NOEL CUNNINGHAM:
Jim Isaac was the one who came in at the right time and said, "Let's do a Jason movie." I'd known Jim since 1988 or '89, and he was a good friend from many of Sean's shows. He also came in and took over the directing chores on The Horror Show, which turned out to be a very difficult production. But Jim did a great job in trying to come in and save that. So Sean said, "Okay, we'll do another Jason. Come and develop it if you want." There wasn't a paycheck in it for any of us, but Sean gave us the shot with another Friday that we'd all been talking about for the last four years or so.
ETHAN WILEY, Composer:
Jim Isaac and grew up in the same little town in California. We met and became friends in third grade, then by junior high we started doing theatre together, and we've remained best friends ever since. Later on, when I went to work for Sean Cunningham and Steve Miner, I talked them into hiring Jim and he ended up being the effects supervisor for House II. From that relationship, Jim moved down to Los Angeles and did the effects for DeepStar Six, and eventually Sean had him replace the original director of The Horror Show. He was brought in to save the day. So I think Jason X was finally Sean giving Jim the reward which he so richly deserved, after working so hard on so many movies.
JIM ISAAC, Director:
I was thinking very broad strokes. I originally wanted to make Friday scary again. We are back in Crystal Lake, but it's winter and in the middle of a big storm. It would be either kids on a cross-country skiing trip that get lost, or they are already there but get snowed in. I thought that might be an interesting look for a Friday film—blood on white. I could see Jason on a frozen pond. But that wasn't a favorite idea with Todd and Noel and Sean.
Todd had picked up on this idea about space. He kind of described the trailer and what he thought was cool about it, and it did excite the room. We left there going, "Yeah, all right, this could be cool." But, in retrospect, that might have been the first of many moments when I should have fought harder for the original idea I felt strongest about.
Left Director Jim Isaac on the set of Jason X. An accomplished special effects artist, Isaac began his career in Hollywood working on such hits as Return of the Jedi, The Fly and Gremlins. Following his directorial debut with Jason X, he would go on to helm the genre films Skinwalkers and Pig Hunt. Right: Screenwriter Todd Farmer, in a 2010 publicity pose. After working in development for Sean Cunningham and Crystal Lake Entertainment, Jason X would be Farmer's first produced screenplay. The successful scribe has since gone on to a notable career in Hollywood genre films, scripting and acting in the hit 2008 remake My Bloody Valentine 3-D, as well as writing the cult favorite The Messengers and the Nicolas Cage starrer Drive Angry.
NOEL CUNNINGHAM:
Jim, Todd and I sat around a table and literally came up with every scenario we could put Jason in. Nothing was too extreme or too bizarre. We kicked around different scenarios. Jason in the hood, Jason in the snow, Jason underwater. We had him fighting gangs in L.A., in the arctic, on safari, in space, the NASCAR circuit—everything. We didn't want to shut anything down.
TODD FARMER:
I thought of Jason in the distant future—like a Blade Runner type of deal. I like action stuff, I like science fiction stuff, and I like the idea of taking Jason and dropping him into a situation that would be foreign to him and possibly create some conflict for the character. And, personally, I always loved the idea of Jason taking Manhattan. I just thought it was funny. But in Jason Takes Manhattan, he really never got there. So I thought, "Well, let's stick Jason somewhere else. Let's put him in space."
We also couldn't tell a story that followed Jason Goes to Hell because Freddy vs. Jason was going to follow Jason Goes to Hell. But I was actually very concerned that we follow something, so I set it 10 years in the future. And there was a guy working for Sean at the time who thought that was lunacy because then you would know who survived Freddy vs. Jason. I was like, "They both survive. They've been surviving for 20 years. There's no big mystery there..."
NOEL CUNNINGHAM:
Jason in space was kind of a throwaway. You immediately flash to the Hellraiser and Leprechaun sequels and the disasters that those were. But once we started going through every other option, there was so much stuff we could do with the concept that we actually thought it could work. Get bad-ass space marines and guns and future shit that we've never seen before. So we said, "Fuck it, this is going to be fun!"
