KASDAN: He hasn't had that long, you know. He's fearless. IGNFF: Yeah, that really does come across in his work.
I imagine Dreamcatcher couldn't have been the easiest shoot. You have snowy exteriors, special effects, pyrotechnics, prosthetic asses, a large cast although you're used to working with ensembles. Was it as tough as it seemed?
KASDAN: It was tough in exactly the way I thought it would be. And you know, when you take on something like this, you read a book like this, you know that it's going to be an adventure. That's part of what draws you to it.
No matter where we wound up shooting, we knew we needed snow on the ground and it had to be cold. We were shooting in the middle of winter. It turned out to be very cold, sometimes 27 below.
But, that was in British Columbia. When you do that, your whole crew and it was a Canadian crew, which I'd never worked with before and they were fantastic and I think that they weren't daunted by the weather. It was kind of great, because then it becomes like everybody's in this together and how can we do this, and we had to just not be out in it, and mostly at night, but also make it snow all the time.
We have different kinds of snow blowing, and you have these huge fans and people are wrangling enormously large and difficult equipment around in three foot deep snow. It is an undertaking. IGNFF: When exactly during the shoot did you film the bathroom sequence?
I would imagine if you started with that, people would be wanting to know, "What the heck do we do tomorrow?" How do you top that? KASDAN: It came in the second half of the show, and we had returned to Vancouver to the stages.
We built the cabin out in the woods, but the interiors were all done in Vancouver. So, luckily we were heavily into the process when we got into that part of it. Jonesy (Damian Lewis) faces an alien.
IGNFF: Were you a horror film fan at all? Were you influenced by any particular films or filmmakers for the making of this project? KASDAN: I think I was for sure.
Two separate things. One is that I'm not good about going to the theater and being frightened. Something about sitting there with other people makes me twice as anxious.
I went to see Aliens , which I think is like the scariest movie ever made, practically. I had to like see the comic book first, because I couldn't stand the anxiety of not knowing when that face-sucker was going to come out. But, those movies have a huge impact on me, when I can get myself to see them, you know.
I loved Alien , and I loved Carrie , and I loved The Exorcist those were big movies for me. They were just brilliantly done, and unusual, and they all took horror to some new place. What I have not gone to see, and don't like much is the slasher movies.
Just the fear that somebody's going to jump out and surprise you, that's not that interesting to me. Or that you're going to see something, somebody's hand chopped off unexpectedly. Continue on to the conclusion of Stax's conversation with Lawrence Kasdan in which Kasdan discusses how Dreamcatcher compares to his other films, working on Raiders of the Lost Ark and the Star Wars films, his upcoming projects, and more.
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