Wes Craven

The Last House on the Left – interview with Iliadis & Craven

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MoviesOnline.ca has a new interview with Last House director Dennis Iliadis and producer Wes Craven. Quotes below.

book-of-daniel,garret dillahunt,jesusMoviesOnline: When you were considering Garret for this role, did you know that he had played Jesus?

ILIADIS: Actually I hadn’t seen that, I had seen the other stuff he did and Jesse James and all that. He’s a phenomenal actor and he managed to bring all the subtleties and ambiguities that I wanted. We were casting for Krug and everyone was coming and doing the squinty eyes and (he growls) and Garret brought this intensity, this evil which is not premeditated, and when that evil emerges it’s even stronger because it comes from a real human being who’s very angry. It doesn’t come from someone who has just decided to be bad.

MoviesOnline: Did you encourage the cast not to go out and socialize or have dinner together so that the actors playing the bad guys would be more menacing?

ILIADIS: You mean keeping the cast separate? No, actually my biggest focus was to rehearse with them and to really get them into character, and we did one very intensive week of rehearsals where we really went deep. After that, it was very important to let them decompress in any way they wanted, and believe me, they gave so much of themselves that they could have dinner wherever they wanted after the scenes.

CRAVEN: Sara said something very interesting, that when she heard Garret was doing the [role of Krug], [she thought] oh it’s a friend, so there was this sense I think of mutual trust among them, where they felt like no matter how horrible what they were acting was, they were in the hands of somebody that in some tiny part of their brain they could go and say I’m here with a friend, so it made it bearable.

garret dillahunt,krug,the last house on the leftMoviesOnline: How hard was it to shoot the assault scenes in the house, particularly the one in the kitchen?

ILIADIS: I really enjoy choreographing scenes like that, and also it’s very much about rehearsal. You rehearse all the basic and physical stuff so that performance can shine through. You don’t want your actors to be worried about the technical bits. You want the characters to shine through whatever is happening. So it was really rehearsing and we had a great stunt coordinator, his name was Mo in South Africa, and the actors were really willing to get into it and get dirty and painful and all that, and they did most of the fights. There’s very little stunt double work. You get good actors who are willing to get into it, and you work hard. You rehearse enough so that they can still act while they’re doing all this complex stuff, and that’s what you get. [MoviesOnline.ca]

Last House premiere – press release

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The Last House on the Left will have its world premiere on Tuesday, March 10 at the ArcLight Hollywood theatre. Here is the press release:

ROGUE PICTURES PRESENTS THE WORLD PREMIERE OF ‘THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT’ AT ARCLIGHT HOLLYWOOD

WHAT: World premiere of the suspense thriller “THE LAST HOUSE ON
THE LEFT”

WHO: “THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT” cast members Monica Potter, Garret
Dillahunt, Aaron Paul, Spencer Treat Clark, Riki Lindhome,
Martha MacIsaac and Sara Paxton; director Dennis Iliadis;
producers Wes Craven, Sean Cunningham and Marianne Maddalena;
and writers Adam Alleca and Carl Ellsworth

Plus many additional celebrity guests.

WHERE: ArcLight Hollywood
6360 W. Sunset Boulevard
Hollywood, CA

WHEN: Tuesday, March 10, 2009
5:30 PM Press Call Time
6:30 PM Celebrity Arrivals
7:30 PM Screening Begins

THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT arrives in theaters on Friday, March 13, 2009.

The Last House on the Left – behind the scenes featurettes

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Collider.com has a couple of new featurettes for The Last House on the Left. The first one includes interviews with Wes Craven and producer Sean Cunningham:

The second one has some behind the scenes footage, including a couple of really cool fight scenes between Garret and Tony Goldwyn:

Source: Collider.com.

Interview with Sara Paxton (The Last House on the Left)

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SCI FI Wire interviewed Sara Paxton (Mari in The Last House on the Left). A couple of quotes after the jump:

Starring in Last House was no doubt an opportunity for you to show what you can do as an actress, but what else about it compelled you to audition and sign on?

Paxton: Definitely Wes Craven. He’s an icon, and that was interesting to me. The role, the script. What really sold me, though, was when I met the director, Dennis Iliadis. I hadn’t seen the original Last House on the Left, but I did watch Dennis’s movie Hardcore, which is an independent film that he did in Greece. That movie completely shocked me. Then I was like, “Oh, OK, he means business. He’s a good director. Where do I sign?” Reading a script like that, and a remake, of course, it’s so touchy. You don’t know where it can go. It can be really good or bad, but maybe with good actors and a good director it can be something special. And I really think that’s what we ended up doing, something very special.

How hard was it for you to be in the presence of Garret Dillahunt before and after shooting those scenes in which he terrorizes you?

Paxton: I’m not one of those actors where, if I have to hate you, I’m really going to hate you in real life. That’s not something I need to do. And Garret was so nervous. He didn’t want to hurt me. He was worried that I’d start crying or get emotional. He was the scared one, the one that backed away, and finally I came to him and said, “Don’t worry about me. I’m a big girl. I can handle it.” If anything, I was worried that he wouldn’t be rough enough. I was worried that the scene wouldn’t come off real because he wouldn’t throw himself into it completely. But we had our talk and we came to an agreement.

And since we have you on the phone, we’ve got to ask about Mr. Ed. You actually shot a Mr. Ed pilot with Sherman Hemsley and Sherilyn Fenn?

Paxton: Gosh, I was about 15 when I did that [in 2004] with Garret [Dillahunt], and Sherman Hemsley was the voice of the horse. I think it could have been a good idea. With the horses, it was a lot of work. I remember at least five days out of that shoot where the horse got loose and trampled over some lights, ran through the set, knocked down craft services. The horses were going a little crazy. So maybe that was too much of a problem.