Samuel Bayer directed legendary music videos like Nirvana's "Smell's Like Teen Spirit." Back when MTV actually played videos, his work heralded the grunge movement and a gritty visual style for the genre. It took nearly 20 years for him to make the leap to film. Bayer's first feature is a doozy, the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street.
Children of the '80s grew up with Freddy Krueger. The 1984 Wes Craven movie spawned seven sequels (if you count Freddy Vs. Jason, which most count in both series.) Freddy even got his own TV show and made other pop culture appearances, because he was such a charismatic showman. He was the ultimate movie monster with a face covered in burn makeup and a glove with four knives for fingers. In the movies, he was a child killer, but since he ruled the fantasy realm of dreams, he was inherently fun.
The legend is that parents of Springwood rounded up Freddy and burned him alive, since the courts wouldn't dispense a satisfying justice to his crimes. When the Elm Street children grew up, Freddy invaded their dreams. If they died in the dream, they were dead for real. Robert Englund played Freddy until now. For the reinvention, Oscar nominee Jackie Earle Haley put on the burn makeup, the finger-bladed glove and the red and green sweater.
The new version of Freddy was the focus of Bayer's last year, from production through reshoots to the ultimate release. It would have been nice to get his thoughts on things relating to the music business, but Freddy led to so many topics it dominated the discussion. Sitting in the Beverly Hills sun, a few beads of sweat and a mid-afternoon squint set the stage for an analysis of the new Freddy.
SuicideGirls: Was if your idea to accuse this Freddy of being a child molester or was that already in the new script?
Samuel Bayer: That was something in the script that was before I got in. That was Wesley. That was Wesley Strick that I think brought that in. It was kind of cool that that was Wes Craven's intention in the original movie to have a different element rather than just murder of children.
SG: So how did you deal with the language of talking about that, without flat out saying it?
SB: I think you have to be very careful. We're not doing social commentary. We're making an entertaining movie. I think this is a movie about monsters and it's a very interesting society. It's very interesting they call people serial killers and make them really charming and make them like Hannibal Lecter. They eat you and yet they're still really charming and they talk really eloquently. I think we try to make Freddy as a human being a much more flawed and much more of a real human being. Sometimes monsters don't always have to have burned skin to be monsters. The mythology of Freddy Krueger is still the same, but we try to make something I think a little bit more interesting, a little bit deeper and complex.
SG: You never use the P word but they talk like people would talk about abuse.
SB: It's the same thing. Again, we're not doing social commentary. I know that I don't have children but if someone hurt my child using the P word, I don't know what I'd do. I might hurt them really badly. I might actually kill them. So that again is trying to add some realism to our film. It's easy to say he was a murderer. It's much more complex to say he was something else.
SG: Did you design this Nightmare to fit in with the grittier aesthetic of recent horror movies like Saw and Hostel?
SB: I think the stuff from the '80s certainly feels like it was from a certain time period. There are certain elements of the cinematography that I recognize. It's like the hand that crafted The Terminator, James Cameron's original movie, looks very much like the same cinematography that was used in Nightmare on Elm Street. Backlit, blue tinted, smoke and certain elements that just made the movies look like they were made in the 1980s. Look, I have a very specific look for what my work looks like. I think my music videos and my commercials look very much like the film that I made. I certainly made this for modern audiences but I don't know about Saw and Hostel and stuff like that.
SG: Well, a boiler room is boiler room at a certain point.
SB: Right. I mean, I think there's an industrial sense, a grittiness. I look more at things like Dark Knight and the look and style and feeling of that movie, a comic book movie, a movie about a superhero that was rooted in as much reality as you can possibly make. That became the template for this film.
SG: So that is a more modern approach to the material.
SB: I completely agree. I think if you put it in that way I completely agree. It is very much a 21st century take on Freddy Krueger. If there's maybe two different ways movies can go these days, that either you have a gigantic budget and you're James Cameron and you can spend four years of your life devoting it to crafting something that is mind blowing, there's that. Then I think there's the other way to go which is I'm not going to rely on special effects. I'm going to make something that's based very much in the real world and the physical world. The characters and the way it's lit and everything is as real as I can make it.
SG: Is CGI really better than the practical effects of the original films?
SB: No, probably not. No, listen, I'm very proud of a lot of elements of the movie. I would not say that the CG element of what we did in this film is any better than what was done 25 years ago. Having said that, I can also say that everything else I did absolutely looks better, whether it's the girl being thrown against the ceiling or even something that almost may feel to some people that we're literally replicating the shot. The hand in the bathtub, it's a more elegantly photographed image.
SG: Well, it's not like it's shot for shot.
SB: No, I mean listen. I hope the reason why him coming through the wall or the hand in the bathtub or the girl skipping rope or the girl being bashed against the ceiling, and there are some little tiny nuggets of other things that we put into the movie, was paying homage to the original film and to Wes Craven and what he created and the power of the movie. We did it for the fans. I can't say that enough. If I wasn't making a movie that had such a legacy and so many die hard fans, I never would have done that stuff.
