|
|
|
 |
||
|
With BOOGEYMAN 2, Jeff Betancourt has made the leap from accomplished editor to filmmaker for the company he's called home for many years. Betancourt's first project with Ghost House was the megahit THE GRUDGE and followed it up with the first BOOGEYMAN and THE GRUDGE 2. Starting his career in editing the independent hit STAR MAPS in 1997, Betancourt's credits as editor include CHUCK & BUCK, THE GOOD GIRL, HAROLD & KUMAR GO TO WHITE CASTLE, and THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE. When Ghost House decided to tap into the direct to DVD market with BOOGEYMAN 2, they called on Betancourt to direct his first feature film. To promote the upcoming release on DVD, Betancourt stopped into the Colonel's Crypt to talk about making this film, stepping up from editing to directing, and the challenging tasks of an editor in working with CGI in this Colonel's Crypt exclusive.
COLONEL'S CRYPT: How were you approached with directing BOOGEYMAN 2? JEFF BETANCOURT: I've been working with Ghost House for a while now, the two GRUDGE movies and on a couple of other projects, and I had always talked to them about directing something, so when the script for BOOGEYMAN 2 came around it seemed like the perfect chance for me to test the waters and see what it would be like to direct a project like this. They got excited about me doing it and it seemed like the perfect venue. I really wanted to do something contained and scary and really focus on the scares, the different kills without being overwhelmed by a huge budget. CC: Being you've worked with Ghost House, how was the process of going from editor to director? JB: I always felt that editing and directing are both about storytelling. As an editor, my biggest job was to help the director tell the story as best as possible, whether it's sound or music or the performances, things like that, so it seemed very natural to move on to the directing aspect. The part I was most nervous about was directing actors. That was something I really hadn't done before. We spent a lot of time in the casting process and came up with a great cast that put 110% into it so that made my job really easy. As far as the actual editing of the movie goes, that was difficult. I kinda wished I had a separate editor because you feel that sometimes you get that distance on it, and the other thing is as a director, you hire all these great creative people and if you have an idea and you've got a great cinematographer, you can tell him "What if we did a shot like this," and he figures out how to do it. As an editor, it was like when I came up to an idea, there was no one to do it, I had to do it myself. It was a lot more exhausting than I thought it was going to be but in the end it was a lot of fun. CC: What was the budget on BOOGEYMAN 2? JB: I'm not really sure. It was definitely smaller than the first one. We felt that if we kept the budget smaller we could do a lot more, make it bloodier and scarier than the first one. CC: As far as the casting, explain the process in casting, from genre veterans Tobin Bell and Renee O'Connor to Danielle Savre, who's new to the genre. JB: Putting this cast together was one of my favorite parts of the projects. One of the best things that horror movies have to offer and you can go back to the genre throughout the years is that the horror is the star of the show. You don't have to cast a big leading lady or a big star in a film, you can a lot of times find undiscovered talent. When I talked to Ghost House about directing this, I made that specific in what I wanted to do. I wanted the younger cast to be undiscovered with a chance to show off their talents while knowing we wanted to anchor the cast with veterans like Tobin and Renee. We went through the normal casting process and just read hundreds of actors for all the different parts. They all responded so well. You could tell that some of them just walked in and they had done some homework in learning some of the phobias that the character had. It made the decision on who to cast really difficult. In the end it was about the chemistry and in how they worked together. Some just got it right from the beginning, the spirit of the project in that we wanted to make it a fun movie but not necessarily a goofy movie. In order to nail it, they had to play as seriously as they could and just let the fun come from the script and the other aspects of the film. CC: How did you become acquainted with Ghost House? JB: I edited a movie called HAROLD & KUMAR GO TO WHITE CASTLE, and some of the producers from HAROLD & KUMAR are involved at Ghost House, Nathan Kahane and Joe Drake, and they recommended me for Ghost House. The first film I did for them was THE GRUDGE. I always loved the horror genre and I knew I wanted to do something but I hadn't done anything in the horror genre before. So they took a risk on me but they knew I could help them. Takashi Shimizu, the director, did not speak any English so we had to use a translator, and I think that they knew I would get along well with him and the translator, and would be able to facilitate the whole process. I lucked out and ended up doing that first GRUDGE movie. We all enjoyed working with each other and it lasted ever since. CC: Was editing always your primary goal or did you always have aspirations to be a director? JB: Directing's always been one of my long term goals. I've almost seen the editing process as a great learning experience; learning from the directors, the producers, and how the whole process works. When the time was right, I was looking for the right project to do and to feel really comfortable with it now. CC: What horror films growing up inspired you? JB: When I got my first VCR when I was around 13 or 14, when you go to the video store, you go through the blockbusters pretty quickly, and all the stuff that was left was all these horror movies that I never heard of before. But now that I had a VCR, I could finally watch them, so I everything from THE PROWLER and THE BURNING in addition to the stuff I already knew like HALLOWEEN or the FRIDAY THE 13TH movies. It was a real huge staple, my parents would get their movies and I would get a stack of five or ten horror movies that I would watch at night after