RANDOLPH CHEVELDAVE:
I can vividly remember how quickly Sharlene became fine with nudity. It was kind of like, within 10 seconds of taking off her clothes, everything was normal again. And Rob has a hairy butt.
KANE HODDER:
There was an ad-lib in that scene. Jason was supposed to throw Sharlene into the mirror, and she breaks it with her head and it shatters in the sink, which allows me to then go over and have a weapon, a shard of glass, to grab. Well, we used a stunt double, and when I threw her and she crashed into the mirror, the glass just cracked and stayed in place but didn't shatter. But Rob kept rolling. So I just walked over to the glass and punched it. That was a total of-the-moment invention, and now I think it's one of the Jason's best moments in the film.
The specter of Freddy Krueger weighed heavily on the mind of Rob Hedden as he conceptualized Jason Takes Manhattan. If Part VIII was going to compete—and beat—the more audacious Nightmare on Elm Street films, it needed more fantastical special effects and imaginative visuals. Transplanting Jason and his unique brand of carnage to a new locale would not be enough. Part of Hedden's solution was to give his heroine a series of flashbacks and hallucinations that would allow the film to not only further explore the mythology of Jason Voorhees, but deliver the audience the kinds of unexpected shocks and creative scares they had never seen before in a Friday the 13th film. Unfortunately, the cost of such ambitions often stretched the film's limited budget to its breaking point, eventually causing Jason Takes Manhattan to go overbudget and overschedule. But even with enough subplots left on the cutting room floor to fill three other Friday the 13ths, frayed nerves and bruised egos still wouldn't sink this voyage of the damned.
RANDOLPH CHEVELDAVE:
I think that Rob is a strange choice to direct a Friday the 13th movie. He does not have a dark side. Rob is a very happy guy—I would think horror would be the last genre he would be chosen for. Witness his last success, the family film Clockstoppers. That strikes me as exactly the kind of thing Rob wants to do.
Part VIII is definitely lighter than the other Friday movies. Rob and I agreed that we did not want to get really graphic with the violence, that we would rather creep people out with what they thought they might see rather than revolt them with the amount of blood. We wanted them to be scared of the movie, not be scared of their reaction to the movie. I think that whole attitude is largely Rob.
ROB HEDDEN:
We made this movie at the time when A Nightmare on Elm Street was really taking off. There was pressure from Frank and the studio: "Hey, freshen your movie up." That's what they did with Nightmare—they took an old genre and they added a new spin on it. And I thought those movies were very clever, very creative. So there are shades of supernatural and sci-fi in Friday VIII. There's the whole thing with Rennie seeing the ghost of young Jason, where she's hearing voices, all her delusions, and the way he dies at the end—which may or may not be in her mind. I wanted the audience to wonder of the things they were seeing, "Is this real, or is it Rennie's imagination?"
Filming Part VIII's many complex water-bound scenes required creative use of Canada's limited filmmaking resources. "There were no studios in Vancouver, so you had to find something that could work," says producer Randolph Cheveldave. "As it turned out, this school was scheduled for demolition and had two big gymnasiums. And the school ended up allowing us two big studios and office space for a mile, and even an excellent special effects shop in the school's old metalworking shop. All the sets we built there, other than the mock-up of the exterior of the ship that was built in a tank.
BRYAN ENGLAND:
I first met Rob Hedden when I was going over to the Paramount lot to show him my reels. It was a hot summer day, and I'd never been to the studio before. And all of a sudden, someone comes screaming down the lot doing wheelies in one of those small carts they have at studios. It was Tony Danza! He was doing a show there at the time, and he pulls up and goes, "Wanna lift?" And I said, 'Sure!" That's how I got the job on Jason Takes Manhattan. I was only a neophyte cameraman. It was going to be my first big studio film, my first time going up to a foreign country, even the first time I had a camera operator.