SG: Considering this is a reinvention of Freddy, why did you choose to quote some lines directly from not just the original film, but others in the series?
SB: I say it again and again. The original movie became our bible. I always said that from what I read and understand that Wes Craven created the original movie to be a standalone movie, to never have a sequel. I did a lot of research on things that he had said in the press about dreams and how he came up with the character of Freddy Krueger. I made this movie for new fans and old fans and maybe in a way Wes himself.
SG: How important are Freddy's taunts?
SB: You can't do the movie without Freddy's taunts. I just can't say enough that if Freddy isn't scary then we failed. I found certainly in some of the later films they were just about the jokes. Maybe they were about the kills but the jokes were more important than anything else. If it's more funny than it is scary, then it's not really a horror movie anymore.
SG: Don't you think the idea could have been that it be disarming or more evil that he cracks jokes while he kills?
SB: You know what? I leave that up to the fans. For me as a filmmaker, I find it very difficult to watch the later films and find too much that's scary about them.
SG: Or maybe by part six, they stopped trying to be scary and just went for pure entertainment.
SB: Then I think that people that expect to see this as part seven will be very disappointed.
SG: Actually, this would be part nine. I was just using six as an example.
SB: Or part nine. With the TV series then part 45, right?
SG: Obviously Freddy has to be burned. That's part of the story. Could you have chosen a differnet outfit than the traditional sweater and hat?
SB: Can't.
SG: You obviously wouldn't lose the glove, but you wouldn't think of trying a different look for a reboot?
SB: You know, if something works, don't try to fix it. It's cool, man. It's funny, I looked at the different movies. Sometimes the glove was made of bones or it's more metallic. I think in one movie he wore a jacket, a trenchcoat actually on top of the sweater. We looked with the wardrobe stylist. The sweaters actually changed a little bit from movie to movie. Sometimes the hat looked like it was perfectly press and there wasn't a burn in it. To me, it was Batman without the utility belt or without the cape. I had to keep the cape and the utility belt. It was the face that I could really change.
SG: Was there always going to be a tag at the end of the movie?
SB: Yeah, the coda. That was the term, the coda. Yeah, there was always going to be a coda at the end. There was talk of another coda earlier on in the process. How we were going to end the movie, there was a lot of discussion over that. Were we going to give it away that it was all a dream or was it going to end on a happier note, that was a big part of it.
SG: So did you find out that Wes Craven hated the coda on his original movie?
SB: Yes. I did but you know, I think that Wes hated it because, what I read is he wanted to end it on a happier note. He wanted good to triumph over evil. I leave it to people to see this movie but I'm not necessarily saying it one way or the other other than we left it in a certain place.
A Nightmare on Elm Street opens April 30.
Children of the '80s grew up with Freddy Krueger. The 1984 Wes Craven movie spawned seven sequels (if you count Freddy Vs. Jason, which most count in both series.) Freddy even got his own TV show and made other pop culture appearances, because he was such a charismatic showman. He was the ultimate movie monster with a face covered in burn makeup and a glove with four knives for fingers. In the movies, he was a child killer, but since he ruled the fantasy realm of dreams, he was inherently fun.
The legend is that parents of Springwood rounded up Freddy and burned him alive, since the courts wouldn't dispense a satisfying justice to his crimes. When the Elm Street children grew up, Freddy invaded their dreams. If they died in the dream, they were dead for real. Robert Englund played Freddy until now. For the reinvention, Oscar nominee Jackie Earle Haley put on the burn makeup, the finger-bladed glove and the red and green sweater.
The new version of Freddy was the focus of Bayer's last year, from production through reshoots to the ultimate release. It would have been nice to get his thoughts on things relating to the music business, but Freddy led to so many topics it dominated the discussion. Sitting in the Beverly Hills sun, a few beads of sweat and a mid-afternoon squint set the stage for an analysis of the new Freddy.
SuicideGirls: Was if your idea to accuse this Freddy of being a child molester or was that already in the new script?
Samuel Bayer: That was something in the script that was before I got in. That was Wesley. That was Wesley Strick that I think brought that in. It was kind of cool that that was Wes Craven's intention in the original movie to have a different element rather than just murder of children.
SG: So how did you deal with the language of talking about that, without flat out saying it?
SB: I think you have to be very careful. We're not doing social commentary. We're making an entertaining movie. I think this is a movie about monsters and it's a very interesting society. It's very interesting they call people serial killers and make them really charming and make them like Hannibal Lecter. They eat you and yet they're still really charming and they talk really eloquently. I think we try to make Freddy as a human being a much more flawed and much more of a real human being. Sometimes monsters don't always have to have burned skin to be monsters. The mythology of Freddy Krueger is still the same, but we try to make something I think a little bit more interesting, a little bit deeper and complex.
SG: You never use the P word but they talk like people would talk about abuse.
SB: It's the same thing. Again, we're not doing social commentary. I know that I don't have children but if someone hurt my child using the P word, I don't know what I'd do. I might hurt them really badly. I might actually kill them. So that again is trying to add some realism to our film. It's easy to say he was a murderer. It's much more complex to say he was something else.
