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Features
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The Surprising Skeleton Crew
On the heels of Jennifer Connelly in Dark Water comes a voodoo thriller directed by a Brit and starring a pair of actors better known for romantic comedy and drama.
Thursday, August 11, 2005
By Brett Buckalew
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Christina Radish / Agency Photos
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Director Ian Softley
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When you think of elegant ghost stories that send a chill running down your spine, it’s unlikely that you’d imagine director Iain Softley and actress Kate Hudson as the ideal collaborators to bring one such creepy tale to the big screen.
Softley leans towards quietly thought-provoking character dramas like The Wings of the Dove and K-PAX, while Hudson of course is best known for the bright-eyed, bubbly persona she has developed in romantic comedies ranging from How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days to Raising Helen. Even in Cameron Crowe’s bittersweet Almost Famous, Hudson couldn’t help but elevate the movie’s youthful-optimism quotient whenever her groupie character Penny Lane came onscreen.
Between the two of them, this director and actor have respectively never managed to raise a single goose bump in the entirety of their respective careers. Until now, that is.
The new supernatural thriller The Skeleton Key, about a young woman encountering the spirit world while staying in a decaying New Orleans mansion, finds Softley and Hudson segueing seamlessly into the world of scary movies. When talking with Film Stew during a recent steamy weekend in New Orleans - all the better for atmospheric verisimilitude - Softley asserts that, all appearances to the contrary, he’s a natural fit for the genre.
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Christina Radish / Agency Photos
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Closest to her Key character
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“I always thought that it was my instinct to deal with the way the normal world comes into contact with the unknown, with the occult, or with things outside of what one would call rational, normal experience,” the filmmaker explains, “[As you see in] films like Don’t Look Now, films like Rosemary’s Baby or Kubrick’s The Shining.”
“And I think the thing that distinguishes those films,” Softley continues, “because they are about where the real world meets beliefs that challenge rational, skeptical people, [is] that part of the architecture of those films is that you start with very naturalistic environments and real people.”
The environment came courtesy of Louisiana itself, via The Skeleton Key’s various New Orleans locals. As for the people, they were first fleshed out in a script by Ehren Kruger (Scream 3, the upcoming The Brothers Grimm, with a story focusing on Caroline (Hudson), a hospice worker still haunted by the recent death of her father. Looking for a change of scenery, she accepts a job as a live-in caretaker for a recent stroke victim, Ben (John Hurt), whose estate is located in the swampy Terrebonne Parish. Ben’s wife Violet (Gena Rowlands) entrusts Caroline with a skeleton key that can access any room in the house, which turns out to be more of a curse than a blessing when Caroline discovers an attic full of hoodoo artifacts and hints that ghosts of the mansion’s previous owners may still be lurking inside the house.
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Christina Radish / Agency Photos
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Supernatural thrillers, yes; comedies, no.
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Pretty dark stuff for a perky star like Hudson, but Softley believes that her playing against type may reveal something about her off-screen self that fans haven’t previously been privy to. “When I met her, I was struck by how similar she was to the character of Caroline,” Softley remarks about Hudson. “And in fact, she said herself that she thinks it’s the part that’s closest to who she really is.”
“Caroline is an empowered female leading role,” he insists. “She’s being forced by external events to shed off some of the frivolity of a 25-year-old, and there’s a sense of the mortality of her family and a sense of the real world. I think particularly after Kate had [her] baby [nineteen-month-old Ryder Russell Robinson], she was able to bring even more of that maturity, but when I first met her, she was a lot closer to a 35 year old as opposed to a 25 year old.”
When asked about her similarities to Caroline, Hudson shares, “it was actually quite accessible for me to play her. It was very accessible to tap into my fears, very accessible to understand why somebody would move to a city because of its music or because of a passion. And she’s strong-minded and a little tough, and I feel like she feels okay being alone.”