We were always trying new things. Rob was full of enthusiasm. One day, Rob came to me and said, "Bryan, I want a point of view shot of a dismembered head!" It was for the death scene of the boxer, who gets his head knocked off by Jason on top of the roof. Well, how are we going to do that? So we found this company in Canada that makes Nerf balls. We had them create a giant four foot by four foot Nerf ball we could put the camera in, and we just threw it right off the roof. Every time it bounced down into a giant trash bin, the whole crew just went, "Score!" We called it the "Nerf-cam." We were always coming up with crazy things like that.
ROB HEDDEN:
The thing about this movie, regardless of the story or the direction, is that we really tried to up the production value and make it look like a "real" movie, as opposed to an inexpensive slasher flick. Bryan England wasn't a famous DP but he was phenomenally enthusiastic. He hand-carried his reels to the meeting so he could show us his stuff. He was passionate. Then we looked at this film he shot, I, Madman. I was like, "I don't know where this guy came from, but this is what I want my film to look like!" The color saturation, the lighting quality—there was no grain in it, it was lush, it looked gorgeous. And after he came onboard, I wasn't disappointed. Usually in these movies, it's like, "Let's shoot it quick and move on to the next setup." But Bryan would paint with light, and took his time with every shot. That included the effects—he never rushed any of it.
RANDOLPH CHEVELDAVE:
There was one flashback scene where they were contemplating flushing Jason down a giant toilet. I thought that was pretty stupid. I actually had to argue very hard with Rob and Bryan England not to do it. From my point of view, this was footage that would be very expensive to obtain, and all we're going to do was leave it on the cutting room floor.
ROB HEDDEN:
What we did for the amount of money that we had! I wanted to do a shot where Jason was outside her porthole, looking through the window, but the camera would come all the way through the porthole and up to her face. And the only way to do that was with a "fly-away" wall, where there was actually no glass in the porthole and a seam there. So I had Rennie's state room built on a stage, and as soon as the lens cleared the porthole, the walls would fly out of the way, and the whole camera kept moving in.
Another sequence that should have taken days to film was of the young Jason coming out of the mirror at Rennie. We got in there and did all the physical stuff in only one day, and we were able to do it so quickly because we over-designed the shot. Martin Becker was really clever. It was done with liquid mercury, and the set was built sitting flat in a pool—so the mirror is actually horizontal, and the arm came up out of the liquid and shot up. We glued Jensen's hair down and had her standing sideways—she' actually looking straight down, but it looks like she's staring right into the mirror. And we had a color wheel with different gels on it, and someone spinning it so we were getting all these flashing lights with different colors. It's a fantastic effect that I'd never seen done like that before.
MARTIN CUMMINS:
The great thing about Rob is that there's no mystery with him. Often directors can be afraid of actors and their crew, or they can feel like they have to talk to you in some kind of very deep and philosophical, fucked-up language. I don't need that, and most actors don't, especially when you're young. I just need you to tell me what you want and I'll do that. Rob was very passionate, but he was never pretentious about it. He knew what he was shooting and that we all should be having fun. And he kept any of the above-board tensions away from the actors; he protected us.
JENSEN DAGGETT:
Rob Hedden was an enthusiastic director. He had to do pre-production, filming and post-production in an amazingly short period of time. I got the sense that he had thrown himself into the project completely and
was very optimistic about the final product. He was kind and unassuming and really did try to support his cast.
New York has a new problem!
BRYAN ENGLAND:
There were a lot of politics on that movie, mostly for poor Randy Cheveldave. Randy got blamed for a lot of overages, which weren't all his fault. Frank Mancuso, Jr. was just too busy with Internal Affairs, with Richard Gere and Andy Garcia, which was going to be Frank's breakthrough movie. I also felt that the original script concept, with Jason on a cruise ship, was great. Then they had the one in New York. So they just blended the two, but what happened was, instead of really going through the script and fine-tuning, it was just, "We'll figure it out on the day."
