Guadalajara Jalisco.- “Doctor Strange”, answered without hesitation when asked what was the film that had cost him the most work“a Marvel movie is a very exhausting job, it’s almost like joining the army”.
“I remember that Robert Downey Jr. he went to the premiere of Doctor Strange just to support me, we had approached him for work and now we were friends, and when he went to the red carpet he came with me and told me ‘Did you survive? Did you get divorced?’and I laughed because making these movies makes you turn to dust”, he recounted causing laughter in the audience.
In his master class at the Guadalajara International Film Festival (FICG) “Creating worlds through shadows”, the American director of horror and fantasy, chatted with the moderator Héctor Trejo, film students and followers of his work, different anecdotes in his work as a film director.
The Sorcerer Supreme, Doctor Strange, was on the big screens in 2016, which offered a different journey than what was used to consuming Marvel: “I wanted to protect the enchantment and the spirituality of this filmI think it was psychedelic spirituality,” said Scott Derrickson.
In addition, he has also directed horror films such as Emily Rose’s exorcism from 2005 and Sinister of 2012, which are won the affection of the publicreason why many and many followers of the director went to the Cineteca FICG to listen to his master class.
Regarding the successful Marvel sorcerer, he assured that his main objective was to bring something different to the screen: “The psychedelic vision of the character’s comics […] I love the Marvel universe but I didn’t want it to have visible destruction, I wanted every scene in the movie to have things never seen beforeAnd I think we did it.”
mystery and terror
“Does anyone here really want to know what happened to the joker when he says: ‘do you want to know why i have these scars?’?… no!”, he joked after assuring that the mystery is the most powerful knowledge in the cinema.
“Imagine if there was a scene where they explain to us why Hannibal Lecter eats people, that would ruin that guy”, he said between irony.
In addition, he added that all the characters in any movie have a ‘behind’, why they became what they are, and precisely is in the mystery which causes them to “hook” on the character.
“When we talk about genuinely bad behaviorwe are talking about a lot of mystery, something I know is that real monsters, for example Ted Bundy He had a happy childhood, he wasn’t traumatized, he was born bad.”
“(People) want to go out on a Friday night, they pay for a babysitter, they pay for high priced parking, they pay for even higher priced popcorn and they also go to the movies and spend 15 dollars, it is very important to me that person, so I think ‘if it doesn’t scare me, it won’t scare them‘ So I do my job to the best of my ability,” he replied to a follower.
The attendees of the master class cast doubts on how to choose a good horror story: “I knew that the only way to reach the Hollywood industry was write something so good they had to”.
The Black Phone
“It’s definitely my most emotional movieI think it’s very personal […] It has a lot of memories from my childhood, experiences from when I was a child.”
His latest film called The Black Phone, which will only hit theaters on June 23, tells the story of a boy being kidnapped by a mysterious man with a mask, who puts him in a room with a black phone.
The film is inspired by a 2005 Joe Hill short story titled “Best New Horror” for which Derrickson joked: “This writer is very confident to name his book “The Best New Horror.”
“Every story in that book is good, but Black Phone […] With its basic idea of a kid being kidnapped and taken to a basement with a black phone, it felt like a movie.” He said about having chosen precisely that story as the basis for his film, “He took a serial killer story into a ghost story and put them together.”.
“I was in therapy for about two years, almost three, where I was talking a lot about my childhood, the violence I experienced, the violence in the neighborhood, among other traumatic things I experienced, and in that period of time I thought ‘why didn’t you take all this that i’m processing and put it in a story‘”, he added while explaining that he mixed his experiences with the story of Joe Hill.
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Derrickson concluded by citing some of the film directors who have left viewers on the edge of their seats, such as Ari Aster (hereditary, Midsommar), Robert Eggers (witch), David Robert Mitchell (It Follows), among others.
A Marvel Movie Is Like Joining The Army: Scott Derrickson On Directing FICG Movies