You gotta laugh at the camp element, too. It's like "Sinbad Goes to Mars" or something. And the great thing about it is that it gave us free reign. Not only to redesign his appearance, but to outfit him with new weapons. Of course, Jason without a machete is like Freddy without his razor fingers. So we created some great new machetes for Jason, too.
NOEL CUNNINGHAM:
It originally came out of the word "biomechanoid." Jason had been blown to bits and been rebuilt. In the earlier versions, he had a lot more flesh on him and things poking through. Then, of course, we realized that wouldn't work—we couldn't make that happen in the suit. That's when UberJason became more polished and shit. But I loved what Stephan did. It looked really cool.
UberJason concept art.
KELLY LEPKOWSKY:
We came up a few months early to Toronto before principal photography started. Stephen and I built a small-scale mock-up of the UberJason character—what we called "the cat," because of his red eye. Stephan sculpted it, and everybody absolutely loved it. Then we began the process of creating the suit by taking castings of Kane Hodder's body to create a form that was almost like a sculpted UberJason suit, which created a whole new set of challenges.
STEPHAN DUPUIS:
It was like Kane was sliding inside a banana peel—the suit had two long zippers along the sides. He was in and out of it in only 15 minutes—compared to some of the elaborate makeups he had to wear on previous Fridays, I'm sure he was pretty happy about that. The production of the UberJason suit was really challenging because it was made out of so many different materials. You've got the metal parts, which are VacuForm, and they're attached to foam pieces with Velcro. And the black part of the suit is leather. And the tendrils that grow into the metal are silicone. So all of that had to be blended together. It took months of experimenting to get right.
TODD FARMER:
We always knew Kane would play Jason again. No one ever doubted that he wouldn't.
KANE HODDER, "Jason Voorhees":
The first time I read Jason X, I knew it was the best Friday the 13th script we ever had, and it was only a rough draft. I was excited. And I thought UberJason was great. It was a chance for a whole different look for the character.
Working in the UberJason suit was difficult, because all that metallic-looking stuff was made of separate plastic pieces attached to the suit. And some were so big, like my entire arm, that it was encased in silicone, so I couldn't bend it. Same with one of my legs. The suit minimizes what you are doing, so you think you are doing everything really broad, but it doesn't come across like that. I really had to exaggerate my movements, even my head turning. I also wanted to make my movements a little smoother and more deliberate, not quite as haphazard as my other Jason. It was a real challenge, and I'm not sure how well it came across.
MELYSSA ADE:
I thought UberJason was an extraordinary feat of imagination. It's absolutely incredible that, collectively, minds came up with the concept and design, and built it and lit it. It's like a piece of art. It really is like a beautiful painting. And that's what I keep telling myself on the set when I was scared—it's a painting!
And Kane Hodder—when he was Jason, he absolutely frightened me. So one of the ways I had to compensate for that was humor. Like, from a distance, I would sort of take him in and then kind of suck it up. Or when he was UberJason, I'd say, "Kane, uh, you got a little pinkeye goin' on there. You need some drops?" You've gotta use the humor to get over the frightening situation. But Kane knows that I was frightened of what he did but also knows when I'm acting intense, to be real for the scene. So he was always aware of our process as actors.
LEXA DOIG:
When those red, cat-like eyes are staring directly at you, peering out from behind that devilish chrome mask, you couldn't help but be frightened.
CHUCK CAMPBELL:
I was in the production office one day, and Kane comes walking around the corner, in full UberJason makeup. Red eyes and everything. I turned around and I must have looked absolutely terrified, because Jim Isaac said, "If you can react like that on the set, it will be perfect!"
LISA RYDER:
Kane's a very strange dude. He's very sweet and polite and nice, but then he has this strange side of him. He's kind of method. He has "K-I-L-L" tattooed on his inner lip. And he growls at you before a take. I think it's because he's such a nice guy—he needs to distance himself from his co-actors when he's trying to kill them. He feels a responsibility to fans to perpetuate that image of himself. It's his thing. He was actually fighting for Jason's motivation!
