This has been a great year for the horror genre with past releases like The Witch, The Conjuring 2, The Wailing, and Lights Out. Over half way into the year and that hot streak continues with the completely engrossing Don’t Breathe. We sit down with Don’t Breathe‘s writer/director Fede Alvarez and veteran stage and screen actor Stephen Lang and talk about past films, atmospheric filmmaking, simulating blindness, and why Alvarez thinks we’re all perverts.
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.
Fede Alvarez on Filmmaking
How did you go from your stop-motion film roots to horror? How did you make that kind of a jump?
Fede Alvarez: Well, let me do a little bit of math, but there’s like 20 years between one and the other. Yeah, I was doing stop-motion stuff when I was 7 I think. Then, when I was a teenager, I was doing a lot of superhero stuff. It was just one of those things I was always doing, making films, and then one day I just realized I was a grown man and someone offered me money in exchange to keep doing that, and then I became a professional. It was never a career goal, like, “This is where I’m going.” I just liked telling stories with the camera and I was doing it for a long time, so I don’t really know how I get to the places I go. I just do the things I like to do and right now I like to do horror movies. I don’t think one is straight forward horror. It has horror elements for sure, but the structure and the style is more of a thriller and the imagery of some moments are more of a horror movie.
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Silence and darkness were two of the film’s biggest assets as far as establishing atmosphere. How difficult was it juggling the cinematography and with the sound design to create that heightened atmosphere?
Fede Alvarez: Very difficult. I think if things come too easy then you’re probably not doing a good job.The challenge was that we had a script with very little dialogue. It was a movie that even if you don’t speak the language, and there were no subtitles, you would still understand what’s going on. That left a lot of room for the sound design, the music, and the camera work. When the actors are not talking, the camera is speaking for them. Because I also wrote it, I re-created it in a way so that I would have room to play. It was difficult, but I think when you have something that is a challenge, you have a better chance to succeed and give the audience something that is not just your everyday weekend movie that you could just watch and dismiss the next day.
Youth and Acting
This was such a physically and mentally challenging role that was very dialogue light. Do you think you could have done it twenty years ago as a younger actor?
Stephen Lang: I don’t think there is a role that I did twenty years ago that I couldn’t do better today. It’s a question of simplification. As you get older, I try to simplify my work, unless the work needs to be baroque and arcane or ornate. I do think that I’ve arrived at a place where I immediately was able to lend myself to this part. As a human being too, which I think also helps as an actor, I’ve become more empathetic as I’ve gotten older. I think that my capacity to understand and to have patience, and give people a break, has enlarged over the years. I guess I would say I’m glad played this role now, and not twenty years ago.
Fede Alvarez: I would add that aside from him, the rest of the cast were very young. For my money, he [Stephen Lang] was the one with the most youthful approach. Our relationship for the film was one that I most enjoyed. We were both of the spirit of “Let’s play!” or “This is going to be great because of this!” and he would try different stuff. Sometimes, with the younger actors, they are more conflicted. They’re in a place in their careers where they’ve only made a couple movies, and thinking, “This one better work!” They’re in a place where they sound like old people and bitter. I’m not talking about anyone in particular, but I’ve worked with young actors in Evil Dead and now in this film and they sometimes just remind me of an old soul. They are bitter with just fears of failure. This is the first time in a film that I work with an actor that is older than 25 years old. He [Stephen Lang] has made more movies than any of them, but he felt like the youngest one of them all as far as his approach and spirit of not being scared to try things.
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Stephen Lang on Blindness
Blindness is a condition that we can experience but never know the ultimate in being trapped within it. What preparations as a performer made you empathize most with being blind?
Stephen Lang: There are many other conditions for which that statement would be true, of course. From a side door, you’re actually talking about acting. (laughter) But yes, of course, blindness is a very particular one. It, of course, needs to be approached with great respect for many reasons, not least of which is times we live in.
When you want to learn about something, what is the first thing you do…you go to the internet. What I found – and what surprised me about it, even though it makes perfect sense – there were many instances of blind people doing extraordinary things they. Things that we would think they couldn’t do. They were jumping out of airplanes, skiing, and cooking shows. That’s not what I was looking for, I was learning how “to be blind”. What I was looking at were people have worked through a condition that those of us with sight would look at with a certain amount of despair. What I was seeing was something that was aggressive and positive, and it was just a good, immediate thing to understand.
What other characteristics were you trying to understand in his particular blindness?
Stephen Lang: Well, for one thing, he was once a sighted man, knew what it was like to see and is now deprived of it. There is no question that he went through the bleakest despair, and with the other factors in his life. He’s kind of Job-like in the woe that’s been heaped upon him. In terms of the blindness, at some point you have a choice: I’m either going to jump into the abyss or I’m going to learn to live. If I’m going to live, I’m going to be resilient, and I’m going to be all that I could be. So there is a lot of strength in the guy. He does in some way to begin to positivize his condition.
That leads you to his execution. You do that by first defining the parameters of your life, your realm, your kingdom, and you become so experienced within those walls that you can operate with economy, efficiency and total confidence. In so doing, learning the geography of the house. By doing that, you accomplish two major aims. You project a mastery over your circumstances, which is vital for the whole ethos of the film. The other thing it does is sell the blindness because you’re moving in straight lines, you’re moving with confidence. It’s like playing hyper-sighted, in a way, when you’re actually not
Did the contact lenses help? I know you probably couldn’t see much out of them.
Stephen Lang: They do eliminate a good amount of your vision. In a sense, they operate like that ‘red string’ around your finger to remind you to go buy cantaloupe. “Don’t forget to be blind.” (laughs) And also, we were working in low light conditions, so I would say that somewhere between 50 and 75% of my sight was eliminated in the first place. Then became the leap of faith to eliminate the rest. Also, he [Fede Alvarez] was there all the way to, “Hey, tilt your head,” or, “Jut your chin.” All the stuff that would physically help to see.
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Fede Alvarez Thinks We’re All Perverts – In the Best Possible Way
The history of the horror genre, before blood and gore could be shown, relied more on the psychology of fear, rather than the showing of what those fears could perpetuate. Do you think you could have worked under those restrictions and how do you think Don’t Breathe would have been different?
Fede Alvarez: I think a lot of it would work under those restrictions. If you asked someone what they thought the worst thing that happened in the movie was, it’s more psychological and harder to pick up. It was more the things they feared were going to happen. Most of the fear is psychological, like the whole infamous scene in the cellar where nothing really happens except what you fear is going to happen. What really happens? Nothing. If anything, the blind man [Stephen Lang] gets the worst part of the thing.I do that all the time. I like playing with the idea of hope versus fear. I try to create a hope in the audience in a scene and then get them terrified when something else happens.Or even introduce a third option they haven’t even considered.
A lot of early filmmakers, like Polanski, all thought the same thing: the audience are perverts, but in the best possible way. Let’s say I show you the trailer to this movie. What does it promise you? It promises to show people suffering and probably dying. That’s what it shows you and that’s why people show up to the theater. You don’t show up to the theater saying, “Oh, I don’t want anybody to die.” The reality is that If nobody dies and nobody gets hurt, they’d want their money back. That is the perversion. You do want to see it even if you say you don’t. There is something in your mind that needs to witness these things.
Almost like a voyeurism.
Yeah, you want to see how people react under those things. During the [scene with the horror climax], you don’t want it to happen, but there is a part of you brain that is stimulated by the whole thing, in terrible ways, but human beings are complex. I’m aware of that and I try to deliver on the promises that my films makes.
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