YANI GELLMAN:
As an actor, you're also relying on your imagination anyway, so it wasn't that difficult to imagine you were in the future and on a spaceship. In fact, that made it even more fun because you could almost take it as far as you wanted. What was really tricky was the technical aspects because of the effects. Being able to concentrate and hit all your marks and maintain eyelines and things, all the while still being present in the scene.
"It's hard to come up with original ways to kill people," laughs screenwriter Todd Farmer. "I mean, what hasn't already been done in a Friday the 13th movie!?"
LEXA DOIG:
When you see an actor that you've become friends with and you walk onto the set and there's this actor with a spike sticking out of his stomach, and blood coming up out of his mouth and everywhere, it's a bit discombobulating. It does throw you a little bit. But you can also then use it in a scene. You just have to be fearless about it and your reactions, then trust your director to tell you, "Okay, that's a bit too big," or "That's too much," or "No, go bigger and have more of a reaction."
BARNA MORICZ:
I hung out a lot with Steve Lucescu, the stunt coordinator and he plays Condor in the movie. Watching him work was amazing. In one scene, he dies being impaled on this huge screw. And he fell from the hangar on down, right on his back and he had to do the stunt for that. I couldn't believe how scary he made it look, yet at the same time it was perfectly controlled. And over and over again—every take, he would drop perfectly, to exactly the same level. Talk about precision.
STEVE LUCESCU, Stunt Coordinator/"Condor":
Working with the actors, the most important thing is trust. If you're trying to get an actor to do something that they have never done before then they are certainly going to apprehensive, just as anybody would in that kind of situation. Our job is to then work within their abilities and enhance those abilities, and possibly teach them new modifications and variations to make the stunt work. And on a film like Jason X, it can be even more of a challenge because it was not like some movies, where you have the time and money to take six months to prep it and work it out every single day for eight hours for a single scene. We didn't have the resources for that, so we had to take the action we were capable of doing and just enhance it as best we could.
I would never say that as a stuntman you're immune to fear. Fear is a good thing—it lets you know that you're still thinking. That there's the possibility of errors still to be made. I think people who have no fear are the foolish people. Now, at the same time saying that, if you're fearful of doing the actual stunt when you're doing it I think something's wrong because that means you have a doubt somewhere in that sequence of events that's supposed to happen to execute it properly. Despite what some people think, we performers and stunt coordinators don't deal in daredevil acts. We don't do things because we want to break the world record. We do this because Camera B might jam or the battery might fail or an actor may not hit his mark or something may break down or something may not work exactly as we want it to. So we have to be able to get up, dust ourselves, clean up and go back and do another take and another take and another take until it works exactly how the director needs it to.
NOEL CUNNINGHAM:
One morning, Chuck Campbell woke up, and it turned out he had been bitten by something and his calf was just enormous. It literally looked like his thigh. He ended up at the hospital all night getting it drained out, and he had like six pages to shoot the next day. Luckily he was barely able to make it and we got to shoot as much stuff as possible. But it was one of those moments on a low-budget shoot like ours that gets the adrenaline flowing. A real high blood pressure day.
TODD FARMER:
The hardest part was going back and getting to be a kid again, only to realize that your 30-year-old body doesn't sustain that damage any longer. But that's movie magic.
DERWIN JOHNSON:
This was a two-and-a-half-month shoot so you really had to be of sound mind and body throughout the process. These are long, 12 do 15 hour days, often five days a week. It's almost like training for the Olympics, but on a different scale. You almost have to put yourself into the mindset that you're going into a competition, or a battle.
It's a little surreal to act out your own murder, and then watch yourself get killed onscreen. It's also kind of cool, too. When I read the script and I read how my death happened, I went to Jim Isaac and said, "Don't hire a stunt guy. I want to do it!" I have done martial arts and fight classes in the past and thought I could do this. And I think it's better for the film. The camera can come in much close and you don't have to cheat anything like you might with a stuntman that can't show his face. Ultimately, the experience of doing that scene was little strange because it's so close to being real, yet also while you're doing it you don't think twice because you know it's safe. It was exhilarating.
STEVE LUCESCU:
Because of the extensive use of visual effects that we had, it left the wide open to do just about anything we could possibly dream up with the death sequences, and anything Jim wanted to do. I had worked with visual effects before Jason X, but not to that extent, and it was also unique too for a Friday the 13th, I think.
NOEL CUNNINGHAM:
Going into space did give us an opportunity to be really creative. In the woods, all you've got are trees and rocks and gardening implements. But up in space, you got guns and bombs and nuclear stuff. So these were things that don't really exist and we could have a lot of fun with it.
KELLY LEPKOWSKY:
It was interesting to be involved in production meetings, trying to come up with new and exciting ways of killing people. We wanted to go beyond just stabbing somebody with a machete, and do something that would be really fun and interesting and exciting for the fans.
