Wrong Turn 2 director Joe Lynch

I know. It’s the weirdest thing. You say to yourself, “Alright, all I’ve got to do is do that one video that’s a few hundred thousand dollars and that puts you in that higher echelon but then when you get there even those guys are going, “Back in the day we were doing coke off chicks’ tits between shots and every video was a million dollars. That heyday is gone.” But the networks still need the programming and the labels and bands are still there so despite the fact that there’s no money for it, you still try to make them as cool and creative as possible. So I’m out in Tokyo I’m doing this show called Street Fury which is this crazy drifting show and my manager, Luke Rivet, at Anonymous Content, heard about this project and they were looking for a director. I had just come in from a 12 hour shoot. I sat down at my computer and my instant messenger icon comes up. It is my manager Luke and he goes, “Did you ever hear of Wrong Turn?” I was one of the five people that saw the movie in the theaters. Anytime a horror movie comes out, good, bad or otherwise, more likely than not I’ll see it. You almost want to support the scene no matter what. It’s like supporting your favorite band. I went to see Wrong Turn more for Sam Winston than I did for it being a horror movie. I liked it because it was more brutal than I thought it was going to be. Luke goes, “There’s a script for Wrong Turn 2, would you be interested?” When you’re in my position it is an extremely hard, uphill battle. So I thought to myself, “Fuck it, what, what do I have to lose here?” I’m on this train going from Tokyo to Osaka and I read the whole script on that trip and what was funny is that it wasn’t particularly different but I liked all the blueprints that it laid out. “Ok, I can do something with this. I know I have a shot in hell because there are probably 15 guys that are going for this with much more qualifications than me.” So I figured I would just pitch them what I would want to see in a horror movie. I sat up there reading the script going, “Ok, if I were sitting in the theater and I saw the opening scene has a girl that’s going to get killed a particular way.” But in the script it just cuts to black. I’m sitting there going, “Wait a second, even Dead Alive succumbed to that easy title card transition where a guy’s about to get split in half “Ungah!” and then cuts it to the title. I’m going, “I want to see that effect and let that linger while the titles go.” I sat there as the 12 year old kid who read Fangoria and Gorezone going, what would I want to see in a movie like this? That’s when I just started getting more excited about it. Even down to the casting. I was on that train reading the script and when I got to Dale Murphy I went “That’s fucking Henry Rollins right there but he would never do this movie. No fucking way but if I was casting this I would want a Henry Rollins type.”

So I get back to the States and I tell Luke, let’s fucking try. They sent my reel over and they actually said “wow, let’s see what you’ve got.” So I had three days to come up with a presentation. So I came in with this fucking 13 page thesis paper on how exactly I wanted to shoot it, the approach that I wanted, the influences I had, three pages of casting and I spent the whole weekend with this great storyboard artist named Ken Perkins who actually did my new website. I meet [Vice President, Production for Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment] Tom Siegrist and he looks at me and my huge poster boards and says, “Holy shit, someone came prepared.” What was great was that Tom is also a horror movie fan so when I would say something like Man Bites Dog or Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 or even Cannibal Holocaust he would go “I get you.” Not, “I’ll have to look on IMDB later and see if I know exactly what you’re talking about.” It was great. I know that I wasn’t tops on the list but I guess I said something right because next thing I know they’re like “let’s do this.” I went in there saying, “This script can be a really fun but the one thing that I wanted to make sure of was this has to feel like a fan film without it being winking to the audience and it has to have some connection to the first film.” If you have any sequel that comes out and it doesn’t have a connection to the mythology, fans feel disappointed. I wanted to make a fans’ horror movie. I want to make a lament to the splatter films of the 80’s. I want this box up next to the first one and feel like someone can watch both of them and feel they are connected. But I’m also pushing to get the film called Another Wrong Turn.

That was heartbreaking because I got to admit I was disappointed because he made iconic characters out of those three hillbillies in the first one. I sent a nice letter to Stan saying that I have all the respect in the world for the first film and I don’t want to piss fans off. I never heard back from him but he’s a busy man.

As an effects makeup aficionado I sat there and racked my brain going, “Alright, who could I get?” I couldn’t work with an effects house that didn’t take this seriously and they had to want to push the boundaries of what we could do with the time and money we had. The script was pretty ambitious in terms of it’s scope. The first film was almost like a Ten Little Indians thing where they would just whittle down characters. In this one we have three different sets of characters. We were trying to do a bigger film on a smaller budget so we said “We got to make sure that the money is allotted and stretched as far as it can to put as much on screen as possible.” That was why we shot in Canada. We made sure that our effects houses and everybody involved were from Canada. I really couldn’t believe how many great people were up there in Canada so I would shoot in there again in a fucking heartbeat. I figured that if I have to work in Canada I wanted Bill Terezakis on makeup. I knew of Bill’s work on Freddy vs. Jason, Final Destination II and X-Men 2. To me he is like the Canadian KNB [EFX Group]. Next thing I know I’m meeting him and he’s going “I want to do your movie.” I’m going “Fuck yeah; you are going to do my movie.”

