Daniel Pearl is one of the greatest Directors of Photography in the horror filmmaking community. Not only did he shoot the original American Nightmare; The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in 1974, but he also got the unique opportunity to reimage it once again in 2003.

In 2009 he once again was a vital part of the creative team to remake Friday the 13th which became the largest grossing horror movies ever during it’s opening weekend.

Constructinghorror.com is grateful that one of the most respected horror cinematographers took time out of his busy schedule to explore the art of horror cinematography.

C.H.: How did you end up shooting the remake of yet another classic horror movie such as Friday the 13th?

D.P.: I’m famous for shooting horror films. I’m not a huge fan of horror films. I don’t really watch them. I’m just good at shooting them. They offer a cinematographer an opportunity to do something very gutsy, bold, brave with the camera, the lensing, and the lighting, all three of those things. So I just enjoy shooting them, but I don’t watch all that many of them. Consequently, I’ve never seen any of the previous movies—and there are 11 of them, this being the 12th one in the franchise. So, I was contacted by Marcus Nispel who, as you probably know, I did the remake of Texas Chain Saw Massacre with. I shot Pathfinder (2007) with him, and I shot hundreds of commercials with him. He told me that he’d taken this job on, and I didn’t really think it was the film that either of our careers needed. He had had a pretty big flop with Pathfinder and wanted to make another film that got received well. I went and watched the original Friday the 13th (1980), and I couldn’t believe how horrible it was. So I called him up and said, “Why are we remaking this piece of junk? It’s terrible.” And his response was, “Well, we’re going to make it better, of course.” And I was like, “OK, well, then, I guess it’s worth doing.”

Everyone, pretty much, when I heard we were making the film, thought it was going to be a guaranteed success, like it was going to be a hit for sure. Sure enough, it did—and I don’t know if you follow the numbers in the States—but it did 43.5 million dollars on opening weekend, which was the weekend of Friday the 13th last February. That was a record for an opening weekend for a horror film, and also it was a record for the opening of any film in the month of February. February here in the states is a pretty dead month, so in the past if you shoot a film and you hear it’s being released in February, you feel a little bit embarrassed, like, “Oh no, what did we do wrong? How come we’re getting a February release?” Of course, here, they went for the coincidence of it actually being Friday the 13th.

C.H.: From a cinematic point of view, What were the initial discussions in remaking Friday the 13th? How did you approach this remake?

Well, it’s funny. My approach to everything is based upon the economy, really. I have an intuitive style of composition, and there are certain things I like about light, certain kinds of contrasts that I like to light to, and I sort of apply that. Of course, I’ll take any cues that are given to me by the director, and first I read the screenplay, and that frequently speaks to me. Sometimes when I read the screenplay I’m actually seeing the movie when I’m reading it. So, that factors in—really my first impression of the story as I read it. I read the screenplay, and I form my first impressions right there, sometimes actually seeing the images in my mind. That plays a big part of what I do. As I was saying before, my natural sense of composition, my natural things that I like to do with light—contrast ratios, directions, quality of light that I like. They factor in heavily. The schedule of the movie factors into it. You have to tailor what one does in the making of the movie to the schedule and to the budget, meaning I can’t plan something that’s going to take too long to set up and we don’t end up shooting anything that day. I also have to be mindful of the size of crew that I have and the equipment budget that I have, so I have to factor that into my approach. And then, probably at least as big, if not bigger, than my initial impression of things is the actual locations themselves. That speaks to me a lot about what I do. I know intuitively what can make an image scary, and now I just have to fit that into the situations that the screenplay and the location manager put us into. And that has quite a lot to do with the actual locations. The best way I can explain it to you is, when you stand in a location and look at it right, that’s your set. There are things you like about the location, details you want to emphasize. And then there are things that are not quite right about the location, that you may not like, and these are things you want to de-emphasize. Now, you emphasize things by where you place them in the composition, how you light them. To de-emphasize things, you might not include them in the frame at all. You might minimalize things by where you place them in the frame. You might choose not to light something that you don’t like. Once I make those decisions—what’s in the frame, what’s not in the frame—that then gives me some clue as to where I can light from, because unless it’s a torch or a flashlight or a practical lamp, I normally have to use a light that’s outside of the frame some place. So, once I decide what’s in the frame, now I know what’s outside the frame, and now I can start to figure out where I can put my lights.