TODD FARMER:
It became a sit-com situation. We'd sit around a table and everybody would think up stuff. It's hard to come up with an original death in a Friday the 13th movie because Jason has done most of them. So I wanted to put twists on deaths that we had seen before and do them in new shocking ways. Sort of an homage to some of the more classic deaths in the other films. Though a lot of the deaths I think they all got changed. We also had at least a couple of deaths you had seen before. Plus it's always fun to kill somebody. Jim enjoyed killing me so much he had me die twice in the movie. First in the video simulation, then for real. And the influence of video games on Jason X was huge. That's why I originally wrote it in only two weeks, because I was busy playing EverQuest—several of the characters in Jason X were named after guys it it, like Weylander and Tsuarnon.
Original concept art.
DOV TIEFENBACH:
That was a really weird scene to shoot. They made a mold of my arm, right down to each freckle. I had to have my arm behind my back, so I'm holding a replica of my arm and my hand and then looking down and seeing a bloody stump. And in one of the shots when I was walking, it was actually dangling and the camera could actually see it so I had to duck-tape my arm to my body. Getting it off was not a fun experience either. But after the shoot I still asked them if I could keep the arm because it would have been been great for playing tricks.
DAVID HANDMAN:
That scene, Todd and Dov's kills, it was difficult because we were trying to articulate for the audience something that happens in virtual reality, and the same characters dying not once but twice. And it was one of those scenes that was very complicated due to its visual effects so I got five pieces of film back for one shot. So not only did I have to figure out what film belonged with what, but even after I got it all together it was difficult know how to make sense of it. I think we finally got there, and now it's one of my favorite scenes in the movie. And Todd dies really well.
TODD FARMER:
My death scene that I originally wrote was actually that Jason as going to shove me through the whole hull of the ship, but we couldn't do that because it would cost too much. So now he just bangs my head in th
e wall. In the shot of Kane where he pushes me into the wall, that's actually just a hole in the wall with some fabric pulled over it. But then he missed the hole, and my nose was completely shattered. A lot of fans actually complain my and Azrael's death aren't that gory, but those are actually two of the biggest stunts in the movie.
LEXA DOIG:
Acting against the special effects is like being a kid when you play house. It's a bunch of cushions in your living room, and if you can get back to that frame of mind it is really fun, and challenging. The special effects guys were fantastic, because they're very descriptive, and they would show all of us actors the conceptual drawings and what the intentions were for any individual scene. Plus, Jim used to do effects himself, so he was great about reminding us every now and again where we were supposed to be at, emotionally, during a scene.
CHUCK CAMPBELL:
For the cast, it was a big fun-fest. Whether it was exploding a head or spinning on a drill bit. I also welcomed the experience of working with all the blue screen. It is very technical work, but challenging. And it was so funny—any time we'd look at a screen or have some kind of monitor, there was nothing there. It was all Star Trek-pretend.
KELLY LEPOWSKY, Visual Effects Supervisor:
We actually had an entire "Green Room" for all of the green screen work. That allowed us to take any model or any actor and place them in front of any environment we wanted. Of course, it is a technique that has been around for quite a while now in film, but through the use of CGI, we could take it one step further. We also used green screen for many pieces of the background of our sets, which we could then replace in the digital realm with all sorts of fantastic things.
LISA RYDER:
Any time an actor can be placed in a really uncomfortable position with a green suit on them, it's still cheaper than CGI. In fact, it's like $1,000 per second cheaper. It's so funny—any shot in the film where you see just my head talking, that's me with a green dog collar on.
DAVID HANDMAN:
I was cutting the film in L.A. while they were shooting in Toronto. I didn't get to experience the shooting of Jason X, and there's a certain vibe that happens during production. The ability to sit down with a director and watch dailies, and go to the set and get the feel of it—I think that was really missed on Jason X. I couldn't really tell Jim what he should be doing tomorrow because I still needed to see the film he had already shot. There are a lot of visual jokes that Jim wanted to tell, but he couldn't shoot them because they ended up shooting all this other stuff that we eventually got rid of anyway.
I remember specifically there was a shot planned for Janessa's death scene where she gets sucked out of the airlock. That was a shot Jim wanted to get and he had it all scripted and he couldn't get it. To me, that was the money shot. You get that at all costs. You don't make the director spend time doing other things if it means he's not going to get that shot, because otherwise the scene isn't about anything.
TODD FARMER:
There was a scene at the beginning of the movie, with the Dr. Wimmer character that gets killed. That was always in there—we just never knew that David Cronenberg was going to play him. Originally, there was also another scene that had two co-pilots in it which I had wanted to be played by David and Dean Lorey. Dean and I had become pretty close over the years so I just thought it would be funny. But that eventually got cut, too.
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
The dean of Canadian films, David Cronenberg, made a special appearance in our movie. He is still a very dear friend of Jim Isaac, and Jim has worked with him on virtually all of his pictures. So when he found out Jim was making Jason X in Canada, he was an enormous help and decided to come in and do a cameo at the beginning. We're very grateful to him, and he's very good in the role.
STEPHAN DUPUIS:
It was fun to see David Cronenberg in front of the camera. His stint was very short but it was like a friendly visit. And because he had a spear thrown through his stomach, his acting was very funny. We had a great time that day and it was one of the highlights, I think, of the shoot.
