Gregory Dark

I think the girls are phenomenal. I used to shoot adult stuff a long time ago and that’s the vision I always had back then. When I shot music videos, here and there I’d be able to get things in. I did a Sublime video called Wrong Way where I made Bijou Phillips look like a Brigitte Bardot character. I love the whole concept of the website, the photography, the imagery and what not.

I don’t know what pornography is anymore. I could argue it either direction. You could say See No Evil is pornography but there’s not any sexual content per say. You can say a movie like Hostel is pornography. There was a Newsweek article where [Lionsgate’s co-president of marketing] Tim Palen at Lionsgate was interviewed and he talked about torture pornography. It’s no different from sexual pornography I suppose. It’s a different way of approaching the emotions. I don’t consider pornography a bad thing if you think about it philosophically. I think it’s a very healthy expression of society. That’s how I looked at it when I made adult films. I also did things like conceptual art pieces using sex scenes where I didn’t try to make them erotic. I tried to make them bizarre and unusual and almost anti-erotic to see how the viewer would react.

I think they quite liked them. They’ve never seen anything like that.

I did very well with that stuff. A couple of museums in Europe played my movies. When I started doing music videos, a lot of the times you couldn’t do these sorts of things but here and there I was able to push the envelope.

I don’t know about nowadays. At one point you could. When I did a Britney Spears video, they wanted her to be the sweetest most obvious girl next door that you could find. It was before she became Britney Spears the stripper. I did the one where she had to have her shirt buttoned up to her neck. Now she has to have her breasts exposed and wearing a thong.

Yeah, you get offered a certain type of picture. But a music video director will probably not get offered romantic comedies.

Yeah, you get horror movies here and there. I was going to do a werewolf movie with Ice Cube called Stray Dogs a few years ago. It was a really big budget movie and we ended up not doing it because New Line ended up pulling the greenlight back.

No, you don’t think Vince McMahon. The thing about Vince is he wants to play his own game the way he wants to play it. I thought See No Evil was basically Friday the 13th. It’s a people in an enclosed environment getting picked off so I had to figure out what to do with that. This guy Kane is very interesting, very menacing and scary. He’s able to do all of his own stunts and he can go to a psychotic place so I tried to develop that. I came in late in the game and I tried to develop a bit of a back story with him being kept in a cage like a dog. The most unclean insane way of keeping somebody to create a socialized psychosis which had to do with murder.

I explain those things to my actors and certainly Kane really understood them. To me the whole movie is about creating a psychosis and how a psychosis is either a chemical experience or it’s a socialized experience that becomes a chemical experience.

We shot in Australia so he wasn’t on set. But we’d run stuff by him and he’d like it or he wouldn’t. This is his first theatrical release movie, so needless to say he wants to see it work. I thought it would be really interesting to make an old school type of horror movie like from the early 80’s. I didn’t develop the script but that’s what the script was. I thought that was interesting because so many horror movies of today are like TV movies. They are really boring in many ways. They’re not horrible, they’re not brutal but they’re not upping the ante in terms of brutality or anything like that. They’re a lot of wind blowing and sound design. Those are the elements of more contemporary horror especially with the American remakes of Japanese horror.

I looked at it like a rollercoaster ride of death. You’re locked in this box with this crazy guy who’s hooking you, squeezing you, chopping you so how are you going to get out? That was the idea.

I think the first draft he had a hook.

No, he actually did it. He was very adept at throwing this thing.

He’s huge but he’s also very coordinated and he learned how to throw a hook. He thought of it as a soft martial arts weapon and he was able to learn how to use it.

Well because he’d get so much into character you’d wonder if he was actually going to do something particularly violent. It was very hard to tell when he was just being Kane. He flipped out once and just broke apart a whole room. This is a seven foot man with that kind of strength and he just lost it in his character. He completely incorporated the method acting technique at one point and became the character.

I wanted to take this very obvious storyline and figure out how to make it more visual. Using some contemporary techniques and contemporary camera moves I wanted to figure out how I could create a sick bit of a back story for the killer.

I used a bunch of techniques that we haven’t seen so much in horror films. I used hand crank cameras. I used a rig that fits on the person and you point the camera at them and you actually walk with it, like if you see the Richie in the movie running down the hallway, that’s that technique.

I think it was time for me to do a stylish movie. But I didn’t want to take away from the horror and brutality because that’s what I think this movie is. It fits very well into that idea of torture porn and it’s almost beautiful in places and yet it’s sickening,

I did a couple low budget movies back in the late 80’s. Then I did a bunch of erotic thrillers for Showtime which led to music videos.

I’ve done about 250 music videos. I’ve done everybody you can think of except for Christina Aguilera.

Yeah, it was easy. I have a graduate degree in art from Stanford University. I used to do performance art, sculptures and paintings with performances around them. So music videos were a very easy transition for me.

I hadn’t done a hardcore porno movie in an awful long time. I did all these other things in between so I transitioned so the jury’s ultimately out. Sometimes they like me as a video director sometimes they don’t. I did do a pilot for MTV last year and I’m doing three more pilots this year for them.

I’m doing a horror pilot and two I can’t really talk about. One is based on a series of horror movies and I did one called To the Limit which is about street racing, Fast and the Furious meets Real World. That one’s more like a reality show. The other two are a cross between scripted and reality.

Sure. I think there are a lot of things you could play with.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck