Patrick Lussier has horror in his veins. The man who cut his teeth editing such horror classics and Wes Craven's New Nightmare and the original Scream trilogy got his start directing with the first Dracula 2000 movies, but quickly moved on to bigger, baudier fare in My Bloody Valentine 3D and this year's supernatural action romp Drive Angry. We had an audience with the director, who had a lot to say about making a 1970's car movie in the new century, how to fix 3D movies, why hisnew Hellraiser movie isn't a remake and, perhaps most importantly, how he's going to incorporate Halloween III: Season of the Witch into his upcoming follow-up to Rob Zombie's Halloween 1 and 2.
Crave Online: First of all, I wanted to say that I’m actually a really big fan of pretty much everything you’ve done. I didn’t see a couple of the Dracula movies, I’m pretty embarrassed to admit…
Patrick Lussier: Don’t be embarrassed. Nobody else did either.
Crave Online: (Laughs) – Let’s talk about Drive Angry first off. I was a big proponent of this movie, and one of the things I liked most about it – and it’s a little thing, but I liked it – is that the title is bad advice.
Patrick Lussier: Yes. Yes. The title will definitely get you a ticket and is something to be advised against.
Crave Online: I was talking to Todd Farmer about the genesis of the project, and it started as car movie. There are a lot of different kinds of car movies. What was it that most excited you about putting one together from scratch?
Patrick Lussier: You know, I always remember obviously the early 70’s car movies, things like that. Dirty Mary Crazy Larry and Race with the Devil in particular…
Crave Online: I thought I saw some Race with the Devil in this!
Patrick Lussier: Yeah. Race with the Devil was a movie I remember seeing the trailer for with like Freebie and the Bean or something, and just going, “Oh my God, I have to see that movie!” I was like ten, or something like that. And my parents go, “You will never see that film.” And it wasn’t literally until about four or five years ago that I finally managed to see it. But the trailer had such a profound sort of impact on me, those fragments of how it was sold at that time, the sort of wonderful exploitation involved, it really sort of stuck with me. And it just seemed like all those great old car movies would be fun, to do something like Vanishing Point. And High Plains Drifter was another thing that we really liked from that time period, the time when heroes were total antiheroes, and were just as likely to shoot you in the face as save you. All those things were really brought together and as we started talking about what we wanted to do we added a supernatural element, and fast cars, and Drive Angry is what resulted.
Crave Online: Obviously it has horror elements, but this is your first straight up action movie. Was that a shift you really wanted to make?
Patrick Lussier: I’ve always loved shooting action, and I’ve always loved cutting action, so it just seemed like a natural progression. It’s something I really like to do, and with this it just felt like, yeah, we could have the horrific elements but it would be fun to do something that was action-driven and had a lot of choreography to it. Yeah. It was occasionally daunting because of the sheer mechanics of doing it. Obviously you’re not just having somebody walking down a creepy hallway, you’re actually asking people to put themselves in harm’s way driving the wrong way through one-way traffic. (Laughs) – So that has a different emotional and mental impact to it.
Crave Online: While I’m sure you did a lot of the car stunts for real, I’m having a hard time imagining that William Fichtner actually stepped out of a car in mid-air onto the hood of another car.
Patrick Lussier: Yes, he does it! We did it on stage, and the way we shot it was with air jacks, so the trooper car was on a set of air jacks and the truck is on a set of air jacks. So it was literally hovering, floating…
Crave Online: That’s really cool, actually…
Patrick Lussier: So, yeah, he gets out while they’re moving but he gets out while they’re not moving on the freeway at high speeds.
Crave Online: So Drive Angry is your second 3D movie. And I actually wrote an article on Crave Online talking about how I prefer the 3D in Drive Angry to the 3D in Avatar, and I meant that because it’s aware of itself. It’s actually having fun with it, and I got the impression – and I’d like you to correct me if I’m wrong, please – that you seem to be embracing 3D as a novelty as opposed to something that’s actually immersive.
Patrick Lussier: Well, yeah. It does both things, and while you can’t do the novelty every five seconds because it gets really, really tiring, to me it’s fun to exploit what the technology can do. It has this great element of rollercoaster to it. It has this great element of… and not just letting you immerse yourself in, but also reaching out and smacking you in the head. And that’s a really fun component to it, especially for a movie like Drive Angry or a movie like My Bloody Valentine, they have a real sort of ‘haunted house’ vibe to them, so why not use the technology for all it’s worth? Because it can do that stuff really well, it can do other stuff, it can be immersive, it can be pretty, it can be intoxicating, blah-blah-blah. But at the same time, it just seems like, why not use everything that it has to offer?
