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Features
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Into the Horror Genre
It’s not exactly Lord of the Rings. But with the slick new hybrid Turistas, actor-turned-director John Stockwell brings his bikinis-and-water trilogy to a chilling conclusion.
Wednesday, November 29, 2006 at 7:00 PM
By Daniel Robert Epstein
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Albert L. Ortega/WireImage.com
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From Blue Crush to the Brazil crush
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As a director who was once an actor, John Stockwell understands from first-hand experience the do’s and don’ts of a movie set. Such as showing up on a Monday morning still hung over.
“When I was an actor, I remember I had gone to a weekend concert and I showed up on the set of Christine a little hung over,” Stockwell recalls during a recent interview with FilmStew. “[Director] John Carpenter read me the riot act; he was ready to fire me.”
“He was clearly in charge and if he decided that day that he was going to get rid of me, even though we were three weeks into filming, he would have gotten rid of me,” he continues. “Today, you can’t do that. Even the B-level actors know that once you’re three weeks into shooting, they’re in charge.”
“But I didn’t have that experience with Turistas,” Stockwell insists. “Josh Duhamel is such a work horse. We went down to Brazil and we didn’t have trailers. The actors’ trailers were tents and air mattresses, and once Josh set the tone, everyone else fell in behind him. Lunch was bologna sandwich on the jungle trail.”
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Gary Gershoff/WireImage.com
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Duhamel, doing the TRL thing
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Thanks to films like crazy/beautiful, Into the Blue, Blue Crush and now Turistas, Stockwell has as a director had more than his fair share of experience with beautiful young women. When it came for his latest film’s scenes of nudity, his days as an actor once again came in handy.
“I take the formality out of it,” he explains. “That doesn’t necessarily mean let’s make the whole crew get naked, but we just don’t treat it as a big deal. We’re trying to get reality here. I don’t want the sheet artfully draped. If you’re having sex, then your underwear is off.”
“There’s so much bullsh*t that’s tethered to sexuality in movies, so you try and transcend that,” adds Stockwell. “But the truth is, in every test screening that I did for crazy/beautiful, people were like, ‘Boy, there’s too much nudity in this movie. Why doesn’t Kirsten Dunst wear a bra?’ There’s a real anxiety and discomfort created by sexuality in movies.”
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Tim Whitby/WireImage.com
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Co-star Melissa George
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When Stockwell first read the script for Turistas, about a group of Americans for whom things go terribly wrong during a vacation in Brazil, he himself had just returned from Peru, where he had been robbed. Separately, before the setting of the film was relocated to Brazil, screenwriter Michael Arden Ross had placed the action in Guatemala after reading a news account of a British woman who, by simply taking photographs in a local village, was stoned to death because locals somehow thought she was trying to kidnap their children.
“Brazil works in the sense that it’s a place that can go from the vacation of a lifetime, the most seductive addictive place, to a place where things can go south with real consequences,” Stockwell muses. “While we were shooting, the Brazilians would tell me, ‘Oh yes, it’s safe. But last week I was kidnapped and held for a week, but I got out.’”
“You can’t go to the police because the police are corrupt,” he observes. “So I thought for an American, it’s a little unsettling at times.”
Turistas was initially rated NC-17 by the Motion Picture Association of America for its grisly mix of sex and violence. Particularly because of some of the scenes at the end, which grew progressively more realistic thanks to Stockwell’s work with special effects maestro Todd Masters.
Stockwell and his producers went back to the MPAA about a half-dozen times before they finally wrangled an R. For the filmmaker, it was an echo of his previous struggles to move from an initial R rating to the preferred PG-13. Although contrary to Internet rumors, he says Jessica Alba’s derriere was not digitally disguised to soften the sheen of Into the Blue.
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Jessie McCarthy/WireImage.com
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Co-star Olivia Wilde
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“Carving up [someone in Turistas] wasn’t an issue, but breasts being bared was,” Stockwell reveals. “If you mix sexuality with violence, the MPAA gets very unnerved. If it's just straight on violence, like someone chopping someone’s head off, that’s okay. But if someone’s showing their breasts at the same time or there’s anything vaguely sexual, it makes everyone more anxious.”
Recently, Stockwell dabbled for the first time in TV directing via the Showtime series The L Word, work that involved girl-on-girl oral sex and another provocative love scene with Cybill Shepherd. Meanwhile, he’s since moved across the pay cable dial to HBO Picturehouse for his next feature project. Based on a Rolling Stone article entitled “Kid Cannabis,” it's all about a group of kids who smuggle marijuana from Canada into the United States.
Stockwell has also tried to put together a pair of TV pilots both set in Hawaii, a lush locale that he remains obsessed with. And, he says, he would say yes to directing a Sopranos or Entourage episode in a New Jersey minute.
“It’s strange how people experience horror movies,” Stockwell suggests. “There were people who told me [about Turistas], ‘I loved your movie. I couldn’t watch most of it,’ or, ‘I loved your movie. I watched it through my fingers.’”
“Some people enjoy that kind of moviegoing experience. It’s not what I enjoy personally, but as a director, I do want to try different things. It’s all about exploring different audiences and shaking it up.”
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