Paul Schrader got to talking to The Independent about his experience with making EXORCIST: THE BEGINNING (check out The Arrow’s review of the Renny Harlin version), and man what a nightmare. You make the film you said you’d make, within the budget and timeframe you said you’d make it, and the studio head decides he just doesn’t dig the concept. So you get to see your baby thrown out with the bathwater. Weak, eh?
Here are some of my favorite excerpts:
“Morgan Creek is one man – it’s a one-man operation, it’s James Robinson. If he decides something, that’s it – everything comes out of his pocket, so I think that somewhere in the shooting, he started to change his mind about having made this film, and he started to feel that he was making the wrong movie.”
“That’s why I call it buyer’s remorse. You know, like, he went out and bought a Lexus and came home and said, ‘I really shouldn’t have bought that,’ so then he goes back out and buys a Hunter – now he has a Lexus and a Hunter. I think that, by the time I had finished – and there was a lot of pressure on me to deliver my first cut very, very quickly – I think that he was already moving on in his mind to another film.”
“…The problem was that the core of the idea, which was there before I came, and which I liked, is not designed for hard-core horror, despite its diabolical and disturbing elements…A poor crippled boy, getting better – not very useful for hardcore horror…Here, the concept was turned on its head. I did not want to wrench hard-core horror from it, because the concept really wasn’t suitable. Jim came to realise, I think, that the problem for him lay with the premise. But once you change the premise and the director, you have a new movie.”
Schrader also rather diplomatically deflects the question of his opinion about the Harlin version by responding with how much William Peter Blatty (EXORCIST author) disliked it. You can read the whole sordid tale here, and also check out the world premiere at the Brussels International Festival of Fantastic Film, or on DVD like the rest of us…hopefully soon!
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