I felt like the crew liked me. But I could also tell they were really frustrated. The morale just gets down. There were times I should have regrouped, gotten everyone together and told them that I see this going in a bad direction. They deserved that. Every little detail in a movie helps create the tone of the picture. It is just like rewriting a script—if you chip away here and you chip way there, for whatever reason, whether it is because of budget or because of time, it starts to become a different movie. The art department matters. The costume department matters. You take away their ability to do their job to the best of their ability, and you end up with a shell of a movie. But I have to say, again, it's my fault. I'm the director, and it is my job to have a vision, and the balls to fight for it.
TODD FARMER:
Jason X was a unique experience for me because I was the novice on the crew. Here are these people, some of whom have won an Oscar, and they're making a Jason movie—which makes me think it should have been a lot better than it was.
For my scenes as Dallas, I was scheduled for the very first day. Dean Lorey called me the night before and said, "The first day of shooting sets the tone for the whole movie. So if you screw up, you're screwing up the movie!" I'm like, "Thanks, buddy!" I also think Jimmy scheduled it because he, too, felt that the two of us working together would set the tone for the movie, and not because he was worried about me being on the set for the rest of the shoot. Or, maybe he really did just want me dead from the moment we started working on this project and he was finally getting his wish.
DOV TIEFENBACH, "Azrael":
It was really neat acting with the writer of the movie. And it was funny, because a lot of Todd's own lines were being written out, so they'd all be making fun of him, 'cause then he'd go and write them all back in.
DAVID HANDMAN, Editor:
Jason X was a negative pickup and New Line wasn't involved until the movie was delivered. Perhaps it's strange or ironic, but maybe some of the creative problems on Jason X were because no one was getting notes from the studio. And without a studio to fight with, that made it harder for everyone to be on the same page. Because you're fighting each other instead.
NOEL CUNNINGHAM:
People often ask, "What does a producer do?" It varies from show to show, and from producer to producer. There are some producers who nickel and dime everything, and there are some producers who just oversee and manage and try to stay out of everyone's way. That is what I was trying to do, and I don't know how successful I was. I just wanted to lift any kind of roadblocks out of the way so that Jim could just go and shoot. Jim was very competent and he had been through the ringer a number of times before, and together we were pretty much helming the thing. I had also been friends with Jim for about 12 years before Jason X. It just seemed like he knew the material, and knew the movie we were trying to make. Jim is really smart, but I always had problems with certain parts of the script. Ultimately, I wasn't always sure about a lot of Jim's choices.
Finally, I just backed off because Jim was directing. I said, "Okay. If you understand this then go for it. Prove me wrong." I wouldn't call it a clash at all, but there was always that sort of underlying dynamic there.
JIM ISAAC:
Sean, certainly at the beginning, respected Noel's creative sensibilities. Noel knew the fans and the series. He got it. And I knew that whatever he lacked in experience in producing, ultimately that wasn't the problem. It was having somebody to fight for our vision. Noel had his heart in the right place, there's no question. Certainly at the beginning—I really thought that Noel had a good sense of where I wanted to go with the movie, creatively. Noel, Todd and I, we all wanted the same tone. So it must have been horribly difficult for Noel to be in that situation, and then to be working for his dad who he doesn't want to disappoint. But my feeling was, "Noel, you go fight those battles for me, all right? If I want something different and I'm busy, you go get in a room with your dad and make it happen for me."
By the time we got well into principal photography, Todd was gone. Sean was still writing pages. Sometimes we'd get them the night before, or even during shooting the next day. To be honest, I didn't like the pages. I didn't agree with the pages. The actors were flipping out. My assistant directors wanted to smash their heads against the wall. But I loved my cast and my crew. I just feel bad for the cast because I really worked hard to find young, energetic actors who were willing to try and make this something good, and now pages are being thrown at them at the last minute, and there I am not truly endorsing them. But what could I say? I feel bad that we didn't allow the actors to do their best work, and that's my job. They certainly didn't have enough time to work with what they were given.
I really wanted the acting in Jason X to blow every other Friday movie out of the water. But what was happening with all the rewrites is why, sometimes, when you see a movie, an actor is brilliant in one moment and not so brilliant the next. You think, as a moviegoer, "How did that happen?" Well, a million things could happen. These actors all worked their asses off. They were sometimes given pages and pages of things that didn't make sense. They really did the best they possibly could. I think they really came through for me. It was tough.
Crystal Lake space camp. Jim Isaac directs Derwin Johnson, Melyssa Ade and Lexa Doig (left); Isaac runs through a scene with actor Chuck Campbell.
DAVID HANDMAN:
One day, Sean came into the editing room while I was working on the cargo bay scenes. I mentioned to Sean that I thought we were going to be short on our running time, and he goes back to Toronto and tells Jim Isaac, "I want all these shots to be really long." Meaning, if we're short, we can beef up the screen time with all these really pretty shots of people and guns and them being chased around. Well, that was a big backfire, because it was boring and nothing's happening. The thing about Todd's script was that it was so tight and so funny, and you didn't want it to bore people at all.