they went to bed. In a weird way, it's kind of interesting that BOOGEYMAN 2 is coming out on video because I found my love of horror through video even beyond seeing films at the cinema. I feel that there's a real market and a chance for people to find undiscovered stuff if you get it on video. That's where a lot of the love came from. When I was five years old, my parents took me to see JAWS which probably had a huge effect on me. They thought it was a really scary movie and I thought it was a great adventure story but they would cover my eyes when the severed leg would slip down to the bottom of the ocean. I just thought it was great and ever since then I've had this passion for it. I really love it. CC: For people that don't know much about editing, what is the role of an editor on a film? How much preparation are you given, and how much are you working in conjunction with the directors and producers of a film? JB: I sort of feel that the job of the director sort of has two main positions. I usually start when the director begins shooting the movie. I start watching the footage and editing together while they are shooting, basically operating as the director's eyes and ears while the photography is going on. I make sure by that point I know the story really well and I've worked with the director so I kind of understand what he's looking for where I can go "I think we got this scene" or "I don't think we have this scene, we might need to shoot a little more coverage," and I can quickly show him scenes cut together so he sees it starting to come together. Once we're finished shooting, I feel that I'm out of the director's position and now I'm in the audience's position. I'm sitting there and I'm the first audience to see this movie and to see this footage. "How is it working? Is it working or not? What kind of music do we need to tell the story," is what I ask myself. In a lot of ways I feel that I'm the front line of the audience, standing in for them and figuring out how they're going to feel about this material. I help the director from that perspective in terms of putting it together and always being that person to bounce ideas off of. CC: With BOOGEYMAN 2, I don't think there was any CGI in it but you've worked with CGI elements in previous projects. How different is it editing a project with CGI, is it more difficult or demanding, and how do you work with the visual effects artists in post production? JB: As an editor, if I am working on a project that has CGI, it is pretty difficult because you're constantly having to use your imagination to sort of fill in. You don't know how long the shot's going to take. A lot of my job is figuring out "How long do we need that feet because this hand is reaching out to grab this character. How long do I want to hold on it?" If the hand is made up of computer bits, you don't know yet, you're always guessing. You hear from the producer "It's going to look like this, but you can't really quite see it yet," so it is really difficult and one of the more frustrating parts about working in the process. I work very closely with the visual effects artists in terms of talking to them about what we hope the shot will be, how long we hope it will last, and how much it needs to read and how quickly you are going to be able to read that image. With that said, nine times out of ten I would always take practical over it. The only visual effects shots we have in BOOGEYMAN 2 are like matte paintings behind the hospital, things to clean up the image, but all of the horror elements I really wanted to be practical; all the blood and all the design really went in to making it as practical as possible. CC: Was there any particular sequence you enjoyed filming while on set? JB: Oh man (Laughs). There are so many good ones. I think the maggot scene is one of my favorites where the character of Alison has to cut the maggots out of her arm. First of all, even though I told her, the actress wasn't really clear on the fact that she was actually going to have maggots put on her skin. She'd always say "Well it's a fake arm, they're going to put them on a fake arm," and I'd say "No we'll have to put some on your arm as well," so it wasn't until she was actually tied down to the bed and I went "We're going to put these on you, but they're not really maggots, they're really moths," and it turns out she has a phobia about moths and what we were going to put on her. It kind of freaked her out a little bit but in the end she had a great time and a blast, but that was really fun. When you're doing a scene like that, you do it in stages. The first stage of it she applies a certain part of her makeup then she goes away for stage two of the makeup to put on, we go shoot another scene, then she comes back and we shoot a little more, so we spent the day playing with maggots and her getting her arm cut open, so it was fun. The other thing about that scene was I always stood by the camera near the actors when we were shooting but the monitors were way down at the other end of the hospital where the producers and the effects crew were standing, so when she was pulling tendons out of her arm, we'd hear screams and groans from the other end of the hospital so we knew what we were getting and that it was working out. CC: BOOGEYMAN 2 deals with the element of the fear that these characters' fears factor into their demise. Would you say that fear is the biggest element in horror? JB: I think so and I think fear is the definition of horror. For me I love the prosthetics and blood and the effects as much as anybody, I really dig all that stuff, but without the fear thrown into that aspect, it's just kind of blood and guts and I don't get that. That's the big challenge to us as filmmakers and as fans too; finding that material that's still going to be scary. It's a constant challenge to try to make it as scary as possible and also keep it original and still deliver on all that stuff the audience expects. It's really tricky because you never know, what's scary to me isn't necessarily scary to everybody else. That's a lesson I learned from Takashi Shimizu, the director of THE GRUDGE movies because there would be a lot of discussion on how a scene would work and what wouldn't