MOTHMAN's
Mark Pellington
THE MOTHMAN PROPHCIES is one of the better supernatural thrillers of the new millennium. Based on a supposedly non-fiction book by John A. Keel, the Richard Hatem's screenplay details the strange events that befall journalist John Klein (Richard Gere) after the untimely death of his wife in an automobile accident. In some inexplicable fashion, Klein finds himself two years later in the small town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, where there has been a rash of sightings of an elusive, frightening figure, sketches of which bear a startling similarity to drawings made by Klein's wife just before she died in the hospital. The film was directed by Mark Pellington (Arlington Road), who appeared after a 2002 screening of the film in Hollywood and made the following comments on the subject of translating the story to the screen:
QUESTION: DESCRIBE THE SOURCE MATERIAL AND HOW THE FILM DIFFERS:
MARK PELLINGTON: I'd say [the film was] 'inspired by true events.' John Keel wrote a book in the mid-'70s called The Mothman Prophecies, which was really a chronicle of these events. The main true catastrophic event was the collapse of the Silver Bridge -- it really did collapse one night before Christmas. The town had been plagued over a thirteen month period with strange phone calls, sightings of weird creatures'a plethora of strange, paranormal, odd events. You would have had to make a five-hour film to put all of Keel's book, but I think what Richard Hatem did that was really brilliant was he took Keel's non-fiction book and created a narrative framework for the film. He invented the character of John Klein as the engine to drive through. He composited different characters together, really made it a character piece, and let us follow [Richard] Gere through the film to experience these things.
HOW DID YOU BECOME INVOLVED IN THE PROJECT?
I had had a previous, positive successful relationship with Lakeshore [Entertainment], Tom Rosenberg, Gary Lucchesi, and Richard Wright; I had made my two previous films for them, and right as we were finishing Arlington Road, they gave me Richard's first script. I passed on it at the time, because I wanted to see how Arlington Road would do and decide what I wanted to do. To make a long story short, they came back. They had been trying some different avenues of which way this movie could go, because this movie could go a lot of different ways: you could make it more overt, make it more of a creature movie. When I signed on, I said, 'Let's just start fresh. Let me bring in a couple of friends of mine, Ernie Marrero and Lewis Clarke. Let me see if we could do our draft in a month.' It was very much inspired by and building upon the original house that Richard had built, but we decided, 'Let's remodel a little bit.' I was interested in not making a creature movie; I was interested in making a movie about subjectivity and perception and fear. I said, 'If we can not show the Mothman at all, it will be a success.' So we kind of shaped it, put in a lot of these ideas that felt right to me. They responded to it; Gary and Tom liked it. They went back to Richard [Gere]; he signed on, and we went from there.
ALTHOUGH THE FILM CONTAINS EXCELLENT VISUALS, MUCH OF THE TERROR IS SUGGESTED THROUGH SOUND.
The sound design was one of the reasons I did the film. When I first read the script, there were the phone calls and all of the implied threat via sound. We hired a sound designer before we hired a d.p. [director of photography] -- that should give you a sense of how important sound was in the film -- a fantastic French sound designer, Claude Letessier, who had done Thin Red Line. James McQuaide, one of the producers, said 'There's this guy who's fantastic.' We met him, and his ideas about sound merged really well with the ideas the composer, tomandandy [Tom Hajdu and Andy Milburn], who I've worked with for years. The editor, Brian Berdan, also had a huge input into the sound construction, and I'm quite proud of it.
WERE YOU TOTALLY LOCKED INTO THE SCRIPT, OR DID YOU EMBELISH DURING SHOOTING?
We never went into any one day saying, 'Oh, what are we going to do today; let's wing it.' There was some experimentation in the motel room, because we shot for nine days at the end. I actually sat and showed Richard and Laura the film -- everything that had been assembled up to that date. So the scene of him smashing his head into the mirror, we were able to invent. Gary Lucchesi, one of the producers, had an idea and said, 'We need another scare.' That's where we came up with the idea of him rolling over in bed and finding Debra there. That was a challenge thrown out to me, and I came up with that after a couple of days. So there was a little bit of invention, but for the most part we had pretty well designed it.
WAS THERE STUDIO PRESSURE FOR CLEARER RESOLTUION?
No. We tested it a couple times. We made a couple little tweaks after the first focus group. I'm all for showing it: you have to show it to an audience; you have to sit there and see, 'They're bored here.' The main questions: we tweaked the Alan Bates scene, put back in a few things that we had taken out, to answer a couple of questions. But no, I think the lack of tying it all together, the ambiguity of it, was something that appealed to them and appealed to me, because once you start tying up everything and answering every question for these people, you're going to alienate everybody else who doesn't want it [spelled out]. There's a lot of people who think she didn't have to say 'Wake up, Number 37' [a reference to the number of victims predicted for the bridge collapse]. They got it. For every person that gets it, there's someone who doesn't it. You just make these judgment calls and hope that you're doing the right thing.
WERE THERE ANY DELETED SCENES?
There are going to be five deleted scenes on the DVD. Three of them, we shot knowing that pacing-wise, rhythm-wise, they could probably go. One was an early scene at a church where Lucinda [Jenny, the actress playing the wife of Gordon Smallwood] is concerned about Gordon [Will Paton], but when you?re editing, you go, 'Omigod, she conveyed that with one look in the house at the beginning.' So scenes that you thought worked, you didn't need.
WHAT DID AUTHOR JOHN KEEL THINK OF ADAPTATION?
He's a really kind, smart man. He really liked the movie. He really felt that the film captures the spirit and the intention of his book. He felt that Gere's unraveling mirrored his own unraveling. He said, 'Yeah, you can't put everything in there.' But he was pleased. He doesn't seem to be the kind of guy who would blow smoke up my ass. He was pretty much like, I figured if he had hated it, he would have said that. So that was nice. The same thing with Richard Hatem: he wrote me a nice letter. You always want a major respect for writers; you always want to respect the original source.
WHAT DO YOU THINK THE APPEAL OF THE SUPERNATURAL IN ENTERTAINMENT IS.
I love horror films; I've loved supernatural films in the past. I wouldn't have said I was a huge fan or I'm totally into it; I never really saw The X-Files. I don't know what kind of movie this is. Is it supernatural? Is it science-fiction? Is it psychological thriller or mystery? Or is it a combination of all of them? I'm interested in mystery and the unknown and in fear, and I think that those ideas are always going to be relevant in the theatre. I'm really just in awe of the power of cinema -- in a darkened room, people having this experience. Theres always going to be movies like that, because there's always going to be things in the real world that mystify us, that make us feel like 'What the fuck is going on, and why are we here?' That's why we listen to music or look at art or come to films that maybe entertain us or get us through it or maybe point us in a way toward our own experience that can make us just survive.
