30 Days of Night: Dining in the Dark
Journalists were invited recently to Sony Studios in L.A. to an early screening of the upcoming horror film 30 Days of Night. We saw the very scary movie and were treated to a Q and A with Steve Niles, the creator of the graphic novel upon which the movie is based and the co-screenwriter, Rob Tapert, the producer and the film's director David Slade. Afterwards press was led to a big soundstage on the lot that had been set up for a "dining in the dark" experience in honor of the film's creepy, no-sun-for-days theme. The TV series "CSI" just aired an episode in which a murder takes place in just such a setting! Vampires aren't the only beings who dine in the dark.
I admit it. This reporter gets a bit claustrophobic in a strange place in total darkness and I wasn't able to enjoy the experience but, we were led in small groups to tables by blind waiters. We aren't talking "dim" here but total inky blackness! I had to bail but my colleagues tell me that not one bit of food was spilt although some chocolate cake ended up in someone's briefcase! Depriving humans of one of their senses, in this case, sight, is supposed to make the remaining senses more acute. I'm sure the roast beef and warm chocolate dessert was yummy but I wasn't alone in being too uncomfortable to partake. Thank got I was not stranded in the dark...with vampires...for 30 days!
Here is the lowdown on the new film from the filmmakers. Steve Niles, creator of the comic and co-writer of the screenplay says he's "very happy" with the way the comic has been translated to screen.
Steve got the idea for the comic from reading articles about Barrow, Alaska and the 30 days of darkness there each year. The town bans alcohol because of an increasing suicide rate during these dark days. "I wondered what kind of tough people live in this place. This was 12 years ago. So I tore out the little piece, I wrote 'vampires' in the corner, because that seemed like the obvious, and I just sat on it. It took me another like five or six years until I was in L.A. and then I pitched it around for two years to blank faces. It wasn't until we did the comic that they caught on, they picked up on it". Steve started writing the screenplay about a month before finishing the final issue of the comic. The writer says he wasn't on set but "everyone kept calling me, giving me daily updates so no problem".
Rob Tapert, producer on the film, told us he'd been looking for a film that would expand the vampire legend, give us something new. That's what attracted him. "Steve's agent send us the first two comics. Then Steve came in and pitched the ending to us. The idea of having a love story [Eben played by Josh Hartnett and Stella played by Melissa George] as the backbone to a horror film appealed to us. Also, to have vampires in a way we hadn't seen them. I think Steve said it was kind of the 'anti-Buffy'". Rob usually hates vampire films... but "not this one".
U.K. Director David Slade was impressed with the stark, dark setting. At the top of a list of actors for the lead was Josh Hartnett but Slade thought he'd never do the film. What David didn't know was that Josh is fascinated by vampire stories!
Slade met with Hartnett "at this little bowling alley vegetarian diner. We're both vegetarian which is weird since we're doing a vampire movie, but I'm thinking 'he's never going to take this role. This is not a huge [film]. It's a little survival piece with lots of horrible horror'. It was a really good conversation, very intelligent. He was everything I wanted for the character. I took a picture of the outside of this [diner] with my camera and I kind of went back not really expecting anything. I sent him a thank you e-mail and attached the picture of this [place], and apparently that picture was the thing that made him want to do the film. He said he'd never seen such malevolence in a photograph of a place he'd been to almost every day of his childhood life. He worked his a** off on this and I think this is one of his best performances".
Ben Foster, the bad guy in 3:10 to Yuma plays a freaked out stranger in town in the film. According to Slade, "turns out he has a vampire fetish. He's mad about vampires and he was expecting to be a vampire". Slade told him that he's not quite a vampire in the film but Foster took the part anyway and he was so good that his role was expanded.
Slade testifies that the three-month shoot was very difficult. "We were under extreme duress, physical and mental, working extremely long nights. I think, on the one hand, we were having too much fun to actually be daunted by it. And, on the other hand, there was the physical stress of actually doing the thing, staying up all those nights. After two months of night shoots, people start to go apes**t, or really crazy".
Isolation at night wasn't the only problem. "We were on mountaintops for about a week or so. We did like a week in the general store, which was like, 'Oh my God, this is great. This is easy.' On the mountaintop, everything breaks down. You've got a big techno crane with tons of cables and they're all not working because of the moisture and everyone's getting altitude sickness and freezing their a**es off. It was a really physically demanding film to actually shoot".
The vampires don't actually fly in the film but they can jump from building to building in a cool way. We asked Slade how this was done. "We went to the stunt coordinator and we go, 'we don't want to be flying, we don't want to use wires. We want to be complete and utterly physical, trying not to break the laws of physics.' And we used these amazing air cannon ramps. If you're not a good stuntman you break a leg, but you kind of jump on it and it just blasts you into the air like a giant catapult. So there's a couple of shots where we did that. I think we did a couple of gags in the final fight with wires because it was the only way it could be done. But everything else was done physically and practically".
The filmmakers wanted to present a different type of vampire. "It was funny. There's a scene where someone gets shot and falls to the ground. You assume they are a vampire but the vampire next to him gets down and starts eating him so that was 'friendly fire'". The director got into the action at one point himself. "There's two screams right at the end, and one of them is a woman screaming. The woman is my girlfriend, and I was the 'woman' chasing after her".
Part of the way to mark the passage of time during the 30 days is by looking at the beard growth on the lead actors' faces. However, according to Slade, the film was shot out of order so this became a nightmare. "I don't want to talk about beards. On top of working in freezing cold conditions at night and then [worrying about] continuity. We were always, 'okay what stage of beard are we at now?'"
You can catch the creepy and fast-moving 30 Days of Night, at theaters this Friday.
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Lynn Barker is a Hollywood-based entertainment journalist and produced screenwriter.