work. In the end, all we could really do was do what would be scary to us. If it's not scary to someone else, we can't change that. If you throw in a louder sting, a louder piece of music, it's not necessarily going to make it scarier, it's just not scary to them. You just have to trust your own instincts. CC: That's one thing I do get a little tired of is that musical stinger. JB: (imitates musical sound) Everyone wants to do that all the time when I'm editing. CC: That's just one cliche I'd like to get rid of. JB: It works in some areas and not in others. CC: Where do you see the horror genre and film in general going within the next five years? JB: We are at such an interesting crossroads. Personally I think it's a really exciting time for horror fans. For a long time I feel like nobody's gotten the shaft quite like horror fans. Who else but a horror fan is going to go to the video store, pick up this movie that people have never heard of, but they're going to give it a chance because it's a horror movie, maybe they'll find that one cool scary thing in it that they'll like, even know I know the rest of the movie may be crap. They've kinda gotten a lot of shit and have to wade through the crap in order to find the thing that they want. I wanted to make a video project that we were going to approach it like the biggest theatrical movie we could. We were going to make it with Triple A talent, were going to light it like a feature film, because I was tired of the audience being cheated like that. Whatever people may think of the movie, I wanted it to be a quality product that they can enjoy. I think a lot of stuff coming out, they are approaching it at a much more elevated level. That's one of the reasons why I feel it is so exciting. Getting a movie released in theaters and putting it out really subjects it to a lot of scrutiny from the studio before it even goes out so it makes it difficult to put something fresh or something different out in theaters, it's very expensive to market stuff. Now you have these other venues that are coming up, like direct to DVD and downloading movies, something like iTunes, there's a lot of opportunity for the stuff to really get out there, and for more unique stuff to get out there for a lot more people, like our cast or for me to have an opportunity to do stuff that they wouldn't have normally had. My hope is that this can be used as fertile ground for some great talent to come up. CC: You actually brought across a topic I wanted to ask, in that many fans and horror websites go up in arms about the rating of a film. I know with THE GRUDGE films they've been released theatrically PG-13 but also in unrated versions on DVD. As an editor, was the intention basically to make an unrated version specifically for the market, or was it intentional to look in the editing, to keep it in that rating level theatrically? JB: We never talk about the rating, at least from my end when you first start making it. With THE GRUDGE, we went to make the scariest movie we possibly could. The stuff that we had the hardest time getting by the ratings board for THE GRUDGE wasn't stuff we expected to have a problem with, it wasn't the blood or the guts. I don't know if you're familiar with the original Japanese version or the director's cut, but there's a scene in the movie where the little boy witnesses his mother being murdered by the father, and there was just no way we were going to get that past the censors. That was a complete surprise to us. On that movie, and most of the movies I've worked on, there was a genuine feeling of we wanted to have this version of the story out there. It wasn't like we felt we needed to save this for when we put out the other DVD. I know it doesn't sound true but it really was true. Shimizu and myself were so heartbroken because that tragedy, which was the heart of THE GRUDGE to him, was taken out, and for it to be put out like that in theaters, as successful as it was, he was always disappointed. He really was thankful for the unrated version. I think there are a lot of people that say it was done just for marketing purposes but we really did want to have both options. I also think there is something positive to be had in a PG-13 horror movie. That was also really fun and challenging. If we were trying to make it PG-13, how far could we push it? How scary could we make it and still make it PG-13 and open it to a wider audience? There's a certain challenge and at some point you have to embrace it and go to make the scariest movie we can, given that this is our rating. I'm always surprised with what the ratings board will come back with. CC: Would you say that editing THE GRUDGE has been your best overall experience as an editor? JB: There's been so many great experiences. In terms of horror, that was so much fun. BOOGEYMAN 2 was huge, but then I've done a lot of movies like CHUCK & BUCK which were completely different but was totally satisfying in their own right. I feel like I've taken so much from all these different ones. Working on something like THE GOOD GIRL or CHUCK & BUCK really taught me so much about characters and getting a lot done for a really small budget. THE GRUDGE introduced me to working in horror. I got to work with Sam Raimi and Takashi Shimizu and all these great people for the first time so it did have a huge impact, but I can't say it really stood out more than the other projects I have worked on. CC: What is next for Jeff Betancourt as both an editor and as a director? JB: As an editor I am finishing up a movie called THE RUINS, based on the Scott Smith novel for Dreamworks. We're working on sound for that right now. After that, looking for the next directing project and we'll see what comes up. CC: I leave the last word to you. JB: Thanks for your attention and I really hope that there's a lot more of these direct to DVD movies that come out and surprise people with their quality. I think it's a real opportunity for talented filmmakers to really do something different and I hope that we're just continuing that line with BOOGEYMAN 2. CC: Thanks for your time Jeff. JB: Thank you Scott. Special thanks to Leif Helland at MPRM. BOOGEYMAN 2 comes out on DVD January 8th. Click here to order!
|
HOME
BLOGS
|
|||
