By Maura Reilly Apr 18, 2008, 14:12 GMT
Members of the press were invited to sit down with some of the cast and crew of the upcoming MGM/Lakeshore release Pathology at the 2007 Comic-Con and talk murder most foul. In this installment, writer/producers Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor along with director Marc Schoelermann fill us in on their creative process and just how to find humor in a morgue.
The first question came for a woman who translates English language movies into Spanish. She had worked on Crash which elicited apologies and condolences from Neveldine and Taylor. She asked about the difference in pacing from the frantic Crank.
NEVELDINE: “Totally different movie styles. Brian and I write for all genres. [Pathology’s] a story that we’ve had in our heads for years. The pacing is a lot different. I don’t want to saw it’s slower. It just moves at its own speed. Crank was a frenetic, wild action film that followed the guy whose heart would stop if he stopped. That was the gist of the movie. This is a little more medical so we really slowed it down. Marc can really speak to that. He knows Crank well too and he knows Pathology.”
SCHOELERMANN: “It’s a completely different movie. It’s not like you’re going to see Crank in a hospital. It’s more of a thriller than it is an action film. It doesn’t really have any [of the] comical elements that made Crank so great in it. It’s a completely different movie and it moves at a different pace, obviously. So we spend more time with setting up the characters and making them real instead of just using comical…”
NEVELDINE: “Yeah, they’re not over the top caricatures.”
SCHOELERMANN: “But the film actually moves pretty fast once you’re in the story and everything gets going. But it’s not at a comical hyper speed. It’s more like a realistic one.”
NEVELDINE: “There is humor in the movie but it’s a different sort of humor, right? When we went down to research with Craig Harvey at the LA County morgue you hang out with these people and they’re playing Frank Sinatra, they’re making jokes about everyone, they’re taking photos of the open bodies, the Y cuts. One guy is like diving in and the other guy is taking the photo. You know, this is their life and they want to have it be light. There are moments that are light in Pathology, which is really nice. You don’t see it in these horror/thriller films. You get a chance to see it in Pathology. It’s not like these other cut-‘em-up torture films, not at all.
TAYLOR: What we think it has in common with Crank is that they’re both intense experiences that you haven’t had before. We think it’s an original movie that will touch you in a place that you haven’t been touched before. Hopefully Crank did the same thing. But beyond that it’s completely different.
SCHOELERMANN: And it’s not about blood/gore at all. I think you’re going to be surprised at how tame it is when it comes to gore and blood. I think everyone expects it to be like the bloodiest film of all time. Or whatever you think about when you hear the title Pathology. It’s actually very psychologically intense. Yet there is gore in it, obviously, because we’re dealing with autopsies and with pathology rooms. But it’s not about showing it.
Everything you see in the movie based in reality. If there’s a cut, if they take out the rib cage with rib shears this is what happens there every day. It’s not something we made up or something we are trying to make disgusting as possible. It’s just the way it is. And it also looks exactly how it looks down there. So everything is basically grounded in reality. There’s nothing that we just made up to scare people.
NEVELDINE: It seems that they’re raising the bar with horror films these days by the blood and gore and not getting back into the character and the story. We feel like we’re raising the bar in a different way.
Researching for the perfect crime: any danger criminals are going to pick up some new tips?
NEVELDINE: *laughs* If they can pull off some of the outrageous things that these guys do in the movie than more power to them. There are some of the strangest, most unusual ways of dispatching humans in this movie than you’ll ever encounter. These are young geniuses, these kids. It would be very simple for them to figure out what the other guy did. So in order to keep the game going they have to take it pretty far, past the point where…I can’t really see there being any copy cats.
How did the trio work together as a creative team?
NEVELDINE: It was really interesting for us. Obviously when we write a script as directors and as cinematographers as well, we have a very specific idea in our heads as to how those scenes will look and how they’ll play and how they’ll cut together. So it would have been very easy for us to come in with a director and just be over his shoulder the whole time saying ’no, that’s not right’. We realized that would make a terrible movie. We’ve got a director who we believe in, who is a visual genius, who has a style that is very different from ours. The best thing that we could do was support him when he needed support but to stay out of his way and let him go. The final result is so rewarding. To see the thing you wrote imagined by somebody so well and differently than you would have done it. It’s fun for us to watch the movie, just as fans.
TAYLOR: And it’s great because Marc didn’t kick us of the set either. He wanted us there and we had a great time. It was such a collaboration that way. We even camera operated a few shots for Marc. He said ‘I want you guys to do this’ because we do some crazy, wild stuff as you know.
Were actual dead bodies or live extras used in the movie?
SCHOELERMANN: [It was] a mixture of prosthetic bodies that we used. If you have the rib cage open and all the organs out there’s nothing you can apply to a living person. So we used something like that. We also had extras dressed up in make-up laying there for the occasion. You can’t shoot real bodies. They won’t let you do that. And there’s no real reason to do it. The funny thing is when you go down to the morgue and see 250 dead people lined up there, there’s nothing as fake looking as dead bodies. If I was saw this in a movie I’d say that these are the worst make-up effects that I’ve ever seen. It’s really weird. We tried to split the difference between what looks fake and what looks real to you or what you’d expect.
