Q: Making a sequel to a remake of a movie you already made a sequel to… Are you trying to do something completely different, or are you trying to keep parts of the original sequel?
Q: Did you find it difficult to bring freshness to a film franchise that you’ve already done six times before?
Q: How do you overcome that?
Q: Are the cats back?
Q: What do you want to do next?
Shimizu: I do really like making horror movies because it’s interesting, because you have all these tricks to play on, it’s very much fun, but I do want to go for something different, maybe I can do different types of horror, including all these suspense or thriller type things, but the film that I really want to shoot now is a comedy.
Q: Are there any difficulties and limitations of having a PG-13 rating, which you didn’t have to deal with when making the original movies?
Sometimes, I talk to the producers and they have some different opinions from mine, and there is this conflict, and also, it is a big contradiction, I think, because what it says in the script and what we’re doing is very different. So the movie I want to make is this comedy where this leading actress is dealing with this contradiction in between what it says in the script and what we’re doing [on the set to keep it PG-13].
Q: What did you learn on the first American movie that you're applying on the sequel?
Shimizu: Yeah, very small things but a lot of different things, especially between the actors and I, I think I’m more careful with them, because last time, I just didn’t know anything about this American actor’s system [referring to SAG union rules, presumably], the only system I knew was this Japanese system, and since I know what the American system is like now, I know how to make it work with them.
Q: Was there ever any suggestion when you did the first movie to move the story outside of
Q: Is this going to be a trilogy?
Shimizu: That’s what I hear, meaning that the producers and the production company is saying it’s a trilogy, but you know, if the Grudge 2 is not going to be a major hit, no one’s going to want to do Grudge 3. They just want to say that it’s a trilogy and that’s fine, but who knows? But I would love for that to happen. But if it’s a third one, people are going to expect more, right? It needs to be better and bigger and just everything more, so in that sense, I don’t know if I’m ready to do that, but I haven’t really thought about it.
Q: Have you ever considered writing or producing a third movie, and not directing?
Q: Why do you prefer practical FX over CG?
Shimizu: It’s not that I dislike those CGI FX, but the thing is that if it’s a horror film, as soon as they figure out that it’s a CGI, it’s not going to be scary any more and when we see those things with CGI and it’s like fancy and big, it’s interesting, but at the same time, as soon as they find out that it can be real, not CGI, the level of scare comes down to half of it, and that’s just not something I like as a style. If people are not going to be scared of those CGI, I’d rather just do it practically, and if we can maintain the level of the scare I want to go for, I’d rather just do it practically. One of the most important things that I’m going for in the Grudge is that all these scares can happen in everyday life. Anybody can experience any of these things, because they’ll be very familiar to the characters’ life or characters, whatever they’re doing. So as soon as they see all these CGI things and they think, “Oh, that can’t be real”, they’re just going to lose that scare because that can’t happen to them anymore. If it’s a movie like Lord of the Rings or something, it’s all fantasy and people really go for that, so we don’t have to worry about that kind of stuff, but what I’m doing is very much of this everyday life where anything can happen to anybody type of thing.
Q: Having spent so much time developing this curse and its history, have you thought about how the curse can be ended?
Shimizu: In the script meeting, I do talk about that idea with writers and producers, but every time we try to stop the curse, our ideas just don’t go anywhere good, and we just can’t come up with anything interesting to stop the curse, so if that’s the case, I would rather just go for something that could never be stopped. But who knows, maybe something can be stopped in Grudge 3?
Q: How do you feel about the spoofing or satirizing of The Grudge in Scary Movie 4?
Shimizu: It really makes me happy because Scary Movie 4, they’re doing a spoof of War of the Worlds and King Kong and these are the movies with big budget, big movies, and then next to that, there’s Grudge, and I just feel like I’m getting such recognition, those movies, and in my mind, horror and comedy are very close, so in that sense, I would love to make movies like the Scary Movies in the future.
So actually, the year before last, I did this TV series of something very similar to a Scary Movie type of thing. It’s a comedy version of a horror film, and that was on the air really late at night, so it wasn’t that big, but I did something like that and I enjoyed it, so that’s something I’d really like to do. I think that the TV series that I just talked about will be released in
Q: What’s the TV series called?
Q: Can you talk about the state of horror in
Q: What horror directors do you respect now?
Staci Layne Wilson reporting [photo of Staci with
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End
Be sure and read our Grudge 2 on-set interviews with Amber Tamblyn [3], Edison Chen [4], and Takako Fuji [5].
Don't forget to read our exclusive interview with Takashi Shimizu from 2004 [3].
Links:
[1] http://www.horror.com/php/article-1049-1.html
[2] http://starlens.com
[3] http://www.horror.com/php/article-1199-1.html
[4] http://www.horror.com/php/article-1200-1.html
[5] http://www.horror.com/php/article-1198-1.html