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ARROW: Hello Mr. Englund, how are you?
ARROW: First, I'd like to thank you for giving me years and years of nightmares as a child.
ROBERT'S FAV HORROR MOVIES
ARROW: (laugh) I'll start off by asking you what your favorite horror movie is?
ARROW: Yeah.
ARROW: Yeah, great movie! ROBERT: Those right now are my favorites and both of them are what I like to call at this stage in my life: the classy end of horror. Sort of like "Rosemary's Baby" and stuff like that. But I don't want my fans to think that I don't like them down and dirty too-- I also recently saw a great little English film called "Dog Soldiers" that I really liked and going back to the early eighties, I loved John Carpenter's remake of "The Thing" with Kurt Russell, I haven't seen it in a while but it's a movie that I hold very dear. I also loved Brian De Palma's "Sisters" back in the 70's. The film had a great use of split screen, blended comedy, horror, thriller and had some great nightmare concepts. Have you seen De Palma's new movie? ARROW: Yeah, I have actually...Femme Fatale. ROBERT: Did you like it? ARROW: Yeah, I did. It's Brian De Palma going back to his old way; "Body Double" kind of vibe.
ARROW: Oh yeah! Have you seen the film yourself? ROBERT: I haven't seen it, I literally wrapped "Freddy vs Jason" on the last week of November and they were still shooting when I left. I missed the cast party and all because I had to fly down to Laguna Beach where I live. Once there, I threw the wife and the dog in the car and drove all the way back to the California coast because I had to do Thanksgiving with my wife's family. I just drove back 2 days ago and my face is still swollen around the eyes. ARROW: You relaxing now? RE: Yeah, I'm just taking it easy: sweeping up the leaves, getting ready for the holidays to hit. FREDDY VS JASON: DIRECTORS AND SCRIPTS
ARROW: Well, let's hop onto what everybody is mucho looking forward to, me included, which is "Freddy vs Jason". ROBERT: Sure. ARROW: What was it about this specific screenplay that made it be "the one", as opposed to all of the other scripts that strolled through over the years? ROBERT: I think it wasn't just the scripts delaying the production...they also went through a bunch of directors. I have been set to do this movie since 2000, that was the goal. Sort of like Freddy 2000 you know? ARROW: Yeah. ROBERT: So the first director was Rob Bottin the genius effects guy-- ARROW: Yup, The Thing... ROBERT: They had problems with the budget with Rob, so then I think they brought on Guillermo del Toro...but he went on to "Blade 2". They were tweaking the script all this time too. I actually went to Europe once and sat across one of the producers of "King of the Hill", the animated show, and he had also done a draft for the film! I thought that was great! So after Michael De Luca left New Line, there were new people that had to be agreeable on the script and maybe there were changes in attitude as to what the script should have. I always felt there had to be a great "Jason nightmare" or the movie wouldn't work and how Jason and Freddy would get together was always a problem for me. As time went by, we needed to re-integrate the back stories on both monsters in the script. Now all those things are accomplished amazingly and amazingly fast, I think. You're going to have to surrender a little bit to the contrivance of how Freddy and Jason get together. Freddy literally needs Jason.
HYPNOCIL
ROBERT: Yeah, they brought it back.
The adults are manufacturing it now and the lead girl Lori, played by
Monica Keena, her father is a pharmaceutical guy. So Freddy is sort of impotent now and
he can't reach his revenge on the siblings and the survivors of the
vigilante parents that burned him alive, so he needs someone to
instill fear, so he uses Jason since Jason operates in the real
world. Jason becomes Freddy's sort of "Frankenstein monster" and
Freddy eventually lo ARROW: Wow, I'm now officially anxious to see this. ROBERT: It's great. This is not anything new, the critics are saying this is another way to exploit the franchise and all, but it really goes back to "Batman Vs Superman", "Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein" or the "Wolfman meets Dracula" and all that. This is like an old tried and true, wonderful, fun Hollywood popcorn concept and it isn't anything new. Because of Ronnie Yu, the director who did "Bride of Chucky", and more recently Samuel Jackson's film "Formula 51", I look at this film as a great, state of the art-- almost like a coffee table comic book, just by the way it looks. Fred Murphy who was the DP on "The Mothman Prophecies" and "October Sky" was the DP on the film and between he and Ronnie, they sort of came up with this beautiful, and yet twisted, look to the film. It's like some gorgeous, twisted, violent Dutch comic book you know-- Asian, Cyber Japanese Cyber Punk, illustrated comic book with Scorsese camera angles, Orson Wells camera angles and film noir style...it's REALLY interesting! There's also lots of different colors plays, kind of like Paul Schrader's style. It's just really a great classy, violent popcorn movie. I've been calling it a gourmet popcorn that's spelled...G-O-R-E (in a scary ass Freddy voice that made me jump). ARROW: (laughs) It sounds like a freakin' visual treat! ROBERT: It is, and I think that the audience just has to surrender itself to the comic book mentality of it. I don't mean like comic "funny", I mean like the graphic style. Once the movie starts, there's just a great rhythm to it...it's just cool sequence after cool sequence. JASON GOES RAVING IN CORN
ROBERT: My favorite scene in the movie is a sequence I'm not even in. It's a sequence of Jason at a rave in a cornfield in middle America. ARROW: OH YEAH! (I got excited there...big time!) ROBERT: The scene is just phenomenal! When you read it, it has these great rhythms to it and when you see it visually: little rave nerd boys with day glow clothes being piped and speared by Jason and flung across rows and rows of corn glowing like meteors or comets through the night. ARROW: Wow! ROBERT: It's cool stuff...really cool stuff. ARROW: That's like a crowd pleasing Jason scene for the fans. ROBERT: It's a great Jason scene with Freddy getting in at the end of it. It's just structurally such a wonderful relentless, Jason the mindless shark feeding at a rave scene. It's just the perfect thing. The rhythms, the geometry of the corn field. It's really going to be a famous sequence, I think.
