Form, Andrew & Fuller, Brad (The Amityville Horror)
They are two of the men that did what once was thought impossible; they helped remake The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It was not only ballsy, but also somewhat dangerous when you consider the short tempers of some horror fans, but luckily they managed to show that they had what it takes to re-imagine a classic horror film and give it a good update for the 21st Century. Now they’re back with another 70’s remake, though this time of a film not quite as flawless as the original TCM, The Amityville Horror.
Our man Sean was on hand for the recent press junket, and proved himself to be the most Amityville-savvy man in the room. Read on!
Question: What did you cut out that was gross and bloody?
Brad Fuller: Not that much, actually. Well, there is a big sequence we cut out, with the kids, that was in the original movie where the window comes down on the kids’ hand. We did that because, it was really early on in the production, and it just never gelled. But the end of the scene is cool where the window almost takes the kids head off.
Andrew Form: We did the head, not the hands. It missed his head by an inch. That will be on the DVD.
BF: Other than that, it’s pretty much all in there.
Q: Speaking of gore, how much is too much? How do you balance gore with psychological thrills?
BF: I don’t think you know how much is too much until you show a movie to an audience. You think you have a sense. Andrew, the director, came up with the concept to do the scene with the finger in the head. Drew and I sat on the set and he looked at me and I looked at him and he said, “There’s no way that’s getting in the movie. That’s way over the line.”
AF: And we shot that scene two ways; one way with, one way without.
BF: From the day that was shot, no one thought that was going in the movie. You see it in the editing room, people start filing in, you start showing it to friends, and people start responding to it, proving that what we think isn’t always the ultimate determiner of what is too far or not far enough. People seem to gravitate towards that scene (laughs).
Q: How did Andrew Douglas get the job? He’s virtually unknown.
BF: Very similarly to the way Marcus Nispel got the job on Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Coming out of the commercial video world, we were looking for commercial video directors that Michael wanted to give their shot to and help through the process. We had a great exchange with Marcus on Chainsaw. We were looking for a director on Amityville, and his reels were amazing. We saw three or four guys, they all came in, and Andrew Douglas just pitched us the movie that we wanted to make.
Q: Speaking of which, what can you tell us about the prequel to Texas Chainsaw Massacre?
BF: The prequel is three years before the Jessica Biel movie. It is an origin movie, and we are going to tell the story of why he became Leatherface.
Q: Will Andrew Bryniarski be returning as Leatherface?
BF: We have not made any decisions yet.
AF: R. Lee Ermey is in the movie, hopefully. He has some really fun stuff in this movie. If you liked him in the last Chainsaw, you will love him in this one. He has a lot to do and he is really fun.
Q: Any good eye candy?
BF: Oh yeah. The first fifteen pages we learn about Leatherface and then there’s a group of kids who come across him and they get snagged.
Q: Kosar is not writing it?
AF: No. David Schow, who wrote The Crow, is writing it.
Q: Both remakes you’ve done are both based on true stories. How important is it in any of these movies that you try to convince the audience that it’s based on a true story?
AF: In Amityville there was no debating the Defeo murders. In the opening of the film, he [Ronald Defeo] says that the house made him do it. Maybe he changed his story over the last thirty years in prison, but Ronald Defeo, when he came out of the house, heard voices, the whole Katch’em and Kill’em thing, there was a book that was found that he was scribbling on, and he murdered his entire family. We do know that the Lutzes moved in and left within 28 days. A lot of people will debate what happened in that house, but the truth is only five people know, and Kathy Lutz just died during filming. So it’s just George and the three kids who really know what happened in that house.
Q: Have you spoken to George?
AF: No. The kids have never spoken. Since the book has been written, no one has been able to speak to the kids.
Q: Why do you think that is?
AF: I think it was really traumatic for those three. They were young. The movie made close to ninety million in ’79, and the book sold ten million copies. The Lutzes were all over the place.
Q: Did you have any access to the original house at all?
AF: No, someone lives in the original house, and you can’t even tell what it looks like. They’ve taken the famous iconic eyes out, and changed the address.
BF: I went there, I checked it out, and I wanted to see what it was. Since he grew up there [indicating Andrew], he’s seen it. I had never seen it.
Q: What about the movie house in Tom’s River, New Jersey?
AF: I talked to the owner of the house, we talked about it, and we decided that we were going to do something different. We found this lake in Wisconsin and decided to build what you saw in the film.
