Viral video director turns to the Evil side
Fede Alvarez blew up his hometown in a short film that caught great attention
Anyone who thinks YouTube is nothing but videos of dogs on skateboards and waterskiing squirrels should have a chat with Fede Alvarez.
The Uruguayan filmmaker won international attention in 2009 after posting online his homemade 2009 sci-fi short Panic Attack!, which concisely conjures a giant alien robot attack on Montevideo, his hometown.
His admirers include fantasy/horror maestro Sam Raimi, whose career spans decades and dimensions, from the demonized woodlands cabin of The Evil Dead trilogy to the concrete canyons of the Spider-Man franchise to the bewitched wonderland of Oz the Great and Powerful.
Raimi saw a kindred spirit in Alvarez, 35. He tapped him to direct and co-write Evil Dead, a remake of The Evil Dead, Raimi’s devilishly influential1981indie horror classic that launched a thousand rips. The new Evil Dead begins possessing multiplexes Friday.
Alvarez talked to the Star from a Miami promotional tour stop, his plans for a Toronto visit having been scuttled by evil winter weather.
I guess we can’t avoid the obvious question: why remake a cult classic like The Evil Dead? Why risk enraging fans, or evil spirits?
You have to ask Sam Raimi. He’s the one who wanted to remake it. He’s the one who came to me and said, “Hey Fede, would you do this film for me?” He wanted to do a new Evil
Dead for a long time now but he said he never found the right filmmaker. Do you think of it as a straight remake, or something else?
I don’t think it’s a remake. From the new film to the original, there are some similarities in the set pieces but the nature of the story is completely different. Why they go to the cabin, who they are, even their journey is completely different. At the end of the day, the nature of any story is the characters: who they are, what they want and what they’re doing. It’s just a new Evil Dead on so many levels. I didn’t want this one to overwrite the original at all. That would be sacrilege. It can’t take place of the original. That’s why I was the first one who said we have to lose the “The” in the title. An even more radical decision was to not bring back Ash, Bruce Campbell’s popular character from the original trilogy.
I don’t think it would ever work to try to remake that character. It would be like trying to remake Indiana Jones. It’s very hard for the audience to imagine those characters played by somebody else. A new audience that didn’t know about the original film wouldn’t mind, but for me, it’s such a sacred and holy ground that I would have never dared to put a new actor in that role and remake the magic of the original character. Was Sam Raimi very involved in the creative process?
Sam Raimi knows his audience like nobody. He was a great guy during the process of the writing, but he would never step onto the set. He said I was on my own making the movie. It had to be that way. In postproduction, he would watch the cut and give me some notes; never giving solutions, always just guiding. Helping to guide me through what needs to be better. You have a cast of relative unknowns. Did you turn down any big names?
At the beginning there’s always a list. All these movies start with a list. Studios give you a list of 10 names they want you to go after. A lot of those people didn’t want to make our movie, because they thought it was too violent. A lot of the stars thought it was too violent, too brutal. But it was a good thing at the end of the day because it gave us the chance to have the freedom to go out and get the best actors for the role. Where do you stand on violence in movies?
For me, the only issue is when you make a movie where you show guns as something sexy and cool, people shooting people. That’s my only problem. In our movie, we have just one shotgun that is there because it’s a part of the classic movie. It’s shot two or three times and it’s definitely not sexy. It’s in a brutal and realistic way and it shows you in this movie the harm that a gun can make and how powerful it is and how dangerous it is. We don’t show it as something cool and funny at all. Evil Dead is being sold as “the most terrifying film you will ever experience.” That’s a strong message.
It is, but of course that comes from the studio and they decide to sell the film in that way. But I’m proud of it. They can’t use that claim for every film they do. It’s just going to work once. I’m proud that they decided to choose my film and put that stamp on it. For me, the original Evil Dead was the most terrifying experience I ever had. When I watched it for the first time when I was 12 it was definitely the scariest movie I had ever seen. That was the spirit of the original that I wanted to bring back in this one. I wanted to make sure that some kids would watch this new movie without knowing what it is — but it’s going to be a terrifying experience for them. Ayear ago, Diablo Cody (Juno, Jennifer’s Body) was listed as a cowriter of Evil Dead. What happened there? How much did she contribute? I wanted an American writer to do a pass on dialogue after I finished the second draft. She was a big Evil Dead fan, so I asked her if she wanted to be part of it. She came in and did a pass on dialogue. She did a great job, but for some reason I didn’t use much of it . . . the tone was a little bit different. She went for a little bit more humour and I wanted to keep it gritty and dark. She’s not credited as a writer
because we didn’t use enough. Were you trying not to be funny with Evil Dead? The truth is, we didn’t try to make a decision. We said, look, let’s be faithful to the spirit of the first one, where they went out trying to make the scariest, goriest, craziest movie they could. They were completely over the top. Instead of choosing if it’s going to be funny or not, we chose to go with the same spirit. Of course, when you’re standing in the line of over-the-top horror, sometimes it’s going to be funny. For some it’s just disturbing and scary. That’s great too. But Sam never intended to be funny (with The Evil Dead). And what about Evil Dead 2 and Evil Dead 3? Going to happen? We are already writing Evil Dead 2. If I’m director or not, that remains to be seen. It depends where the story goes. It would have to surprise everybody. Every Evil Deadmovie is different than the previous. We’d have to keep shocking people and throw them off balance. But, if we dare to make a different Evil Dead, I would definitely direct it.