Joe Johnston Interview, The Wolfman

MoviesOnline sat down with director Joe Johnston to talk about his new film, The Wolfman, starring Benicio Del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, Hugo Weaving and Emily Blunt. An Academy Award-winning art director for Raiders of the Lost Ark, Johnston’s resume as a director includes a strong combination of character-driven films such as October Sky and epic visual effects movies including Jurassic Park III and Hidalgo.

As with all of his projects, Johnston was far more interested in story before spectacle. In screenwriters Andrew Kevin Walker and David Self’s tale, he found underneath the action and the blood and the terror, a love story about Lawrence Talbot and his dead brother’s fiancée, Gwen. “I wanted that relationship to be the element that held the story together,” he explains, “the key piece that invested the audience in understanding this horrible thing Lawrence is inflicted with.”

Johnston was also excited by the visual challenges that would come from turning the script into an action-horror film. “I want to show the audience something they haven’t seen before in our process of turning a man into a werewolf,” he says. “We’ve done transformations in The Wolfman that you could only do with the help of computer-generated animation. We have a great place to start the transformation, which is Benicio Del Toro, and we have a great place to end up, which is Rick Baker’s makeup. But it’s not a straight-line transformation…we go off in multiple directions to get to the end result.”

Johnston told us how he set about creating a horror film for today’s audiences while paying homage to the classic Universal monster movie and he explained how he collaborated with his creative team to get the right look and tone for the film and balance between practical and CGI effects. He also gave us an update on his next film, Captain America, which is currently in preproduction and set for release in 2011.

Q: In the process of reshoots and release dates, did you ever try a PG-13 version? Was there an extended version?

Joe Johnston: No, it was always an R rating. At one point, the head of the studio called me and said, “Do you think we could recut this into a PG-13?” I said, “Yes, but nobody would want to see it.” So it was always intended to be an R. You’ve all seen the film.

Q: It’s good that it’s R.

Joe Johnston: I think so. It deserves to be an R.

Q: Were there ever extended versions?

Joe Johnston: Well, there is an extended cut that will be the DVD. It’s about 17 minutes longer and it’s what we cut out of our third cut in order to reduce the time between the beginning of the film and when Benicio transforms into the wolfman because we knew that that was the moment the audience was waiting for. They knew it was going to happen and they were perhaps less patient than I was with getting to that point. So the note we got from the preview screenings was that the beginning is slow. I wanted the characters to develop and those relationships to be a little fuller before we got to the place where he is bitten and transformed. That’s basically what you’ll see in the extended cut, is the restored footage from the first 40 minutes.

Q: Why did you want to make Benicio’s character more noble?

Joe Johnston: Well, I don’t remember exactly using that description noble, but I did want there to be as much contrast between Lawrence and The Wolfman as possible. I think that originally, Lawrence was a little bit of a hellraiser to begin with. He was this actor who went out and partied all night, went to bed with three women at once and he hung out in opium dens and places like that. It was a different take on the character but I felt that in order to increase the contrast between who this guy was and what he was going to become, both sides of the character, the hero and the villain, I felt like he should be slightly more noble, although I don’t remember using that word.

Q: What informed your decision in terms of practical vs. visual effects such as having a CG bear and stag and the transformations?

Joe Johnston: Well, it’s difficult to have a real bear and one the size that I wanted to have. We could have used this bear that’s almost a pet from Czechoslovakia but to get it across the borders and get all the permits signed and everything, it turned out to be a lot easier to have the CG bear. It was a bear that already existed in the computer. It was basically the bear from The Golden Compass. It’s The Golden Compass bear, obviously not a polar bear and we changed its face, but the point is the data was already there. We didn’t have to design it from the ground up. The stag also existed from some other project and again we changed him too but to get a stag to be able to stake him to the ground and have him pull against the rope and everything is more than we would want to do with a real animal. So basically, as far as the transformation goes, I know that Rick originally thought that he would do the transformations with mechanisms and prosthetics and rubber like he had done with American Werewolf in London. Nobody does that stuff better than Rick obviously. The problem I had was that I was coming in starting three weeks from principal photography and in order to have Rick do the transformation, I would have to decide almost immediately exactly what the stages of the transformation were. By letting them be CG, I could make those decisions deep into post. I just basically didn’t have the flexibility to be able to sit down and say, “This is exactly what I want it to be” that early in the production.

Q: Time constraints.

Joe Johnston: Exactly.