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
It would be fair to say, yeah, that I wasn't a fan of the other Friday the 13th films. Essentially, you had like 16 crummy movies as templates. So to do another one, you're duplicating the mistakes of the past rather than trying to figure out what you did right. If we just took Jason and stuck him in a summer camp again, there's a limit to how many teenagers you can have run in and out of cabins and around tree. And you can't rely on the circus of special effects anymore like we could in 1980. You can only compete with the unexpected story. I didn't want to change the principal reason why people went to these movies, but I could certainly dress it up and make it look different and better and treat it with a little more respect.
When Noel and Todd came in and pitched me the idea of Jason in space, I just said, "What are you, nuts?" But they kept batting for it. They went off and came up with a treatment. Only then did I say, "Jesus, this is a terrific idea." Because everything that the horror audience would like to have is in there. It had new locations, new characters, new technology, and twists and turns that you would never expect. It was a way of rejuvenating the series, one that I sincerely thought could make the fans very, very happy.
TODD FARMER:
The initial attitude of Michael De Luca at New Line was that we weren't going to make another Jason movie. And if you put yourself in New Line's shoes, why would you? Real money was being spent on Freddy vs. Jason, so why go backwards? It doesn't make any sense. But we pitched it to De Luca and by the end of the meeting, he was really excited.
NOEL CUNNINGHAM:
After we convinced Sean, we still had to pitch the concept to Michael De Luca. But we did our homework. Jim Isaac has been a special effects coordinator forever and worked on some really big shows and knows a lot of good people, so he called in a bunch of favors. We already had lined up Stephan Dupuis, who won an Oscar for The Fly, to be our head of makeup effects. We also hired a couple of guys from ILM to do some pretty matte paintings. So we brought De Luca this huge dog and pony show. We showed him so much cool visual shit that he was like, "This could really rock!" And Todd is remarkable in how fast he can bang something out, and he wrote a first rough draft in only a couple of days. So when De Luca was so impressed he said, "Great! When can you have a script?" we just went, "Well, we've got a rough draft right here," and just slid it across the table. It was pretty slick and cool!
TODD FARMER:
Ultimately, I have come to have many regrets on Jason X. But the first one is probably that, after we sold that pitch, I don't ever remember a celebration. I don't remember any of us ever going, "Wow! We got a green light!" Because from there on out, there was always a struggle, always a battle, always a fight. And it never ended, even after the movie was finished.
Whether taking Jason Voorhees out of the sanctity of his woods and into the outer reaches of space was an inspired feat of creative audacity or a foolish flight of fancy, it represented a considerable financial risk for Crystal Lake Entertainment. Jason X commanded the highest budget yet for a Friday the 13th film—projected initially at $13 million, its negative cost was more than the previous four installments of the franchise combined. And both the producers and the director agreed on one thing: every dollar had to get up on screen. But pressures began to mount even during the earliest stages of pre-production. Creative differences and bruised egos became commonplace as the original shooting script was extensively rewritten, both with the input of original screenwriter Todd Farmer and without. Sean Cunningham had always championed an open atmosphere that encouraged collab
oration, an attitude that had paid handsome dividends for him in the past. But this time, too many cooks in the kitchen quickly spoiled the recipe for success, rather than distilling and refining its essence into a single, cohesive vision.
NOEL CUNNINGHAM:
"Vision" is a word that gets thrown around a lot, and I really do think, initially, all three of us, Jim, Todd and I, had the same vision for Jason X. We all liked the same movies. We just wanted a good shoot 'em up, scary, fun, funny, sexy action horror movie in space. We weren't trying to change the world. We weren't trying to impart any great moral lesson here. So we developed the script together, the three of us, very tightly, just going through and writing scenes and then reading them aloud to each other and saying, "Well, that didn't work," or, "That was great." And we made a whole list of other movies that inspired us.
After that, we sent Todd off to write it. But then there were some writers brought in at the last minute to fix certain problems which, in hindsight, created much bigger problems.