So, I’m not the kind of guy who goes out and watches a half a dozen films of the same type and decides to steal a little bit from each one of them. I prefer to—the way I say it is that it comes from my head or my heart, not my ass, you know? It’s either my ideas from reading the screenplay, or ideas I get from talking to the director or the producer, or sometimes even speaking to the writer will give me some inspiration. But I try to make it my own, something I found on my own and didn’t copy from another film. I find that a lot of young directors will come in, and within the first five minutes of a meeting, they’ll throw ten or twelve titles of film at you. Like, “Well, it’s kind of a cross between Apocalypse Now and I Know What You Did Last Summer,” you know, weird combinations that sometimes don’t even make sense. I take that in, but as it’s going down, I’ll tell them, “Okay, we can talk this way, but what I’m hoping we’re going to do is something that’s our own.” Now are my films always that revolutionary? No, they’re not. But at least I can say that what you see on the screen is born from what comes out of my head and the situations that I’m in.

You know, it’s funny. When I did Alien vs. Predator’s – Requiem (2007), when we were prepping, the directors—the brothers Strauss —had to go back to Los Angeles for the weekend, and I said, “Listen guys, the only one of these films I ever saw was Alien, the very first one, the Ridley Scott one. I hadn’t seen any of the Predator movies, Alien vs. Predator, or the rest of the Alien films. What should I watch while you’re gone?” And they said, “The remake of the Texas Chain Saw Massacre, that’s what you should watch.” And so, basically, that was right on. That was what I wanted to hear. They wanted it to come from me, and not from the rest of the films. They were like, “Just don’t even bother watching the rest of the films. In fact, don’t watch the other Alien vs. Predator. You’ll hate it, and it’ll just put you off.”

C.H.: What about storyboarding and creating the setups? When do you do that? Is it on the set, or is it in preproduction with Marcus Nispel ?

Nispel did it himself with a storyboard artist, and in fact he did it before the locations were found. You know, storyboards have their place, and Marcus uses them more as a visual checklist than actually as a reference for the shots. A lot of the times you have storyboards, and that’s exactly the shots the director wants. With Marcus, it’s more or less a bunch of ideas about shots. They’re always stuck up on a sticky board, and he’s got these pictures that are not very big, maybe 2.5 centimeters by 6 centimeters or a little bigger, maybe 4 centimeters by 8. Anyhow, he went ahead and did that, which was a bit disappointing to me, because I’d hoped that we’d do it together and design some very cool shots. But he went ahead and did it with a storyboard artist friend of his before we got together on it, which I never really like—I’d rather be involved in the process. And it’s done without any idea of what the locations are. So, like with what I was saying—how we include what we like about the locations and exclude what we don’t like about it—that’s all totally disregarded. Also, they’re not very detailed drawings, and the screen direction is not always the same. Sometimes, the person’s facing left to right, sometimes right to left. So, storyboards can in some ways be a confusion, and what dawned on me in the process of making this film, which was a difficult film to make, is that these storyboards started out as words, where he said words to a storyboard artist, the artist made some sort of quick, simplistic drawings out of those, they were given to me, and I’d have to look at the drawings and translate them back into words to communicate to my crew, because they couldn’t understand the drawings. You couldn’t just say, “Here, take the drawing and go make that shot,” because it might just’ve been a drawing of a machete. But, what goes behind it? Do you want to see doorway, do you want to see a tree, or what’s behind it? So, in a way, because of the way the storyboards were done, and because of the situation, I felt a shot list might have been a more useful device then storyboards. However, Marcus uses them as a way of thinking about the scene—he draws up all the possible shots, he draws up a lot of inserts that he wants. And then he uses them as his shot-list. They’re all sitting there, and he’ll take them and, to some degree, shoot them in whatever order he feels like shooting them in, which isn’t always the best way to go either.

C.H.: In an ideal situation, how do you prefer to work?