Q: Can you talk about the look and tone of the film and how you collaborated with your director of photography Shelly Johnson and production designer Rick Heinrichs.

Joe Johnston: Well, I inherited Rick Heinrichs as a production designer. I had never worked with him before. I knew of his reputation, and he had designed some films that I was really a fan of. He did Sleepy Hollow and another couple that I can’t remember right now. I thought he did an amazing job with especially creating the Talbot house and making it a character in the film. It is almost as much a character as some of our live-action characters because I really wanted him to create this environment that you didn’t necessarily feel comfortable in. It was a big, dark, scary, ugly house basically. Every interior is a set. We didn’t use any practical locations except for the exterior, but because I came in three weeks from start of principal photography, I sat down with Rick and I said, “Do you have a vision of what you think this place should be?” And he showed me some sketches and some models and some reference that he had found and he says, “This is what I think it should be.” I said, “That’s fantastic, go with it.” As far as Shelly Johnson who I’ve worked with twice before, I think the only thing I told Shelly was that this movie should be more about the shadows than the light. I said, “I want you to create something that we haven’t seen in a long time. I really want it to look like a classic gothic horror film. Not necessarily old fashioned but I want it to reference what movies like this used to look like.” I think that was the only input I had with Shelly. He showed me some tests that were beyond what I was hoping for and it’s the kind of thing where I felt like I was really able to delegate the look of the photography and the production design because I trusted these guys so much. I think they just did a fantastic job. That’s my favorite thing about the film is how it looks.

Q: How did you reference the classic Universal monster films but still create a horror film for today’s audience?

Joe Johnston: Well, I think it’s because they’re used to vastly different horror films that I wanted to go back to something that I remembered from a long time ago. I think that we’ve seen so many examples of CG characters running around and doing things that subconsciously we know they can’t do, I think that it takes you out of the picture sometimes. I wanted you to always feel that whatever this beast was, he was not breaking any laws of physics. He had a strength and a power that you could understand. I didn’t want to basically do what we saw in Van Helsing which is since you can do anything, you take advantage of that and you do it and I think that audiences know when it’s not real and when it is. I think it’s a subtle thing that you don’t ever think about, but you know when this guy is leaping and landing and punching people, it feels more real.

Q: Were you all for makeup versus CGI for the werewolf? Would you do another Jurassic entirely in CGI?

Joe Johnston: No, I think that I wouldn’t want to do it entirely in CGI but there’s no other way to really do a walking dinosaur. But, what we do in the Jurassic Park movies is we build full size dinosaurs that we can have interact with the people. We often blend the animatronic dinosaurs with the CG and hopefully you don’t know where one begins and the other one ends. Like any other kind of visual effect, what you really want to do is use it as a tool to tell the story. I don’t want anybody to come out of the theater saying, “Wow, what great visual effects we just saw.” I’d rather have them say, “We really enjoyed the movie. It was really entertaining.” You don’t want to separate the effects. I like visual effects that are basically invisible. You don’t know when you’ve seen one or you forget that it was an effect hopefully.

Q: What specifically did editor Walter Murch bring to the project?

Joe Johnston: Well, Dennis Virkler had done a cut of the film that was about over half an hour longer and we had sort of reached a plateau where the film wasn’t changing. We were getting studio notes and audience notes and we felt like we sort of needed a fresh take on it. I’ve known Walter for probably 20 years but I’ve never worked with him. He’s one of the Lucasfilm guys, Northern California guys. They were asking me, “We’re going to bring in a new editor. Is there anybody you like?” I never in a million years assumed that Walter Murch would be available for one thing, and that he would want to do it. Greg McRitchie at Universal made a few calls and Walter’s agent said, “Walter’s available. He’s not working and he’s looking for something to do.” Great, are you kidding? But Walter took the cut and he looked for ways to energize it and to bring out the relationship story even more than it was. One thing that Walter does which is really fascinating to watch is there’ll be a scene that’ll be in the movie that has always been in, and because it is so crucial to the story, you think the movie can’t exist without the scene. Walter will say, “Let’s take that scene out and let’s see how the movie plays without it.” Sometimes the movie plays without it and sometimes it doesn’t but what you do with that kind of exercise is you learn what’s important in the film and you learn how important these other scenes are and if the movie works without that pivotal scene. So we did that a few times. We took out scenes in various parts of the movie and watched it without them. We usually put them back in but in a couple of cases we didn’t. I guess the thing that I appreciate about Walter is that nothing is sacred in the cut. He will do anything. He’ll try anything. With digital editing now, you can do a cut, put it in a bin and save it and then try something completely different and within a matter of hours you’ve got a completely different film. Walter really uses that technology wisely. A lot of fun to work with him too. He’s got a lot of great stories as you can imagine.

