Director: F. Javier Gutierrez
Writers: David Loucka (story and screenplay), Jacob Estes (story and screenplay), and Akiva Goldmsna (screenplay)
Starring: Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz, Alex Roe, Johnny Galecki, and Bonnie Morgan
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Official Socials: Site | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | IMDb
Hashtag: #Rings
A young woman finds herself on the receiving end of a terrifying curse that threatens to take her life in 7 days.
As a huge horror movie fan, I was very excited to not only get to see an advanced screening of Rings, but also to get to interview the director, F. Javier Gutierrez. Throughout the movie, I kept coming up with questions to ask the him and I am honored to have been able to interview him.
So, where did you want
this film to fit on The Ring’s timeline? Did you want it to be a sequel,
prequel, or maybe your own adaptation of the original idea?
F. Javier: I would say
it’s like a sequel because it’s like we talk about the original movie somehow
indirectly. We say at some point they found the body and so we are not talking
about Rachel and Aidan but we acknowledge that that happened, so I would say
it’s like a… like an evolution of what happened in the first one. We are forgetting
about the whole story about Aidan or Rachel and the position [of] the second
one, we’re not talking about that [laughs] but yes we go back a little bit to
the root of the original one. If you remember the first Ring and they’re—
everything starts in the college actually, and Rachel kind of is there because
like a young girl dies and it’s like, “What happened?”, and then she starts to
investigate, right? So we are like following the thread of that path- of the
college- thinking like, what happens if fifteen years later somehow, somebody
again runs into one of the tapes and plays that there again in a college. Like
it belongs to that kind of environment- the college, the people, the crowds
sharing tapes and things but out now, in a contemporary world, what will
happen? So it’s more like an evolution, I don’t know if I’d call it a sequel
exactly but it’s like the next step following the original course of The Ring.
How did
you get involved with the project?
F. Javier: Uh, I was on
The Crow, so I was working on that one [and] that is actually a project that I
love and that’s been like two years or something- like two years and a half-
and it was for too long unfortunately and I helped, I fixed a lot of things, I
helped a lot, I really got to put together like a team again and James O’Barr on
board… and it was really, really exciting but unfortunately there were a lot of
problems that were out of my reach- I couldn’t control everything- and I… I
always try to be optimistic but I just can’t do everything [laughs]. But, I was
not able to handle that, it was like, rough to understand that it doesn’t
depend on me, I cannot do everything. So, um, when everything wasn’t going down
on The Crow and all those moments, I got to know Walter Parkes and Laurie
MacDonald. They are the producers of the first Ring movie… they are pretty
impressive, they have pretty impressive resumes. So they call me, they tell me
the loved my movie Before the Fall. It is a small movie I did in Spain… and it
was released here on IFC and they saw it and they said, “You have that darkness
and you have that visual world that you can bring something to the table of The
Ring like Gore could bring to the first one. So, when they made that call I was
doing The Crow and I thought oh okay, The Crow [or] The Ring [laughs]. And so I
start off on [Rings] and when Rings starts to move very fast, because they
probably were like six years in development when I arrived, and when I was
there the movie started to get on track and move very fast, I had to stop
working on The Crow. I couldn’t be there, so I helped them with the transition
to a new director… and I jumped into the boat of The Ring.
So, in
the film, you state that you wanted to involve technology and morality but in
the film it kind of—you went back to VHS. Why not just skip to having it on the
computers already and streaming it?
F. Javier: I am
nostalgic! I like VHS, it’s like, I mean, if [I] as a fan, I see that with like
a pin drive I would be like “what the fuck?” So I wanted to create like a link at
least, that something that we wanted to attack, I would love to have a
transition from the real tape, because you know, that’s what people my age like
to do. They like to look at old tapes and see them transition to DVD, to see
all that I feel like I made justice to the real tape. So that’s why we set the
opening scene like that to see the transition, it set up the roots again for
the new crowd and those [fans] from the original movies can be like ‘”oh okay”
and understand why the transition.
It was also like a punch to start with energy like “guys, forget about
the original Ring because this is quite different but we are going to try to
show some throwbacks like the tape and other things like that.
Interviewer 4: When
you saw the final product and you saw how everything came out what was your
feeling? How did you—what was that experience?
Okay,
uh, 2016 was kind of a big like new horror movies type of year, what do you
think that sets Rings apart from all the other ones that just came out?
F. Javier: Um I love
the movies of these last two years, I think they’re very, very unique. A lot of
them are all very personal I think, which I really appreciate because they come
from the independent world, they’re something that can’t really be made in a
franchise. Things like that; I really love and appreciate them. In a Hollywood
franchise you have to do another kind of horror. In this particular case we did
something recovering the sense of the original one, right? But I think it’s a
good approach actually because you’re not going to go in that direction with a
movie like The Ring, which is really rough. This is taking the direction of
keeping the classic mood of the original one, I think. After I watched it at
the end after everything, I came back and watched it and I thought look, it’s
fun. I mean, it was not scary for me because I did edit it [laughs]. But I felt
I was a fan. Somehow we managed a movie that has a lot of horror classics,
which some people might think is a bit outdated but I think actually it’s
something fresh because nowadays everyone is trying to do something new with
horror movies.
There’s
a few really interesting scenes in the film… which one would you say was the
most difficult to film?
F. Javier: The one in
the cemetery was pretty complicated. That one was probably the hardest.
Yeah,
it looks difficult [laughs]
F. Javier: We don’t
want any spoilers but you know, the space, everything was real. It was pretty
practical. It was rough for the actress too because she was actually doing it
herself. I asked her if she could please do it for me because I want to see it
real, I want to see your face, and so it was pretty hard, that one. And then,
technically, what was a really hard one was Samara crawling out from the TV
because I really love the original one, I love when she walks out, and when I
took this movie I thought “I have to do something, at least!” You know, I felt
a lot of pressure to do something different. And it’s the sequence that
everyone wanted to watch!
Alright, so, you’ve directed a film that was meant to frighten your audience
and inspire suspense in them. What would you say frightens you, personally, and
did you incorporate any of your own fears into this film?
F. Javier: My own fears
are more—I mean, in this one there’s some sense of it. I mean, I would have to
say that where I portrayed my own fears I would have to go back to my previous
movie Before the Fall because it was based more around my childhood somehow.
It’s like, uh, a girl walking out of a TV has nothing to do with my childhood.
So, I think it has something. I’m a fighter too, I always fight, but even if
you fight and fight against the dark sometimes you cannot win. This concept
comes up a lot in the movie, fighting your own destiny, and it’s something I
might have to see a psychologist for! In Before the Fall, it’s called 3 Days in
Spanish because everyone is going to die in three days and you have to make
decisions; right ones or wrong ones, but you knew you were going to die. In
Rings, Julia is going to die in seven days. So I think that’s the personal
link, to know that at the end of the day we are all going to die somehow; seven
days, ten days, seven years, who knows? And the decisions you make through the
journey I believe are somehow scary and somehow
challenging.
by
Yulia
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