Andrea, Jean-Baptiste (Dead End)
In Dead End, a very John Hughes-like scenario is turned inside out when a family en route to grandma’s house on Christmas Eve, find themselves stuck on a lonely stretch of road that never ends. A road where ghostly terror is lurking in the shadows. Having traveled the film festival route, Dead End is now available to check out on home video courtesy of Lions Gate Home Entertainment. Dread Central correspondent Axl caught up to one half of the film’s directing team and had a chat with Jean-Baptiste Andrea…
Axl: First off, how does a Paris-based screenwriter get to direct a movie in L.A?
Jean-Baptiste Andrea: I’d been a screenwriter for 6 years, always with the idea that I would someday direct what I’d written. I was working with Fabrice [Canepa, co-writer and co-director of Dead End], but we couldn’t find anyone interested in funding one of our projects in France. So at one point we decided to write something that wouldn’t cost too much to direct, and to write it in English so we could try to sell it outside of France. At first we sent the script to a few production companies here in France but they never replied. We finally handed it to James Huth, who eventually became our producer, and he sent it to a friend of his in the US. So all of a sudden in three months time we got all the funding we needed. We had two French producers, but the whole production crew was American. We came back to Paris for post-production, except for the music and post-sync. Mixing was done in Switzerland. I’d been working in theatre since I was fifteen; it was a passion so it never occurred to me that I could study theatre or cinema in college. I studied something I thought was more serious and after graduation I immediately started writing for the screen, created my own little company and started filming with a small camera and a few friends.
Axl: So how did you learn about all the technical aspects of directing a movie?
JBA: I read a lot, watched lots of movies, analyzed them frame by frame and learned it all by myself. When I’d started that production company with two of my friends we thought we’d direct documentaries. It didn’t really work out so we wrote a pilot for a TV show and filmed it ourselves with a small crew; I learned a lot from that experience. You can be a director even if you don’t have any technical notions; you can simply rely on your crew. I was interested in these technical aspects so I did learn about them, but once I’d explained what I wanted for a shot, I wouldn’t interfere with the DP’s work for example. Everyone was free to bring a few extra ideas in his work and the DP came up with extra details I hadn’t thought about, which was great because I love being surprised by what the actors or the DP can add to a movie.
Axl: Where does the idea for Dead End come from?
JBA: First of all, it had to be fantastic because we love the genre and we knew that it would appeal to a type of audience that we really like. Horror buffs are real film fans; they’re very smart and usually more knowledgeable than most film fans. The idea itself comes from the hitchhiker story (a driver picks up a hitchhiker on a dark and deserted road and the hitchhiker disappears without a trace); it’s actually an international myth that you can find everywhere in the world in slightly different forms; sometimes the hitchhiker is evil; sometimes they’re good and warn you against a danger. The version that traumatized me as a kid was the one that takes place in the South East of France: it’s called the Torne and I imagined it as a woman dressed in white. I’d also read a story in the Bibliotheque Rose – a very popular series of children’s books in France – in which a woman in white appeared in a garden and it terrified me, so the image stayed with me.
Axl: How did you divide work on writing the screenplay and directing?
JBA: Dividing work on writing was very easy; we just sat down together in front of the computer. Some people work separately then put it all together; we really worked together all along. I find it easier to have someone who immediately reacts to what you want to write down; but you really gotta find someone who’s got the same type of ideas, someone you can see eye to eye with, and that’s what I’ve found with Fabrice.
Besides when you embark on something this impressive, it’s comforting to share it with someone else. We did have a few minor differences of opinion when we directed; for instance when we edited the brain masturbation sequence. I think the way we edited it was too on the nose, not subtle enough. We got two inserts of her fingers in her brain, and I thought it only needed one. The scene is so violent that you get the idea even without the inserts, and it’s powerful enough. My point of view on this one was clearly ‘less is more.’ Talking about editing, the movie’s only 80 minutes long because we sacrificed a few scenes that didn’t really bring much to the story; I didn’t care about the movie’s length as long as we only kept what really mattered; there was no point adding superfluous scenes just for the sake of it. We’ve also changed the order in which some sequences appear on screen. My first idea was to start the movie with Lin Shaye looking at a bunch of family pictures – her son’s birthday party. You can still see one of the pics at the end of the credits. It was a way for me to introduce the family. So I insisted on filming the sequence, we filmed it and when I watched it I found it to be terrible. So we decided to kick off the movie with a scene that was supposed to be a bit later in the story.
