It’ll be interesting to see what a story from M. Night Shayamalan can be done in another filmmaker’s hands. In the case of DEVIL, the first installment in Shyamalan’s “Night Chronicles” trilogy, the filmmakers are twofold: Drew and John Erick Dowdle. And while that is not particularly newsy…what the Dowdel Bros. offered to the L.A. Times this week sort of is…
While out pimpin’ DEVIL’s September 17th release date (this Friday), John and Erick spoke at good length about their new project: the benefits of having M. Night’s name attached, the fortuitous omens, odd blessings and strange coincidences that occurred on set. Read all about it below!
First, in regards to having Shyamalan’s brand attached to DEVIL, Drew Dowdle claimed:
“His name does us so much more good — the good far outweighs the bad in terms of the exposure this film has.”
And coming off the hyper-gory QUARANTINE, John Erick addressed the idea behind DEVIL’s change of pace:
“We wanted to take a less is more approach…try to do something to see if we could scare the hell out of people without showing every last little thing,” John Erick said.
And perhaps most interesting were the on-set shenanigans that went down. While out scouting buildings to use in the film, they found a new 50-foot skyscraper with only one tenant to use. Problem is a woman became trapped in the elevator that stopped between floors, and she had to wait some two hours before being rescued.
“We were like, this is a good omen! This is our building,” Drew recalled. “Then when we were coming back for another scout, they had another problem with the elevator where multiple people got stuck. It wasn’t for as long, but they had the same thing happen again. They were having some real issues.
“The other thing that was cool — people will totally think it’s a production design element — its address was 333,” he added. “That was actually the real address. We weren’t about to change it.”
DEVIL centers on a group of people who are trapped in an elevator, and one of them is the devil.
DEVIL star Caroline Dhavernas!
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