Q: Is the house an exaggeration?
BF: Yes. As a company we are attracted to real-life stories, or at least stories that are rooted in truth because if it feels more real to you as a viewer, it has a deeper effect. We’ve been brought a lot of horror films, but the only ones we’re really interested in are the ones that are based in truth.
Q: Have you contacted the Lutzes to try to get them involved?
BF: Very early on MGM said they were gonna take care of the Lutzes and for us to just do our thing and if we went too far they would let us know.
AF: There was also a competing project that Dimension was controlling, which George Lutz was involved in, and we were trying to keep the projects separate. So there was the one that he was involved in which was 25 years later, and there was our project, with the 28 days, which MGM controlled the rights to and the Jay Anson book. So it was a little tough in the beginning.
Q: Did you try the Defeo Family?
BF: We reached out to Ronald Defeo.
AF: We wanted to go see him. We wrote him a letter in jail but he never responded…we only know the research that Scott Kosar was able to come up with. I mean, there’ s a book out there, “The Night the Defeos Died,” that was written all about them. It’s so hard to tell the truth about it; if you go on the Internet there are so many crazy stories and theories.
Q: What is your personal opinion? There have been a lot of reports that the Lutzes were hired by the Defeo’s attorney to solidify Ronald’s insanity plea.
AF: My personal opinion? I think that the Lutzes bought that house, moved in, and I think something happened in those 28 days because I don’t believe that they were that smart, to come up with the whole book thing. Knowing that they were gonna get the book deal, and sell ten million copies, and get out of your house within 28 days and make it all work.
Q: So why do you think nothing has happened in that house since?
BF: Well, that is subject to debate. Some people say that some things have happened. It’s hard for us to find that out because no one is calling us and telling us what happens in the house.
AF: I do know that Missy Lutz came out recently saying that she did have an imaginary friend named Jodie, and George says the same thing. We know that Jodie character did exist when the Lutzes lived there.
Q: Are you considered exploiters by people who care about this issue?
BF: I don’t really know. I don’t think I have gotten any emails…
AF: We did when we did Chainsaw. People hated us when they found out we were making that movie.
BF: But that comes with the territory.
Q: Who hated you?
AF: The die-hard fans who couldn’t believe we were gonna touch that movie. How can you ever touch the Texas Chainsaw Massacre?
Q: But not the people of Wisconsin where Ed Gein was?
AF: No, we never heard from them.
Q: I’m guessing the current owners of the house can’t be too happy about this film being made.
AF: I can’t imagine that Amityville is too happy with us right now. It’s so funny; I just got a picture, when you take the Long Island railroad. If you go through the Amityville station, it’s all our movie posters (laughs). They took everything out. When you see the Amityville sign for the station and then it’s just, “April 15th.”
Q: Now, a bit of Amityville/Defeo murder lore. Why do you think no one heard the shots when Ronald Defeo shot his family? Is it possible he had a silencer on the gun?
AF: He didn’t have a silencer. That is the part of the story….I sat down and talked to Kenneth Gregusky, who was the first cop on the scene when the murders happened and I also spoke to the coroner Adelman. Both those guys say they don’t think anything weird was going on, and they don’t believe that the house is haunted. But when I ask them the question about how that happened, no one could explain it. When you go there and see that house, you see that the houses are so close together and the thing that both these guys said to me was, “You can hear that gun from half a mile away and someone should have gotten out of bed” and no one could explain why no one got out of bed. Everyone was in his or her beds, in the same position. I mean, that’s an odd thing. In our story, she [Jodie] gets out of bed and gets killed in the closet. That’s not what really happened. They were all in their beds, face down.
Q: To me that was always one of the most intriguing things about the story, so why make that change?
BF: Well, we really needed to have that character and we needed to hang a lantern on it early so that when she’s a ghost for the rest of the movie, you know it. And if she was just in her bed, we couldn’t really do that. You had to see her in a way and feel something for her, and when she’s up against the wall hopefully you feel sorry for her. And you remember her.
AF: And why she is in the house and no one else is. Why the other five members are not haunting the house.
Q: What can we expect on the DVD?
BF: I don’t know. MGM hasn’t really talked to us about it.
AF: We did all of the interviews we did with Gregusky, Adelman, and Lorraine Warren. Those will all be on the DVD. Great interviews. They haven’t done too many interviews, those people. Brad went to New York and shot them and they say really interesting stuff. The people who were there that witnessed the real stuff.