The ideal situation is a collaborative situation, but unfortunately we didn’t have the prep time going into this. Marcus was busy on some other thing, so we didn’t have a lot of time. And the producers were doing another picture, so they didn’t get on the case early. So we were still arranging locations while we were starting to shoot. So, we didn’t really have the time to go and sit in a location and spend a fair amount of time talking about the shots, so it got so that we’d get to the location and say, “Okay, so how do we do this?” Also, traditionally you would have it so that, like at the opening of the film where the five kids wind up around a campfire— Marcus didn’t want to shoot the traditional master, which would be to arrange the five people around the fire in a semi-circle and put the lens and shoot across the fire at the semi-circle. He didn’t want to shoot like that. He wanted to shoot more unusual angles. The studio, when they saw the footage, they went, “Where’s the master?” And they then put an edict out saying we had to shoot a master of every scene. So, the master shot—which, for your readers who may not know what it is, is a shot that’s wide enough to establish the locale, maybe with a camera move, its scope is big enough to include all the actors and capture all the action in the scene. It’s the one shot that basically contains all the elements of a scene. We were put under strong rules that, from day one on, we needed to shoot a master of every scene. They don’t always use it, but if there are any questions as to what happens in the scene, you always have the master to fall back on.

C.H.: What’s your approach to covering a scene?

Well, once we get the master, it pretty much unfolds. It becomes pretty logical for us. After a master, we might go into over-the-shoulder shots for dialogue. Especially if we’re in a 2.35 aspect ratio—here we shot anamorphic, where the width is 2.35 times the height of the frame—the nice, wide frame is very good for over-the-shoulder shots and big scenics. So, after the master shot, we probably go into over-the-shoulders, shoot close-ups for whoever we feel needs it. Now, if there’s 6 or 7 people in the scene, that might mean 6 or 7 close-ups, since probably everyone gets a close-up in the scene. So that’s kind of the way it goes. Then, we might have special shots—any special shots, like an object we want a special close-up on, or an action we want a certain angle on to make it play better. I guess where Marcus was coming from is he didn’t want to be so conventional. He wanted to get away from the basic and shoot it more, you know, with special angles. Which is certainly an honorable way to go about things, but here we didn’t have the final say. They insisted we play it safe and shoot masters, so basically that’s what happened.

C.H.: With the night scene exteriors in mind, what were the technical requirements?

A lot of nights, and we shot with the anamorphic lenses. Fortunately, while all of my crew was great, I had two guys in particular who were superstars for me. One was a guy named Jacques Jouffret, who is French-born, but he’s been working in the States for I think 15 or 16 years. I’ve known him since he first came to the States and started working here. He is, in my opinion, not only one of the world’s greatest steadicam operators, but he’s just a great operator all the way around. I was very fortunate to get him. He was actually previously booked on a film with my friend Guillermo Navarro, and Guillermo’s film fell through and so, at the last moment, Jacques became available for me. And he did a fantastic job on both the steadicam and the hand-held work. In addition to that, I was able to reunite with a gaffer named Roger Sassen, who has been gaffing on and off for me for over 25 years. We go back to the early days of music videos, where he and I were sort of considered the kings of music videos. And that’s a very happy working relationship for me with Roger. He just understands what I like, he knows what I like, he’s been with me for so many years, and he pushes me to get on with it, which is kind of necessary as there’s always a schedule that you have to stay up to. Even though you want every shot to be a Rembrandt, and for every shot to be perfection, you’ve got to get the shots done in the course of the day. Roger’s very good about that, and he was huge for me. So, two guys who were just gigantic in helping me achieve the look of this film were Jacques Jouffret and Roger Sassen. In addition, the director was adamant that we shoot with anamorphic lenses as a method of achieving this popular—now becoming very popular—2.35 aspect ratio.

