Greetings, all. Ambush Bug here with another AICN HORROR: ZOMBIES & SHARKS column. This time around, I talk with Sean Stone, son of director Oliver Stone and director of the new found footage film GREYSTONE PARK. I had a chance to check out the film which is available this week and my review can be read below the interview. Enjoy!

SEAN STONE (SS): Hey Mark, good to talk with you.
BUG: You too. Let’s get right into the interview. How did the film first come about? What made you decide to want to start out your film career with a found footage film?
SS: It came about very much the way you see inside the film itself at a table conversation with my father, Oliver, and myself and a couple of friends. We were sharing stories and Alex, who I hadn’t met before that night, he’s been working for a few years actually exploring haunted places in Jersey and Greystone to him was the pinnacle. He thought that was the scariest location he had been to and he described it kind of like THE SHINING hotel, where it’s just like a world that transforms. Every time he said he went in there he said he would get lost. He said he didn’t recognize the walls, so it was almost like a maze, you know? He made it all sound so very interesting, and I’ve always been a horror fan. Since I was a kid I’ve loved ghost stories and anything that’s frightening, because it’s almost like the primal feeling of “fight or flight” and I thought “This is my chance to have a ghost hunting experience.”

BUG: Yeah. I just noticed that this film is not your typical found footage film, because it does have edits. It has a little bit of a soundtrack. It also has some other clips of other footage that you’ve put in there as well, which is reminiscent of your father’s style. Is that something that you intentionally did to separate yourself from the found footage stuff?

I wanted the audience to have that same feeling that the characters are. When you face supernatural phenomena, you do kind of lose your mind. It’s very similar to madness of being mentally ill, because you just don’t know “Am I going crazy? Am I cracking up? Is there a shadow there? Is that shadow moving? Is it a person?” The lines really start to blur between reality and madness and that to me is the truth of it, so that’s why I went to go shoot this film and in this manor. We never said it’s found footage like “They all died in the end and this is their film.” We said, “This is our experience.” And I think that’s the style I like, that we are going for, which is the mixture of the guys have a camera inside the story, but there’s also a camera outside. It keeps that authenticity like you’re really with them and that’s all we were going for, to keep you wondering “What is this journey like?”

SS: You are very astute and that was actually probably one of the most fun things about making this movie, being able to position sound people so they look like shadow men and we put them in almost every scene in the background. Even ghosts, we even had a few of those in the film, like when they are walking around.
BUG: Yeah, and it definitely did add to the creepy factor in it. Are you a fan of the ghost hunting films or TV shows?
SS: I watched a lot of them when we were in the process of preproduction and writing, because I just wanted to get a feel of how the hunt went down, what kind of phenomena they experienced, but I never really watched them before, because to me I wanted a visceral experience. We were literally going through this stuff and wanting to see my friends get possessed or hearing things screaming or laughing in the abandoned place and eerie music playing and you’re just like “Am I tripping?” We would look at each other as things were in front of us or we’d hear something in the back and I’d be like “Did you throw that?” Alex is like “What? I didn’t throw anything.” These were the kind of experiences we were going through and so when you watch the TV shows or horror films like PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, it’s like “I lived that.” I lived almost everything that happened in this film, so you don’t really get scared by movies anymore once you’ve had to deal with it in real life.

SS: It’s funny, because when he first looked at the script, he said “What’s with the dialog” and it’s a long scene, so as a director of course he’s like “This is a long scene.” It was ten pages of script and so it was a ten minute scene, scene. He was like “I’ll just tell the story,” because it was a story that he told me as a kid about this crazy old lady in the mountains. He told me that as a little boy and it always has stuck with me and then of course because in the film, in GREYSTONE, you have these experiences that are kind of similar looking ghosts. I thought “Well perfect, just tell your story” and he’s a great storyteller. He has a great voice and whenever you have dinner conversations with him, he really does dominate the discussion. So there was not really much direction as far as me. I just maybe just give him a few indicators here and there, but ultimately he told the story that he knew very well and we knocked it our fairly quickly, so there wasn’t much direction there.

