RONNY YU, Director:
I didn't study film at all. I had polio when I was about nine months old, so I didn't have a huge playgroup. My father, seeing that, took me to the theatre all the time. We saw everything in Hong Kong—all the Hollywood films, Hitchcock, Westerns, whatever—and they fascinated me. I was like, "They're using images, one image plus another image, and it tells a story!" So when I tried to go to college, I wanted to go to film school, to study more, but my father didn't think it was a proper job. Then later on, I had a chance to hang out with all these film people, and get to know how to physically put films together. And my first job was a director, so I thought there must be somebody up there who had it programmed, like, "You must be a director for the rest of your life."
In 2002, I was living in Sydney, Australia, and I got a call from New Line saying, "Would you mind if we flew you over to talk to our boss, Bob Shaye? He has a project for you." I said, "Sure. What project?" They say, "A good project. You're going to like it, especially since you're always telling people you want to make a real American movie. And this is a real, real American movie." I called my agent and he said, "You might like it. Take the flight, go to Hollywood and have the meeting." So I came over, and then they told me it was Freddy vs. Jason.
"Speaking of Freudian implications, look at Jason's mother," says actor Robert Englund. "She's a real piece of work."
STOKELY CHAFFIN:
When we originally put together our top list of five or six directors for Freddy vs. Jason, Ronny Yu was on it. I just expected him to say, "Thanks so much for your interest, I really appreciate it, but it's a no." But he was open to it. We could tell. So we kept reeling him in a little bit, and said, "Well, why don't you just come here for a meeting and we can talk about it further?" We practically begged him.
Then he came into Bob's office and acted out a scene from the script. He stepped on Bob's toe and spun him around, and I was going, "Oh God, what are you doing!?" But even if you could only understand Ronny's every third word, you could feel his passion for the material.
RONNY YU:
The whole reason, the dream of making a Hollywood movie for me is because of the market. It's so big. Everywhere in the world, you point your finger, and if it is from Hollywood your film has a chance to be seen. If you make Hong Kong movies, you can only point your finger to a Chinatown or Asian territory. I think it's funny that a movie I made, Bride with White Hair, received a lot of attention in the Western world. I didn't intend to make it like a horror movie or a slasher movie, but somehow, in the West, people look at it as a horror or slasher movie, and they send me scripts assuming I'm a slasher movie director. But I'm not. And the same thing happened with Bride of Chucky—I had never seen a Child's Play film. Bob Shaye asked me if I had seen any of the Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street sequels. I said no. He said, "You mean no Jason, no Freddy?" But I think my lack of knowledge about Freddy and Jason worked in my favor, because the studio was looking for somebody who could come in with a fresh take and some new ideas.
Then they gave me the script and said I needed to tell them yes or no right now, because they'd waited for so long. Nine years or something like that. They also wanted to start in two months. I had to come out to America in May 2002 and they were supposed to start prep by June. So I read it, but I still said, "Thank you. I'm heading back." And they said, "Why? Why? Why?" I said, "I'm not so sure about the script. I think it still needs some massaging." But then Bob and the other New Line executives said, "Ronny, do whatever you want to make it right, to feel comfortable."
Once I was given that sort of freedom, I said okay. At that moment, I was just looking at it as a fun movie. It wasn't until after I accepted it that I started to think, "Oh, God! I hope this Chinaman does not screw this up."
With its director officially signed on and pre-production commencing in June 2002, writers Damian Shannon and Mark Swift set about writing a new draft of Freddy vs. Jason tailored to Ronny Yu's vision. But Yu, feeling that the script still needed streamlining, called in Blade scripter David Goyer to do an uncredited rewrite. The result was major changes in both plot and character, with Goyer refashioning Shannon and Swift's admittedly lengthy, perhaps even unwieldy, 130-page screenplay into a tight and economical blueprint for a crisp, action-packed 90-minute movie.
One person who would not participate in the final development process, however, was Sean Cunningham. Although neither Cunningham nor New Line ever wavered in their enthusiasm for Freddy vs. Jason, the film's day-to-day production chores ultimately would be turned over to executive producer Doug Curtis.
