Hey folks, Harry here with Quint's interview with John Fawcett, director of the ungodly cool GINGER SNAPS, yeah I know I'm pushing it, but dammit, I don't half ass love things, I really love this one... Now while I was in Cannes, Anton Sirius sent in his interview with Mr Fawcett which was done at last year's Toronto Film Festival... and it was really quite a nice interview, but it looks like Quint got to sit down and tele-chat with Fawcett for a bit longer... and this was like 2-3 weeks ago so it brings up much more up to date regarding GINGER SNAPS and where the film is at in terms of reaching us where we live... So read with rapt attention and remember... I'm telling you right now... JOHN FAWCETT IS A NAME TO WATCH!!! I expect great things from this man! You'll see!

Ahoy there, squirts! ‘Tis I, your friendly neighborhood seaman, Quint, here to give you fine folks a peek into the mind of John Fawcett, the director of the cool as all hell werewolf flick Ginger Snaps. You lucky Canadians get to see this movie on the big screen as of last Friday, May 11th. For my American friends... well, we’ll just have to wait and see. I also got you guys some pretty damn cool pics, some of them exclusives... at least I think so. Exclusive or not, they look awesome.

It appears that Anton Sirius also nabbed an interview with Mr. Fawcett. Whoops. Our interviews are pretty different, but we do cover some of the same topics, so my apologies for the redundant questions.

A word of warning before ye’ enter, squirts. This interview is pretty typical of the kind of interview I like to do. We bullshit. We get off topic. This isn’t Barbara Walters. This isn’t Larry King. This is Quint and John Fawcett, two horror geeks talking about cool horror geek stuff. If that’s not up your alley, well then I’m sorry. Fair warning. Just don’t bitch to me about it later. Without any further adieu, let the scar sharin’ begin!

QUINT: I GUESS WE’RE GOING TO START THIS THING OFF FAIRLY SIMPLY. WHAT ARE YOUR FAVORITE WEREWOLF MOVIES?

JOHN FAWCETT: Well, one of the big reasons why I like the idea of making a werewolf film is because there weren’t that many good examples of big werewolf films. There’s really not that many. Obviously American Werewolf in London, The Howling, the first Howling... maybe Wolfen. To a certain degree, I Was A Teenage Werewolf, the Michael Landon thing. There were interesting sort of things that happened in that.

I think, though, if I felt like I was drawing inspiration from anything for Ginger Snaps, I don’t think it was necessarily from any of those movies. I think it came from other sources. But I don’t know... really, what else is there? Are there other good werewolf movie out there?

Q: BESIDES THE WOLFMAN? WELL, I HAVE A SOFT SPOT IN MY HEART FOR SILVER BULLET, BUT I REALIZE I’M ONE OF THE FEW WHO DO.

JF: Yeah, I didn’t really care for Silver Bullet. To me, in terms of horror films or of things I was thinking in terms of approaching Ginger, it was probably knowing what was kind of out there in the way of werewolf movies, good or bad, then trying to step away from that and trying to create something sort of fresh and real.

Q: YEAH, THAT’S ONE OF THE THINGS THAT SEEMS TO BE SURPRISING PEOPLE THAT YOU GET CLOSE ENOUGH TO THE CLICHE, LIKE WITH THE MIMI ROGERS MOTHER CHARACTER, BUT JUST CLOSE ENOUGH TO REMIND US THAT WE’RE WATCHING SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT.

JF: As far as approaching it as a werewolf film, it was always kinda knowing what the audience’s expectations were and based on all the movies that were made before, which is essentially the Hollywood mythology of the werewolf, then within the film saying that if werewolves exist it wouldn’t be the Hollywood mythology. I guess trying to treat the werewolf as a biological infection rather than a mythological sort of thing.

The moon comes up and you go through a transformation into an animal, you run around and kill a bunch of people, then turn back into human form. But this is something that’s passed on through the blood stream as an infection, grows from the inside out and is an indelible process. It isn’t the kind of thing that can’t be stopped by magical means. It can be stopped because you can kill it, like any animal, and there are certain sort of medical remedies for it, which I kinda liked and thought was sort of an original approach to the idea of a werewolf.

Q: HAVE YOU ALWAYS LIKED HORROR FILMS IN GENERAL?