The most visually complex and effects-intensive of the Friday the 13th films, Jason X utilized then-cutting edge CGI technology, combined with such traditional processes as green screen and wire work to achieve its futuristic illusions. "We actually had an entire 'Green Room' for all of the green screen work," says visual effects supervisor Kelly Lepkowsky. "That allowed us to take any model or any actor and place them in front of any environment we wanted. Of course, it is a technique that has been around for quite a while now in film, but through the use of CGI, we could take it one step further. We also used green screen for many pieces of the background of our sets, which we could then replace in the digital realm with all sorts of fantastic things."
LISA RYDER:
It was a long shoot, about 30 or 40 days and really long hours. It was quite physically exhausting. Plus, I was overlappoing on "Andromeda" at the time, so I'd have to fly back and forth between sets. Yes, all of us, I think we did bond, but you still don't want it to go on forever. So I wouldn't say I was that sad when it ended.
NOEL CUNNINGHAM:
I wish we could have gone back and done a couple weeks' worth of reshoots, just go and spend the money. But we flat-out didn't have it. Sean simply wouldn't give it to us.
TODD FARMER:
Sean's opinion at the time was that if we had just done what he said, we would have had a better movie. My opinion was that if Sean had stayed out of the way, and if Jimmy would have listened to me, we would have had a better movie. But I'm sure Jimmy will say, "If everybody would have listened to me, we would have had the best movie of all." This is all why real moviemakers get paid a lot of money, because they can work through those kinds of situations. We couldn't.
Of all the risks the makers of Jason X would take with the Friday the 13th formula, none was riskier than their reinvention of Jason himself. The sight of a hockey-masked mongoloid stalking nubile young teens in the woods was as archaic to the teenagers of the new millennium as the black-caped, plastic-fanged Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula had been to the kids of the 1980s. If Jason was going to be blasted into outer space, a beaten-up hockey mask and a K-Mart machete would not be enough to bring him into the 21st century. Evil needed an upgrade.
TODD FARMER:
We knew that Freddy vs. Jason was coming out eventually. We also knew that, time-wise, Jason X would take place after the last Freddy film and after the last Jason film. So we wanted to let Freddy and Jason have their time and not interfere with that. So we moved Jason X 10 years into the future, so it takes place around the year 2010. Which is a good thing, because then we could have the freedom to create our own Jason, and do it in a way that wasn't tied to the last Jason movie.
I honestly can't remember who actually first pitched the idea for "UberJason," but I remember everybody loved it. There was a moment of silence in the office when we talked about it. I wanted to take Jason somewhere different. He's somebody the audience still roots for, even though he hacks up young virgins. So I wanted to give the fans an opportunity to really cheer when he comes back. I've also always liked the idea of the false ending in a movie. The idea of this nano-tech machine that was built in the script—I remember nanotechnology from the film Virtuosity. I always thought that was cool but it was never used again. So in Jason X I thought it would be funny if we totally destroy Jason and then, whether it's a malfunction or just the evil of Jason, he comes back rebuilt for the future.
JIM ISAAC:
We all agreed, at some point, that these kids had to rebuild Jason. There had to be a moment when they totally creamed him. I mean, just rip him to pieces. Then, through some weird new technology, he comes back to life as something totally new. I just said, "Wow. Here's an opportunity for us to create a new Jason. Something really different and wild." So Todd went off and wrote something that was fresh and cool.
NOEL CUNNINGHAM:
UberJason was one of the big things
that turned the tide for setting the film in space. The initial thinking of it was much more raw and cobbled together. It was also kind of a leftover from one the Freddy vs. Jason script attempts, because in one of them there was a scene where Jason breaks into a sporting goods store and there's a goalie display and one of the mannequins is wearing a big chrome hockey mask. Jason kind of looks at it and switches masks. That was probably the genesis of the whole UberJason concept, to ramp up his look a little, like, "Fuck—if you thought he was bad-ass before, now he's a cyborg bad-ass! Bigger, stronger, sleeker, meaner and better!" At least that was the intent.
STEPHAN DUPUIS:
By the end of 1999, months before pre-production started, I was already designing UberJason. Because it was like, "How are we gonna pull this off? The guy with the hockey mask with a machete winds up in outer space!" To be honest, I was not thinking whether fans of Friday the 13th were going to be thrown for a loop or not. I had no idea because I'm not a fan of the Friday movies. I saw the first one a long time ago and I knew what the character, Jason, was all about, but that's it. UberJason is a completely new creation.
The idea was that Jason has regenerative powers, and it has been several years since the last Friday movie. 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.
With UberJason, I began by doodling and just having fun. I was trying to think of the actual mechanical lines of the robot itself. I have always bought a lot of art books, from different artists and illustrators and painters, and that's usually where I get my inspiration—comic books, cartoons, you name it. Because you get these fantastic, evocative illustrations. Then the challenge is, can we translate it into three dimensions? I was also thinking about Maria, the robot from Metropolis. That sort of design—I made all the lines more art deco-ish. Another influence was Burt Ogard. His dynamic anatomy has these really cool, very beautiful anatomy lines. So it was a mixture of those two things that informed the look of UberJason.
Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th (Enhanced Edition) Page 78