MARK SWIFT:
Sean became a producer in name only. We never had a meeting with him, and we never talked, even on the phone. We never saw his script notes. I guess New Line sort of shielded him from us. Jason X was a disaster, and it killed Freddy vs. Jason for a while. I think New Line lost a lot of faith in not just Friday the 13th but the whole question of whether there was still an audience for Freddy vs. Jason. The next thing we knew, the studio was testing the idea in malls, figuring out whether 13-year-old kids would want to see this movie. We thought we were in real trouble.
CYRUS VORIS:
I think New Line would have loved to just buy Sean out and then do whatever they wanted. But, you know, I give Sean credit—he was one of the creators of the property, it was his baby and he owned it, so he wanted to be involved. It was more important for Sean to have some involvement than just to get a bunch of money. But probably, to this day, even though Freddy vs. Jason became a big success, I'm sure there's still tension between Sean and New Line.
"I really wanted the script to exploit the nightmares of Jason, to not only have Freddy privy to what makes Jason tick, but also for the audience to have his backstory reiterated," says actor Robert Englund. "Freddy's really got to get in Jason's head. And the screenwriters solved that with Freddy vs. Jason. That was one of the things in the script that made me really happy to get on board."
DOUG CURTIS, Executive Producer:
Sean chose not to be involved. I didn't even meet Sean until three weeks before we started shooting the movie. At one point he decided he wanted to be involved, but the studio said it was too late, which dumbfounded him. Ultimately, the trade-off was that we put his daughter, Jessica, on the film as an Associate Producer. And she was a very smart girl and a very good producer.
But I'll tell you the most important thing about Sean: he was the most gracious person I've ever known in my life. He sent me a gift basket on the first day of shooting that said, "Good luck, buddy." Then he sent me another basket at the end of shooting that said, "Congratulations." Ultimately, he should be very excited and proud of Freddy vs. Jason.
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
I was glad Freddy vs. Jason was getting made, but I had strong feelings that there were deficiencies in the script. I had been wrestling with Freddy vs. Jason for years, and I felt I had learned to understand storytelling much better than I had earlier. I also thought the hiring of Ronny Yu spoke to the difficulties of working within the studio system. "Shooters" are often hired to be directors, and Ronny is a good example of that. Ronny is a great visualist, but he doesn't have a clue about what he's shooting in terms of telling a story. But Ronny was somebody who was going to get the movie into production, and at that point I was happy just to get the fucking picture made.
Ultimately, you don't want somebody on the set who's bringing negative energy. You want to keep it positive, and do the best you can with what you've got. So I shook everyone's hands and told them how supportive I was. I also was involved in the promotion of the movie, because I felt that was the least I could do, and that it was part of my job. And I'm certainly not going to look a gift horse in the mouth.
RONNY YU:
Throughout the shoot it was basically just me and Stokely. She really supported me on all the battles and changes in the script. I did get a ton of notes from Mr. Cunningham saying, "These are the rules. Don't bend them!" So I did my ho
mework and spent two weeks going through all 17 movies. The balance I tried to work out was, how do you satisfy the hardcore fans of both franchises as well as excite people outside of that? I took myself as an example, because in the beginning I wasn't that familiar with the films at all. And it was different than Bride of Chucky—that was campy because how seriously can you take a two-foot-tall doll?
In the end, after looking at all of the films, I thought that every one of them had their good parts. But I particularly liked the first Nightmare and the first Friday—the Sean Cunningham one. I thought we should go back to the roots. I decided that I couldn't reinvent these two long-lasting American horror icons. My job is to respect what's been laid down and just turn up the entertainment level a notch.
MARK SWIFT:
A couple of months before shooting, around July of 2002, we met with Ronny two or three times and incorporated his notes. We turned in our last draft in August. Originally when they looked at our script, New Line said that it would cost $60 million, and that's a lot of money. I give credit to Ronny and those guys—they did it for $30 million. Some stuff had to go. So they hired David Goyer to do a polish, and that turned into him writing pages while they were shooting. He's responsible for a lot of the dialogue in the finished film, and most of the characters and material that was cut.
