cast comes in… so, how much of what was on the page is what we see in the film?
Barbara Crampton: Well, I said this just recently that I’ve never been in a movie where the outcome matched my thought of what it was going to be, or my vision in my mind of what it was going to be like when I first read it. I think everybody reads something and you have a picture in your mind of anything, whether you read a novel or a script or a short story, you see pictures in your mind and it’s from your subjective view. Movie-making is so collaborative, and so many other people have their own influences that they put into the mix, that when the stew is finally made and comes out, it’s just different; it’s always different than what you envision. Especially for me as an actor because I see everything through my character’s eyes, maybe not as much for you…
AP: Well, it was different for me too; it was a different process because I wrote the script and I’m directing it as well so it’s never exactly as I imagine it, but that’s part of the discovery of it. I’m very visual when I’m writing. I write as I see these images and I create the characters and the locations in that way and you have to try and find something that captures that. It’s never going to be exactly what you see in your head, but that’s actually what I find very exciting. Then you find these amazing locations and amazing actors, and it brings a new life to the material. So you know, the film looks very different than I imagined it and there were a couple of things that didn’t quite work the way I wanted them to, but overall I think it looks much better than I imagined.
DC: Barbara, you have to speak a fair amount of French as Mary. Were you already a speaker, or is it phonetic?
BC: You know, like a lot of Americans I took three years of language in high school and like a lot of Americans I don’t know any of it anymore because we never practice it or use it. So initially, I’m familiar with the French language obviously since taking it in school but since I didn’t practice it so much, I did have to hire somebody to help me phonetically and to kind of understand the meaning of certain things but it was fine; I didn’t find it too difficult. Also… my character is American and in the movie my first language is English so speaking French with an English accent is not that difficult and I did have a lot of time to work on it. But what I also thought is. if my character is mostly speaking French at home with my husband and now she has to speak English with Jack. then my English is also going to take on a little bit of a different tone to it… I think a lot of people speak two languages, then they have to go back to their original language and then go, ‘Oh how do I speak in English again?’ In certain scenes with Jack I had to think to myself, I mostly have been speaking French for whatever it is, twenty-five years and living there thirty years so, but… I thought my English needed to come out a little bit differently or haltingly, so that was kind of fun to work with, just fun to work with the English language in that way as well.
DC: Abner, how much of the characters is in the casting?
AP: Well, I would say that the character of the French husband was probably the one that was the most specific in my head when I was first starting to write it because somehow it was based on various aspects of people… I mean, all of the characters are based on people that I’ve met or I guess I was just taking elements [of] my own personal experiences and somehow putting them into the characters. It’s just like a natural thing for a writer to do that. I don’t know, I think that I specifically wanted all the actors to be different from each other because that’s what it’s about – different personalities clashing with each other.
BC: And having different feelings about the same issue. A serial killer in their midst and how does everybody feel differently about that.
AP: Exactly. And they’re all hiding something but you don’t know what they’re hiding and some of it is revealed in the movie and some of it is not revealed in the movie so you still don’t even know what some of the secrets are. For me that’s interesting because, in a sense, there’s more to be explored by discussion.
DC: You’ve had a fairly recent resurgence into the acting world, Barbara. And you’re playing really strong characters. Is that because there are better roles for women now, or are the filmmakers you know writing roles with you in mind?
BC: Well, that’s a good question; it’s kind of a big question too. You know, I took a break and moved to San Francisco with my husband; he got transferred with his job, and then I was just concentrating on being a mom for a while. Then out of the blue I was offered the role that I did in You’re Next, and because that was such a splashy hit and a really good movie, people became more aware of me: ‘Oh, she’s still alive, she’s still acting…’
Abner: That’s what happened to me.
BC: That’s what happened to Abner: ‘Oh, that’s Barbara Crampton; I remember her!’ And he actually contacted me personally to send me the script, and I think a lot of people have contacted me recently that have probably seen that movie. Then I was lucky enough to work with Ted Geoghegan, the publicist, on You’re Next, and then he wrote a movie, We Are Still Here. So I think I just kind of got lucky, but I also feel that I’ve grown into a different age bracket and the parts that I’m being offered now are a lot more interesting, have a lot more depth to them than when I was in a lot of the Stuart Gordon movies in the early Eighties. Even though I had some great roles in those films, I think the roles that are being offered now kind of move the story along a little bit more and also just have more layers, more depth to them, and I think I as a person have more layers and depth than when I was a late twenty-something actor. I really appreciate the work that people are offering me now, and a lot of these filmmakers that I’m working with today are young people… some of their earliest memories of watching movies are from the early Eighties; they saw Re-Animator and From Beyond and some of the other movies I did during that time so now they’re the ones creating movies, and I think they’re thinking of me for some of these older roles because they remember me from some of the movies they fondly grew up with.
DC: Okay, so I know Barbara is right there, but tell me, Abner – what’s she like to work with?
AP: She’s a nightmare! [laughter] No, I mean, to put it simply, it was the most amazing thing that could have happened at the time because Barbara is so encouraging, just a wonderful person and really hard-working and all she cares about is getting things done and getting them done right so when things were not necessarily moving on set, she would be there to say, ‘Come on guys. What’s going on? Let’s do it.’ She was like my first AD as well.
BC: That’s the mom in me as well, scolding all the little children.
AP: Honestly, that’s it; she’s the best person ever.
BC: And I was your wine-drinking buddy.
AP: Yes, my wine-drinking buddy. Shooting all day and drinking wine all night, or shooting all night and drinking wine all day.
DC: That’s our kind of film set! On that note – a little sommelier humor here – we’ll put a cork in it. Thanks, guys.
AP: Thank you.
BC: Thanks, Staci.
Road Games is out on VOD NOW from IFC Films!
Synopsis:
On a sunny summer day in the French countryside, drifters Jack (Andrew Simpson) and Véronique (Joséphine de La Baume) hook up and hit the road together. But when they accept a ride from a local oddball (Frédéric Pierrot), the pair find themselves thrown into a deadly game of cat and mouse in which nothing is what it seems. Bursting with nonstop twists and turns and an undercurrent of Hitchcockian malice, this riveting psychological thriller is a hell of a ride.
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