Mr. Beaks Delivers One Last David Goyer Interview For THE UNBORN!

Welcome to Part III of my exhaustive THE UNBORN coverage. For those of you playing catch-up, this entirely unplanned series of interviews with writer-director David S. Goyer began at Comic Con, continued with an edit bay visit last October, and concluded today with a lively thirty-five minute back-and-forth at his Beverly Hills office. Had all gone according to studio plan, we would've finished this cycle back in December at the press junket, but a scheduling snafu on my end forced us to push until the day before the film's theatrical release. In a way, this was preferable. Junket interviews tend to be rushed and canned. Better to get your subject either prior to or long after the media tour; they're more relaxed, and you look less like the enemy. Not that Goyer is ever adversarial. He's always friendly and unfailingly honest. In turn, I felt like I could speak freely about my thoughts - good and bad - on THE UNBORN. Hopefully, this translated into an interesting interview. Aside from his demonic possession flick (you've probably been inundated with ads by this point, but here's a link to the trailer), we also talked about his steampunk adventure take on THE INVISIBLE MAN, Nazis, glory holes, Batman and the importance of a leading lady with a good scream. To ease us in to our third conversation in six months, I commended Goyer on becoming my all-time most interviewed person. As I started my recorder, he was trying to determine whether that's a good thing.

Mr. Beaks: Well, I'm obviously not avoiding you.

David Goyer: Okay. That's good.

Beaks: You know, the tough thing about having seen a chunk of the film three months ago is that I built up this expectation of how I felt the film was going to play. I was surprised that this is a very briskly paced horror film.

Goyer: You thought it would be more leisurely?

Beaks: Yeah.

Goyer: Because you'd seen most of the first act, which is more leisurely.

Beaks: Yeah, I thought it would be one of those horror movies that soaks into your bones a little.

Goyer: Do you wish it had been more leisurely?

Beaks: Honestly? Yeah. But I think that's more my kind of horror movie. Sitting in the theater with an audience, I can't deny that they were responding to the movie the way you wanted them to respond.

Goyer: It's funny. It started out longer. And it's not like the studio was pressuring me, saying, "Cut it down!" I just... we tested it and watched it with audiences, and you could sense when they wanted the rhythm to be paced up a little. I don't know. I still think the first act is fairly leisurely. Then it kind of torques up, and then the last act is just this onslaught of... whatever. I go back and forth. I like movies like THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES - which was very leisurely and savaged at the box office. (Laughs) I ended up being fairly happy with [THE UNBORN] even though it became more fast paced. But it didn't become that much more fast paced than what you saw.

Beaks: And that's the thing. I see the first act, and then I build from there this expectation of where I think the movie is headed. It's this problem I've been having lately with footage presentations. I've seen the first twenty minutes or so of WATCHMEN twice now, and, even though I know where the story is headed, I don't know how it's going to be arranged. I'll probably have to see it twice before I can work up a fair assessment of the movie.

Goyer: But, again, I would say the experience of watching it with an audience is different. When I watched [THE UNBORN] with an audience, I could feel when they were getting restless. You always have to decide how much you're going to listen to the focus groups or not, but it's a palpable thing when you're sitting there. It's a tough call. I guess I'll take it sort of as a compliment that you wanted it more leisurely. (Pause) But I think the experience is different from you watching it in an edit bay or at home or something like that. So many times you see these longer versions that come out on DVD afterwards. At home, you can take another half-hour and it's not a big deal; you can pause the movie and go get a drink.

Beaks: This is just my experience, though. I'm not the intended audience - well, maybe a little.

Goyer: No. How old are you?

Beaks: Thirty-five.

Goyer: You're not the intended audience. I mean, I hope that you got something out of it, but the intended audience is probably eighteen to twenty-six. That's a big gap. I read some early reviews where people said, "You know, there's some interesting creepy stuff in this, but then the final act is just the usual scares." But there's also an expectation from the audience that that's what they want. There's that moment where you have to, as Guillermo [Del Toro] would say, "show your dick". It's a tough call.

Beaks: Well, when I said that I was the intended audience, I meant as a fan of horror. I go into every horror movie wanting to be scared or creeped out - and there's some creepy stuff in this. But I've also seen over 1,000 horror movies or something. If that's possible.

Goyer: It sure is possible.

