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

MoviesOnline: 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.

MoviesOnline: 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]