Cast & Crew Interview, The Mist

With “The Mist” opening in theaters this weekend, I thought why not revisit our interview with three-time Oscar-nominee Frank Darabont ("The Green Mile," "The Shawshank Redemption") and the cast and creative team from San Diego’s 2007 Comic-Con where they talked about their new film.

Darabont reunites with horror-master Stephen King to write and direct the chilling adaptation of the author's original short story. Joining our press conference are director Frank Darabont, actors Thomas Jane, Marcia Gay Harden, and Laurie Holden, Visual FX Supervisor Everett Burrell, Creature & Make-Up FX Supervisor Greg Nicotero, and artist Drew Struzan (who designed the hand painted posters for “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones,” the special edition DVD covers for “The Green Mile” and “The Shawshank Redemption,” the Comic-Con poster for “The Mist,” and is now doing the artwork for Steven Spielberg’s upcoming 2008 Indiana Jones VI movie!).

In “The Mist,” artist David Drayton (Jane) and a small town community come under vicious attack from creatures prowling in a thick and unnatural mist that follows a violent thunderstorm. Local rumors point to an experiment called the ‘The Arrowhead Project' conducted at a nearby top-secret military base, but questions as to the origins of the deadly vapor are secondary to the group's overall chances for survival. Retreating to a local supermarket, Drayton and the survivors (Harden, Holden, and others) must face-off against each other before taking a united stand against an enemy they cannot even see.

Here’s what the director, cast, creature effects wizards, and one very extraordinary poster artist had to tell us about their adventures making “The Mist”:

Q: How did you first become involved in this project? I know you’re a big Stephen King fan, but why this particular story?

FRANK DARABONT: I have loved this story since 1980 when I first read it in Dark Forces Anthology edited by Kirby McCauley. I think it was republished again in Skeleton Crew two years later. I’ve always loved it and I’ve always wanted to do it. In fact, I remember sitting one night on the set of “Nightmare on Elm Street 3” which was my first writing credit along with Chuck Russell who was directing it and I remember thinking wow my writing career seems to have started. I’d like to start thinking about a directing possibility. I want to get in touch with Stephen King and find out if he’d give me the rights to something and I was weighing one night “Shawshank Redemption” or “The Mist.” I decided to go for “Shawshank” and it turned me into a classier guy than I’d ever intended. But I never let go of the idea of making this movie. There’s something about good, intense, pressure cooker ensembles that I really love and this particular one is pretty unique so it finally came back around. It finally came time to do it.

Q: Can you talk about what it took to do all the special effects for this film?

FRANK DARABONT: It was a very interesting experience for me and I gather for the cast as well to play a lot of scenes with things that weren’t actually there. I think it was kind of a first time for me directing scenes like that. ‘Okay, pretend that the thing is swooping and the thing is chewing.’ It was very interesting.

LAURIE HOLDEN: I felt like we were really lucky because Greg Nicotero (Creature Design and Make-up FX) and Everett Burrell (VFX Supervisor for Café FX) brought out these puppets and showed us how the mouths worked and how the eyes worked and so we really had a very good reference point so when they took the puppets away and we were looking at dots and pretending to see the monsters, we really knew the size of them and how ferocious they were or if they had 8 legs or whatever, so that was a real gift the fact that we had the puppets there on set because that’s very rare. Usually it’s like ‘Okay. Monster comes in. Scream.’ So it was wonderful having that there and it helped for all of our performances.

GREG NICOTERO: Well I was reminding Frank at one point that our first meeting on this movie was about 12 years ago when he was just initially getting ready to do it. ‘I might do The Mist next. I might do this and that.’ So we did a whole bunch of sketches and drawings and I went over to his house one morning and showed him a bunch of creature designs. It was all very preliminary but we’d been friends for a long, long time. So then he called in October and said, “Okay, we got a green light for ‘The Mist.’ We have to start thinking about creature designs.” Everybody knows if you want to come off with great creatures, they’re not going to come up over night. It’s not going to be the first one out of the gate. So we started sketching stuff and we went up to Café FX and had a lot of round table meetings about developing the creatures, developing how the stuff worked, and it was a great, great experience because Frank had specific ideas about what he wanted to do and Everett and I, our history made it a really good team to say “Okay. We can handle that and Visual Effects can do this.” And by building all the puppet stuff…of course, the fun thing for us is every time someone comes on set, they all come to the creature effects room and everybody wants to play. They start pulling on cables and puppeteering the creatures and playing. I have to give a tremendous amount of credit to Everett because I think he and his team at Café FX have gone above and beyond even what I had hoped the creature work would look like. I mean once we wrap the film, I’m done. I’ve built the creatures and we shoot them and then they go into the Raiders of the Lost Ark crate in the back of K.N.B. (Effects Group) and then it falls into their category. It’s amazing stuff what I’ve seen. I’m blown away so I can’t imagine what people who have no idea what’s coming up are going to think. We were going to bring a spider but it wouldn’t fit in the car. So they’re kind of a little big. We could’ve strapped it on the roof but somebody would have thought we were an exterminating company. We tried to get it in the back of the car. We measured it but it wouldn’t fit.