Beaks: But [THE UNBORN] reminds me of the kind of horror movie I went to see when I was a teenager. It's got the jump scares and--

Goyer: I'm hoping it's a movie that will satisfy the jump scare audience, but have maybe a little bit more integrity than some of those do. Maybe it'll have a moments here or there that are a little more off-center or odd. Because, like I said, I love movies like MOTHMAN PROPHECIES and SESSION 9, which are all about atmosphere. But there was a complete jury nullification in terms of those movies. They were rejected 100%. I guess I'm hoping that I can straddle the line between the two.

Beaks: I also think those two movies were victims of studios or distributors that didn't know what to do with them.

Goyer: They were dumped, yeah.

Beaks: That's the tricky part with movies like that. But I see what you're saying in terms of added integrity. I've talked to you several times about this movie, and it's clear that you're keen to introduce more interesting elements like heterochromia or Nazis experimenting on twins. Films like this typically don't have that kind of intelligence behind them. They're usually running from the same playbook. So you've at least tried to get people thinking about things more profound than a guy with a big butcher knife.

Goyer: I hope so. To a certain extent, there may have been more of that that we cut out. There were longer scenes with Gary Oldman and longer scenes with the Jane Alexander character that sort of spoke to those elements. I find that interesting, but it seemed at a certain point that the audience was like, "Okay, I like that up to here, and then we've heard enough. We don't need more Kabbalah stuff."

Beaks: That's another thing about horror films. There are two ways to do it. On one hand, the more information you get, the creepier the film gets. On the other, the more inexplicable things are, the more you don't know... that fucks you up.

Goyer: It's a hard line to walk to know how much to explain and how much [to leave out]. There are a few moments in the movie that I wanted to explain less, and the studio was pressing me to explain more; I felt that the more you explain, the more you demystify. To a certain extent, they weren't wrong. You go to some of these focus groups and some of them want more. So you give them more, and then they say it's confusing or they didn't want the information. It's interesting. There were moments during the preview process of this movie that I did listen to the audience, and there were definitely moments where I didn't - where I just went with my gut.

Beaks: Did you get any resistance with regards to the Nazi element?

Goyer: Bizarrely, no. None. None from the test audiences and none from the studio. I thought we would, and we didn't.

Beaks: That's strange. Then again, there's something weird going on because there are a lot of--

Goyer: Nazi movies. I know. There's DEFIANCE, there's THE READER, there's VALKYRIE.

Beaks: i have no idea where that came from.

Goyer: It's just one of those things. Shaun [Cassidy] was in here earlier*, and he had this show a few years back called INVASION. It came out the same year I had a show on CBS called THRESHOLD and NBC had a show called SURFACE. One year, three major networks had shows about alien invasions. It's just this zeitgeist film. Like THE ILLUSIONIST and THE PRESTIGE coming out within a month of each other.

Beaks: I guess.

Goyer: But no push-back on the Nazi thing. None. Every once in a while, you do a preview screening, and out of 400 people, one or two people say they're offended. Like a right-to-life person would say they're offended by [THE UNBORN] because "you're advocating abortion". You'd have these strange, anomalous reactions.

Beaks: What about the shooting of the concentration camp scenes? I always wonder how filmmakers cope with creating such an upsetting environment. Does it get to you at some point?

Goyer: We tried to make it as historically accurate as we could. We weren't doing a full Holocaust film - and they're not speaking, so I think that makes it more abstract. It bothered me, but it's also weird because you have 200 crew members walking around. We also had EPK that day. And we had to film all of that in one day. I would say that on a typical movie we would average maybe twenty-seven setups a day, maybe a little more. But on that particular day - and we had child actors, and you can only shoot with them for, like, six hours - we shot fifty-two setups. That's an insane amount. (Pause) By including those things, I was wondering whether I was trivializing [the Holocaust] or not. Hopefully, because the whole movie isn't about that, we're not. But I did think about it.

Beaks: Well, to a degree you are exploiting it. But it's not like you're making ILSA.

Goyer: Exactly. I guess we are exploiting it by the mere fact that we talk about it, but... the character of Sofi is Hungarian and my wife is Hungarian. And my wife's grandmother was a Holocaust survivor who was Hungarian. And the woman who taught Jane Alexander the accent was a Hungarian Holocaust survivor. So it's not like I was some Catholic guy deciding to co-opt the subject. I had relatives who died in the Holocaust as well. And there are certainly many books that have delved into horror and linked whatever monster or ghost story they were telling to the Holocaust. That's been done much more in books than in film.

