By Todd Garbarini
Film
director Paul W.S. Anderson, not to be confused with film directors Paul Thomas
Anderson or Wes Anderson, hails from Wallsend, North Tyneside, England and,
like so many of his contemporaries, began shooting movies on Super-8mm in his
youth. In his mid-twenties, he enjoyed professional success as a writer on the British
series El C.I.D. Following the end of the show, he and producer Jeremy
Bolt founded their own company, Impact Pictures and, after much toil, financed Shopping,
which was released in the United Kingdom in 1994 and in the States in 1996. This
put them on the map and brought him Mortal Kombat in 1995, a film based
upon the popular video game of the same name. This led to the sci-fi/horror
film Event Horizon, which is now available on 4K UHD Blu-ray, and it’s
this film that I discussed with Mr. Anderson recently while he was promoting
the release.
Todd Garbarini: I want to thank you for taking the
time to speak with me and thank you also for the Resident Evil films. I
enjoy those very much.
Paul W.S. Anderson: Me, too!
TG: How did you first see Ridley Scott’s Alien and what
was the effect that it had on you?
PWSA: I saw
[Sir] Ridley’s Alien when I was at school, and I saw it when I was far
too young, and it terrified the living daylights out of me. I also had a real
crush on Sigourney Weaver. So, it was a big, big impact. I had never seen a
movie like it. I mean it was amazing, and the look of the alien and the alien
spaceship, which I later realized was the work of [Swiss artist H.R.] Giger,
was just spectacular. It was really like nothing I’d ever seen in cinemas
before.
TG: I feel
the exact same way. I was ten and-a-half years-old when Alien was
released here in the States, two years to the day that Star Wars was
released here…in fact, the financial success of Star Wars bankrolled Alien…and
I was shocked to see that it was restricted to just adults! My parents would not
take me to see it. Kenner had produced toys, games and puzzles in the stores
based on the film. It took me another four years to see it on home video, but
the power of that movie came through tremendously, even on a six-year-old 13” Sylvania
television.
PWSA: I didn’t
see it with my parents either. Like you, I had loved Star Wars and I
thought, Wow, another space movie! Boy, was I wrong! (laughs)
TG: Was there one
particular film that, or filmmaker who, compelled you to become a director?
PWSA: I can
tell you that certain filmmakers have had a huge influence on me. Ridley Scott and
Tony Scott in particular because I love their movies. I love the look of their
movies and what their movies are about and how they are put together. They came
from the same part of the Northeast of England as I did. I never knew anyone in
the film industry, and no one made movies in the North of England. So, wanting
to be a film director when I was growing up seemed like an impossible dream. But
there were these two brothers who somehow managed to do it and they were very
inspiring to me because of that. They didn’t know anyone in the film industry
either. They built themselves from the ground up. I felt like I could do it as
well.
TG: You
derived inspiration from them.
PWSA: Exactly. Now, in terms of
wanting to become a filmmaker, I used to watch a lot of westerns when I was a little
kid. They used to have these things called “Saturday morning pictures” wherein
your parents would drop you off at a cinema that was full of about 350 kids without
any parental supervision. This would never happen today, and you would be there
for about four hours to basically run riot while your parents went and did some
shopping or went and had sex or did whatever they did on a Saturday afternoon without
the kids around. Most of the kids were running around throwing popcorn at one
another and beating each other up. I think I was one of the few kids who just
sat and watched the movies. They showed a couple of Laurel and Hardy shorts because
they were cheap and then some old westerns. I must have seen every John Ford western.
John Wayne was my favorite actor because I watched all these westerns with him
in them. I recall at the end of either The Searchers or Rio Bravo,
I saw his name in the credits as they rolled and I suddenly made the link that
he wasn’t a real cowboy, but rather an actor pretending to be a cowboy. Once I
realized that movies were not reality and just recorded by a cameraman, that
they were artifice, they were awesome and that’s what I wanted to do with my
life. I had no idea how I was going to achieve that. I just knew that that’s
what I wanted to do after seeing those amazing images on the big screen. That
was the inception of me wanting to make movies.
TG: Do you consider yourself to be a genre director?
PWSA: Yes, I
have worked almost exclusively in the sci-fi/horror genre. But like every
director in the world, I want to direct a western. No studio wants to make a
western, unfortunately, because they are just so uncommercial nowadays. I’m
about to make a movie called In the Lost Lands based on a story by author
George R.R. Martin [of Game of Thrones fame]. At its heart, it’s very
much a western as it has all the iconography that one would associate with a
western. It’s set in a post-apocalyptic land, so on the surface it’s not a
western, but at its heart it is most definitely a western. It deals with a lot
of western tropes and storytelling and imagery, so I am very excited to be
doing that.
