KOEPP & BACON
Director/actor duo DAVID KOEPP and KEVIN BACON on reuniting, horror, and mice
Like a scarier Ant & Dec.
IT’S BEEN 21 years since Kevin Bacon and David Koepp first worked together, on the haunting (and slightly overlooked in all the Sixth Sense hubbub) Stir Of Echoes. Since then they’ve remained friends, but stayed apart professionally. Until horror brought them back together again, reuniting them on the Wales-set psychological chiller, You Should Have Left. Empire spoke to them both, over Zoom, to talk about how their friendship began, how it’s changed, and what scares them.
ON FIRST WORKING TOGETHER…
David Koepp: One of the ideas [for Stir Of Echoes] was to do this working-class story. Kevin’s name came up right away as someone who could play that believably, and not as a rich man in a poor man’s shirt. I’d been a big fan since She’s Having A Baby. I must have seen that movie seven or eight times. I think it went well from the start. Kevin Bacon: We had a great time. In some ways we continued to bond even more intensely after the film, partly because we were very disappointed in the way that the film was released. The fact that we’ve remained friends is really surprising because, generally in this crazy town, if you make something that works at the box office, that’s where real friendships begin. Koepp: You can be great buddies during the making of a film, and then it bombs, and whenever you see each other, you act like you owe each other money. You don’t want to catch failure again. That person might be contagious. But Stir Of Echoes didn’t fail. It did just fine.
ON THE SECOND TIME AROUND…
Bacon: We just kept communicating. I kept saying, “We need to get together and do this again, and make something scary again.” But it took 20 years for me to wear him down. Koepp: He called me. He said, “Let’s do something kind of scary and make it about a marriage.” I think it was Kyra’s [Sedgwick, Bacon’s wife] notion, in fact. So I went over and he made me a sandwich and it was very delicious, and we talked about what’s scary with marriage. Then Kevin read a review of the novel You Should Have Left, and it was a lot of what we were talking about. So we optioned the book, and I started working on the script.
Bacon: To Kyra’s credit, when you think about making a scary movie, people don’t necessarily think of it in character-based terms. Kyra’s take on it was that Ordinary People is her favourite movie, so if she’s thinking about something scary, she wants a scary Ordinary People.
ON THE DRAW OF HORROR…
Koepp: The genre lends itself effortlessly to interpretation. I think what makes it real and relatable is if you feel a personal or deeply rooted human fear. Some guy with an axe chasing people around, that’s something to be scared of. But if the guy with an axe is your dad? That’s a hell of a lot scarier.
Bacon: I like high stakes. It gives you life-and-death situations. Friday The 13th for me was just a gig. I needed to eat. And it’s a slasher film, which generally is not so big on character. It’s big on blood and teens smoking weed and having sex and getting arrows through their throats. But something like Stir Of Echoes or Tremors or You Should Have Left — those are character-driven.
ON THEIR FAVOURITE HORROR FILMS…
Bacon: Don’t Look Now, Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist and The Shining, obviously. I love Audition. And I really loved Midsommar.
I thought it was super-cool. And The Descent. Koepp: I would include Get Out and Us, because they’re doing what horror can do best, which is grounding it in a real social situation.
Bacon: And Get Out is funny. That’s the other amazing thing about it.
Koepp: It gave me so much anxiety that I had to go to the bathroom 45 minutes in, just to have a few minutes. It sets you up for such monstrous things, and then people are just talking and being normal. So you know it’s coming, but you don’t know how or when. I had to splash water on my face and then watch the rest of the movie. It was a very intense experience.
Bacon: I am in a very small club of people that saw a movie called Clown, directed by Jon Watts. It’s this crazy, low-budget horror about a man whose clown costume sticks to his face. And I said, “I gotta work with this guy.” And I ended up doing Cop Car with him.
Koepp: I’d throw in The Return Of The Living Dead. A great late-’80s classic. It’s campy and over the top, but there’s a moment where they ask a zombie why it eats brains, and it says because of the pain. The guy says to this corpse, “It hurts to be dead?” And the corpse says, “Yesssssssss.” it’s one of those genius ideas that gives you chills, and that you can’t believe nobody thought of before.
ON WHAT SCARES THEM…
Koepp: My kids asked me, “What’s the scariest idea for a movie you can possibly think of?” And I said, without hesitation, “Ageing.” And their faces… it was like I’d told them it hurts to be dead.
Bacon: Mice. We’re overrun with mice right now. And I don’t like them. I don’t mind rats — I had rats when I was a kid. They were pets. But mice, for some reason, just really freak me out.
Koepp: That reminds me. I gotta call you about that Willard remake.
Bacon: No way, baby!
YOU SHOULD HAVE LEFT IS OUT ON 12 OCTOBER ON DVD, BLU-RAY AND DOWNLOAD