There was an enormous amount of dialogue stuff that we took out. There would be scenes, like the girl who gets sucked out the airlock, Janessa, where she's standing at a console basically directing traffic around the ship. And she's saying stylized, futuristic dialogue that she has no idea about. So we don't believe it and we don't care about it. They're words the audience has never heard. Or during that scene where the crew is re-animating Rowan's character—these are high school kids throwing around these words—it's just boring stuff. A lot of that was, again, because of Sean's fear of being short, but in all honestly, Sean also thinks that kind of stuff is dramatic. He thinks that is what people respond to, that all that dialogue makes an audience feel like there's an emergency. But, as far as I'm concerned, it just goes in one ear and out the other. You had to get rid of all that stuff.
Ultimately, I made Jim spend time on shots that he really didn't need at the expense of other things. It took all of the fun out of the original feel of the movie. I felt bad about that.
LISA RYDER:
We shot this great setpiece with Kay-EM in a house of mirrors. I'm walking around with my big gun, and Jason keeps appearing, and I'm blasting away at all the mirrors. There was a whole bunch of terrific action stuff, but that all got cut. I was really disappointed.
Sean was on set and came in with a bunch of his own rewrites all the time. Sean had his say, definitely. Every movie is like that, though. There are tons of examples of directors and producers with differing visions, and they have to come to some sort of midway. But Jim has a sense of humor that I don't think is really from the horror genre. I don't think that was a huge interest for him. He was pushing toward the comic. So perhaps that midway point between Jim and Sean was never quite found.
DAVID HANDMAN:
Sean wanted a Friday the 13th movie, and that's what he sold. We couldn't just go in and make a comedy. But at the same time, the people at New Line—De Luca thought the script was hilarious. I think he would have liked a comedy. But that's not what the franchise is. Personally, I think there's some hilarious stuf
f there. It was a cartoon—that's what we were trying to make.
JONATHAN POTTS:
There were a lot of script changes on the spot. My sex scene with Melyssa Ade, where she has those huge nipple clamps on me, was hilarious. That was all Jim—"I have this great idea! It's so twisted!" That scene lets us see just how warped Jim is. And shopping for my outfit for that scene was a riot. Maxyne Baker, the costume designer, took me down to a "He-and-She" sex shop in Toronto. And there I was, standing in the middle of this store, trying on negligee and bra tops. We even took Polaroids of different outfits to make sure there was a big enough opening in the bra so the clamp could get on my breast. And no one batted an eye.
MELYSSA ADE:
Janessa was described in the original sides as "the sex kitten, with claws to match." Which I think is pretty appropriate. She's definitely the smartest one on the ship. And she knows what she wants, and she's gonna get it. She's one of those girls who likes to have control over what's going on. I saw her as a bit of a control freak. Then when all havoc breaks loose, we see her come a little bit undone. That is what was fun, to play this very strong, very gutsy, pretty wacky woman sort of lose touch and then we get to see a bit of her vulnerabilities.
I also thought that the sexual tension is something that Janessa's very comfortable with. She is having an affair with her professor, and she has no problem at all. She's just sort of workin' what she's got and playing with that. Sexuality is an important part of who she is, and an important part of how she relates to other people. So she's intensely flirtatious with every male. I was trying to ride the fine line there between how much of that is for their mutual benefit and how much of that is her trying to get ahead for herself? Just how devious is she? In that scene, I wanted the audience to not be sure yet.
I will tell you that Jim Isaac's strength is in casting. You ask any of the cast members, they will tell you. He had a complete idea of what Jason X is, all in his very, very small head. He has a small head, in his little, little brain. I talked with Jim before I came on the project about the character and about wanting her to be strong but also playful and her being actively involved in what was going on. So I came in to work each day with complete faith in him.
LISA RYDER:
When I found out I got the film, I did waffle. I just assumed that it was going straight to video. I was like, "I don't want anyone to see this." And then I walked on set, and I met Jim, and because of his enthusiasm, and the talent that was on board, I started thinking, "Maybe this will be really cool and really funny. Maybe it will actually work." But as things went along, we started to worry that it was getting too campy.
Chuck Campbell and I had a really tough time with our love scenes—especially the kissing scene and the "nipple" scene. They were weirdly written. So Chuck and Jim and I got together and did a bit of rewriting. It was not exactly improv, on-the-spot stuff, but every once in a while, someone would add a line. It went through a kind of evolution. I guess something was lost in the translation. Because we certainly wanted to keep their relationship sweet and light—romantic, actually. Like that one scene where they kiss and then she goes, "We have a better chance of survival now."
I really wasn't willing to go to the graphic, "let's get a close-up of her getting uploaded" kind of stuff that was written. I wasn't into that, and I don't think Jim was into it, either. The dialogue needed a little bit of work. Most of the dialogue in Friday the 13th movies is sexual-cheesy, and we just didn't want that. And there has to be that, I guess, because of the tradition of the series.