Q: Did you intend to shoot it hand held with a sort of documentary feel to it all along or did that come about after you did “The Shield”?

FRANK DARABONT: It’s actually I think, if anything, my desire to go into a more fluid, ragged, documentary kind of direction with this movie. [That’s] probably what drew me to “The Shield” in the first place because I thought well I don’t really have this kind of experience as a director and I’m a big believer in learning even if that means there’s a baby step or two. I believe in that kind of preparation so I was lucky enough to do a couple things for television last year and it was really…in my mind it was always getting into character for “The Mist.” I want to learn something new that I can then apply to this feature. What I learned was so thrilling that I took the cinematographer and the camera operator and the editor and the script supervisor from “The Shield” and asked them to join us on this. I dialed in so quickly to it and those folks were so dialed into it already that it created a wonderful way to do something completely different that I’d never done before. It was really a thrill.

Q: Would you say that’s how you modernized what is pretty much the traditional monster movie?

FRANK DARABONT: It might be on the surface of it but, to me, it’s a throw back to Paddy Chayefsky. It’s a throw back to Shakespeare. It’s people at each other. It’s not so much about the unbelievably cool creatures that we’ve got working in this thing. It’s not really about that. What this is about is fear. What does fear compel people to do especially when you throw people into the dark and you scare the shit out of them and as the David Drayton character says as one point, you take all the rules away. Then what? How primitive do people get? It’s “Lord of the Flies” that happens to have monsters in it.

MARCIA GAY HARDEN: I feel like it’s as much about the question of what’s out there, that fear, that not knowing, as the fact of what’s out there. So there’s this interesting balance. We see the horrible thing but not all of it. You see the tentacle but not all of it. And then you’re back in the room and the adrenaline and the sweat and this tension builds up and the people behave in horrible ways and then something else happens and one of those things gets in. Without the human balance, it would be shot after shot of [screams] which to me is not nearly as interesting as this, like he said, the “Lord of the Flies.” How do people behave? That’s the fun of it and Frank was like … I want to say he was the director but he really wasn’t. He was the conductor, the ringmaster holding this brown cigarette constantly, a skinny brown cigarette in his hand standing over behind a bay of monitors watching it and yelling, “Bring this in.” And then scenes when he got excited, he’d yell loudly. How many extras were there every day?

FRANK DARABONT: Anywhere from…depending on the day, there were from 50 to 80.

MARCIA GAY HARDEN: And 5 of them were 700 hundred years old and they stood without any complaint at all which would never happen on the lot.

FRANK DARABONT: They were lovely.

MARCIA GAY HARDEN: They were completely acting and being a part of it so it wasn’t just your camera or business thing. Really he was like a ringmaster. It was very exciting.

FRANK DARABONT: It was really different. I’ve gotten louder as I’ve gone on. I had a microphone and speakers all over the set. It was like, “Okay. Duck. Act. He’s screaming. There’s a fucking thing swooping. Oh my God! Run!” I was narrating through the whole thing. I used to direct very quietly. I used to whisper in actors’ ears. Not anymore. It’s like I’ve turned into Dick Donner. [Laughs]

MARCIA GAY HARDEN: You didn’t have to question what is he thinking. It was just “Do this and do it now!”

Q: Thomas and Laurie, can you talk a little about your characters?

THOMAS JANE: Well in the book we make love up in the manager’s office, only in the Stephen King book. He’s trying everything he can to get back to his wife and his kid and while his kid’s sleeping, he’s upstairs schtupping Amanda in the manager’s office. But it’s like what happens to you in times of stress and fear and duress. You never know if you’re going to make it out of there alive. For some reason in the book you’re with the hero. He’s right there with him. But in the movie you’d be like ‘that guy needs to die.’ [Laughs]

FRANK DARABONT: But I’m so not getting away with that on screen. I’m not even trying.

LAURIE HOLDEN: I’m married to somebody else in the film and I’m one of the leaders on the good side of the aisle. There’s a bad side of the aisle and a good side of the aisle depending on who you speak to, of course, Marsha. [Laughs] We’re more like surrogates to each other. There’s more of a kind, emotional relationship as opposed to a sexual, romantic one – a good support system for one another.

THOMAS JANE: We kind of form a little surrogate family with my son and my father and she becomes the mother to the son and we become a little unit as we’re trying to get through this nightmare together. And it’s really fascinating how quickly people turn into animals.