STOKELY CHAFFIN:
The script was overly long and complicated and very dense. We timed the script, and it came in at two hours 28 minutes. We're like, "You know, this is not the American Beauty of horror films and it probably shouldn't be two hours long." So David Goyer made it a more cinematic movie. He was so good at streamlining the material that you never even noticed what he took out.
MARK SWIFT:
When you lose scenes, in order to keep story, you have to have characters speak about what's missing. Then you run into a situation where a lot of the characters are just talking plot, which is never enjoyable. What also happens in the process of making something shorter is you combine characters. Obviously, stuff has to get lost, but there are so many little things that would have made the movie that much better. But that's part of making movies. They wanted it to be fast and they wanted a quick running time.
Throughout this chapter, view Freddy vs. Jason makeup effects supervisor William Terezakis' original concepts and storyboards for key characters and scenes in Freddy vs. Jason.
RONNY YU:
I have my own feeling about what's scary. I like these old classic movies, Hitchcock and others, that use the principle of the three big S's: first you set up the suspense, then you surprise the audience, then immediately you shock them. So the challenge or the difficulty of making a horror movie is not how much blood you put in, or how gory you can make it, but how to play that game with the audience. I wanted Freddy vs. Jason to move lightning fast, with the whole thing taking place over two or three nights. Even now, after the fact, I look at it and I think we should have brought Freddy and Jason into it earlier. Just get them in the ring.
I thought of Freddy vs. Jason as the first film in a series, not the 20th. To kind of forget everything that's happened before and start from scratch while at the same time, showing flashbacks at the beginning of the film and sort of telling the stories of Freddy and Jason in just a few minutes, like a refresher course. Everyone knows who Freddy and Jason are, so we wanted to make a film for the masses, not the really hardcore fans who might remember some detail from a sequel 10 years ago. There's no mention of Jason X, that's for sure.
One of the things that David Goyer did when he came in to rewrite the script was just to tighten everything up. If a piece of dialogue was 10 spaces long, he'd shorten it down to two lines, real smooth. My feeling was that at the beginning it was a little bit confusing. Because if you started first from Jason, the audience thinks, "Is this real? Oh, it's not real. It's a dream. Whose dream? Jason's dream? Why is Jason dreaming?" You know, there are so many holes that we need to fill. So I think it's better that we started the movie with Freddy because everybody knows that Freddy only comes in a dream. And then after you introduce Freddy, you introduce Jason, then the audience gets to know oh, okay, Freddy is in Jason's dream now. It became more clear.
DOUG CURTIS:
I thought the writers were afraid that the audience wasn't going to get it. But the audience gets it because they've already seen the movies. And if you haven't, you're not even in the theater because you don't give a shit about it.
ROBERT ENGLUND:
One thing that was really important that the writers saw was the contrivance of getting Freddy and Jason together, and digging out of it by delving into the mythology and the back story of the prior films and both characters. Freddy's impotent at the outset of Freddy vs. Jason. He can't instill fear and get in and access the subconscious of the children of Elm Street, so he needs someone to scare them, some dream they haven't had before, and something that is not a dream fear. And now he's bumped in to you-know-who, our buddy in the hockey mask in some kind of mutual purgatory that they dwell in, and he guides him towards Elm Street. Once you buy into that, then the movie just takes off. It's like horses leaving the gate.
DAMIAN SHANNON:
Goyer made a lot of smart cuts—great editorial changes—and did them without losing any scenes. However, some great Jason highlights at Crystal Lake were lost, as well as an epilogue that really wrapped up the characters of Lori and her father. We also tried to keep the Freddy one-liners disturbing, kind of like dark comedy. We wanted to turn him back to what he was like in the first one. That really didn't end up in the movie, either.