RANDOLPH CHEVELDAVE:
Paramount was not directly involved. If they had anything to say, they said it through Frank. And I have to say that on Part VIII, my contact with Frank was absolutely minimal. I don't believe he and I saw each other during the entire course of making it. He had a very hands-off approach to this one, which was quite surprising because when we did April Fool's Day together, he was on the set every day. For Part VIII, he wasn't even in the country. I also think that, by coincidence during our production he also had his hands full with Internal Affairs. I would say that it is a fair assessment that he had his eyes on a much larger prize.
Because there was such a hurry to get the film done, the budgeting and pre-production were done based on Rob's original outline. I only started getting involved once it was decided that Canada was the place to do it. Ordinarily, Friday the 13th movies were being made for about $3 million. And this one was going to get $4 million because it was an atypical entry. And by the time all was said and done, it cost about $5 million. But hey, what other Friday the 13th movie has a storm at sea, a sinking boat, and New York?
DAVID FISCHER:
There were pressures directed at Rob from the producers, in terms of shooting only what's going to be needed on the screen. But this was his first film, and I think it's understandable that he was kind of like a kid in a candy store. We were also trying to recreate New York City in Vancouver. That simply cost money, and it was time-intensive to go about breaking down the bits and pieces of what we needed in order to make it real and believable.
Many staples of New York had to be created from scratch. The whole subway sequence was a big challenge. There are no subways to destroy in Vancouver, so we took an abandoned tunnel that was 1,000 feet long and ran under the city, and shipped in tons of gravel. Then we built fake subway tracks for hundreds of yards down this tunnel and built a fake subway car. And Vancouver is a pretty clean city, so here we were, going around to all these alleys and picking up garbage. We even added the graffiti. It was a great learning experience.
ROB HEDDEN:
David did a great job of making Vancouver look like New York City. It was challenging. We had to take a spotless Vancouver tunnel system that had not a speck of litter on the ground, and make it look dirty, grungy and covered in graffiti. But the funny part was, we could only get the tunnels on off hours, so we would come in, dirty the whole place up, shoot it, and then we'd have to get out of there and leave poor David to clean it all up.
STEVE MIRKOVICH, Editor:
I was just getting my career going. I had done a few pictures, including Big Trouble in Little China and Prince of Darkness for John Carpenter. Then came Jason Takes Manhattan. Rob and I got along very well, and although I cannot say I was a huge Friday the 13th fan at that point, I thought it would be fun.
I ended up working on the film in Vancouver probably six or seven months, and the shoot was just seven or eight weeks. After wrap, Rob said, "We're gonna live with this picture, and we're gonna use every day that we have, contractually, to do it." Many times a director will be overwhelmed by the amount of film he or she has shot. I do not think I have ever worked with a director who said, "I want you to cut from here to here to here to here to here." I also do not think most directors, during the production process, can think that way, because they are shooting 12 hours a day, then spending two or three hours in their hotel room going over the shot list for the next day, trying to figure out how to solve all their problems.
Eventually, the film went over budget. But Rob was always very communicative and very reasonable, and he was not a screamer., which speaks greatly of him, because he had very big fish to fry during production. And, like every other filmmaker, especially a first-time director, he was under constant pressure.
ROB HEDDEN:
The very first cut of the movie was over two hours long. Then we all looked at it, tried to be objective and decided what this movie was and was not about. And ultimately you are trying to satisfy the audience. So we decided it had to be less talk, more action. The big suspense sequences were gold, but it turned out we didn't need a lot of the character stuff I had written.
We were naïve and ambitious. We probably did things we shouldn't have. The problem was that the producer side of me was like, "I'd rather get more shots in the can. I can sacrifice the look a little bit to get more coverage." While the artistic side was arguing, "Oh, my God, this film is going to look gorgeous. So if it takes a little longer—if I lose a set-up or two a day—it's worth it." And that side ultimately won out.
