Witchboard
Witchboard
Witchboard: Russell has an extraordinary ability of spotting potential and maximizing it to create a movie star in the example of casting Patricia Arquette as the first lead actress in ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors’, or bringing Jim Carrey and Cameron Diaz into the international spotlight with his 1994 film ‘The Mask’, knowing all-too-well that it was Diaz’s first motion picture. He was also instrumental in invoking Dwayne Johnson into acting with the 2002 picture ‘The Scorpion King’. He completed his 40 year career as Chuck Russell, a movie director with undeniable vision.
Russell has an obsession with discovering unpolished verticals and rawers vseeing seeing what talent can pull off no matter the genre, scope or budget, which imangas he developed more while working in theatre.
“Somehow, we have to make the characters believable, whether in an action or comedy or drama,” he explains. “You got to know what goes on in the minds of the performers. You have to try and get the real person in them when they act.”
Russell is here referring to ‘Witchboard,’ the new film he is making that remakes the cult classic film which was released in 1986, and which has its world premiere on Friday as part of Montreal’s Fantasia Festival. It’s an Independent Horror project, and it sort of goes back to the time when Russell was just a kid, beginning with ‘Dream Warriors’ and his other movie in 1988, ‘The Blob’—both of which have become a cult classic among ‘80 horror generations.
The new “Witchboard” tells the story of a girl named Emily (Madison Iseman) who end up finding a tormented board in a forest. As genre fans might envision, the more she uses it for personal gain, the more enigmatic events occur around her. However, what sets this film apart from other horror films is a strong sense of the films purpose and the narrative.
Emily and her fiancé Christian (Aaron Dominguez) are moving into New Orleans with their close and very attractive friends who were filmed in the French Quarter, which is where a large portion of the movie was filmed. Currently, Christian is opening a fine – dining restaurant, so there are lots of fantastic scenes of tastings and dinners. All in all, “Witchboard” does succeed in creating multi-dimensional characters, which are doing something, looking at something, and having inner lives – which many of such narratives do not bother developing.
Russell remarks that much of that framework came through the location itself.
“New Orleans reminds me most of classic witchcraft and sorcery,” he states. “But it also has a French connection as well in this story as some of the most famous Witch Trials occurred in France as well as the French settling in New Orleans. I wanted some correlation between this group and the people who created the Witchboard in the 1700s. New Orleans couldn’t get any more interesting and bright in terms of atmosphere and the music is easy to listen to.”
That is where food and friends made sense to Russell.
“I’ve been wanting to do a foodie film, so a number of my interests came to play here,” he explains. “New Orleans has great food, and it is a place where I find a union between food and horror. If [David] Cronenberg is renowned for his body horror, I suppose in this film we’re going for the food horror genre. Also, I missed that time not long after graduating from college, where everyone had a group of friends. It is immediately after college when you venture to prove how far you can go: you have a circle of friends and set out to own a boutique restaurant. This sort of a relationship was the key for me to the narrative, since I do not wish to stick to one method of storytelling. This is not the story of one protagonist. There is chaos yes, but it doesn’t mean that the only goal is to clock out when characters have been killed in a specified time. As with other horror-themed films, it becomes very soporific if the same methods are employed repeatedly which is why I aimed to be creative.”
Yet the maelstrom takes time and is delivered little by little owing to jamie campbell bower’s mustache and twirl as a sexy evil college professor obsessed with the witchboard and seeking to use it complete the orgy in the erie old house that he lives in.
Russell was accomplishing big budget stunts on an indie cost level and, as a result, some of the setpieces such as the dinner party that went awry and involved a lot of extras as well as cuts, stunts and hysterical bloody cutlery were quite complex and needed a great deal of planning.
“There is some clever staging in putting things together,” he remarks. “The sequence in the restaurant is many stunts, many effects and because it is an independent film, otherwise it is a big studio film, I think I would just have built the whole thing in a stage. But as it was, there was a real standing two storey restaurant and it was completely open. There was a lot of planning and it was a lot of fun to do. We had three days to shoot that, which is not so much for that kind of thing, with all this set up. We were being creative.”
Russell agrees that these classical film components are not always the priority of all directors, but they are the principles of the craft that he is concentrating on in “Witchboard.”
“I just think the audiences deserve a great tale,” he states. “I am here first to please the audiences with something that there is a universal story to be told, there is something that can be identified with these characters.”
I am drawn to independent films because their casts often feature new and aspiring actors who can be mentored or nurtured, and they are an immense pleasure to work with.”
Apart from improving his actors, he also insisted on being great but previously said he had his conditions for achieving this.
“It’s Linda Blair in the middle of it all: Elm Street, The Blob and this return… There was such a desire to surpass oneself. That was my self-imposed challenge. I stated: ‘You have to go beyond everything you have done so far.’”
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- Genre: horror, Mystery
- Country: United States
- Director: Chuck Russell
- Cast: Madison Iseman, Jamie Campbell Bower, Charlie Tahan