NEVELDINE: There were definitely places where we had to make the bodies faker in order to make them look more real. Just to give an example: we saw a body one time we went down [to the morgue] where he as was green, like Kelly green, like Kermit the Frog. They had him opened up and the inside was like a candy apple. You’re looking at it going ‘this is a gag, right? This can’t be real.’ Well he was real but if you put that in a movie nobody would ever buy it. We actually had to back off from reality to create the illusion.
TAYLOR: Depending on how long someone’s been dead, the decomposition really changes the color of the body, the temperature all that stuff. That guy was [dead] six-months when they found him.
NEVELDINE: The morgue is like a giant bowl of jelly-bellies: no two flavor alike, all different colors. It’s really exciting. By the way there are real organs and bodies in the movie. We just can’t tell you which ones and where because then we’d get in trouble.
How did they capture the feel of the morgue?
SCHOELERMANN: When you walk out there and you see the hallway, that’s pretty much how a morgue looks like. They don’t have to make it glamorous because nobody ever goes down there to visit someone. So it’s more like a practical basement with tiled rooms and those metal tables. It’s nothing really fancy. We just try to make it as real as possible. We didn’t go for a highly stylized look. You can pretty easily go for something that looks pretty fancy, almost like a spaceship. We actually didn’t want to go that route.
We wanted to make it as real looking as possible. We took a couple chances here and there but in general I think we succeeded pretty well. If you want to know how it smells, just go into a Whole Foods and walk by the meat section and that’s how it smells.
NEVELDINE: on like a Monday, like they didn’t change the meat or one of those Carcenrias. You know?
SCHOELERMANN: It has that cold meat smell that you have and then like detergents and stuff like that. So it’s a mixture of that.
TAYLOR: A lot of bleach.
NEVELDINE: It doesn’t smell quite as bad as you think it should smell until someone cuts into something they shouldn’t cut into. And then it smells really bad.
TAYLOR: We go into that in the movie.
What was the Director’s Palate?
SCHOELERMANN: I brought out some references of what I liked and how I wanted it to look. We tried not to be over-stylish. What we did for example is we shot everything in shadow. So there’s never real direct sunlight on Milo until he meets his fiancée. Everything there is sunlit. Everything else is pretty much in shadow and de-saturated by locations and by everything else. But it’s not overly stylized. There’s nothing you’ll see that will look like a music video or a commercial. We took our chances with making sure that everything fits the movie that nothing pops out.
NEVELDINE: Marc is like a walking IMDB. I’ve probably seen hundreds of movies. He’s seen thousands and thousands. He can tell you the director, the costume designer…it’s unbelievable. So you’re influenced by cinema in general, which is amazing.
Was there one particular scene they were excited about that they could tell us about?
TAYLOR: there are a lot of cool autopsy scenes and a little bit of the CSI, figuring out how they did it.
NEVELDINE: the scenes that are the most powerful in this movie are a culmination of story elements and character elements that when they finally happen it’s going to devastate people. But it’s really hard to say. We can’t give you one like: ‘Yeah, Jason and Amy go out in Chinatown.’ There are no gimmicky scenes like that. When you see the movie and get to that point there are few things that are going to knock people down.
TAYLOR: We can talk about the hooker scene though. It’s a point in the movie where Jake Gallo goes a little over the top and he decides to take as many lives as he can. And he branches out from the normal criminals and takes an innocent. It’s a climatic point in the movie.
NEVELDINE: That’s a highlight in terms of performance too. Anything where Milo and Michael are going head to head, face to face the chemistry of these two guys is like the snake and the mongoose. It’s really fun to watch. It’s one of those classic confrontations.
Casting Milo
SCHOELERMANN: Milo auditioned for us. Early on we decided that everybody who wanted to be in the movie had to be auditioned. There’s a lot of things were you go to the agent and the agents tells you ‘ok, but you have to make an offer,’ which basically means you offer them money and you’ve already cast them in the part. But everyone who came in to do this movie we said ‘no, we have to see you.’ Because the script is so powerful when it comes to characters it’s really easy to mess it up even by just by having a mediocre actor.
There’s nothing where you can say ‘ok this story’s going to work. There’s a lot of gore in it and whoever plays it, we don’t care.’ It’s a really strong character based script so the roles were very difficult. That’s why we early on made the decision to have everyone read. And who wouldn’t read would never be in the movie.
TAYLOR: Milo came and he kicked ass. We loved the turn, like Milo talks about, from Heroes to Pathology. We think it’s unbelievable.
NEVELDINE: It was actually kind of similar to Crank in the sense that we’ve got our hero who is engaging in the most anti-social, horrible behavior possible and yet we still expect the audience to like him and care about him and want him to win. You need a guy who’s so intrinsically likable, like a Jason Statham. I mean the audience they just love the guy. And it doesn’t matter really what he does. He can be a complete sociopath; they’re still going to like him. It’s the same thing with Milo. He has a quality of goodness about him that no matter what he’s doing you still want him to win, you still identify with him. We needed a guy like that.
Pathology opens in select cites Friday.
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