SG: Did you design this Nightmare to fit in with the grittier aesthetic of recent horror movies like Saw and Hostel?
SB: I think the stuff from the '80s certainly feels like it was from a certain time period. There are certain elements of the cinematography that I recognize. It's like the hand that crafted The Terminator, James Cameron's original movie, looks very much like the same cinematography that was used in Nightmare on Elm Street. Backlit, blue tinted, smoke and certain elements that just made the movies look like they were made in the 1980s. Look, I have a very specific look for what my work looks like. I think my music videos and my commercials look very much like the film that I made. I certainly made this for modern audiences but I don't know about Saw and Hostel and stuff like that.
SG: Well, a boiler room is boiler room at a certain point.
SB: Right. I mean, I think there's an industrial sense, a grittiness. I look more at things like Dark Knight and the look and style and feeling of that movie, a comic book movie, a movie about a superhero that was rooted in as much reality as you can possibly make. That became the template for this film.
SG: So that is a more modern approach to the material.
SB: I completely agree. I think if you put it in that way I completely agree. It is very much a 21st century take on Freddy Krueger. If there's maybe two different ways movies can go these days, that either you have a gigantic budget and you're James Cameron and you can spend four years of your life devoting it to crafting something that is mind blowing, there's that. Then I think there's the other way to go which is I'm not going to rely on special effects. I'm going to make something that's based very much in the real world and the physical world. The characters and the way it's lit and everything is as real as I can make it.
SG: Is CGI really better than the practical effects of the original films?
SB: No, probably not. No, listen, I'm very proud of a lot of elements of the movie. I would not say that the CG element of what we did in this film is any better than what was done 25 years ago. Having said that, I can also say that everything else I did absolutely looks better, whether it's the girl being thrown against the ceiling or even something that almost may feel to some people that we're literally replicating the shot. The hand in the bathtub, it's a more elegantly photographed image.
SG: Well, it's not like it's shot for shot.
SB: No, I mean listen. I hope the reason why him coming through the wall or the hand in the bathtub or the girl skipping rope or the girl being bashed against the ceiling, and there are some little tiny nuggets of other things that we put into the movie, was paying homage to the original film and to Wes Craven and what he created and the power of the movie. We did it for the fans. I can't say that enough. If I wasn't making a movie that had such a legacy and so many die hard fans, I never would have done that stuff.
SG: Considering this is a reinvention of Freddy, why did you choose to quote some lines directly from not just the original film, but others in the series?
SB: I say it again and again. The original movie became our bible. I always said that from what I read and understand that Wes Craven created the original movie to be a standalone movie, to never have a sequel. I did a lot of research on things that he had said in the press about dreams and how he came up with the character of Freddy Krueger. I made this movie for new fans and old fans and maybe in a way Wes himself.
SG: How important are Freddy's taunts?
SB: You can't do the movie without Freddy's taunts. I just can't say enough that if Freddy isn't scary then we failed. I found certainly in some of the later films they were just about the jokes. Maybe they were about the kills but the jokes were more important than anything else. If it's more funny than it is scary, then it's not really a horror movie anymore.
SG: Don't you think the idea could have been that it be disarming or more evil that he cracks jokes while he kills?
SB: You know what? I leave that up to the fans. For me as a filmmaker, I find it very difficult to watch the later films and find too much that's scary about them.
SG: Or maybe by part six, they stopped trying to be scary and just went for pure entertainment.
SB: Then I think that people that expect to see this as part seven will be very disappointed.
SG: Actually, this would be part nine. I was just using six as an example.
SB: Or part nine. With the TV series then part 45, right?
SG: Obviously Freddy has to be burned. That's part of the story. Could you have chosen a differnet outfit than the traditional sweater and hat?
SB: Can't.
SG: You obviously wouldn't lose the glove, but you wouldn't think of trying a different look for a reboot?
SB: You know, if something works, don't try to fix it. It's cool, man. It's funny, I looked at the different movies. Sometimes the glove was made of bones or it's more metallic. I think in one movie he wore a jacket, a trenchcoat actually on top of the sweater. We looked with the wardrobe stylist. The sweaters actually changed a little bit from movie to movie. Sometimes the hat looked like it was perfectly press and there wasn't a burn in it. To me, it was Batman without the utility belt or without the cape. I had to keep the cape and the utility belt. It was the face that I could really change.
SG: Was there always going to be a tag at the end of the movie?
SB: Yeah, the coda. That was the term, the coda. Yeah, there was always going to be a coda at the end. There was talk of another coda earlier on in the process. How we were going to end the movie, there was a lot of discussion over that. Were we going to give it away that it was all a dream or was it going to end on a happier note, that was a big part of it.
SG: So did you find out that Wes Craven hated the coda on his original movie?
SB: Yes. I did but you know, I think that Wes hated it because, what I read is he wanted to end it on a happier note. He wanted good to triumph over evil. I leave it to people to see this movie but I'm not necessarily saying it one way or the other other than we left it in a certain place.
A Nightmare on Elm Street opens April 30.