CraveOnline: How long into your screenwriting career had you been planning to direct?
Eric Heisserer: Probably since my first produced credit. When Elm Street finally hit the theaters, I had the start of an itch to direct my own feature. I started putting it to the test with each successive movie that made it and began to hire storyboard artists on my own and board out sequences for the movie that I wrote to see how visual I could get and how close to what my director came up with. That was kind of just a little training ground for myself.
So how close did Nightmare get and how close did FInal Destination 5 get to the storyboards?
[Laughs] I would say both of those were quite different from the final product but I got very close on a handful of sequences in The Thing. That’s what gave me the confidence to try and tackle this.
Did you storyboard Hours then?
I did, but in my own stick figure way. Jaron [Presant], my director of photography, I would tell him, “This balloon is Nolan and this small balloon is the baby.”
What will your next film be?
I have a couple of projects that I’ve written that I’m hoping will be my next feature but they’re still on the horizon right now.
Do you think you could direct in the franchise realm like Nightmare on Elm Street, Final Destination and The Thing?
I don’t think so. I think I have to stick with original properties. That leaves those amazing franchises for more capable directors.
Were those easier as a screenwriter, to write within a franchise?
I don’t know if anything’s ever been easier. I’d say that it’s always a double-edged sword. It’s easier in that you have so much character development already done for you. Someone’s paved that way so we know who this character is, we know who these villains are or we know what the stakes are for certain scenarios, like with Freddy Krueger. The hard thing then is to develop a storyline that’s different from the ones that have come before so you can justify why you’re making another movie, but also similar enough that it feels like it’s part of the same world. That dance is a very difficult one to do.
I know the intention with Nightmare was to reinvent and reboot, but I thought if you wanted to you could see it as Nightmare 9. Is that an insult to you?
No.
Or was it intentional that certain fans could maybe see it either way?
I do believe that there was an ambiguity there. Now, whether that was purposeful or accidental is up to debate but we found the deeper into the Nightmare culture that we got, the more divided everyone was with their opinion of what the franchise is. Everyone’s Freddy Krueger was a little bit different, their favorite version of him. There is the slapstick comedy Krueger or the scary as hell version and it was hard to try and service all of those masters.
Did you write the line “How’s this for a wet dream?” or did they improvise it?
I believe that was a line from someone who came in and did some rewrite work.
Well, it’s from Nightmare 4 so it was a surprise to see that one in there.
Yeah.
Did you have any good Final Destination deaths that didn’t make it into 5?
[Laughs] Yeah, there were a couple of Final Destination deaths that were just too much. In fact, the original death at the health spa wasn’t the Buddha and acupuncture. It was actually death by colonic. We just deemed that was too much. That was just like a bridge too far.
That’s where Final Destination draws the line.
Apparently so. [Laughs]
Was writing the script to Hours different than writing those projects?
Very much. It really was. I had no established franchise to lean on for the basics. I had to cook this with ingredients in my own kitchen so to speak. It was scarier in that it dealt with a lot of fears and emotions and ideas that I was looking at, that I was facing personally, so there was a lot of me invested in it. That makes its telling and its success or failure that much more risky I guess.
Knowing you were writing a movie for one person, was Paul your first choice?
I wasn’t thinking of any one actor when I wrote it and Paul was certainly not the first on the list. I looked at and met with a number of actors over the course of nine months.
Other name actors?
They fell into one of three categories. One category would be the really big names that I think were all a little squeamish about working with first time directors, their agents especially. [Laughs] Then you had ones that are looking to make a comeback, to have a resurgence but were otherwise off the radar. That made it very difficult to get funding. Then you had the other category of actors who could get it funded but it was hard for me to tell if they’d be right for the role.
I went through a lot of those and I went into the meeting with Paul thinking that I would likely say no to him as well because I didn’t know if I could see him in it. Then I spent 15 minutes with him and I heard his story about when his daughter was born. There’s a kind of honesty to Paul’s performance. Some are chameleons in that they can adopt some other role and then some actors have a sense of the more they show of themselves, the more they can embody the role of that character. I thought that he and Nolan were close enough in real life that this would work.
Could you have done this story even if there weren’t a real Hurricane Katrina?
Certainly. In fact, we talked about that for a while, not making it [Katrina]. The deal was that there were so many really terrifying real moments from Katrina that if we were to do a fictionalized thing, it was weird to fictionalize so many of these moments that actually happened which is why we use those interstitial devices, the footage, from CNN and from other news broadcasts to remind you. Yes, people shot at helicopters. Yes, there were problems with illness and snakes. There are plenty of other stories that just couldn’t find it into the movie that we heard about.
Was casting Genesis Rodriguez’s part difficult because you had to explain to an actress she’s not going to be in very much of the movie?
Thankfully, I think they got that. Genesis certainly connected with it right away that while she only had a small slice of the screen time, she was arguably the most important character because it’s the whole reason why Nolan goes on this journey. So she did a great job. She even cooperated with my crazy shooting schedule for her and I appreciated that.
She has to come back to appear in his mind, and you were shooting in sequence?
Yeah, and I didn’t want to shoot that out of order just to work her days through. We brought her in at the very beginning so we had all the happy flashback scenes at the first of our shoot and I saw that Paul really liked Genesis. He just loved hanging out with her and then I took her away from him and I threw him in this hospital. For about two and a half weeks, he’s mostly all by himself so that on the last day of shooting is when we shot the scene where she came back and we flew her back in. At that point in time, he was so desperate to see her again that I think there was just a lot more on the line.
Shooting chronologically is a luxury most films don’t have. Was that easy to schedule given the single location?
Not especially. It required some serious choreography from members of my crew, but they knew at the same time that it was going to be so much easier on them to shoot chronologically because they could track so many things that had to be monitored. Both my wardrobe and my makeup departments had big timetables, really like excel spreadsheets almost, that tracked the different phases of his clothes, the deterioration, when does he get cut, when does this wetness happen, how do they deal with this on his face or whatever else. If we did a take that I liked where he got a little dirty on some excursion to the ambulance for instance, then wardrobe is like, “All right, we’re going to make sure we keep that going.” It was just a lot of attention to detail that I was happy that my crew committed to.
How does New Orleans feel about doing Katrina stories?
Well, considering every member of the crew had a Katrina story themselves and lived through it, I feel like they were great at keeping us all honest and keeping this authentic. As my producer said, they’re kind of our bullshit police, which I appreciated. I feel like because we were telling a personal story and we weren’t trying to manipulate the events of Katrina to fit something and we weren’t going the massive 2012 style apocalyptic movie, I think we got a thumbs up from them. We’ll find out [when it’s released].
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Best Episode Ever and Shelf Space Weekly. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