DOES FREDDY GETS HIS DAY? BABY JASON?
ARROW: Does Freddy get his own famous, crowd-pleasing sequence?
ROBERT: Freddy has a couple of great
sequences in the film, but he's kind of like the puppet master in
this for a while. What's great about Freddy in this is when he gets
to comment and manipulate the back stories and the fears of the
characters-- especially with Jason. I'll just give you a hint: Freddy
meets baby Jason. Ok...it's great, it's just really sick stuff. ARROW: I wanted to address this. Being on the Net a lot and hearing all the feedback about "Freddy Vs Jason", I picked up that the younger teens, the newer audience are really, really looking forward to the film...while some of the long time, more hardcore fans are a little afraid that maybe Freddy and Jason are being watered down or "mainstreamed" for today's target audience. ROBERT: All I can tell you is this: Remember what I told ya before? Gourmet popcorn? ARROW: Yeah. ROBERT: There's more violence, Freddy is less funny and more violent... ARROW: Nice! (fanboy body rush happened here) ROBERT: Freddy is a little older here, Freddy is not uber-Freddy like he was in "Wes Craven's New Nightmare", he's not a jokester either. He's a little slower, he gets yanked in reality, gets an ass kicking. Freddy is also a little more afraid and his powers are a little diminished. But he has an agenda and there's more violence and more twisted shit in this film than in the last 4 Freddy movies. ARROW: Well, that's very good news! Would you say that the film is more axed towards the fantastic, the gore or a little bit of both? ROBERT: I think it's a meld of both. The film is really stylish but it's also really violent. It's got lots of effects and lots and lots of good gore. Sometimes it gets a little "Monty Python" gore, but that's intentional because it's dream world shit. So you get both values out of it.
KANE HODDER, JASON'S MOTHER AND
ARROW: Now I want to address this. Lots of fans, me included, are pissed that Kane Hodder is not Jason and... ROBERT: Let me tell you what I know about this. ARROW: Shoot. ROBERT: It was never meant as an insult to Kane except for the reality that Kane is not in it, which you can perceive, as an insult because Kane was certainly responsible for the popularity of Jason in the last 10 years. Director Ronny Yu, who has lots of strong stuff out there, I mean we loved "Bride of Chucky"...well, Ronny had this image of Jason. Now I'm not sure if it derived from a Friday the 13th movie as much as from an illustration, a comic book what-not, but he always presumed that Jason was gigantically big and because it's "Freddy Vs Jason", he always thought that in this comic book style that he was going to exploit, Jason would be larger than life, almost basketball player-like. He's just absolutely huge in this movie!
(Arrow Note: Ken Kirzinger, who plays Jason in FVJ, is 6"5 and
Kane Hodder is 6"3...
I always serve the writer first because
I'm English trained, even though I'm American. I don't protect my own
ass, I protect the writer's ass first.
ARROW: (laughs) That's hilarious. ROBERT: That's the imagery I used for the whole movie. And there's a little bit of sympathy for Jason in the movie even though he's a relentless killer, because his back-story is more sympathetic. So I played into that, I made Freddy a real asshole in this movie, even more so than usual. He's that little yappy dog that you want to see get his and Jason is like the big stupid dog with a little bit of sympathy in him. Now you can quote me on that, but that might be a trap, don't print this as the result of the battle necessarily, as I like to say Freddy takes a licking...but he keeps on ticking. ----------------------------------- You haven't lived until you've heard the TRUE Freddy Krueger's voice cackle at ya over the phone! I expected a burnt tongue to pop out of my receiver at any moment. I've never felt so "fanboy" during an interview...I mean, here I am talking with a man who scared the shit out of me when I was a kid. Robert lived up to his positive rep, he was way cool, funny and very pleasant to interview. Thanks A BUNDLE Robert and keep kicking it dude! I now can't wait for Freddy Vs Jason! CLICK HERE TO READ PART 2 OF MY INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT ENGLUND
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Robert
Englund has been on the scene since the 70s. He's been in films like Tobe Hooper's "Eaten Alive", "Dead and Buried", "Galaxy
of Terror", "The V series", "Wishmaster", "Urban Legend" and way
more. But it's his incarnation of dream killer Freddy "the
freakin'
man" Krueger, originating in Wes Craven's genre classic "Nightmare
on Elm Street" that immortalized him as a horror icon. Let's face
it, the Big K is now amongst the ranks of all the horror greats: we
have Dracula, Frankenstein and yes...we have Freddy! That's quite an
accomplishment and Robert deserves all of his success. He has always
been really good to his fans throughout the years, while
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