Beaks: Very true. Moving on to your lead Odette Yustman. I read an interview recently, and was amused that, when you auditioned her, you had her scream. I like that this is still a requirement in the horror film audition process.

Goyer: Well, I wasn't going by some rule book. It wasn't so much that I wanted to make sure she had a good scream; I wanted to know that she would be prepared on a film set to go to a raw, unhinged place. If she couldn't do it in the audition - and we saw hundreds of women, and would ask them all to do that - then I would say, "Fuck it, I don't think she has what it takes to go to the places we need to take her for this movie." But she went there. And it was disturbing when she did it.

Beaks: That's cool. It's just that I have visions of John Travolta auditioning screams when I think of that.

Goyer: I know. [BLOW OUT] is one of my favorite De Palma films.

Beaks: It's my absolute favorite. But that idea of auditioning these girls who are, in many respects, factory made. I've heard Odette compared to Megan Fox--

Goyer: I don't think she looks like Megan Fox. I think she's a little more ethnic. Odette is obviously really beautiful, but I think she's also a talented young actress. Maybe you felt differently, but I was really happy with her.

Beaks: No, she was fine. Oddly enough, I think I really started to like her when the doctor tells her that they're going to have to insert the... (searching for the word)

Goyer: Speculum?

Beaks: Yes. Insert the speculum into her eye. Her reaction was adorable.

Goyer: It was a real reaction. Men and women seemed to like Odette equally. The women liked her because she was approachable. I like her. I think she's got a good future ahead of her.

(For some reason, I went off on a tangent about auditioning CW ingenues. Not a very interesting topic of conversation. This, however, is.) Beaks: I want to congratulate you for having the first suspense beat to ever be constructed around a glory hole.

Goyer: (Smiles) Well, it's true.

Beaks: That's groundbreaking stuff, man.

Goyer: Somebody said that was unintentionally funny. And I was like, "No, that's intentionally funny."

Beaks: After the screening, someone was saying, "How could he do that? Did he know what he was doing?" And I said, "Um, I think he did that on purpose."

Goyer: That was totally on purpose!

Beaks: I was like, "I think he knows."

Goyer: No shit! I just thought that was funny. And in most cases, the audience seems to respond how I want them to respond.

Beaks: And then to have those little beetles pouring out. Where did that come from?

Goyer: I was out in my backyard and I found a potato bug. My dog was playing with it and I'd never seen one before. They're also called Jerusalem Crickets. I thought it was nasty, so I went online, found out what it was and said, "We should put that in the movie." We had to hire these entomology students in New Mexico to find them because they're seasonal. We got about 500 of them and then the rest were CG.

Beaks: Actually, I was more interested as to how you thought of them in conjunction with a glory hole.

Goyer: Why the glory hole? Because it's sexual. There's also the block she wears in her mouth when they do the exorcism; I think that's very sexual as well. A lot of times, good horror will connect to that. It's playing on a convention of if you hear a creepy sound are you going to move toward it and look. There's obviously titters in the theater because some people think, "Oh, is a cock going to come out of [the glory hole]?" And what comes out of there isn't what you expect. So I think the scene starts out creepy; then, as you start to focus on the glory hole, people start to titter and it's funny. But then what I hope happens is that it gets weird and fucked up; I hope it destabilizes people, and that they don't know whether to be freaked out or laugh. I tried to do a couple of scenes like that in the movie. I like the scene where the kid gets hit by the car. That's a funny scene. You laugh, but then it's kind of fucked up afterwards. I like mixing the two intensities.

Beaks: There's something very Wes Craven about that approach.

Goyer: I'll take that.

Beaks: When you made this film, was there an expectation that it would be built for a franchise?

Goyer: I think even if there weren't a movie after this, I would've ended it the way I ended it. It's a very traditional way to end a horror film: a) the curse is continuing, and b) the whole reason it began was not quite for the reason we thought. It's like, "Oh fuck, it didn't really want her; what it wanted was inside of her!" Could there be another movie? Of course. And I don't think it would be a cheat to do another movie. But if there weren't another movie, I'd be fine with it ending like it ends.

Beaks: Would you personally want to write another movie?