Axl: What can you tell us about the casting?
JBA: We immediately loved Alexandra Holden. I’d already seen her in Friends, where she played Elizabeth, Ross’s girlfriend in season 6. We’d seen lots of other people but when she auditioned I knew she was the one. Mick Cain was too old for the part but he showed up dressed as a teenager, and he was so funny that we decided to pick him anyway. We’d already had someone to play the mother but she changed her mind two weeks before shooting began. Lin Shaye had heard of the script and told us she wanted the part and we said yes right away, even though she wasn’t exactly what we’d had in mind at first – we’d thought about someone more conventional; Lin’s a bit stranger – but she was amazing. As for Ray Wise, we hadn’t cast anyone for his part until three weeks before shooting; we simply couldn’t find who we were looking for. So the casting director asked us what type of actor we had in mind and we said, ‘we’d like someone like Ray Wise’. But we never even thought we could actually have Ray Wise! He read it in 24 hours and said yes the next day. Two days later we had a meeting with him and had a car accident on the way! The only car accident in my entire life… After we’d completed the casting, two days before we started shooting, I had this weird feeling; I felt like the movie itself was completed. Like no matter what could happen now, the movie was made and no one could take it away from me. I went for a walk and spent an hour on Mulholland drive looking at L.A, it felt so great. It was a magical time.
Axl: Where did you find that long road where Dead End takes place?
JBA: We shot it in L.A, 3 minutes away from Sunset Boulevard on Franklin Canyon. We wanted a very long, straight and narrow road with trees on each side like the one you see on the poster, but there’s nothing like that in L.A. We even thought about re-writing the script to re-locate it in the desert because we just couldn’t find the right road; but after a while we discovered a 400 meter-long section of road with rocks on one side and trees on the other, that we could close for night shooting. Of course since there were trees on only one side of the road we had to turn the car around to shoot the other side; we also had to paint yellow marks on the road to make it look longer.
Axl: There’s been quite a fuss on the web about the ending of Dead End; what can you say about it?
* SPOILERS *
JBA: The idea for the ending comes from a short film that we’d written a few years ago. The only thing we wanted was to make people believe that one thing had happened when it actually hadn’t. Sixth Sense got released while we were writing Dead End and it played on the same type of idea so we wondered if we could keep this twist ending, and we realized our movie wasn’t about its ending. Dead End is about how this family goes to pieces in this extreme situation. We knew some people would guess the ending but thought it didn’t really matter because it wasn’t what the movie was about anyway. It probably was a mistake because the people who’ve guessed feel frustrated because they would’ve liked to be proven wrong. I like the ending; at one point we thought about not putting it in the movie and leaving it open, but then we would have been frustrated as screenwriters; it’s such an easy solution to leave things open and not answer to anything… We also wanted something rational; Fabrice and I both like it better when supernatural elements are rooted in reality, otherwise the story’s no longer scary. It has to look real to be scary, the way Sixth Sense is. And we played on humour – “I’m a collector” can be interpreted both ways… The last image, with the note Ray Wise wrote, also changes the way you interpret the story. The two realities cannot be conciliated and you have to make your own choice. People took the ending too seriously; all we wanted was to have fun with the fact that we had the freedom to put these two realities together. Now of course if people hear about the so-called twist ending all the time, they’re more likely to guess what it is and be frustrated…
* END OF SPOILERS *
Axl: What’s up next?
JBA: I have a couple of projects I’m working on at the moment, but can’t really say much about them right now. They will very likely be produced out of France, in English. There’s such a huge difference between the US and France in the way people see the movie business, their open-mindedness, their enthusiasm… Things can go so much faster in the US, especially when you work in fantasy or horror.
Special thanks to Jean-Baptiste for chatting with us and to Lions Gate Entertainment!
Categorized:Interviews News