JF: Always. Always. Horror film is what initially drew me to filmmaking to begin with. It was movies like American Werewolf In London, like Halloween... Some of my earliest film memories are Fantastic Voyage. In fact the two earliest horror films I remember... there was a film called Killdozer that I loved when I was little. It scared the shit outta me. I think it’s maybe titled something else... I think it was actually a made for TV movie, but it’s essentially a ghost in the machine sorta story, but kinda like Duel. It’s about a bulldozer that gets possessed and runs by itself and it kills a lot of people.

The second sort of earliest film memory that also fuckin’ totally traumatized me was a movie that Bob Clark made called Black Christmas, which was weirdly a Canadian film. It was actually shot on the University of Toronto campus. It was back in the tax shelter days when David Cronenberg was making Shivers and all sorts of fuckin’ really shitty movies were getting made. And Black Christmas came out with Margot Kidder and Olivia Hussey. It’s about, basically, a killer in a sorority house kinda thing and it actually holds up fairly well. It’s actually quite scary. I remember seeing that and it totally, completely effected me.

Q: THAT’S A GREAT MOVIE. I’VE ACTUALLY SEEN THAT ON THE BIG SCREEN.

JF: Have you?

Q: YEAH, QUENTIN TARANTINO COMES THROUGH AUSTIN EVERY YEAR AND PUTS ON A FILM FESTIVAL OF FORGOTTEN FILMS HE’S COLLECTED ON 35mm or 16mm. I BELIEVE IT WAS QT3 WHERE HE HAD AN ALL NIGHT HORROR MARATHON AND BLACK CHRISTMAS SHOWED. FROM WHAT HE WAS SAYING, IT WAS FIRST FILM, EVEN BEFORE HALLOWEEN, TO ADOPT THE POINT OF VIEW OF THE KILLER.

JF: It was. It’s really one of those movies that it kicked off a lot of stuff. It kinda got copied a bit with When A Stranger Calls because it’s an almost identical sort of premise. Yeah, it totally scared the shit outta me, man. There’s one shot in there were Olivia Hussey goes and discovers Margot Kidder sorta slaughtered in the bedroom and then looks over and sees this eye peering out at her between the door jam that I could not shake. I must of seen the movie when I was 9 or 10 and I couldn’t sleep with the closet door open. It had to be fully closed so an eyeball couldn’t be, like, peering through a crack.

Q: ONE OF MY FIRST FILM MEMORIES IS OF POLTERGEIST. I WOKE UP IN MY BABYSITTER’S LAP, I GUESS IT HAD JUST COME ON CABLE OR SHE RENTED IT OR SOMETHING, AND I WOKE UP DURING THE COFFINS COMING UP OUT OF THE GROUND SCENE, SO THAT FUCKED WITH ME A LITTLE BIT.

JF: Yeah, Poltergeist was great. I saw Poltergeist when I was 14. It was actually kinda cool because I grew up in a city called Calgary, which is in Alberta, which is sorta Western Canada and literally the year I turned 14 the censor board changed the laws about going to movies. It use to be that there was like a general rating, a PG rating and a restricted rating. They brought in the Mature rating which meant that if you were 14 or older you could go see the movie without a parent. That was literally the year I turned 14 and Poltergeist came out that year. I saw Poltergeist in the theater and fuckin’ went crazy for it. I loved it.

But anyway, when I was sorta seeing horror films, when I first started seeing them in the late ‘70s/early ‘80s, they really had an impact. It was one of the big reasons why I decided I wanted to become a filmmaker. In fact, a lot of the first things I experimented with shooting on Super 8 were horror effects type things.

When it came to shooting Ginger, we talked about the idea of... we knew it was a low budget film that was fairly effects heavy and the conversation came up of “Do we want to try and tackle this monster in a CGI sort of environment, or do we want a combination of makeup effects and CGI or just makeup effects?” I decided early on that I wanted it to be real for real. I guess the reason for that is... you know, if I was gonna see any bad effects in the movie, I wanted it to be a bad makeup effect because I felt like at least you know that thing was in the same frame as that girl, you know what I mean. It’s not, like, painted in afterwards. I think there this real immediacy just knowing that you’re not looking at something that has been placed into frame afterwards.