Anamorphic lenses are a technology that goes back probably 50 years, principally available through Panavision—although Todd-AO makes them lenses, and there are some other anamorphic lenses in existence. A company, Hawk, based in Germany, is doing quite great things with anamorphic lenses. But basically, it’s a way to get a widescreen image using a maximum negative area. The natural negative area on a 35 millimeter camera is 1.33, where the width is equivalent to 1.33 times the height. In order to get a higher ratio of width to height, you frequently letterbox, which is to throw away the top and the bottom—slice them off and make it what’s called a letterbox image. With the anamorphic, what you do is shoot with a squeezing element, an element that takes twice the width and squeezes it down to half that width. It takes the 2.35, squeezes it down to 1.16, and fits it in the native negative area, so you’re not throwing away negative to get this 2.35 image. You’re actually using special optics to spread things out by a factor of two. A good example of what this looks like is if you’re watching, say, a Clint Eastwood spaghetti western, or any movie for that matter, and in the beginning they always run them on television without the de-anamorphisizer, so you’re squeezed by a 2:1 ratio, which they do to keep the titles on the screen. So, Clint Eastwood might be very skinny and tall, and his horse might be very skinny when you see The Good, the Bad, the Ugly (1966) or Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) go across. So, they sometimes project it not de-anamorpisized—not un-squeezed—so that all the written material of the credits is on there, and then once the credits are over, they then de-anamorphisize it and take the middle out of it. That was the old school way, on old television. And now—I don’t know what you’re doing today in Sweden, you’re probably projecting 16 by 9, so an anamorphic movie on regular commercial television might actually be seen letterbox now, as opposed to the old days when the networks, especially, would never letterbox what they put out. They would simply move in on that and throw away the sides so they could fill the 1.33. Anyhow, sorry about the long explanation of what anamorphic is. But anamorphics are extremely popular right now, in my mind the reason being that TVs are now 16 by 9 aspect ratio, which is the width being 1.79 times the height. Well, if television is 1.79, I feel like everyone’s saying, “Well cinema has to be something more special than TV,” so we’ll go even broader to 2.35. We can do that with normal, spherical lenses—and throw away top and bottom of the negative—or we can do it with anamorphics. Anamorphics have had a recent rebirth in the last few years. They’ve become very popular. They have a lot of integrity in all of our minds, as filmmakers. With anamorphic, you think you’re doing it properly, you’re not cutting any corners, and you’re doing the right thing by using anamorphic lenses.

They have three qualities that make them unique. All the images look a little bit different—they don’t look exactly the same, certainly not like what you see on a video camera. Which is what we’re always trying to do now, differentiate ourselves from some sort of video or digital capture. They have very interesting qualities when you rack focus. When you focus from near to far on the lens, there’s an interesting sort of shift in the lens. It may have a little bit of distortion as the focus rack goes on. The other thing they do that everyone seems to be very in love with is, they flair. They get light strikes on them, unlike spherical lenses, and people like that. In this day and age, we want our pictures to be strong and tell a story, but we don’t want them too clean and too pristine for a lot of things, especially horror films. We want them a little bit dirty, a little bit gritty, a little bit rough, so these flares are in keeping with that, and they’re very appreciated.

The down side is that the lenses frequently require more light, so right away, as you mention, this story has a lot of night work in it. We knew we wanted to shoot a very fluid style. We knew we wanted a lot of steadicam, we knew we wanted a lot of hand-held, and we knew we had a lot of nights. Well, the typical anamorphic lenses are quite large. They’re probably 25 centimeters long, even for a prime lens, not a zoom lens. They weigh a lot—they might weigh 5 to 6 kilos. They’re not very light-sensitive. They might require 4 to 6, maybe even 8 times the light for a minimum exposure that you would need for a spherical lens. All these things are factors that, as we look into going into this project, make me go, “Well, how am I going to pull this off?” Fortunately—and I’m a very lucky guy, which must have something to do with my passion for the cinema—throughout my career, I’ve been lucky that equipment suppliers, whether it be Eastman-Kodak, Panavision, or Jean-Marie Lavalou with the louma-crane or the techni-crane, these people have always treated me extremely well. And in this case I learned that Panavision was just making a brand new set of lightweight anamorphic lenses called the G-series anamorphics. There were two sets in existence. I contacted them—I had shot a lot with their equipment in the commercial world, both myself and the director of the picture Marcus Nispel had been very good customers—and they managed to get out of the shop a third set of these G-series lenses for me. I can’t tell you how appreciative I am, and what a great contributor that was, technically, to this film. We were able to shoot hand-held, we were able to shoot steadicam, we were able to shoot at night without lighting it so crazily—because they’re fast as well, they’re 2.6 lenses, which is pretty fast for anamorphic lenses. And the light weight helps a lot. An additional factor that helped with the night was that Kodak had just come out with a new high-speed film stock, 5219, with a Vision 3500 Tungsten ASA film. I had a chance to test that film prior to shooting, and it’s my habit to go ahead and push or force-develop a film. If something is lit and there’s not enough light, or if something itself isn’t light enough—like, for example, predator blood, glow-in-the-dark green blood is just not all that bright. It’s bright for the human eye, but not so bright when you’re filming it. With things like that I won’t hesitate to force-develop or what we call “push the film,” where basically what you do is develop the film in the developer for twice the normal amount of time required, making the film twice as light-sensitive. You pick up a little bit of grain—which, again, goes back to the idea that we don’t want things so clean and pristine, and we don’t want it to look like video. So, having a little bit of grain is a good thing. You don’t want to hit the audience over the head with it or beat them to death with what’s like looking into a frying pan, but we still want to have a little bit of a filmic grain feeling to it. So, like I said, it’s my habit to frequently push the film. Well, this film, from what I knew about it, was so incredibly fine-grained that I said, “Look, I want to see what it looks like when I push it two stops,” which was like almost unheard of. I mean the labs would do it, but it’s like, “Oh, you should only do that in extremely dire situations.” Anyhow, I got the test back on it, and I loved the way it looked pushed two stops. It had a bit of expense, but what I can tell you is that because of the incredibly great quality of that film—its fine grain and its ability to capture what we call a wide tonal range, a great range between light and dark that it can capture—made it not so difficult to do all this night work. Most all the nights are pushed at least one stop in force development. A large percentage are 1.5 stops, and there is a fair amount of stuff that is pushed 2 stops in the finished film.