Once Bill and I hooked up creatively we had about a month of designing the cannibal family before we got to the set. I would bounce around these different pictures and ideas so I would send him pictures of aborted fetuses and human mutations that I found on the net. I really wanted to add some reality to this because the lead mutant in the [remake of] The Hills Have Eyes looked like Sloth [of The Goonies]. Bill was on the same wavelength of trying to make these characters look as realistic as possible with them having sunburns and skin damage not just cake on a lot of latex to make them look like mutants. Bill is a mad genius but he’s also one sick son of a bitch and to make him sick was a goal that I needed to achieve.

Everybody knew right off the bat was that the script itself wasn’t a scare fest. My approach was that the first film was more Alien and this film is more Aliens. Fox knew right off the bat that for a sequel you have to up the ante a lot and one of the things that everyone remembers from the first Wrong Turn is that amazing axe kill that Three Finger does to Emmanuelle Chriqui. It is it like when you say Friday the 13th Part III to a fan and they instantly know the best kill is when the guy is upside down and gets cut in half. Every time I would come up with something disgusting like the “axe wound” scene. I’d describe it and they would be like, “That is absolutely fucking disgusting.” But I never once heard “that’s too much” or “We’ll never be able to do that.” They knew that we needed to satiate the fans and as a fan I would be disappointed if there wasn’t more blood or if there wasn’t at least one kill that you could walk away going, “That was fucking crazy.” I think we have a couple that will please those sick bastards out there. But Fox was totally supportive right from the get-go. Any time I would add a story note that was really gross more likely than not they would say, “Ok, let’s see how we can get it done.”

Honestly I never set out to make your typical direct to video movie. In terms of the visual strategy and the scope, I wasn’t making a story that was designed for the TV ratio. I remember shooting these very big, wide shots of things and people were coming up and going, “This isn’t really TV friendly.” I went, “I’m not making a TV movie.” Of course, whether it goes to theaters or not, it’s going to have its real life on DVD. I want people to watch it and go, “Holy shit, why wasn’t that in theaters?” Whether it goes to theaters I honestly don’t know. I’m hoping for the best but frankly I think the film is going to really pop and sing on DVD no matter what because then you don’t have to worry about the constraints of the MPAA and you don’t have to worry about particular marketing. It would be great to see this in a theater with people but at the same time it’s not imperative that it does.

Matthew Currie Holmes is playing this ambitious director who’s been given a shot at a project that’s a little over his head [laughs]. I kept thinking of a cool way to kill him because in the original script his death was a little hazy. So I thought, what’s the greatest death that a director could have and we came up with this idea that he would actually die on camera. Through a very convoluted series of events he actually does and one of the best compliments that I could have had on the set was that people were getting really unnerved and really sick watching his death.
I think people are going to really dig that kill. It’s a shame the picture of Matthew’s head already came out on the net so it’s not going to be a big surprise how he dies but I think the presentation of his death is going to get me into a little trouble. These recent beheadings like Daniel Pearl and all these other guys have infected the internet. You watch those and you think, “I can’t fucking believe what I just saw.” That really affected me and I thought that “if there is a way for me to bottle a tenth of that feeling, without being exploitive, where you’re actually disturbed and you’re actually affected by it, then that’s good safe danger which is what a horror movie is about. It’s not just about jumps, it’s not about black cat scares, it’s about giving you that sense of disturbance, unnerving you and putting you in a position where your skin crawls.

I know in my heart that I made Henry Rollins a total badass in this film. Not that he wasn’t a badass before, but he and I are both pretty proud with what we did with Dale Murphy. He came in and said, “I know this Marine. I know a lot of these guys.” He’s done so much for so many people in the military that it was very important for him to not make this character a caricature. He wanted to have fun with the part but at the same time make him somewhat real.

My cinematographer, Robin Loewen, and I would sit there watching Henry Rollins kick the shit out of a mutant and we’re looking at each other going, “Did you ever think that you would be in the middle of the fucking rain watching Henry Rollins and a fucking hillbilly mutant duke it out?” Henry was so gracious on the set and he took it as serious as he needed to take it. Then there was the thing with the maggot.

On the second day of shooting Henry had four pages of dialogue right in a row. The character is explaining off the rules of the reality show and the entire cast is around him. So we spent all day doing this and Henry was a total, no pun intended, trooper. He would just roll these fucking lines out with all this power and all this fucking energy and the times he would fuck up he would look at everybody and go, “I’m really sorry.” But everybody was supporting him. It was fucking great. In between setups I saw Henry just over by Daniella [Alonso] and Crystal [Lowe] chatting it up. I walk over and he’s saying “Oh maggots aren’t a big deal, check this out.” He picks up this maggot and puts it in his mouth and starts chewing. I was like, “Oh my fucking God.” The girls are just like, “Oh my God.” This is the second day of shooting so people are still feeling each other out. I put my hand out and said, “Henry, give me that maggot.” So I swear to God he just looks at me with these little puppy dog eyes and he spits half of a maggot into my hand. Now the crowd is now circling and they’re all going, “What the fuck is going on?” I go, “Thank you” and then I pop the rest of the maggot into my mouth and chew it up. The entire fucking set just lost it at that point. Now I can vouch that I shared a maggot with Henry Rollins.

Well never once on set did we hold back because we wouldn’t get an R rating. We have so many disgusting scenes, just to give you a taste, we have a human smoothie. I always knew that there was going to be a chance of a gorier version on DVD. So I would rather go bigger and then whittle my way back. There are certain things that we couldn’t shoot because of time or money but I would hope that we get an NC-17.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

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