Exclusive Wolfman Interview: Director Joe Johnston Unleashes Benicio Del Toro’s Inner Beast

Share on Facebook posted 02-13-10 by Julina Tatlock

This Valentine’s Day, I suggest you snuggle close to a warm companion who has soft hair and loves being out in the moonlight, someone who can disembowel you, decapitate you, and tear you limb from limb as quickly as you can say, “Roses are Red.” As sick as it sounds, this is the very loved one I plan to spend my Valentine’s Day with. That’s because I’ve been looking forward to The Wolfman ever since I started vomiting a little in my mouth at the Team Jacob T-shirts I’d see on some of my friends. All this time, I’ve really been longing for a good old monster movie in which dark shadows and beasts are symbols of the unconscious murderous thoughts within us all. Give me a film in which tragedy and horror prevail, not soft-focus teen emo. Don’t get me wrong: This Wolfman also features a parkour werewolf who leaps from rooftops, but despite this contemporary touch there’s an undeniable reverence for old-school filmmaking, with all its makeup, practical effects, and action sequences in which the participants respect the laws of gravity.

On Friday I had the rare privilege of talking on the phone at length with Joe Johnston, director of The Wolfman, while he was at his production office for Captain America. It took all the self-control I could muster to focus my questions on The Wolfman, because Joe’s career has been amazing. He’s worked in visual effects on many of my favorite films of all time, including my first love, Raiders of the Lost Ark, as well as other obscure Lucas films like Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi. Joe’s directing work includes Jumanji, Jurassic Park III, and Hidalgo, so I knew he was no stranger to big action, fantastic leaps of imagination, and assured storytelling. What I didn’t know was how excited, enthusiastic, and grounded he is about the challenges of making action films. Below is Part 1 of our extended conversation. I hope you enjoy!

Pulling Out All the Tricks To Show Two Animals, Intent on Killing One Another

30 NINJAS: Can you talk a little bit about your vision for the fighting between the two leads, Benicio Del Toro and Anthony Hopkins, as werewolves at the end of the film? What was the most important thing for you in that sequence?

JOE JOHNSTON: I wanted it to feel like it was almost a dogfight. I wanted it to feel like it was two animals intent on killing each other. We actually shot the scene twice. The first time we shot it during our normal phase of production, and it was very much like two animals who were trying to go for the jugular: scratching, clawing, and biting. We did a lot of tricks like switching the camera speed a lot — we went down as low as three frames per second for some for the slashes, and then we’d go back up to 20 frames when [the characters] would reposition themselves and move around the room. We shot that fight, we finished production, and when we came back and cut it all together we found that, as intense as it was, it looked like two guys, two stuntmen. Even though we had gone in for close-ups of Benicio and Tony Hopkins, it still looked like two stunt guys fighting. It looked a little like world championship wrestling, and we just determined that if these guys are as powerful as we have set them up to be in other parts of the story — jumping from rooftop to rooftop, leaping over wagons, and crashing through French doors — we needed to go a little further. This is their life-and-death struggle — they’re really trying to kill each other. So when we went back to London to shoot another entire sequence of the chase through London, we added onto that shoot an additional week or so for the final fight. We added things like putting them in harnesses and using cables to yank them across the room into walls; one would throw the other one and he’d go sailing across the room, for example. The end result was that it made them look a lot more powerful once we cut the sequence together. We then backed off a bit because we were getting into the territory where you begin to question, “Hey, is that really possible? Is he really strong enough to do what I just saw?” So we toned that down. We ended up starting at one end of the scale then going to the other end and then backed off [that extreme] a little bit. The most important thing for me, in addition to it looking intense, was that it be believable. We all have seen CG characters that can do absolutely anything, and I think that audiences realize that that they’re watching something artificial, and it takes them out of the movie. Even though this [sequence] didn’t involve any CG I wanted it to look absolutely real. It was unenhanced and there weren’t any hydraulic rams or any special effects tricks that were causing these guys to throw each other around the room. I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out, because it does feel very real and intense, and I think it’s just what the movie needed for the beginning of the end of the film. (It’s not the very end.)

30 NINJAS: You’ve said in other interviews that Benicio Del Toro brought a lot of ideas to the movie. Can you can you tell me what was the most unexpected or surprising idea that that Benicio had about his character or about the film?

J.J.: Well, there were a lot of them. I would say that one of the most important ones was that there was a series of scenes, before he’s bitten by the werewolf and up until the time where he first transforms, during which he thought it was important for the dog to be in all of his scenes. It was [Anthony Hopkins’ character's] dog, and Benicio said, “I really think the dog should be my friend. I’ve come back to the house, and the dog likes me; I see the dog as someone I can bond with. There’s no one else in the house to bond with.” He didn’t exactly put it that way — I’m interpreting his words — but that was what he was getting at. Then once he’s bitten and he’s sort of going through the process of — it’s almost like a virus in your system where you’re changing and you don’t know it. You recognize that something’s happening to you but you’re not sure what it is. The dog recognizes that before anyone else does, and it’s a real interesting idea. But he didn’t tell me exactly where he was going with it. He’s friendly with the dog in several shots, and the dog was not the easiest character to have in every scene. When you have a dog you have to have two trainers, one to get him to look one way and another one to get him to look another way, and dogs always have other agendas besides improving their performances.

