Evil Dead vs Don’t Breathe
Your first feature-length film came from the pre-existing franchise, Evil Dead. This was a unique opportunity for a first time director. How do you think that shaped your career? Did it help or hurt it?
Fede Alvarez: It didn’t hurt it at all. The film was generally well-received, even if it was polarizing. I like polarizing and I try to be polarizing. When I make films, if I do something that I think everyone would like then I feel like I’m playing it too down the middle or have a watered-down version of what the movie should be. It was a very particular experience. It was strange coming from another country — I came from Uruguay, where there wasn’t a Hollywood industry or even a movie industry at that level — and suddenly you’re given a project like that one. Before I had a chance to write a single word on it, people were already saying it was going to be horrible. Sometimes I was literally writing and then I would get an alert on my phone about some article saying something about how bad it was going to be. I hadn’t really even started writing it yet.
That in a way was kind of exciting, because you could use that as motivation to prove them wrong. I really tried to work twice as hard so you don’t give them the pleasure. I did like it. It was my first movie and I was suddenly given the chance to make a movie with those resources and for a film that was going to be released all around the world. The happiness that I had just getting the opportunity was better than any bad feelings about doing a remake. The big difference between this film and my previous one was that, yeah, I could do whatever I wanted, but it always had to be an Evil Dead movie. It meant I had to honor the original.
So you had to stick with their established mythology?
Yeah, it had to be limited by needing to be an Evil Dead movie, but this one was able to be whatever I wanted it to be. That freedom made the process much more enjoyable and it didn’t feel like I was in someone else’s house. I felt at home and this was the home that I created and this is my space. Evil Dead did have a lot of things that were my obsessions and it reshaped the whole story from the original, but this one a lot more of me and shows a lot more of my obsessions and what my perversions are.
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