Q: One thing I would love to see would be the old “In Search Of” episode. Any chance of that being on the DVD?
BF: You know, I don’t know!
AF: We should try.
BF: Someone else brought that up to us. It all MGM you know. It’s a studio in flux. It’s probably going to be Sony I guess. They haven’t spoken to us about that so I don’t know.
Q: How do you feel about the timing of this studio change?
AF: It was bizarre that Dimension was the other partner on the movie. It was pretty interesting with both studios in flux like that. Of the three of our companies, I am certainly the most neurotic. When you’re making a movie and you start hearing rumors that both studios were going out of business, it becomes very unsettling. To both of their credit, neither one of them faltered in their production of the movie. I am not just saying that, either, these companies were always supportive. We’re happy with our commercials and our poster, and we think our trailer is effective, so there is nothing that we can point to about the company going out of business that has negatively affected the marketing of this movie. They got us commercials on “American Idol” and they’re buying on the right shows. Hopefully the audience out there finds the movie.
Q: Did you guys notice anything strange while shooting the film?
BF: The first week of shooting they found a body in the lake. We were at the house, and this lake is not a really big lake, there are not people passing out and dying in that lake…
AF: It’s not Lake Michigan
BF: This is a small little lake in a small community. And Kathy Lutz died the first week of production. One day Drew and I get to work and security guards and police were telling us that lights were going on and off in the house at night. Just stuff like that.
And you know you’re screwed when you’re waking up at 3:15 in the morning and you’re working on this movie…and that happened. You laugh about it but when you look up at that clock you go “whoooah. That’s not good.” It’s hard to get back to bed.
Q: Are you guys keeping the house you built in Wisconsin? Is it being kept for potential sequels?
AF: Half of the house is real. It’s 100 years old. The inside architecture of that home that you see in the movie is real. We built half of the house out, the iconic face. So half of the house is ours that we can rip down again, and then it would be a normal house again. It is still up right now. We’re trying to figure out what to do with it. It was expensive.
Q: Will you still be using the house in Texas for the Chainsaw prequel?
AF: Yeah, we’re going back to Austin.
BF: Well, I don’t know if we’re gonna use the same house or not. It is an origin story and it’s three years before. The writer hasn’t told us if they are living in the same exact house. Obviously we’re going to want to have the steel door and some of those things.
AF: A lot more Slaughterhouse in the new Chainsaw.
Q: Are there any other horror movies you want to remake?
AF: One of the movies we are looking at as a remake is the Rutger Hauer movie The Hitcher. We’re talking about that one.
Q: When is that going to happen?
BF: It’s a long ways away.
AF: We need to get a writer; we’re talking to Universal. They own it. But that would be the next one we do as a remake.
Q: Why is the genre so enticing to you guys?
AF: When I go the movies, I wanna feel something. Horror elicits such an immediate response. You sit in your seat and you know you’re gonna feel something. I have always liked horror movies, my whole life. The Exorcist, The Omen, The Shining, the movies I grew up with. All the way through I had fun with the Elm Streets and the Freddys and the Michael Myers movies. I’ve always been a fan of the genre.
Q: Are you guys ever going to take a chance on an original horror film instead of just remaking them?
AF: Sure.
BF: It’s hard to find great stories. We read every horror script that’s out there, and it’s just hard to find something that we respond to.
AF: No Japanese for us. No Japanese remakes yet.
Q: All of these production companies that have come out to do exclusively horror films have been very successful. What’s the secret?
BF: In terms of other companies, I don’t know what they’re doing. We just try and make horror movies with really good writers and actors that people don’t expect to see in our movies because we think that adds something to it.
AF: Nobody expected to see Ryan Reynolds in The Amityville Horror. We knew that from early talks with the studios.
BF: We just want to continue making high quality horror films. It’s not good for the business that there are four horror movies coming out in October, but like with any business the profit center is there, you go there, you try to take what you can from it, and we just want to be slow and steady. Put one movie out every year or so if we can, maybe eighteen months and that’s the way we look at it.
A big thanks go out to MGM for allowing us to sit in on the junket and for the producers for taking the time to chat with us. The Amityville Horror hits theaters on April 15th; be sure to check out its official site right here!
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Categorized:Interviews News