BARNA MORICZ:
I have a friend who is the biggest Jason fan. And when I told him that I'm shooting a new Friday the 13th, he hated me. And he was like, "Oh, man, you gotta get me Kane Hodder's autograph!" But to be honest, I never knew this Kane when I started the movie, and the first time most of us "grunts" even met him was on the set in the lunchroom. Kane's just sitting by himself, getting into character, and he was wearing the full costume except for his mask. So we're eating lunch and saying to each other, "We should go go talk to him. Let's just introduce ourselves." And Dylan Bierk, who played Briggs, said, "Yeah, I want to ask him why he loves killing so much!" And she did. We went right up and started talking to him and was just a cool, scary guy. And he's big—huge. But off-camera, it was a totally different relationship. Then you do a scene with him you just had to jump right in, because he was completely, deadly serious about the character.
KANE HODDER:
Although I was happy when I first read the script, I was even happier when Jim Isaac got the job. Because he is a fan of what I did before, which always helps me because then the director allows me to have input. I have been playing this character so long that I have opinions on how things should be done regarding Jason. And Jim was all for my opinions. Not necessarily that he agreed with everything I said, but he certainly listened.
Effects supervisor Stephan Dupuis' original UberJason makeup molds.
JIM ISAAC:
Kane used to really crack me up. I did, sometimes, want Jason to do things that weren't completely consistent with his character. Kane would just look down at me and say, in that very deep voice, "Jason doesn't do that." And I'd be like, "Oh, OK!" There was always this feeling that, at any point, he might reach down and grab the top of my head and squeeze if he didn't like the direction I was giving him.
PETER MENSAH:
Jason is a big, physical character so all of us got hurt in some way—a scrape or a cut or a bruise. But Kane was amazing. The guy's the legend. He had scenes like when all the squibs going off on him and he just keeps going and going. The guy didn't get through a day unscathed. And because of who he is, Kane could have been completely distant with us. But he actually stuck it out and hung out with all of us Canadian actors and he really made it easy for everyone.
LISA RYDER:
It was great to have Kane as Jason because it's always better to fight a stunt person than another actor. Actors get all weird and adrenaline-rushed, and they really want to prove themselves in a fight scene so they'll go crazy. Stunt people know exactly what they're doing, they know where they are going to be in a scene and where you should be, exactly when they are going to kick and punch, and even if you do accidentally kick them in the nuts, they never freak out. Jim would literally be saying, "Hit him! Hit him! Hit him! He can take a punch!" In one take, I was kicking and kicking and one of my hits went a little low. Poor Kane had to walk it off for like five minutes after that. But I'd like to think that Kane could still trust me after that.
DENNIS BERARDI, Visual Effects Designer:
I was the designer of many of the visual effects solutions for movie—or, as we liked to call ourselves, the "translators," whereby we help a director to realize their concepts in a purely visual way. And if you think about how an image is captured in its fundamental form, it's just a bunch of pixels that can be manipulated. I think Jason X came at a time when filmmakers were really st
arting to get an understanding that visual effects and digital imaging technology could help them to tell their story. For example, we had many inherently dangerous-looking stunts in the movie and obviously you don't want to put your actors at risk. So we created a "digital stuntman." We did a 3-D scan of Kane Hodder and rendered him digitally in three-dimensional form. Some of the more inherently dangerous stunts were actually a virtual version of Jason. One shot in particular, where Jason and Brodski are burning back up into the atmosphere of Earth—that's a completely 100 percent digital shot, and that you couldn't have photographed traditionally because you couldn't place a camera in that position. Of course, that had been done before, but it was always on bigger movies, like Titanic and Armageddon. What was exciting about Jason X was that back in 2000 and on our limited resources, Jim could actually say, "I want a camera here, and an actor to do this and this" and we could do it digitally without compromise.