MARK SWIFT:
We were trying to pull off a lot. We were trying to have a hidden backstory with Will and Lori's father as a subplot, because there have to be a few other things going on aside from Freddy and Jason fighting. As stock as some of those characters were, we wanted to somehow make that into an arc with her father and Will. I think it's a great triangle—the father sends away the boyfriend of the daughter. That stuff was great to me.
My favorite line in the original Nightmare on Elm Street was when Freddy holds up his glove and says, "This is God." That's the kind of stuff we tried to go for. And Bob Shaye had a rule: "I don't want Freddy to say more than four or five words in a sentence." He really wanted to keep it short. But as the script got cut down, it seemed like Freddy had to explain stuff. He'd turn to the camera and say, "I think I'll let Jason play for a while." That's the kind of stuff that irked me. I remember the first line of the script was always: "Full moon. Dark trees. A misty lake." We always started at Camp Crystal Lake. But in the rewrites, the studio felt the audience needed a sort of refresher course, so that's how the movie came to start with that Freddy voice-over at the beginning. Now he gives this entire speech, where we never really wanted him to talk, ever. We just thought that would make him more scary.
Jason concept art.
DAMIAN SHANNON:
We originally put in a lot of references to the other films in both series. We had a reference to Tommy Jarvis—the developers at Crystal Lake were having problems with this guy protesting. Though some of the horror film references that fans say they see in the movie were not necessarily there on purpose. Maybe subconsciously. Like, was Gibb's red hat a nod to P.J. Soles in Carrie? No. But it is the same character archetype. So it probably came from there, but we weren't aware of it.
MARK SWIFT:
And Lori's character was not a reference to Laurie Strode in Halloween. Actually, my brother's wife and I were having a conversation with her one night and she started talking about how much she hated the violence in horror movies, so I said, "Well, we're naming our lead character after you, then!" But we had some crazy stuff, like Dr. Simms working at Weston Hills—Weston Hills was from Nightmare 3. It was the same doctor's name. Those are the types of things where if there's no one around to point it out, they are going to get cut out by someone along the way. We even had a Jason Takes Manhattan reference. When Deputy Stubbs is talking to the chief he says
, "We've got a Jason Voorhees copycat killer on our hands here. There have been copycat killings as far away as Manhattan." That got cut, too.
DAMIAN SHANNON:
One of the great things about the Nightmare films is that they always opened with a quote, like in Dream Warriors: "Sleep, those little slices of death..." I can't believe they dropped that in Freddy vs. Jason.
MARK SWIFT:
I think it was a time thing. Ronny Yu loved the idea—he originally wanted to open the film with a shot of a fireplace and a spark and then the spark would turn into the quote and the flame would burn and you'd be in the fireplace. But that didn't make it, either.
By the time casting sessions for Freddy vs. Jason began in late July of 2002, the trend of casting extremely photogenic, budding young stars whose faces would bring a high-gloss "we're-hipper-than-you" attitude to slasher films, had begun to subside. But the influence of Scream and its imitative ilk continued to be felt. It was now cool, even a sign of status, for a young star on the rise to appear in a horror film. Jason and Freddy had also been staples of the genre for nearly two decades, which only added to the cache of landing a role in Freddy vs. Jason. Even if the project was not totally considered A-list, its casting directors had a far larger talent pool to choose from than any of the past Friday the 13ths. As Freddy vs. Jason would also be shot in Vancouver, the final ensemble was a mix of American and Canadian talent, both the usual unknowns as well as recognizable faces from film, television and even pop music.
DAMIAN SHANNON:
We wanted half the kids in Freddy vs. Jason to seem like they were in a Friday the 13th movie and half of them to seem like they were in a Nightmare on Elm Street movie. And, of course, all of these films are full of clichés, but we wanted to embrace that. We wanted the virginal girl. We wanted the party kids. We also wanted a unique blend of minorities, because that's what they started to do in the later sequels, the Nightmare movies in particular. I think we came up with a pretty good mix in our screenplay.
Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th (Enhanced Edition) Page 83