C.H.: When you shoot forest scenes at night it requires a lot of artificial lighting. It would be interesting to hear how you shot these night scenes in the forest.

What happens is we go into the forest and in some cases, we’re at the edge of a lake, which makes things more difficult because I’m always into backlighting and cross-lighting and really hate to front-light almost anything, unless it were, say, a female singer who sings on an album. Other than that that, I try always to be backlighting, side-lighting, cross-lighting—lifting up the texture in things, bringing out the third dimension wherever I can. This gets a little difficult when you get near the water. We did actually have, for a few sequences near the million-dollar house that the kids travel to, a quite a big lake out there, quite a big situation. And we had an 18k par stuck out in the woods on the other side of that lake up on the cliff so that we could backlight it from afar—the 18k Arri Sun par, which is the brightest light made. And we also had probably 3 or 4 18k fresnels. I don’t too much like pars, but in this case I did use the Arri Sun because it’s just the brightest light there is. We couldn’t even yell to the lamp operator it was such a far distance. We had to call him on his cell phone or walkie-talkie to get him to spot, flood, pan, or whatever. But yeah, I’m fortunate that we did go kind of big with the lights.

C.H.: In your opinion, how much do people need to know about the geography of the set, where rooms and specific locations are in a scene?

People definitely need to not only know that, but we actually try to make a map of our film, so that when people leave the campfire and they go one direction to the marijuana fields, then in theory they have to go the other direction back to the campfire. It plays on a subconscious level. The big reason for working this way is that Marcus and myself, since I’m the cinematographer, on Pathfinder —the film we did about the Vikings’ first landing on North America in the year 1000—shot whatever worked for us in terms of what was the background. We didn’t worry too much about screen direction. And it was quite confusing to people because there were two Indian villages, and the Vikings were moving around, and nobody really knew whether they were going toward this village or that village, and it created a lot of confusion. So we’ve since learned that it’s necessary to make a map, and we actually sit down and draw it up before we start shooting. When we start looking for locations, we actually draw the lay of the land or, you know, where is Jason’s lair or his old house in terms of where it is in relation to the camp itself, where is it in relation to where the kids were camping out, or where is it in relation to the million-dollar house on the lake? That plays a very important part for us in this film. Then, of course, now we go finding the locations, and doesn’t always work out. So we go, “It’s so much better if it’s going right to left instead of left to right.” So, we may bend it somewhat, and we try not to be dragged around by the nose by the continuity person, who basically is in charge of that screen direction thing. And in this film I personally had quite a lot of power, and we were dragged around by the nose by the person to some degree. Of course, a lot of what you’re doing principally is for the good of the film, but a lot of times they become so . . . You know, even as a cinematographer — we’re grounded in technology. You know, we have to be technologically rigid about the way we do things. We have to live and die by the laws of physics. The continuity person has rules too, you know, rules and regulations. But I mean, we feel like sometimes we should be able to break those rules and regulations. It’s just, exactly when can you?