The women of Crystal Lake, circa the 25th century. Lexa Doig as Rowan (left) and Lisa Ryder as Kay-EM 14. Doig and Ryder would go on to concurrently star together in the hit cable sci-fi series Andromeda. Based on concepts by Star Trek visionary Gene Roddenberry, the hit show ran for five seasons on the SyFy network in the United States.
JIM ISAAC:
Here is what's great about Sean Cunningham as a producer. He is one of the few guys I know of who, without a full green-light, will start writing checks to get you moving. But there is the other side to that. Because this was a negative pickup, at the time we started Sean was using his own money. No bank loan, nothing. And we hadn't gotten anything from New Line yet. So, ironically perhaps, this is what created problems for us—Noel, Todd and I—on Jason X.
Sean was actually with us during pre-production for quite a long time, maybe two months. Todd was writing and things were going fine. Then, suddenly Sean had gotten the money situation worked out. His job was kind of done. But it was tough for him to do all that, because he put a lot on the table—certainly, the movie wouldn't have been made without that risk. So then he looked around and saw all of us making a movie. Now, I think his heart was totally in the right place. And I don't feel at all that Sean was trying to undermine me or anything. Not on any level. But he started to play around with the script a bit more.
The first draft Todd turned in was really raw, but Todd could probably have done two polishes and we would have been there. Even De Luca said it was great. He just told us, "You nailed it." It was weird, sexy. There were some great funny moments, but scary moments, too. It just had a very raw edge to it that I thought worked. And I know Sean will totally disagree with me, but I think the movie would have been much better if we had stuck to that original approach.
TODD FARMER:
The second draft was the one that was green-lit. And after that there were about 100 rewrites. A couple of them were budget-related, but most were just opinions. I remember Dean Lorey called me a ways into pre-production. He had been videotaping a friend of ours who wanted to be cast in the movie. And this guy had been sent a couple of scenes from the script, and he was laughing at them because he didn't think they were funny. And Dean read the pages, and was like, "Todd didn't write this!" Because Dean knows how I write. That's when Dean said, "I think you've been rewritten."
I called Noel, who denied it. Then finally Jim admitted to it. I don't mind being rewritten. In a lot of situations, it's a good thing. I'm a firm believer that rewrites can make a script better. But you can also rewrite the magic right out of a script if you're not careful. And that's exactly what we did on Jason X. We rewrote it so many times that it lost everything that made it even a little bit special. And when you take that away, all you have left is Jason in space. And that's a dumb idea in the first place.
JIM ISAAC:
Todd worked his ass off. He wrote a first draft in three weeks and it was smoking. And his attitude was, "Tell me what to do and I'll do it." The guy would work 24 hours a day if he had to. Todd was also good at sticking up for what he believed in. But ultimately, he knew that if he fought too much he'd just be replaced. So eventually he'd kind of moan and groan and then just go off and do it.
For me, I was in the middle of the firestorm that happens when you're just weeks away from shooting. As a director, you're just all over the map. And now you're being told, almost like a little random side comment, "Oh, we're going to bring in somebody to do a quick polish." Today I'd say, "Stop. You're not." But, you learn, you know? I also think we were all so excited that we even got to make a movie that when Sean would say certain things that we didn't agree with, even if we would argue it a little, in the back of all of our heads we thought, "Well, if we don't do it, he'll just take his camera and go home." To be honest, now, I feel that was my fault. I should not have been worried about that. There was no way Sean would have pulled the plug. I want to make it very clear that Sean and I never really had any negative personal words. And there is no way Sean would have done anything negative. But that is how we all felt, or at least I felt.
There was so much stuff that was lost. I still wanted to keep what audiences had come to expect from these movies. That these kids are out there having fun and screwing up, and then Jason comes and all this shit happens. But this is 400 years in the future, so let's really have some fun with it and utilize the possibilities. We originally had this party scene where all the kids are getting high and drunk and having sex. Only imagine they're doing it in a zero gravity sex bubble. You could really imagine coming up with some pretty wild, cool ideas with that. I liked the whole idea of what audiences expected and really bringing it into a weird and different place.