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Christina Radish / Agency Photos
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Co-star John Hurt
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Hudson, who claims she was so riveted by the script that she tore through it in a mere 45 minutes, relished the chance to dive into the archetype of the fright flick heroine. “After the initial response to the script,” the actress relates, “I went, ‘I’ve never done a thriller, and it would be really fun for me to be able to heave, and pant, and run, and climb, and break windows, and scream every once in a while.’”
Now that she’s gotten the scream-queen thing out of her system, Hudson says the experience ended up sparking her interest in playing a wide range of roles and continuing to stretch herself beyond the romantic comedy field that has become her comfort zone. “I feel like I’d be bored if I always did comedies, and I feel like I’d be bored if I was always a dramatic actor,” Hudson confesses. “I just want to continually find things about the craft and find things about new characters, and discover new things about myself through them.”
Peter Sarsgaard, who plays the estate lawyer watching over Ben and Violet’s mansion, has acquired dependable dramatic cachet through critically acclaimed supporting turns in hard-hitting provocations like Shattered Glass and Kinsey that has eluded his co-star thus far in her career. But, by the same token, Sarsgaard admits that he wouldn’t be able to get laughs as smoothly as Hudson does if he was offered his own comedy vehicle.
“I can make a drama better if it’s not perfectly written,” the actor elaborates. “I know how to do that, to make it better. A lot of comedies revolve around a premise, [such as] ‘He’s in her body, she’s in his body.’ If that premise is just f*cked from the beginning, there’s no amount of salvaging [I can do] in saving it. And if no one’s written a joke, I’m not gonna particularly come up with them.”
Another comedy genius that Sarsgaard humbly bows before is the beloved star of this summer’s box-office smash Wedding Crashers. “You see Vince Vaughn get into a movie sometimes where on the page, you would be like, ‘No way is that thing gonna make it,’” Sarsgaard observes. “And I’ve read them, gotten them and read them, and been like, ‘No way, that can’t possibly work.’ And I really admire an actor like that who can turn the comedy around.”
Even if working on The Skeleton Key didn’t require Sarsgaard to improvise one-liners, it did pose a challenge to the actor by asking him to suspend the attitude of disbelief with which he regards the world of voodoo, hoodoo, and the conjuring of spirits.
| “I believe that if you think it does something, then it does something,” Sarsgaard says with a note of agnosticism. “I sort of think, like, if you think you’ve having a heart attack and you obsess about it, you might have a heart attack, you know what I mean? If someone hands you this nut and says, ‘you’re gonna drop dead in two weeks,’ if you believe in it enough, you might drop dead in two weeks. I feel immune from it, because I don’t believe in it.”
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Regardless of a viewer’s beliefs on matters of the occult, one part of The Skeleton Key that will shock seers and skeptics alike is its surprise ending, which subverts the conclusion most will be expecting from a thriller like this. “I think it’s not giving anything away to say that I was attracted to elements in the story that one would call very un-Hollywood,” Softley cautiously reveals, “and you know I’m referring to the ending. And the thing that’s interesting is the actors were totally struck by that, and they were saying, ‘well, we’re not gonna be able to keep it this way, aren’t we?’”
| Luckily, Universal is releasing the film with unconventional ending intact. Now, all the actors and filmmakers promoting The Skeleton Key have to worry about is keeping the press from spilling the movie’s secret. “I imagine you guys want the same thing I want,” Sarsgaard tells a roundtable of journalists. “I mean, does it really behoove your audience to know everything about the movie before they go see it? Are they gonna want to read the review by people that just explain movies to them?”
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“You know, ‘Oh, it’s a synopsis, it’s the Cliff Notes. Don’t go see it,’” he adds. “I mean, I guess you could do that, but I wouldn’t want to read reviews like that. So I sort of leave that up to you guys.”
In our case at least, Sarsgaard shouldn’t worry. For in deference to a city that feels like Las Vegas with the addition of culture and history, we humbly submit to the idea that what happens in New Orleans stays in New Orleans.
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