INTERVIEW: Pascal Laugier, director of the "perverse" horror MARTYRS!

This week, OWF's Mike Edwards got a chance to talk to Pascal Laugier, the director behind this week's U.K. horror release Martyrs, a movie so scary and disturbing, U.S. distributors dare not touch it. It comes out on DVD over there in April but us Brits, we can handle it. Mike already survived the movie, but barely, likening the Martyrs to "a perverse kind of torture porn movie, others might call it aggressive moralising". Laugier talks his personal inspiration to make the movie and it's a great insight to how his mind works, especially when you remember he is currently the man working on the Hellraiser reboot. Take it away, Mike...

INTERVIEW: PASCAL LAUGIER

ME: The film really stunned me, the change in the middle really turned this away from a conventional horror. What inspired you to do something like this?

PL: I really wanted to use the horror genre as a kind of direct expression. I was feeling very dark and very sad for private reasons in my life when I started writing the film, and I saw a good opportunity to put that dark and that energy directly into the screen. I certainly didn't want to do a self-referential film, I didn't want to horror rollercoaster, I wanted to do something kind of personal. That's why this film is almost impudent, it's like showing my balls to the audience. I can't watch the film with an audience, it's impossible, it's too personal.

ME: The plot messes with our expectations a lot, were you deliberately playing a on the way we expect the genre to be?

PL: I didn't want to do a postmodern film, I'm a horror fan, I love the genre too much to take some distance from it. I just wanted to propose something fresh and unexpected. I always considered the horror genre as something free, almost experimental, that's why I first loved it. The movie makers from the 70s were very very free, and very far from the formulas, and I really wanted tot try to create the same sort of unexpected feeling as we had in the 70s.

ME: Given that it comes from a very personal time in your life, was it hard to take the actresses to that dark place with you?

PL: Oh yeah, there were a lot of Parisian actresses who refused these parts. A lot even refused to meet me after they read the script, I sometimes felt like I had given them a paedophile pornographic film. In my country the horror genre is still taken very condescendingly by a lot of people, it's still very despised, and the more it is despised in France the more I will have the desire to make horror films. I am very comfortable with my underground position in the cinema, I'm cool with that.

ME: You could make it mainstream! I mean FRONTIERE(S) was another popular French film, so could it be possible for the genre to be accepted?

PL: No, because once again we are much more successful in foreign countries. Don't get the wrong idea that the is a French horror new wave, it's a myth.

ME: Are you worried about a remake of MARTYRS?

PL: They are doing it.

ME: And are you going to be involved?

PL: No. They asked me if I was interested in writing and directing it, but I had already spent two years of my life on that project and I wanted to put that behind me. I feel like doing something else. So I will go and watch the film as a member of the audience.

ME: Generally, what's your opinion on Hollywood remakes of these small European films?

PL: It's not bad thing. It's very difficult to have a general view on it though because some of the remakes are masochistic, John Carpenter's THE THING IS a remake, I like the new TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, I like the new DAWN OF THE DEAD, and some of them are pieces of shit. There is no rule. The thing I'd say clearly is that purely from a capitalist point of view it's much easier to remake them than do a fresh new film. It's safer and will make more profit.

ME: In terms of some of the special effects, some of it is very gory, very detailed, how hard was it to attain that?

PL: It was hard. It required hour and hours and hours of preparation. The guy who made all the special effects is dead now, he committed suicide a few months ago. His name was Benoît Lestang and he was a very good friend of mine. He was the genius behind the special effects and we shared a house in Montreal together, doing all the preps and the shooting, so I saw Benoit working night and day to prepare all the stuff so it was only a matter of being talented and working lots. I really wanted all my effects to be almost medical. To be as realistic as possible because the film is not a rollercoaster, it's supposed to be about the flesh, the real condition of the body when you hurt yourself, and you know in real life when you torture your body it's already impressive enough not to need you to go over the top. So what you see now on screen could be really true. We even used some medical documents that we took from real life to keep it as realistic as we could.

ME: It's so dark and so non-standard, how did you expect audiences to take it?

PL: I knew that some people wouldn't take to the film. When we were shooting the 25 minutes in the basement, I knew as I was shooting this sequence and I was was telling the crew and the actresses this, that right now we are losing 10%, 20% of the audience, right now. But it's a risk I had to take as a matter of integrity, as a matter of honesty, because I didn't want these sequences to be fun. to even be entertaining. I almost wanted these sequences to be ugly, to be repetitive, because that is what the film is about. I really wanted the audience to feel the martyrisation of my main character. I almost wanted the audience to be martyred itself. So maybe the idea of the end of the film is to reach another level, it's about asking what we do with the pain we feel on a daily basis, that's what the film is really about. It's not a film about torture, it's a film about being hurt, about pain. And I really wanted the audience to feel the pain.

Martyrs is released this Friday in the U.K.

Check back on Friday, where director Pascal Laugier will be the first guest on our new feature, Movie Castaway, where he lets us know the five films he would take if were unfortunate enough to be stuck on a deserted island, but fortunate enough to have a DVD player, 5 DVDs and electricity.