LAURIE HOLDEN: Not always animals because I don’t think everybody in “The Mist” turns into an animal. I think it’s a morality tale of what happens to people under dire circumstances and fear and some people rise to the occasion. Some people become leaders like your character and some people become mothers like my character and some people become religious crusaders like Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden’s character).

THOMAS JANE: She’s a leader.

LAURIE HOLDEN: She definitely is a leader.

MARCIA GAY HARDEN: But I’m a divisive leader and that’s the question. I’m a divisive leader whereas he’s trying to be a unifying leader and that’s the interesting thing. One leader hurts the community and hurts the potential for survival and the other one doesn’t.

THOMAS JANE: Well I find it really fascinating and I’m hoping that somebody who sees the movie points this out is that – and I don’t think I’m giving anything away – every decision that David makes turns out to be a disaster. [Laughs] Every time, by trying to do the right thing, the smart, logical, reasonable thing, every single time it turns out to be a complete and utter failure and complete disaster. I love that about the movie and the story and the character and what it says about trying to do the right thing.

DREW STRUZAN: He’s like the guy who lives next door to you. He’s not like Indiana Jones or anything. He just happens to be a painter that lives next door. He’s your neighbor. He’s your friend that you see getting your mail and that kind of stuff which is what is great about all the characters in the movie. There were 47 principles I think and 70 extras. I remember one day Frank saying, “Man, I got so many people in this market. We must be crazy.” Because you’re dealing with…it’s not like one room with a couple people. It’s an entire supermarket with different stories and different interactions all through the entire market. You’ve got to follow the storyline of each one of them. It’s as if everyone in this room got sealed in and how you would deal with it. People find their niche. The interesting thing about David’s character that even watching him act, I thought it was like yeah, that guy would be your neighbor and you’d watch him rise and try the best that he can. He doesn’t know all the answers but he does what he thinks is best.

MARCIA GAY HARDEN: There’s also not a lot of “Make my day” and “Die Hard” and those kinds of lines either. In fact, the people who have some of the lines most typical of that are Frances Sternhagen [imitates his voice], “I’ve got a lot of peas.” [Laughs]

FRANK DARABONT: And Toby Jones is like the tough guy with the [inaudible]. And by the way David happens to paint a lot like Drew Struzan, a very talented painter.

Q: How does the experience of directing this film compare to directing your other two films, “Shawshank Redemption” and “The Green Mile,” which were also based on a Stephen King novel?

FRANK DARABONT: Night and day different. Night and day different. And I chose to make it night and day different because really the tonality of this particular story and movie wanted to be different. I didn’t want to have that precision for lack of a better word. No, actually it’s a really good word. It’s a pretty precise word. There’s enormous precision in the films that I’ve made in the past and very clearly thought out and you could see that the kid who grew up watching Stanley Kubrick movies made those films because there’s this tremendous control and that becomes its own shackle after a while and you think, “Okay. Screw that. I’ve played Beethoven’s Ninth with a symphony orchestra. Let’s go play some jazz.” Let’s go grab an instrument and if we miss some notes, then that’s actually part of the point of it, you know. It was a completely different 180 experience for me. For me, probably the most satisfying thing I’ve ever done. Win, lose or draw, if it’s a hit or if it’s a flop, it’s the movie where I actually learned to love directing. Truly. And I never did before, you know. I found it enormously satisfying and rewarding in a lot of ways, but I never enjoyed it because there was tremendous pressure I was putting on myself to try and achieve some ephemeral notion of perfection. Fuck perfection. Let’s have fun. Let’s get in there and roll around in the mud because sometimes that’s fantastic and it feels tremendously vital to me. Some of my favorite movies have done that when they’ve been done well, you know, done intelligently. You let it happen instead of make it happen. This may be a fine distinction between the two but it’s the difference between night and day really. And I dragged all these folks along for the ride and it was different for them too.

MARCIA GAY HARDEN: That’s essentially because the emotion is messy and fear is messy. All of that is really a messy thing to go through and sometimes you don’t get that same visceral feeling. You know like when you watch on the news the person who has just experienced the loss of their house in a fire and you can see the fire in the background and the person says, “I lost everything I had” and you’re like sobbing because it was so raw.

LAURIE HOLDEN: I think it’s the rawest a lot of us have ever been. It was renegade filmmaking at its beast.

FRANK DARABONT: The style fit the story. The style fit the subject. You can’t do that all the time. Some things will require that kind of precision and that kind of painterly approach and okay let me think out months in advance how I want to shoot something versus let’s find it at the moment we’re actually doing it. It depends on the movie. The movie will demand its own tone from all of us in all our respective areas. But this one just really lent it self to this and it was great. It was great. It was like mud wrestling and throwing bricks. It was fabulous. I loved it.

“The Mist” opens in theaters this weekend.