The bottom line is, to make CGI look like it’s absolutely happening in the same frame with the actor it costs an incredible amount of money. I think it can be done, but it takes so much time and money that I just knew what we were going to wind up with was something that just didn’t look like it was there.

Q: THAT’S ONE OF THE THINGS THAT STOOD OUT FOR ME ABOUT GINGER SNAPS. THERE WAS AN HONEST TO GOD MONSTER THERE, NOT JUST A MASS OF PIXELS.

JF: Yeah. The other reason, I guess in the back of my head, was the fact that all the sorta classic horror films that I really loved when I was young... you know, that’s when all those makeup artists were becoming famous. The Rick Bakers and the Rob Bottins and the Tom Savinis and the Stan Winstons... they were all really coming into their own in the mid/late ‘70s, early ‘80s. I guess in my head I always wanted to create something that felt classic. That was another reason I decided I was going with the old style approach to monster.

Q: I’VE ALWAYS BEEN INTRIGUED WITH THE MYTHOLOGY OF WEREWOLVES AND OF LYCANTHROPY. HOW MUCH RESEARCH DID YOU DO ON LYCANTHROPY FOR THE FILM?

JF: Actually, a tremendous amount. We felt like we wanted to draw on... Um... We knew we weren’t making a completely typical werwolf film which wasn’t so cut and dry as the moon comes up and you change back when the moon goes away. It was going to be this slow transformation because it sort of lasted over the course of the film. We really wanted to find the distinction between werewolf and vampire.

Basically, what we were dealing with was a person in human form that was killing people, so we needed to do a fair amount of research to find out where a lot of the mythology sort of came from. We were more interested in the older literature on where the werewolf mythology came from rather than what the Hollywood rules were. We did quite a bit of research.

Q: ONE THING I’VE FOUND... AS I SAID EARLIER, I’M INTRIGUED BY THE MYTH OF LYCANTHROPY. I’VE DONE A BIT OF RESEARCH ON LYCANTHROPY MYSELF. RECENTLY, I STUMBLED ACROSS SOME WEBSITES THAT WERE SUPPOSEDLY RUN BY WEREWOLVES AND WERE THERE TO HELP THE NEWLY BITTEN ADAPT TO A LIFE AS A LYCANTHROPE.

JF: Really?

Q: YEAH. THEY LITERALLY HAD HOW-TOS ON HIDING THE CURSE FROM REGULAR HUMANS AND HOW TO CONTROL THE BLOODLUST... IT’S NOT LIKE YOU’D CLICK TO THE NEXT PAGE AND IT WAS LIKE, “HAHA, WE GOT YOU. BIG JOKE” THING. REALLY INTERESTING STUFF. DID YOU EVER COME ACROSS ANY OF THAT SORT OF THING?

JF: No... well, I don’t remember if I did or not. I know that Karen (Walton, the writer) did piles of research that way. She may have come across that in her gathering of information, but I don’t remember seeing it.

It’s kinda funny. When you look at a site like that, it’s kinda funny, don’t you think? You look at it and go, “This is sort of absurd,” but the people are taking it very, very seriously. That was, like, the tone I guess that I wanted to hit with Ginger Snaps. I knew that it was going to be funny ‘cause I knew there was no way of it not being a bit of a funny premise. It’s kind of absurd, but I like the fact that the characters in it take the whole thing very seriously. I was trying to find a nice blend of serious drama with comedy.

Q: YOU MENTIONED EARLIER THAT HORROR FILMS GOT YOU INTO FILMMAKING, BUT WHAT ACTUALLY GOT YOU GOING ON GINGER SNAPS ITSELF? WHAT WAS THE IMPETUS OF THE PROJECT?

JF: Well, first of all, I knew I wanted to make a horror film. What I was looking for was a concept that was going to be original enough... basically looking for an original concept that I could see within the horror genre, OK. Right off the bat, the only things I knew that I knew I wanted, to make a transformation movie, and I didn’t know I necessarily wanted to make a werewolf film. I’d written a short script about a female botanist that turns into a tree that I never made. That sounds like a goofy premise to begin with, but there was something really cool about it that really worked for me.

So, I liked the idea of making a transformation movie and I knew that I wanted to work with girls because my first feature films I worked with young, sorta teen guys. So, I kinda went, “I’m going to do something different! I’m gonna work with teen girls this time!” Then when I started thinking about transformation films, I started thinking about a werewolf as a subgenre to horror and realized that the werewolf is obviously a transformation movie.