Goyer: I have some interesting thoughts for what you could do in another movie. There are sequels that are welcome and sequels that aren't welcome; it depends on whether audiences like it or not. Even if it does well at the box office, that doesn't mean there's a love for it. It depends. Would I do a sequel to DARK CITY? No. Even if DARK CITY would've made $100 million, I wouldn't have done a sequel. Alex [Proyas] might've, but I wouldn't have. Would I do a sequel to [THE UNBORN]? Under the right circumstances, possibly. There were some questions that I wanted to get into. This whole curse didn't start in the Holocaust; it started way before that. So I'd be interested in going way back and exploring what started it. I'm also interested in exploring what caused her mother to commit suicide, so I'd be willing to go back and start a movie with Carla Gugino [who plays the mother in flashback] for about ten or twenty minutes and move forward from there.

Beaks: I can always do with more Carla Gugino.

Goyer: She's lovely. She's a sweetheart.

Beaks: Speaking of franchises, the way you've described your steampunk take on THE INVISIBLE MAN, that sounds like it's built for a series. (Here's where Goyer gets up and retrieves some early artwork for his film. I promised not to describe it, so I'll just say that Jamie Rama's illustrations were colorful and kickass.) Beaks: So this is a big period adventure.

Goyer: It's meant to be big. We'll see.

Beaks: When I included your comments in our last interview, some of the talk backers approved, and some were like, "Why the hell can't you just make a fucking horror movie?"

Goyer: I saw some of that, too. We all look at the talkback stuff. I don't know why I can't just make a horror film; I just had this idea! (Laughs) Sometimes in these talkbacks or message boards, people will say, "Oh, Hollywood just does "x" or "y". Or they'll say, "Those Hollywood bastards!" Most of the time it's not some Hollywood cabal that says, "We've got this marketing research, and we've decided that this is what we'll do." Once in a while a movie gets made because of that, but that's not how movies are mounted most of the time. Look, I'm not going to sit there and do a movie based on what the talkbackers think are cool; I'm going to do something based on what I think is cool. So if people want to see it, hopefully they will.

Beaks: Someone should throw $20 million at a movie based on what the talkbackers think is cool. It'd probably be a disaster, but...

Goyer: Or it might be great! Who knows?

Beaks: Well, I don't want to keep you any longer...

Goyer: Anything else I can help you with?

Beaks: Well, let's do the obligatory you-can't-tell-me-anything-about-Batman thing.

Goyer: I cannot--

Beaks: I know. But I went to that reception for THE DARK KNIGHT last month.

Goyer: That mixer?

Beaks: Yeah. And I finally got to talk to Chris and Jonathan. I chatted to Chris for a little bit, but actually got to talk to Jonathan for a good long while. Sadly, eighty or ninety percent of what we talked about was off-the-record, but it did bear out what you'd been saying: they're going to take their time.

Goyer: Warner Bros. would love Chris to do it. Everybody would love Chris to do it.

Beaks: But there's no deal in place.

Goyer: There's no deal in place. And Chris won't do a deal until he's satisfied that there is a story worth continuing. He doesn't want to make... I don't think there's ever been a good third movie. And I say that having made one. I like THE EXORCIST III in a way.

Beaks: I think it's a very effective movie. I mean, you can see the on-set turmoil on the screen. The tone's all over the place.

Goyer: Yeah, I kind of like that movie. But it wasn't a successful film. And Chris doesn't want to come from the heights of THE DARK KNIGHT and make something that feels like it was an unnecessary sequel - aside from box office.

Beaks: Okay, but what happens if you guys win Best Picture and a bunch of other Oscars? Will that add to the pressure?

Goyer: It's not going to be much greater than it is already. (Laughs) It just made so much money. Trust me, the pressure is insane. It is the single most important thing on Warner Bros.' agenda. There's enormous pressure. I guess there's a knock-off effect with me and Jonathan because we're the ones who Chris is looking to to "convince me that there is a third one."

Beaks: But you guys are off doing your own things now.

Goyer: As Chris said, we're musing. He just needs to be convinced that there is a story that has credibility. I was talking to him the other day, and I said, "It's at least a movie that the audience clearly wants." And he said, "I agree, but 'wanting' and 'getting it'... that doesn't mean it'll be a great movie." And if it's not a great movie, then to spend three years on it is kind of heartbreaking.

Beaks: All you have to do is get Eddie Murphy, and you guys are set!

Goyer: Or Cher. Or Shia LaBeouf.

THE UNBORN opens nationwide on January 9th. Thanks to Mr. Goyer for taking the time once again. He's a mensch.

*He might be joining Goyer's new show FAST FORWARD in some behind-the-camera capacity.