There’s an interesting story, which I’ll tell you. Are you familiar with where screen direction came about? In 1906, they made the first multi-reel movie. Up to that point, a movie was always a roll of film. The first multi-reeler is The Great Train Robbery. The Great Train Robbery is just that. It’s out in the Wild West. It’s supposed to take place in the West of the 1800s, but it was 1906 anyhow when they did it, so it wasn’t that hard to get it to look like the 1800s. [laughs] But anyhow, they went and they shot it, and there are beautiful bluffs, and they shoot the train going right to left across the beautiful mountains. Then there might be a canyon, and they’d shoot the train going the other way across the canyon. Whatever made good shots is the way they ran the train. They didn’t worry about whether it was going left to right or right to left. Well, when the movie was first screened in New York, as people came out they said, “So, how did you like the movie?” and they’d be like, “Well, the movie was pretty good. The first multi-reel movie was nice. I enjoyed watching it, but where was the train wreck?” The filmmakers went, “What train wreck? What are you talking about?” And the people go, “Well, one train was going from right to left, and another train was going from left to right, and there was only one track, so how come you never showed the two trains colliding?” So the filmmakers say, “No, there’s only one train in the story, all right?” Really, that’s how screen direction came about. When the viewing public saw one train going one way, and one going the other way, they assumed it was a story about two trains. So, we’ve gotten pretty sophisticated in the last 103 years. We don’t need to be as rigid as that, but there are still some hold-overs of that perception that need to be—you know, you only want to confuse people in the cinema when you intend to confuse them.

C.H.: So, when do you confuse them? Are there any scenes in this movie where you used confusion to create suspense?

I can’t think of any things, per se, where we used that technique. That doesn’t come to mind. But a technique that does come to mind is a variation on the magician’s misdirection. A magician, when he’s doing a magic trick with this hand, he’ll do something with the other hand [moves hand], like swing a scarf or something, and meanwhile I’ve taken the coin that was in my hand here and I’ve put it in my mouth or slid it down my sleeve or whatever. For the very first Texas Chain Saw Massacre that I shot 36 years ago, I had seen a Roman Polanski film called The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967), and in it a vampire sneaks up on this character, and the vampire is in the frame before you realize he’s there, because Polanski had misdirected us to look at one side of the wide-screen frame, and when my eyes came back to the other side the vampire was in the frame. This actually made me jump out of my seat when I saw this film. So this is a technique that I employed in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and have employed ever since. In this case, it’s where Jason is not lit—he’s in the picture, and a light swings onto him, and that’s when you see him for the first time. Or he’ll step out from behind something. It’s where people don’t make an entrance. Like near the end of the movie, the character’s moving around upstairs in the bathroom, and Jason’s in there with her, and when we reveal Jason he’s already in the shot. He’s just been hidden behind her. That kind of thing is really quite frightening.

You want to get people to look one place, and you bring the scare in from another place. If you see it coming, it’s like, “Eh, that’s not so scary.” But if you don’t see it until all of the sudden it is there, then that’s scary.

C.H.: How do you introduce the antagonist?

Well, it’s always good not to show the monster too much. They want to see the monster, but ultimately in the end, whether it be Jason or Freddy Krueger or Leatherface or whatever, it’s a big guy in a rubber suit or a rubber mask or something, right? So, you always want to try to keep that a bit sketchy. You want to try to show the monster as little as you have to in a movie because what we know is that the human brain will conjure up something that’s much scarier than we can actually show you. So we try and suggest the things that are actually happening, but we try not to get too graphic with the depiction of what’s happening, like we show him swinging a machete and don’t show the actual severing of the limb but portray it with blood splattering against the wall and the sound effect or the scream or whatever. That’s one of the reasons why horror films like to be dark, too. You don’t get to see things so clearly. Because we know that as human beings we’re paranoid enough that we’ll imagine something much worse than what we can dream up to show.

C.H.: We thought about that when we [the C.H.com editorial staff] saw the movie in a sold out theatre on the opening night, because you do show Jason a lot, but it still scared the hell out of the audience. Why do you think that is? Is it speed, the pace, or . . .