I liked the idea of the transformation because not only does it embody the physical elements, but also just very much embodies the psychological aspects. I liked the fact that it was something that could be emotionally a strong premise... you know, seeing someone change physically... Yeah, it’s kinda gross, it’s kinda creepy, but how does that change them mentally and psychologically. How does that effect who they are as a person? I thought that was something really cool to sorta hang the movie on.

So, then I realized I was making a werewolf movie with two girls, two sisters. I knew they were sisters and I kinda had this impression from the beginning that they would be sorta... They started off a little more cartoony in my head, they started off with, like, little sorta goth girls, almost out of a Tim Burton movie. That’s kinda what I had on it, then I approached Karen and said, “This is kind of a concept I’m interested in. Would you be interested in writing it?” She was not a horror writer. She’s written a lot of scripts, I don’t know that she’d had anything really produced, but she was very, very good with young characters and had a very good sort of aggressive style of writing. She agreed to do it, so I kinda went into it as the resident horror expert and she was kinda the person that was gonna breathe life into the characters and help me develop the story. That’s how it started. That’s more or less where it kinda began.

I remember one of the very first things that I thought of as an idea was that the sisters had an idea that, and I don’t know if there was an attack scene in my head, but I had this idea that they were out in the middle of night during a full moon and one of the girls had a video camera and was taping the girl that they thought was going to turn into a werewolf kinda going, “You feel anything?” Then kinda looking at the moon and going, “Is anything... how are ya’?” Interviewing her, basically, during the full moon and nothing is happening. I kinda went, “Oh, that’s a funny scene,” especially if nothing’s happening. Are they mistaken then? Do they think that they’re going to turn into a werewolf and they’re not or is this werewolf something different than what we normally see. The normal werewolf changes during the light of the full moon. This werewolf, I found humor in the fact that it’s evolving in a very different way than what we expect.

Q: WHERE DID YOU FIND THE TWO LEADS (EMILY PERKINS AND KATHARINE ISABELLE)?

JF: The girls? Emily Perkins, plays Brigitte and Katharine Isabelle plays Ginger. They both came from Vancouver, actually. It’s sort of an interesting story there. I got a tape from Vancouver that was basically cut together with girls auditioning. There was Emily auditioning and someone was reading for her off camera. If you’ve ever seen the audition process, that’s kinda how it works. Then Katharine, the next person up and she’s reading Ginger and someone’s reading off camera for her. Well, I liked Emily right away and Steve, my producer, liked Katharine right away and we kinda went, “OK, lets keep those girls in mind, but let’s keep looking.”

So, we cast in LA, we cast in New York, we cast in Montreal, Vancouver, Toronto and we kept coming back to those two girls. We said, “Well, let’s bring them to Toronto and read them together.” When they came out, one of the first things I found out was these girls actually know each other very well. In fact, they’ve known each other since they were, like, 8. Their families are friends, they have the same agent... In fact, in that audition, Katie was reading for Emily when she was oncamera and Emily was reading for Katie when she was oncamera. They actually did the audition together. I just kinda went, “Oh, my God... this is actually kind of a sign.”

Because what I had was 2 girls that already had this really strong relationship. It was nice because it made the whole thing that much more comfortable, the whole process. Because the script had to put these girls through some fairly nasty sequences and things that they had to do, I wanted them to feel like they were in a very safe place to sort of explore and by them coming to the process already knowing each other, it gave them that familiarity and that comfort zone of being able to explore sort of unselfconsciously. It just made the whole relationship between them that much more believable.

Q: I ACTUALLY HAVE A FRIEND WHO KNOWS EMILY. SHE’S AN ACTRESS NAMED LAURA HARRIS AND...

JF: Yes, I know Laura.

Q: YOU DO?

JF: I mean, I don’t know her personally. I was very interested in Laura. Matter of fact, I made some calls about her after I saw her in The Faculty.

