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…
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.
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?
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 *
* 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!