A perfect example is a moment I wrote for the original opening sequence of the film. We had initially conceived the discovery of Jason to be on a much larger, grand scale. The kids end up falling through this floor into the space where Jason is in cryo-freeze and all this stuff. During this search one of them finds an old condom. It's a Friday the 13th movie, right? And the condom has a shelf life printed on it. So the smartass kid should say, "Cool, let's test it out." To me that's like a no-brainer—they should start having sex right there. Then that's what would make the whole floor fall out, and bring them to Jason and put them in jeopardy. And you get a beautiful actress to take of her shirt. I thought that was a fun way to start the movie. And a sexy way—it gives what everyone wants.
But Sean, when he read it, only had one comment. He said, "Well, finding a condom is not going to make them want to have sex. It doesn't make any sense." So he made us cut the whole scene. Now, I could have just followed him around and said, "What the fuck are you talking about? You're a high school kid and you're with this beautiful chick and you find a condom? Hell, yeah, you'd think of sex. At that age, everything makes you think of sex." It was one of those moments where I should have stopped the presses right there and said, "Sean, you're high. You don't get it." And then bring in Noel and Todd and talk about it. Maybe even get a real teenager in on the discussion. Because that is who we were making this movie for. And that, I think, became the ultimate problem with Jason X. I wanted to make it for teenagers. I ended up making it for Sean.
NOEL CUNNINGHAM:
I ultimately disagreed with a lot of Jim's choices, but he's the director and it was my job to make sure, as best I could, that he had as clear a road in front of him to do what he wanted to do. And I'm sure he disagreed with a lot of the roads I laid out for him. But a lot of what Jim wanted had to be cut for budgetary reasons. Because if you have only $13 million, you can't have kids having sex and flying all over a cargo bay. And if you only have 10 weeks of principal photography, you can't take a week and a half or two weeks just to shoot one sequence.
TODD FARMER:
By the time we were about two weeks away from the start of principal photography, another writer had already come in and done a rewrite—John Vorhaus. I had already finished rewrite after rewrite, but my script
was still a little cluttered. So John streamlined what I had done, and he was very good. But whether this was him, or the notes he was getting, I felt like we lost our edgy tone. It just no longer existed. I saw this as ALIENS with Jason. The kind of movie that has to come at you from the beginning and just stay right in your face. We couldn't be afraid to offend, we couldn't be afraid of going over the top. By this draft, all of the over-the-top stuff was removed. So Jim called me back and said, "I want you to come down and take another pass and put the tone back in." So I came back and did my best. And then that stuff got cut out after I left, anyway.
Jason X begins in the year 2008, 15 years after the events in Jason Goes to Hell. Jason Voorhees has at last been captured and imprisoned at the Crystal Lake Research Facility for further study. With a newly-redesigned appearance, including a new hockey mask, it was up to makeup effects supervisor Stephan Dupuis to reimagine the character for the new millennium. "The idea was that Jason has regenerative powers, and it has been several years since the last Friday movie" explains Dupuis. "So at the beginning of the film, we gave him a bit of hair, as well as a more clearly fleshy appearance, as if he is almost in a constant state of repair. I also wanted to go with more of a gothic version of the old Jason, hence all the shackles and chains, and we made his hockey mask a little more angular. That was also a great contrast for later in the film, when Jason is transformed into UberJason, which is an entirely new and wonderful creation."
JIM ISAAC:
For me, I felt that the integrity and the soul of the movie started being changed right from the beginning. And it was happening in a very slow way. It wasn't like Sean just came in and said, "Let's turn this into a musical." What happened is we started to kind of chip away at things—a little detail here, a little texture there. I started to give into some of these things, and if you don't have anybody looking after your back, at the reality of the big picture and pulling you aside and saying, "Wait a minute, Jim. Remember, you really wanted to have that," it's really going to screw you up. As the script started to go a different direction and get developed in a way I wasn't totally comfortable with, I was focusing on things like getting the crew to start working on the look of Jason, or rehearsing with the cast and that kind of stuff.
Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th (Enhanced Edition) Page 74