The budget ended up being $5 million. It wasn't Bryan's fault. It wasn't Randy's fault. It's nobody's fault. Hey, it's my fault—I'm the director. But Randy really had it the toughest because he got his ass chewed from above. There were some disagreements. But we were doing the best we could do, trying to make the best movie that we could.
One of the many crowd-pleasing kills in Jason Takes Manhattan is the rooftop boxing match between Julius and Jason. "Both Kane and I knew how big of a deal my death scene was, because no one has ever boxed Jason before," beams Dupree. "It turned out awesome. I thought we nailed that scene. I've never counted the actual punches, but Steve Mirkovich, the editor, told me after the film's premiere that it was like 72 punches or something like that! I still hear from fans that that's not just one of their favorite kills in the series, but one of the most memorable in the horror genre."
STEVE MIRKOVICH:
There were so many unexpected problems and challenges. It turned out the original child actor hired to play young Jason was having trouble with one of the swimming scenes. No one knew how we were going to find a new actor on such short notice. Well, my family had come up to visit one day, and producer Randy Cheveldave took one look at my son, Tim, and said to me, "How would he feel about being the young Jason?' I said to my son, "Timmy, it's not gonna be easy. You'll have to do some things that are hard, but you'll also be able to stay up here with me for five weeks. And you can even go on a little shopping spree at Toys 'R' Us when we're done. So, do you want to go home and go back to school, or stay up here and be a little actor?" And he just said, "No, I wanna try it!"
That scene where Jason is crying, "Help me! Help me!" was quite a tearful day. I know it wasn't real, but that's my son, drowning! I also watched—in agony—as they were making the whole head mask for him. All this goop over this little head, with two tiny pencil holes through the nose so he could breathe. Once, I saw his little plaster head just kind of clunk over to the side because he'd fallen asleep. But I was very proud of him.
By the time of his eighth screen incarnation, Jason Voorhees was the horror film equivalent of a crash test dummy. He had been sliced, diced, hacked, slashed, pureed, burned, smashed and bashed so many times that the character had come to resemble nothing less than a lumbering, zombified human hamburger. Jason had "died" no fewer than seven times, with each successive cinematic demise designed to be more spectacular than the last. Jason's behind-the-mask visage, too, had also gone through so many metamorphoses that the challenge of creating a new look for Jason—one that could shock and surprise audiences who'd already grown accustomed to Jason's monstrous appearance—was considerable. But Rob Hedden wanted more than just another radical makeup concept and an outlandish, gory demise. He wan
ted to take Jason home. It would be a creative decision that ultimately pleased few among the cast and crew, particularly actor Kane Hodder, who would publicly lambast the film's ending to the press after-the-fact, and to this day, it remains one of the most lamented endings in the series amongst many longtime Friday fans,
ROB HEDDEN:
Part VIII was conceivably going to be the last in the series. So I felt a real responsibility to make it a bookend to the original Friday the 13th. It was a daunting assignment. The way I decided to do it was to have Jason finally die. I said to Frank very clearly: "Look, I want to kill Jason. And I want to kill him in a way that makes it feel like he's really dead and he's not coming back." And he said, "Go for it."
RANDOLPH CHEVELDAVE:
Originally, Rob thought it would be a really good idea if Jason got completely melted in toxic waste and we never saw him again. But—and as I remember it, this was Frank's idea—Jason wouldn't be completely gone; there would be something left of him. Because, of course, just in case there was another sequel, a door had to be left open a crack. Hence, the little boy on the sewer floor at the end is supposed to be Jason, restored to who he once was before the events in the original film. I think it was a compromise.
ROB HEDDEN:
In the first film a young boy drowns and we find out it is his mother who is the one that has been killing everybody. It's not Jason. That was a great twist, but young Jason still propelled the whole thing. So in our movie, he drowns in toxic waste and turns back to that young boy. I wanted to have it come full circle. His soul has finally been released.
Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th (Enhanced Edition) Page 62