Q: How is preproduction going on Captain America and will you cast an American?

Joe Johnston: Casting an American? Absolutely. Oh yeah. I don't think we could make the film without an American playing the part but we may not be casting in America because we’re going to London. I think we’ll probably shoot in the UK for most of it because it takes place in Europe, but yeah, we’ll definitely be casting.

Q: Was there ever any talk of Wolfman in 3D, or Captain America in 3D?

Joe Johnston: No, we’re shooting the next project in HD but you can take any film now and make it 3D. We’re not going to be shooting it specifically in 3D but this is the first film I will have shot in hi-def. I think it’s one of the first Shelly will shoot in hi-def too so it’ll be a new experience for both of us and it gives you a lot of flexibility in post too, which is something I learned from Walter.  He says, “You know, when you shoot a movie in hi-def, if you want to zoom in 200%, you can. In film, you can go about 15-20% at most before you start seeing grain and degradation but in hi-def you can basically reshoot the film in post if you want to.” So I’m looking forward to trying that.

Q: Did you reference any of the Hammer films?

Joe Johnston: Well, I was familiar enough with the Hammer films, I didn’t really feel like I needed to research them. It was really, I wanted to take what I remember from the Lon Chaney version and update it even though we’re setting it in 1891 and I think the original was set in 1941. But, I just wanted to sort of retell that story in the way that I remembered the original looking which is very dark and shadowy. Like in the transformation, I didn’t want you to see the first transformation. I wanted you to get glimpses of what he was becoming and to put those together in your imagination so that by the time he takes Montford’s head off in the swamp, you’ve never really had a full, clear shot of him. You’ve had glimpses but you know exactly who he is and what he’s capable of. I think that once you - - then there was a shot that we did where he comes out from behind a tree and you see him in a big closeup, every hair perfectly illuminated by moonlight. We cut that shot out because once you’ve seen that, you quit trying to see him. You’ve seen him. It sort of I think takes away from your experience. I like it when audiences can participate and use their imagination to sort of fill in the blanks. We were conscious of that in that first transformation. We knew we were going to show you the second transformation in all its glory completely illuminated by the asylum theater gas lights. So after that point there’s nothing else to hide but we wanted to just keep a little bit of mystery about it up until that point.

Q: Anthony Hopkins plays the character so cool and detached. Was that in the script?

Joe Johnston: No, it was part of his madness. He recognized that for him to overplay that would have detracted from it and he was really conscious of for him, his madness, it’s the way he is. He doesn’t think there’s anything out of the ordinary about it.

Q: Did you feel comfortable from the outset that was going to work?

Joe Johnston: I felt very comfortable. The studio didn’t necessarily. I got calls saying, “He’s not doing anything.” I said, “Well, wait ‘til we cut it together.”

Q: With Captain do you see opportunities to bring an auteur style to it like Sam Raimi did with Spider-Man and Burton and Nolan did with Batman?

Joe Johnston: We’re definitely going to shoot it in a different way than any of the other Marvel pictures have been shot. What I’m trying to do is look at the comics, mostly the new ones, mostly the Brubaker series and to interpret that sort of visual style into a film in a way that I think has been tried before but it always looks like it’s a little too on the nose. It looks like oh, they’re shooting a comic book movie. I want to try something a little bit different.

Q: Have you nailed down what the big set pieces will be?

Joe Johnston: Yes, we have. Right now we have to sort of pick our battles because it’s a little more than we can afford right now, but there are some great action sequences, stuff we haven’t seen before.

Q: For casting, it is about finding the right person or does it also have to be a big name star?

Joe Johnston: No, we’re looking for a complete unknown.

Q: So it’s not a movie star taking this part?

Joe Johnston: I hope not. I hope it’ll be somebody that we discover and who’s never been in - - he’s probably been in something but you won’t know who he is. You won’t recognize him and we’ll surround him with more prominent names. That’s who we’re looking for. Will we find him? I don't know, it’s tough.

Q: When do you have to have casting done?

Joe Johnston: March 1st.

Q: Why did you take the space out of the Wolf Man’s name?

Joe Johnston: I know, we wanted it to be a word, exist as a word and we also wanted to set it off from the original, The Wolf Man. Now it’s a thing until itself.

The Wolfman opens in theaters on February 12th