That’s something that, for me, not being a fan of the franchise—not to say that I dislike it, but I’ve seen only one of the eleven after I read the screenplay. I watched the first one, and I decided it had so little pertinence to me that it didn’t really mean anything to me that I’d watch the first one. I might as well not. I was going after such a different film than that that it meant nothing. But there are people who are big fans of the franchise, right? And they require that there be a big Camp Crystal Lake sign, and some of the fact that you see Jason so much is to appease the people who are fans, who are going to want to see this. They contrive a story of, how does he start out with a hockey mask? How did Jason get the hockey mask? There are all kinds of things that are put in there for the fans of the franchise. So that probably has a bit to do with why you see Jason so much. You talk about it, we see Jason for the first time— And we broke tradition there. There was a long conversation about it. It was actually his third kill, but it’s part of the first scene, so it’s kind of continuous. He kills the guy who finds the marijuana. He then kills the buddy who goes looking for the first guy, who goes back to the campsite and gets his foot in a bear trap. He gets killed. And then with the girl he takes captive, he chases her, right? Now, he’s actually running. She’s on all fours, going backwards—I love this, for me it’s one of the strongest shots in the movie, where he’s chasing her. You know, I’m happy to say that it’s one of the shots that was my idea, to put the camera behind her and grovel back with her. And Jason comes running at her and swings the machete on the run. Well, in the past, Jason is the big, lumbering guy who just ultimately gets you. He doesn’t run in the previous Friday the 13th’s. Jason doesn’t run. He’s slow and steady. He gets you. Ultimately, in trying to get away from him, you’ll run into a dead end, and he’s has you cornered. He’s got you. But he’s more that kind of a guy in previous movies. He was not somebody who ran. We have him running to chase the girl. We have him running to throw the axe at the African-American guy who gets hit.

C.H.: Did you find it difficult to make Jason scary?

What’s kind of funny is I always imagined when I started into the movie is that there was going to be a time when I would wind up taking great care with how I lit that mask and that face. And I was never afforded that opportunity, so I hope it remains scary. I hope you don’t see too much of him. But I actually had to do all of it in a very quick way like, “You’ve got 5 minutes. Quick, get a shot of Jason.” Everything was sort of under the gun, to my recollection, at any rate. I never really sat down and took really fine detail care in lighting Jason and his mask.

C.H.: We’ve been talking about creating horror, but in this movie there is also a fair amount of sex. How do you feel about showing and not showing? The discussion in horror being, as you know, the less we show the scarier it is. What about sex?

First of all, I’m not going to say how old I am, but I did shoot the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre 36 years ago. So I’m not really the same age as the demographic, right? I’m a father. I have a 22 year old daughter. I personally thought that we were too graphic with the sex. You know, it’s beyond cliché—in a horror film, if you have sex you get killed. It’s just, don’t have sex and you won’t get killed. But, as it appears to me, from what I saw at the screening that I attended, the sex and stuff was greatly appreciated. The audience liked it. Now, if you asked me before that screen, I would’ve said, “Eh, it’s unnecessary. It’s gratuitous. We don’t need that. It’s about the killers, not about sex. But, the audience, they love the jokes, they love the sex, they love the jokes, and they love the kids. At least the audience that I saw it with. Would it have had more legs if it was different? I don’t know, I mean you know with the kills you’re going to get an R rating, and once you’ve got the R rating I figure you might as well load it up with R-rated stuff. I guess, I don’t know. What do you think?

C.H.: I feel it worked great in this movie. The audience here in Sweden really loved it. And, from what research is telling us, if you have images of sex combined with horror you make the audience even more scared because of the two very different impulses that collide in the brain.

Yeah, if they’re similar, if there’s psychological similarities, then yeah, you put the two together. I hadn’t ever even thought about it as a physiological contributor, how it would work in that way. But as you say, it makes all the sense in the world to me. It takes total sense to me. When you get the scientists involved and you look scientifically at what arousal does, it makes all the sense in the world.

C.H.: So what do you think. If you imagine sex outside of the screen, would it become more powerful?

I think there’s a whole porno industry that would say it doesn’t work that way with sex. [laughs] I think with sex we know that seeing it is believing it.

C.H.: For all the makers of stories in this genre, if they want to study a scene or a sequence, perhaps, within Friday the 13th, what would you advise us to study, and why?

It’s hard to work out what’s going on with it, but the scene where the machetes are coming up through the floor, and the guy gets pulled down into the hole, I think that’s probably a pretty good scene. There’s a lot of scares going in it. It’s active, it’s quick-cut. I like that one pretty good.