TG: I
interviewed John Carpenter in 2010 and he is a big fan of westerns like yourself.
When he came out of film school in the early 1970s, he really wanted to make one,
but nobody was doing them in this country at the time. So, needless to say, he
was very disappointed.
PWSA: Yes,
but if you take a look at Assault on Precinct 13, the obvious influence
of westerns is in that film.
TG: Yes, absolutely. I love how that film was edited by “John
T. Chance” [the name of the sheriff that John Wayne plays in Rio Bravo]!
PWSG: Exactly! (laughs) And also people like Walter Hill, who was a big influence on me. I absolutely loved, loved The Driver
and 48 Hours. But specifically, what I really liked about Walter Hill
was when he was basically redoing the kind of Jean-Pierre Melville vibe of
those French gangster movies. So, they had imported the American movies, and
they did the French twist on them making them very existential, and then Walter
Hill kind of reimported them back into America and didn’t bother giving the
characters any names, which I absolutely love. So, for me Walter Hill is
somebody who pretty much, with every movie he makes, is a western. Ironically,
the films that work the least are actual westerns, but the ones that tend to
work the best are these urban movies that are really westerns in disguise. So,
I’m sort of hoping that it’s a “lightning strikes” moment for me when I do In
the Lost Lands. It’s basically my western, but nobody will realize it!
TG: Event Horizon pits
a lot of terrific actors in an ensemble piece, among them Sam Neill, Lawrence
Fishburne, Jason Isaacs, and Kathleen Quinlan. Were they your first choices for
their respective roles?
PWSA: Yes, it was a movie where I was
very lucky that the studio was kind of willing to go with my personal choices.
They never insisted that we absolutely had to have somebody who was a movie
star who carried very big movies before. They were on board for doing the ensemble
casting. I was very, very happy about it. It allowed me to get some really
terrific actors together, playing roles that they didn’t traditionally play as
well. Sam Neill at that point was very much in the minds of audiences as the heroic
guy who saved the children from the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. He was
up there with Tom Hanks as probably the actor whom the audience could trust the
most.
TG: Yes. I recall seeing Michael
Mann’s Collateral wherein Tom Cruise completely plays against type.
PWSA: Exactly. Sam Neill was still
sort of the guy who could look after your kids. So, the idea that he would be
the one who goes insane and tears his own eyes out, at that point in time it’s
probably the type of role that you would have expected Laurence Fishburne to
play. And then Fishburne playing sort of the heroic Captain as well, that was
not really a role that he had played before. So, both of them are amazing
performances but both of them were kind of stretching, but in a good way.
TG: Have
you ever seen Sam Neill in a film by Andrzej Zulawski called Possession?
PWSG: No, I
haven’t.
TG: It was shot
in the summer of 1980 in Germany and was released the following year
internationally. It made its way here to the States in a highly butchered
version in 1983, but it’s one of the most bizarre, cinematic experiences that I’ve
ever seen. You should catch up with it if you can. The uncut version is readily
available now.
PWSA: I will!
TG: What
are some of the challenges that you encountered in making Event Horizon
that you hadn’t foreseen?
PWSA: It was
just the compacted time that we had to actually make the film. That was a big
challenge. You know, I was young, and I hadn’t made many movies so I didn’t
really know what I was doing. I was up for a challenge at the time, but
nowadays I would probably say, “Hey, wait a second, I don’t know if that’s really
a good idea.” I had another movie to make right after Event Horizon and
it was with Kurt Russell [Soldier (1998)] with Warner Brothers, so I had
to finish Event Horizon on a certain date, so we had to start shooting
early. So, for such an elaborate movie with so many big builds, and really
complicated things, like the third containment being a real spinning, gyroscope
that was thirty-five feet high, I mean, this was really complicated stuff to do
in the time frame allotted. Then the production got even more compressed when Titanic
fell out of the summer and Paramount announced that Event Horizon would
be taking its place, and then suddenly I had only three to four weeks to
actually do my first cut of the movie before we started testing it. Those were
the logistical challenges. The actual making of the movie was just a delight. I
loved being with those actors on those sets. I didn’t even mind the challenges,
to be honest. Like I said, now I would think twice about doing certain things
in the movie, but back then I was just up for it.
TG: Thank
you for your time and best of luck to you with In the Lost Lands!
PWSA: Thank
you!
(Thanks to Deborah Annakin Peters for her help in arranging this interview.)