KELLY LEPKOWSKY:
That's also how we got to make our little 3-D "nano-ants" to crawl all over the surfaces of the actors' bodies. In addition to scanning Jason we were able to make very accurate 3-D representations of some of the actors. We used technology that was still fairly new at that time, and it wouldn't have been possible even four or five years before that.
MAXYNE BAKER:
For Jason, I made no less than 45 costumes. We had 45 sets of gray shirts and 45 sets of pants. Just his strait-jacket, there were 10 of them. And people don't often realize that films don't shoot in sequence. We might start off one day at the end of the movie and another at the beginning. We had to know exactly how many bullet wounds Jason had from what kind of weapons and exactly how the damage should look. It was a huge organizational challenge. And that, of course, affects your budget and it's another organizational skill that the wardrobe department has to have.
We also did an interesting thing with all the armor Peter Mensah and the other military characters had to wear. These actors had to wear these costumes for like 50 shooting days, so the material couldn't be delicate. So we did something, which I don't think had been done before, we used a material called Kevla. It bends to a degree, but it's incredibly hard. In fact, interestingly enough, they're starting to build car bumpers out of exactly the same process that we used on the film. It's also getting big in motocross gear as well. We just took a step further.
JAMES OSWALD:
Jason certainly has better clothes after he's been rebuilt. And definitely better pecs—pecs of plastic.
MAXYNE BAKER:
The costume for Kay-EM was actually the most difficult. She's a science droid and we wanted her to be sexy but not particularly revealing. So the sexiness had to come from shape. And then she morphs into this incredible character that's like super sexy and super dangerous. We were really nervous whenever Lisa was in that costume on the set because it was a very, very complicated series of actions that she had to do. She has a long weapon strapped to her back, two guns on either thigh, and knives. And she's wearing basically a strapless, black, neoprene piece. To top it off, she had to be in harness for some of the acrobatic shots—do complete somersaults through the air and land on her feet. Who knew if the costume was ever gonna stay intact?
DERICK UNDERSCHULTZ:
A future setting always presents more challenges, but also lots of opportunities to play around with visual styles and lighting that you could never do in a film that takes place in the present day. The goal was always that these characters almost become like comic book heroes, as opposed to totally realistic. Like in the scene when she becomes "Super Kay-EM," again we were able to employ special theatrical lights and patterns to give her a semi-comic book type of a character look. And the same with Jason, when he becomes UberJason.
JONATHAN POTTS:
Peter Mensah had to be wired up for the sequences where he and Jason are flying through the air, and at first I remember that he was very reluctant. Later, Jim said, "Peter said he was really worried about it." And Jim couldn't figure out why. And I said, "You know why that is, Jim? It's because particularly Canadian actors on a set, they are the low men on the totem pole. Usually on a movie shot up in Canada, all the lead roles go to actors who are flown in from L.A., and the director is American and they'll string you up on a wire and leave you hanging there for hours." Plus, Peter was hurt in a previous show where they just didn't give a shit about him. So once bitten, twice shy. But Jim's first priority was Peter's safety, though Peter didn't understand that at first.
PETER MENSAH:
I did a movie called Bless the Child before Jason X. I played Jimmy Smits' guardian angel, in a whole sequence that was shot but that didn't end up making the movie. We shot for over a week in downtown L.A., being hung up on a cable 50 feet in the air for ten days. In Jason X, Kane and I had to both be hung up, in full costume, on cables and do a whole battle in mid-air. It was essentially the end of a long sequence that was a real cat-and-mouse game, because Jason had finished killing off all the rest of the grunts and of course I was the final one. And unfortunately, though my suit looks great, ventilation was a bit of a problem. Not only was it a heavy and tight suit, but there wasn't actually any air coming through it.
