After I interviewed Paul Walker for Hours, the film’s publicist told me writer/director Eric Heisserer was available too if I was interested. Heisserer wasn’t on the schedule, but in fact I was interested since I only met him previously before the film premiered at SXSW. I had much more specific questions after seeing the film.
Walker plays Nolan, a father of a premature newborn born right when Hurricane Katrina hits New Orleans. As doctors, medical staff and patients flee the hospital, Nolan is left alone with his baby on a ventilator. When the power goes out, he find a hand cranked generator that’s only good for three minutes at a time, and less as its charge dwindles. Hours is Heisserer’s directorial debut. As a screenwriter he wrote the remakes of A Nightmare on Elm Street (along with other credited writers) and The Thing and the sequel Final Destination 5. We touched on those too, but I forgot to tell him that I still call it Fivenal Destination.
CraveOnline: It’s a great “what if” story, what if you’re abandoned in a hospital during this disaster. Do you know if there were any true stories of people left behind, whether babies or adults?
Eric Heisserer: There are countless abandon stories. Hospitals [too], but mainly from homes and hospices, retirement homes and a lot of small pockets of people. The story about the ventilator actually came from Charity Hospital which was overcrowded but still without power. The doctors, nurses and the staff there were the ones trying to keep the ICU equipment and the NICU equipment powered.
So it wasn’t as extreme as one person with no training.
No, that’s the fiction that I pulled from it.
Which I approve of. Like I said it’s a great “what if.” You have to think of the most extreme situation.
Yeah, and it supplied me with the story that I wanted to tell which is really about parenthood. I felt that was a more intimate relationship there between the life that’s struggling to stay alive and the father.
Did you know going in what Paul would go through to get this performance?
Well, I knew it would be brutal. [Laughs] There was no mistake about that. I love that he identified with Nolan right away and he talked about how when his daughter was born there were complications, and he recalled so vividly just the panic and the helplessness that he felt and the need to be able to try and do something. I thought that’s just a great emotion, a great mental state that he could pull himself back to for this movie, and I think he did.
How did you keep track of the time, the three minutes and when it dwindles to 2:47 and under two minutes?
That was pretty absurd. We did a lot of stuff that I guess are like method writing. Once we got the layout of the hospital, and we shot in an actual hospital in New Orleans for most of that, and we figured out the locations of the stairwells and the other major points, me and some of our crew ran it ourselves and timed it, timed everything. How long would it take to get to the roof and down? Where can you stop for a breather and all those things? We had to figure out the geography for that to try and make it as real as possible, and there were plenty of times when as we had prepped it for three minutes, or 2:47 or one and change, a lot of us were like, “No, you can’t do that.” Then our DP or our gaffer or somebody would make the run and go, “Oh yeah, that’s doable.”
Once you get into editing and you’re time cutting, does it really matter how accurate you are with the time?
We found that the narrative that you tell in the story once you get to post-production ends up being a lot more fluid. Time becomes a little more relative than the very strict boundaries we were forcing on ourselves during the shoot. We still had a lot of fun with it.
I figured you must have fudged it a few times and that’s okay. Maybe when I’m home I can look at the DVD timer display and count it, but in the theater I couldn’t time it.
Yeah, there are plenty of times like that.
So you shot in a real hospital. How did you set dress the Katrina conditions?
That’s an interesting situation for us because the hospital that we shot in had been abandoned since Katrina. In fact, there’s a shot in the movie that shows a wall calendar that had August of 2005. We found that just there on set. A lot of what you see is equipment and computers and books and stuff that were just left in the hospital. So it was very real and when we were filming, when we had everything lit and we were using the gurneys or the IV equipment around, it felt very authentic and real. If we were between shots or you went one floor up or down, suddenly you felt like you were in a ghost movie because you’re just around all these ancient pieces that had not been seen or touched in over five years.
Did you re-flood the hallways?
We did. We did some natural flooding. We first thought maybe we were going to have to use CG floods or CG water or a special effect to pull it off, but I didn’t like the look of any of those even in pre-vis. They didn’t feel very authentic at all, so my practical effects man came up with a great solution in which he brought in a giant standing pool, tore it down and we flooded the lobby and a couple of the hallways and just shot that. It was fun.
Is Paul essentially acting with a box, because there’s no real baby or even a prop except for the two shots where we see the baby?
Right, he is. He’s doing it all on his own. There were a couple of times when we could bring in a live baby and place it in the incubator so that he had a real person he could talk to. Even if she was off camera, it helped but that was rare. A lot of it was just him.