30 NINJAS: Or matching their action.

J.J.: Yeah, exactly. So we included the dog in several of the shots in these sequences. It was always in the script that the dog turns on him and he growls, barks, or bares his teeth at him, but it wasn’t it wasn’t as meaningful without seeing the dog in the other scenes where he was bonding with Lawrence [Benicio's character]. So it was that kind of thing that was an example of [how] Lawrence, I mean Benicio, was thinking beyond what was on the page and laying the foundation for something that was going to happen further down the road. You know, Benicio didn’t always share his ideas or share the meaning or share his agenda with me, or the writers, but he was always thinking about it. He always had some plan, some scheme cooking, and a lot of these things ultimately made the picture more interesting, more complex and exciting.

30 NINJAS: He seems like a very emotional actor.

J.J.: Yeah, ironically he’s very funny. I think he’s sort of a natural comedian; he just doesn’t choose the sort of roles that show that side of him, but he is very funny on set.

Nothings Harder Than Taming a Werewolf Movie with Only Three Weeks Prep

30 NINJAS: Can you pick out the most surprising or difficult moment during the filming of The Wolfman?

J.J.: You know, it was difficult from beginning to end. It was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to do. I had three weeks of prep, which meant was that I was really [still] doing prep through most of the production. We’d wrap and then we’d go on a scout to look at something, or if we were shooting nights we’d go and scout, come in at noon and go look at location, have a meeting or something, so that the days were 14, 15 hours long. It was pretty absurd.

30 NINJAS: Doug [Liman] talks about his experiences on The Bourne Identity and how brutal it was shooting during the day and writing the script at night and how it took a huge toll on him. Do you feel like [the long days and nights] took a big toll on you?

J.J.: Do I feel that? You know, not only am I trying to come in at the eleventh hour and wrestle this thing to the ground and convince the cast that I was there to help them make the best film — actually that was the easy part — but I also had to convince the studio and the producers and the crew that I knew what I was doing. I think that it eventually became apparent to everybody that I did, but I think the studio was nervous. They had invested a lot of money — they had spent a lot of money already — and they didn’t have a lot to show for it. I think they were apprehensive, as they should be. Any time you bring in a director right before you start shooting, it’s a huge roll of the dice. In defense of [previous director] Mark Romanek, he really did not leave me a sinking ship. He had made a lot of good choices, he had cast of a lot of really fine actors — a lot of the local talent and English cast — and he’d picked some great locations. There were some sets under construction that we went forward with, and some we changed. I was able and wanted to make as many changes as I could, because I wanted to make it my film, but he had done a pretty good job of prep. That was a huge help. I just had to get it going again and steer it in the right direction. [pause] But I’ve forgotten your question.

30 NINJAS: [laughs] It was about the most surprising-

J.J.: Right, or most difficult moment. It was all difficult. We started up in a place called Chatsworth, in Derbyshire; I think it is a few hours outside of London, and it was cold and snowy with frozen puddles and mud on the ground. It was just that it was one of those [times] that you figure, Well, get this over with and this will be the hardest thing we do. And of course we find out that it’s only the beginning, and there were times when we wish we could go back there ’cause it was easier. There’s a theory that says you should always throw out your first two days of dailies, which we didn’t do, but I cringed in a couple places when I looked at the first stuff we shot because I would like to have done things differently, if I’d had more time. I don’t think anyone else will ever notice, and it won’t bother them, but me being a perfectionist and control freak thinks that it just bugs me.

30 NINJAS: I don’t think I’ve ever talked to a director who isn’t like that. It’s your work and you have that responsibility to make it the best you film you can.

J.J.: For me it’s more about the visual than anything, or at least that’s what I always keep as a foundation of the film. I want the picture to look so amazing and so good and so perfect. During that period that you sort of immerse yourself in this world with the wind. It’s a very cold picture, and I told Shelly [Johnson, Cinematographer] before we started, “I want this picture to be cold and bleak and uncomfortable and shadowy.” I said, “I don’t want you to ever think, ‘Let’s make it a warm bright sunny environment,’ because its not that.” There’s one scene in the movie that is a happy scene, and it’s actually a flashback. We just happened to get a sunny day — it’s the one time [during production] when the curse of the werewolf left us alone: The sun came out, the breeze was blowing, and it was beautiful; the kids were running. It was a flashback when Lawrence is thinking about happier times, while his mother was alive. But the rest of the movie is gritty. I won’t say ugly, because the images themselves are beautiful, but you feel like, Oh my God, if I had to live in this place with these tumbling gray skies …

30 NINJAS: You’d probably want to throw yourself in front of a werewolf?

J.J.: Yeah … or at least a steam omnibus. [laughs]