I never thought of Brodski as a particularly modern character. While he fully assimilated the technology, he definitely belonged to a time when soldiers were soldiers and they went out and fought and that was all Brodski really knew. And the idea that he was a counterfoil for Jason came to it's conclusion with this scene. For the first time, Jason's going to have to face a human who is far more resistant than he's used to. Obviously, of course, Brodski still won't be able to match him, but at least he shows that resilience. It made it easier to realize he is more comic-book military. That's clearly what I felt I had to present to make my character successful in the movie—somebody who came from that mindset and who, because he didn't really know of the legend of Jason, was in a sense then willing to face up to him.
MAXYNE BAKER:
Kane's a real character. I didn't know who he was at first, except that he had a back hat on that had a little hockey mask on the front of it. At our first costume fitting, we set him up in the strait-jacket costume he wears at the top of the movie. He's bound up in it, with chains and all kinds of things wrapped around him. And he's being very good about it. Then I was trying to take a Polaroid, and I said, "Kane, do you mind moving back a little bit so I can get all of you in the picture?" And he took two steps back and went right through the fitting room wall. Straight through the drywall!
All I originally knew about Kane was that I had a nine-year-old son at the time who thought that Jason X was the coolest thing that I've ever worked on in my life. I'm not a preteen boy, so to me, Jason was just a huge, big, scary monster. But to kids, it's hilarious. So I brought my son and a few of his friends to the set for his birthday. They went ballistic! And Kane signed some pictures of himself in full Jason makeup for a few of the boys. My son brought home the picture and hung it on his wall, But then at night, he'd ask my husband, "Daddy, can you turn the picture over when I go to sleep?" So it's on his wall, but flipped to the other side.
NOEL CUNNINGHAM:
Jim Isaac's family would come up to the set, and one time it was his son's birthday, so there was another dozen or so eleven-year-olds on the set. And of course they all wanted to meet Jason. So we introduced them to Kane. He was in his makeup chair, and he took off his mask and was just all friendly, like, "Hey kids, how's it going?" So they now had all let down their guard. Then we led the kids around for a tour. And over at one part of the studio, off to the side, were all these fake Jasons. Well, Kane went the opposite direction and went into the prop closet and laid down on the ground as if he was another Jason dummy. So the kids come into the room and we're like, "Oh, here's another Jason dummy. Look how life-like it is!" Then they lean over, and Kane just lunges up at them and hollers. And they all just screamed. I've never seen kids run away so fast in my life.
TODD FARMER:
I reme
mber staying late one night to work on rewrites in the production office after everybody had gone home. And I knew that Stephan and Kelly had worked on a frozen Jason and that it was downstairs. So I wondered if I was strong enough to go downstairs and stay overnight and sleep with my cot pulled up next to the frozen Jason? I wasn't. I left about an hour later and went back to my hotel and slept. Even fake Jason's a creepy dude.
KANE HODDER:
Of all the big UberJason setpieces in the film, the "Virtual Crystal Lake" sequence is, I think, one of the best. It was a lot of fun to be on the spaceship as Jason, but it still felt so much better to be back in the woods. It always feels more natural.
NOEL CUNNINGHAM:
I think the early Friday films were much more like morality plays than Jason X. Back then it was "sex and drugs will get you killed." Today, people don't really give a shit about sex and drugs so much, and that was why we came up with those lines in the Virtual Crystal Lake sequence, where the two girls say to Jason, "You want to smoke some pot and have premarital sex?" That was a definite nod to the old school slasher movies, and the fans really seemed to get that humor.
JAMES OSWALD:
The Cargo Bay set was our single largest challenge because of its physical size. It was 60 feet and 60 feet and 24 feet high. And it was designed to be the stage for many different sequences. Later on, we converted it into the virtual reality environment, which was like Jason's vision of the real Crystal Lake when he was a boy. So we had to take most of the cargo bay dressing out of it, then create from scratch a forest, log cabin and a false lake. All these sort of odd elements that don't really belong there, like rocks, branches, that sort of stuff. It was a lot of work and several months to go from sleek surfaces to a big, dirty, mulch-y thing.
Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th (Enhanced Edition) Page 79