SS: It has been. Obviously through the years it changes. The hookah was a little touch, just because I like the effect of the smoke and hookah kind of creates a relaxed atmosphere of sharing, but we definitely have good conversations with red wine and sharing stories and having friends there. Yeah, I think that’s typical.
BUG: Was there much setup in making the hospital look creepy or was most of that stuff already there as far as the dolls and just all of the creepy stuff that’s going on?
SS: It’s funny, I remember one critic in the UK said “We were watching this and could tell that this is all staged” and I’m like “Hey man, I’m not saying this is real footage. I’m saying it’s based on a real experience.” The locations, we spent six months looking for the right location. The hard part was we would go into these places in Jersey for example with these old hospitals and we would go exploring and they would say “No, sorry they are condemned” or… we literally were going to shoot in Queens and a building that hadn’t been touched for thirty years. We explored it and were told we could shoot there. The day of production our crew was getting ready and we got a call from the state saying, “You better stay out of that property. It’s condemned.”

BUG: Well what do you have coming up next for you? You said this was filmed about three years ago. What else is coming up for you?
SS: Well next up is a martial arts comedy called ENTER THE FIST and that’s going to be a great throwback to the seventies and eighties. You can actually watch the auditions… The ENTER THE FIST auditions are on YouTube and it gives you kind of a feel for what we are going for, a throwback with the idea of characters.

SS: I’ll be playing in it.
BUG: Oh you will? Cool.
SS: I’m working on lining up the actors now.
BUG: Very cool. So what about horror? Is this a genre that you plan on revisiting at some point?
SS: Oh yeah. I love horror films. It’s always a question of having real experiences and towards that, Alex and I wrote a script that’s based on other experiences we’ve had during the making of this film and so I think we are working on that for him to produce it and me to direct it.
BUG: Did your father offer any advice going into this film?

BUG: Well congratulations on it. I’ve seen a lot of found footage films over the last couple of years and this is definitely one of the better ones. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today and best of luck with the film.
SS: Thanks! Bye!
BUG: GREYSTONE PARK is available now On Demand and on DVD/BluRay this week! Check out this exclusive "Making of GREYSTONE PARK" clip below!

GREYSTONE PARK (2012)
Directed by Sean StoneWritten by Sean Stone & Alexander Wraith
Starring Sean Stone, Alexander Wraith, Antonella Lentini, Oliver Stone, Bruce Payne
Find out more about this film here!
Reviewed by
The problem with found footage films from here on out is the fact that there’s been so many of them, people automatically discount them upon hearing about a new one. Much like zombie films, the found footage film immediately incite a moan from Talkbackers as soon as one appears in the story above. I think that’s a mistake, since for every throwaway zombie film, a WALKING DEAD or a JUAN OF THE DEAD is made. And for every forgettable found footage film made, a film like GREYSTONE PARK runs the risk of being overlooked because of the abundance of this type of films out there.

On top of that, Stone seems to be experimenting with subliminal and corner-of-your-eye scares that aren’t all together obvious if you aren’t paying attention. Early through the film, as the three investigators make their way jokingly through the hospital, one will be able to see shadows move in the corners and appear in windows. I also could swear I saw a few flashes of bizarre images on occasion in order to cause even more unease for the viewer. In doing so, Stone has created a world where we can’t really trust what we are seeing, but we know something is definitely off. Stone does a fantastic job of conveying a feeling of dread and tension as they venture deeper into the hospital.

The effects of this film are pretty fun. From blood stained chairs and walls to ragdolls lining the corridors, this is definitely a place filled with creep. A lot of old standbys are used here, making GREYSTONE PARK feel a bit redundant, especially to a fan of the GHOST HUNTERS TV show, but Stone, his partner in crime Alexander Wraith, and their female friend Antonella Lentini keep things interesting by alternating from being brazenly challenging to the spirits of the hospital to scared out of their wits. Guilty of having quite a few scenes that are way too similar to stuff we’ve seen before, GREYSTONE PARK saves itself with some cool subliminal scares, nice ambiance in the decrepit hospital, and a dinner scene focusing on Oliver Stone that I didn’t want to see end. Though one would think bumping around in the dark would be scary enough, seeing Oliver Stone smoking a hookah and telling ghost stories is something the actual investigation in GREYSTONE PARK struggles to beat.




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