Q: YEAH, SHE SHOT THE FACULTY HERE, IN AUSTIN. THAT’S WHERE I MET HER. BUT I SAW HER IN A BIT PART IN STEPHEN KING’S IT AND I LOVE THAT MOVIE. I’M A HUGE TIM CURRY NUT. I WAS LIKE, “OH, MY GOD! YOU WERE IN THAT MOVIE, THAT’S SO COOL!” THE FIRST AND ONLY THING SHE SAID ABOUT IT WAS THAT THE GIRL WHO PLAYED BEVERLY MARSH WAS A FRIEND OF HERS AND SHE COULDN’T STOP TALKING ABOUT WHAT A COOL CHICK SHE WAS. THAT WAS EMILY.

JF: That’s Emily! That’s crazy! Well, you know what? The reason why I decided to move away from Laura was I felt like she was too old, but Emily is the same age as Laura. She’s like 23 or something like that. When I shot with her, she was, like, 22. I could not fuckin’ believe it.

The agent was purposefully keeping her age secret. I was actually worried she wasn’t even 16. She looks so fuckin’ young. In fact, she’s quite a bit older than Katie, who plays Ginger. Katie was 17 when we shot the movie and Emily was, like, 22.

Q: THAT WAS A LITTLE DISCONCERTING FOR ME... BECAUSE I KNEW I HAD SEEN EMILY SOMEWHERE. I JUST KNEW IT. I JUST KEPT SEEING ONE SCENE IN MY MIND WHEN I TRIED THINKING OF WHERE I KNEW THIS ACTRESS FROM. IT WAS HER AT A YOUNG AGE, EYES WIDE IN TERROR. I WAS LIKE, “WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT MOVIE?!?!?” SHE LOOKED LIKE THE GIRL IN STEPHEN KING’S IT, BUT I DISCOUNTED THAT IMMEDIATELY... THAT MOVIE’S 10 YEARS OLD, THAT COULDN’T BE THE SAME GIRL!

JF: Yeah. I just remember, from IT, the scene with Emily at the sink in the bathroom and all the blood sort of shooting out of the sink. That was hilarious. It’s interesting that Emily was in that film. Actually, Katie has already done a... well, I guess it’s not really a horror film, but Katie had a part in Disturbing Behavior.

Q: I ACTUALLY KINDA LIKE THAT MOVIE.

JF: You liked it?

Q: YEAH, IT WAS BETTER THAN I THOUGHT IT WAS GOING TO BE.

JF: Yeah, I think I felt the same way. I thought it was going to be kind of a piece of shit. I rented it on video. I knew Katie was in it, too. It actually wasn’t that bad.

Q: THIS IS THE BIG SERIOUS QUESTION OF THE INTERVIEW... ONE THING I HAVE TO KNOW... WHO THOUGHT UP THE WOLF NIPPLES ON GINGER?

JF: The wolf nipples. That would’ve been me. Unfortunately, I did shoot more with her where you actually see it a little better, but it wound up getting cut out for some reason. I can’t remember if it was the prosthetic not looking terrific or if there was more of a dramatic reason for cutting it, but I loved the idea that when you finally see her chest, she has like 3 pairs of nipples. I thought it was kinda cool.

Q: DID YOU GUYS END UP CUTTING OUT A LOT OF STUFF?

JF: I actually cut a fair amount of material. I think our first cut of the movie ran at about 2 hours and 20 minutes, so I cut a good 40 minutes out. There was a lot more to do with the guidance councilor. There were scenes with the guidance councilor with Ginger and Brigitte. That character ended up getting cut down quite a bit. I also cut a fairly large sequence with Mimi Rogers at the Halloween party. That was more about just wanting to propel the film. That was very much a pacing thing. We were in the last 20 minutes of the movie and just really wanting it to motor. I just realized that, yes I felt for the Mimi character, but it just wasn’t as important as our main story line. It really was a big sequence that felt like it was slowing everything down.

The DVD that we’re printing, we’re actually putting a lot of the out scenes. There’s a lot of cool material that I wound up dropping, for whatever reason. If you like the movie, you’ll get a kick of a lot of the scenes that we wound up cutting.

Q: IS THAT JUST A CANADIAN DVD? CANADA IS STILL REGION 1, RIGHT?

JF: Yeah, it’s gonna be a Canadian pressing of the DVD. To be honest I don’t know what’s going to happen with the movie in the United States yet, whether it’s going to get a theatrical release or not. That’s sort of still kind of up in the air. Hopefully, it’ll break out and show up in theaters. In the meantime, our Canadian theatrical release is slated for May 11. It’s actually going out in Canada fairly wide. I think 70 theaters in Canada which, for a movie like this, is quite a big release.

