Liebesman on The Beginning

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TCM: The Beginning poster (click to see it bigger!)With all the hype and positive word of mouth that’s been circling this Friday’s release of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (review), the usual influx of cast and crew online interviews never really got started. I know I, for one, am very curious to her what director Jonathan Liebesman has to say, especially since he’s getting praise heaped on him by those who have seen it, quite a turnaround from the distaste that arose whenever his name was mentioned in conjunction with his first film, Darkness Falls.

“It was a piece of shit,” he recently admitted to Ed Douglas at Coming Soon “I was younger, I didn’t know what I was doing really. There was studio politics, just so many factors I was not prepared for. I had no idea what I was going into. For this movie, I was much more prepared, much more aware of your role as director-for-hire in a franchise studio picture, and sort of accepted it and embraced it with open arms.” Now that he’s older and wiser, Liebesman seems to have made right by the fans if the early reviews are any indication of the quality of the TCM prequel.

“I take credit for nothing,”he humbly stated. “The producers actually had the signposts mapped out by the time I was on the project, so it was more in little details that I was involved by the time I was directing it. What was important to us was just to answer those questions that people have had for a long time and the newer ones that were posed by the remake for particular characters like how the old dude loses his legs or R. Lee loses his teeth. The main ideas of Leatherface picking up a chainsaw for the first time, killing someone with a chainsaw for the first time, peeling off and putting on a face for the first time, all those things were already there, and it was more like the sequences I fleshed out. It was pretty obvious what questions needed to be answered and what the backstory should be.”

Liebesman, you may recall, was the last director attached to the Platinum Dunes/New Line proposed revival of the Friday the 13th franchise, and if he really did as good a job on The Beginning as it sounds like he did, I think we can be okay with that. Click here to read the full article on Coming Soon, which also includes comments from stars R. Lee Ermey and Jordana Brewster. And be sure to get out there for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning tomorrow night!

Johnny Butane

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