Left: "I saw Brodski as a very straightforward character, and not a very modern one, really," says actor Peter Mensah. "He definitely belonged to a time when soldiers were soldiers and fighting is all they knew. I thought my job in the film was to act as a foil to Jason. Obviously, Brodski can't match him in strength, but he has that same kind of resilience. Even if Brodski knew he'd never win the war, he still had the courage and the willingness to stand up to Jason and fight to the death. Which he did."
TODD FARMER:
Dialogue is always the thing that changes the most when you make a movie, and it changes drastically, right up to the day of shooting and even through editing and looping. And as a screenwriter, you never know where it's gonna end up. On one hand, that's the beauty of it. You start seeing scenes acted out and the actors can bring to it things that you never imagined, and it's just wonderful. When it's working, there's a freedom of creativity that makes it all worthwhile. It makes all the headaches okay. On the other side of it, like it happened on Jason X, the script went through a lot of rewrites long after I left. Which is weird, because as the credited writer on the movie, you get blamed for them.
JIM ISAAC:
What happened with those scenes is a perfect example of us trying to get some of the wild elements in the original script back into the movie. Even as watered down as some of those moments are, I was sincerely trying to recapture that initial tone. I mean, having Tsunaron twist an android's nipples around and then they drop off—that's weird sex. Of course, you have to have a sex scene in a Jason movie, but can't we get kinky with it? Those are the kinds of things that I thought, ultimately, would be fun for the fans. Again, that was just me trying to put back in what I wanted originally, even if they are just bits and pieces.
TODD FARMER:
I'm sure my first script had some one-liners in it. But it was a completely different tone. I would say the story of Jason X is the same, but it's of different character and attitude. The jokes came out of the action, not out of the characters' mouths. A lot of that stuff happens on set. I think the jokes in the film are kind of corny. It is not the kind of humor I prefer. But what do I know?
One scene I always loved that never quite made it was where Weylander and Crutch are in the cockpit of the main ship and they're readying the escape shuttle. Then something happens and Weylander has to leave. Originally, after Weylander walked out, there was Jason, and it became this big action chase sequence. And in that scene was humor that was coming out of the situation—the kind of humor people often resort to when they are in a scary situation. It is not like a lot of the humor that is in the film now, where somebody says, "He's screwed," and we cut to a guy dead on a giant screw.
JONATHAN POTTS:
People have always asked me, "Is it hard making a horror film?" No, man, it's a riot. It's kind of the opposite of what you'd think. It's like playing cowboys and Indians when you're a kid. On the set, it was always that fine line. We would have a scene and we were like, "What do you guys think? Should we play that joke a little bit, or should we ignore it and just go kind of straight?" We'd look at each other and say, "Fuck it—let's make it funny." Jim was definitely on the same page as everyone else. We all knew we couldn't turn this into a truly scary movie again, nor go totally for the campy, making-fun-of-ourselves thing. Yet, you couldn't ignore the obvious, either. Because what were we making? We were making a 10th movie in the Friday the 13th series.
BARNA MORICZ, "Kicker":
Rewrites can be a blessing and a curse for the writer and the crew, but not for the actors. Because Jim let us do our thing, and only if something doesn't work, even if it was just technical, he would tell you. It did get kind of hectic and we'd have our 12- and 16-hour days. Jim's a very cool guy. He was always relaxed and seemed to know what he was doing, even on our toughest days. At the time he was really young and I could totally relate to him. It was like we were buddies.
DERWIN JOHNSON:
As an actor, I tried to imagine what it must be like to go through what these characters go through in four hours. Most people don't ever experience that in their entire lifetime, so it's a heightened sense of reality. Yet it's got to be real on top of that. The audience has to feel that the reactions are realistic. So my biggest preparation was making sure each moment was real, and that I understood who Waylander was, and I understood what the situation was. We are 400 years in the future—what kind of life are we living on a different
planet? I had to make sure the script was clear to me and then everything else would kind of take over from that point on.
I really thought Jim was fantastic with that. I wasn't expecting such a thorough process when I came on board the film. Many times on a film like this, that's very technical, the director is never present and he's worried about lights or special effects or whatever. But he was great between each take. He was very clear and articulated what was going to happen and what was expected of us, from the top of the scene to the bottom.
YANI GELLMAN:
There were times when as a scene was being shot it was actually in the process of being rewritten. We would sit down and Jim would ask us for our ideas. We'd get an idea of where everyone's coming from and then get to sort of develop it. I think we all felt like we were really being involved in more than just a physical sense. Jim was always really open to suggestions from the actors.
LEXA DOIG:
There other actors were on wires and doing flips and all this other amazing stuff in their fight scenes. Rowan just kind of ran around scared a lot. It is really difficult to try and create a reality when you can't associate that with anything in your real life. I haven't been chased by a dead guy in a hockey mask, at least not yet, so I don't really know how it feels. And the way the movie was shot, because of the special effects, it was only snippets here and there. You try and pump yourself up and keep that really high, intense energy level going throughout the entire process. You have downtime for sometimes hours and then you only actually do a shot for about 30 seconds or a few minutes at most. Then you have to run through frame and scream and breathe heavy and try and look scared. Trying to remember where your head space is and keeping track of that energy level, it is something that is really hard to articulate.
Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th (Enhanced Edition) Page 77