Q: I THINK I READ ON IMDB THAT IT WON BEST CANADIAN FILM AT TORONTO FILM FEST, RIGHT?

JF: Actually, no it wasn’t. There was an award, but it was kind of a... it was given to Karen as a kind of honorary mention. It was a screenplay honorary mention. The Best Canadian Movie award actually went to Gary Burns.

Gary Burns, actually, interestingly enough, his second film was a movie called Kitchen Party which Laura Harris starred in. It’s actually a good movie, if you get a chance to see it. She’s actually very good in it. The movie I think is quite good. I know Gary because Gary is from Calgary. But no, it didn’t win. I don’t know where that rumor came from, but it didn’t win Best Canadian Movie.

Q: WWW.IMDB.COM SAYS IT. IT SAYS KAREN WON, BUT IT ALSO SAYS IT WON FOR BEST CANADIAN FILM. I THINK THAT’S WHERE EVERYBODY’S GETTING IT. IMDB IS ONE OF THE MOST USED INTERNET MOVIE RESOURCES.

JF: That is in fact, not the truth.

Q: OK, WE’LL GET THAT OUT THERE FOR YA’. SO, THERE’S STILL A CHANCE, THEN, THAT WE’LL GET TO SEE GINGER SNAPS BIG HERE IN THE STATES? I HEARD SOMETHING ABOUT SOME SORT OF BLOCKBUSTER DISTRIBUTION.

JF: Um, yeah. Because the company we were working with actually went down, they wound up selling Ginger to Blockbuster and right now we’re trying to figure out what Blockbuster is going to do with the movie, but there’s still a chance that they could put it our theatrically. We’re just waiting, hoping that they will see the light and put it out on the screen.

Q: SO, THAT’LL PROBABLY DEPEND ON WHETHER OR NOT THE CANADIAN RELEASE IS A SUCCESS.

JF: I think that’s it exactly. We’re really sorta keeping our fingers crossed that it goes out and performs fairly well in Canada and that’ll hopefully get Blockbuster off their ass.

Q: SO, YOU JUMPED RIGHT INTO SOME OTHER PROJECTS AFTER GINGER, RIGHT?

JF: Yeah. You know what I did? I had a little script for a television movie. I shot last fall, I shot a television movie called Lucky Girl, which was for a Canadian Network. It’s kind of more of a drama. It’s a story of a 17 year old girl who develops a nasty gambling habit and gets into trouble. That’s the very brief version of what it’s about. But it’s actually kind of a very dark downward spiral sorta gambling story. The spin on it is that it’s, you know, a 17 year old girl.

Q: YOU GOT ANYTHING ELSE IN THE WORKS?

JF: I’m basically trying to figure out what my next feature is right now, so that’s what I’m using my time for. I’ve got a couple of scripts that I’m working on and I just haven’t decided where to put my priorities yet. One of them is not a horror film and the other one is a horror film. It’s actually sort of a Medieval action horror film. That’s something I like quite a bit and I’m just starting to decide what the next best thing for me to do is.

Q: WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE DIRTY JOKE?

JF: Oh, man. I don’t know if I... You know, it’s not even that I don’t want to answer the question, but I’m searching my memory for one and now I feel really kind of dumb. You know what? I don’t think I have one. But if I think of one, I’ll email it to you. Sorry, man.

There ya’ have it, squirties. Another interview served up by The Crusty Wonder, the Salty Sensation... Yes, by little old me. Keep yer eyes on the horizons my lovely mermaids and brother seamen, fer I have a plethora of cool stuff comin’ at you in the very near future. A Hooligan tells all about his recent hit film and just about every other movie he’s working on at the moment. Not to mention an interview with one of the stars of Ginger Snaps. So, get up in that crow’s nest and keep that parascope to yer’ eye. You won’t wanna miss the upcoming iceberg of coolness, I guarantee it. ‘Til that day, squirts, this is Quint bidding you a fine farewell and adieu.

-Quint

There once was a lady from Nantucket, her thing was so long she tucked it, when it popped right on out, I said with a shout, "Do You Mind If Bend Down And Suck It!"