My favorite, from my end of it, is where the Asian guy gets killed in the garage. He goes to the tool shed, or the garage, where he gets killed. Now, I did something there not completely unique, but it was written that he was going to swing with the hockey stick and break the light bulb overhead. I didn’t want the light bulb to go completely out. Alfred Hitchcock had done the swinging lamp in Psycho (1960), right? So I had the light, as well as swinging, become quite kinetic—on-off, actually becoming brighter than it was supposed to be, and dark, and a lot of staccato with the light. Like I said, it’s not 100% unique—the idea of the swinging light—although the on-off of it is, not genius, but it’s a little something I brought to it that, to me, makes that . . . Again there are a lot of things you can’t see, and there’s a lot of things you can’t see. It’s flashing light, dark, light, dark, and that, to me, is super-effective. And in fact, in the dailies for that, in each take, before it was edited, when I was seeing a minute-and-a-half or two minutes at a time of that, each take was extremely powerful to me. I thought, “This shouldn’t even be cut, it’s just so strong.” Well, they do wind up editing it, but that’s just what they do. They cut things. But I think that the individual shots that make that scene up play very strong. I wish I could show those to everybody. I wish there were some way to just show you the long takes of that and how effective that is.

C.H.: How do you approach the humerous moments of the story? One-liners and such. Since comedy often requires timing too – do you have anything to do with the pacing of those things?

Not really. It’s the director. I see what they work out when they block it, and I have to know how to cover it, and I have to know where he is when he says his jokes and make sure we can see him where we’re supposed to, et cetera. But other than that, I might say, “Look, I’ve got a pocket of light here, I’ve got a pocket of light over here. Please, do you mind taking one step to your left to do that? Oh, there’s a prop you want here? Let me move the prop over there for you so the prop’s in the right place to put you in the light.” To that degree, but no. Again, I told you on first reading I may have pre-conceived notions of the story and screenplay. But a lot of my approach is reacting to things that I see. I let people lay it out. To the director or the talent I say, “What do you guys have in mind?” They show it to me. Then, 9 times out of 10, I’ll hope that I can bring another idea to it to make it even better or make it, you know, my contribution as a cinematographer. So, I’m better as a reactor than I am as the creator. I react to things creatively, as opposed to being the guy who brings the whole picture to the screen.

C.H.: So what did you learn from this movie?

Here’s what I learned from making this movie. For the second time in a row, I made a film that goes out and breaks a record and makes a lot of money for Michael Bay, and he still doesn’t give me a Ferrari. I don’t know what I have to do. [laughs] I want to send him a text message that says, “If it’s a Ferrari, it should be red. If it’s a Mercedes, it should be silver. If it’s a Porsche, it should be black.” That’s all, that’s the message.

No, what did I learn from this? It reinforced a lot of the things I knew already—that filmmaking is hard work, and that it’s great to make a film that works on whatever level for people. I know that in the end, when the film is over and done with, those of us who make it don’t make much money. We get paid while we’re doing it, but if the film makes a fortune on the back end, we don’t get anything from it. So, that’s kind of disappointing. We were asked going into it to make a lot of exceptions. Like, “Do this special case here, you’re only going to have two weeks of prep,” whatever, or “Please work extra hard.” We always do, because they know we’re passionate about the cinema and that we’re passionate about our work and about being filmmakers. Producers always know that, that everybody loves this so much, that everybody cares so much that they will give it everything they can. And we do—we go above and beyond—and in the end we get nothing for it. Surprisingly, we reshot a scene with a guy named Mark Polanski, because the original director Marcus Nispel wasn’t available. So Mark Polanski directed these things. I ran into him last week at the basketball court. I said, “I didn’t see you at the premier. What happened? Were you working?” He goes, “No, I wasn’t given a ticket.” And he said not only was he not given a ticket, but the special effects make-up artist—the guy who does all the prosthetic pieces, the guy who wrangles the blood, the cut-away limbs, all these things, the guy who did the work on Jason’s face—was not invited to the screening. That’s just outrageous. What can I say? Filmmaking is a lot of fun. You’re very lucky and privileged to be a filmmaker. But the praise, the money, the glory trickle down from the top not to the degree that they should, unfortunately. But hey, I’m still lucky. I’ve had a good career, I’ve had a good life, and I get to make movies.

Stay tuned for our exclusive Audio Interview with Daniel Pearl soon to be published here on ConstructingHorror.com, and for our thoughts, analysis and inpressions of the Friday the 13th remake check out the review in the archive, or simply click here!