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Mark Redfield (Part 2) Go back to Part 1 of this long interview
"It is a digital picture. Most of everything that we have right now is digital. That helped us a great deal with the budget. Cold Harbor, the drama, was shot on film, so things are kind of a mix right now. What we’re planning for 2003, the horror pictures are primarily digital." Where has Jekyll and Hyde been shown, apart from Manchester? "We completed the picture - and this is fascinating - and we sent a rough to Gil. He responded relatively quickly - and I don’t know why that surprised, whether it was politeness or he liked it. From the moment the sound mix and the film was finally completed, it was a matter of weeks before the Manchester festival. So we got that finished just in time because he liked it and accepted it. So Manchester was first. “Then a few weeks later - it seems that everything has been happening in four-week increments since then - it was shown in Los Angeles at another festival called Shriekfest where it also won. It won two awards there, including something they did for me called the Shriekfest Award for my hyphenate status as an actor/producer/director. They had also - and I didn’t know this until a week before Shriekfest - accepted another film that I played the lead in, a science fiction picture called Despiser which a fellow named Philip Cook made. That’ll be on video sometime in the Spring. There’s no date for that either. He went ahead and signed a contract for American and European distribution. I don’t know what else he’s got at this point but I know sometime in the Spring it’ll be out. There is no date yet for Jekyll. “Then we did our premiere. We missed a deadline. There’s this new thing, the New York City Horror Festival, that some folks are doing. They started as film-makers. It’s funny, we missed the deadline but they e-mailed us on the day of the deadline to tell us we didn’t make the deadline, so I’m not sure what that was about. Then in November we had our Maryland premiere here in Baltimore. Everybody of course had been hearing about things and wanting to see it. Other than that, we have sneaked it at a couple of horror conventions on the East Coast and we’re continually being asked: would you show it? So we’re probably not going to do any more festivals at this point, we’re just going to wait and see what the release date on television and video will be - which will be sometime this year." So have you got video distribution sorted out? "We are now sorting that out. Actually just before Christmas we were presented with three offers so we’re seeing what happens now between now and February. There’s the AFM in February. Now that the holidays are over and people are getting back to business and can look at the film, we’re giving it some more time, seeing which might be the best company to go with. But how this thing works: there might be five different contracts for all the territories in the world as we work on this throughout the year."
"It is and it isn’t. The internet and digital are the great levellers. Where, ten years ago, if you took a stick and threw it five miles you could hit another film-maker, well gosh, you could drop it outside your door now and there’s someone who is thinking about picking up a digital camera and doing something. There is so much going on everywhere. So there are more people working in Maryland right now - and I think that’s the same everywhere. There are friends of friends who are talking about things everywhere. “One of the things that we do to help pay the rent at the studio is design and build props and sets for commercials or for other films or special events. There’s the whole thing of a corporation wanting to do some sort of theme party. But there are a lot of film-makers nowadays; nobody you’ve heard of yet, some of them just like me. Maybe they’re coming up and coming out and we’re just getting to know people. Obviously if you go to New York, two and half hours from me, it’s much fiercer and there’s a lot of people up there. But I’m very close to DC, only thirty minutes from DC. So all of a sudden, exponentially, you’ve got people trying to do independent film there. So it’s interesting how it has sort of exploded, certainly in the last five years. “And in distribution, in the film world, digital has become accepted. It’s because of Lucas pushing and the fact that Rodriguez on the higher-end Sony 24fps video did Spy Kids 2, technically on video. Distributors are coming round to it. I think the festivals were the ones who tipped that over because there was a time just recently when they didn’t want to project anything on video, you had to have a print. That’s all gone, that’s all changed. So I think once the cue starts to come from the distributors and the festivals, all of a sudden people are empowered and they’re saying: ‘I’m going to make a film.’ I’m just seeing a lot more people. I’m getting calls from film-makers, saying: ‘What advice can you give me? I’ve been reading about you. What’s going on?’ “Hotbed, I don’t know - but there are more than I thought would have been in Maryland. And of course Blair Witch sort of comes out of Maryland. I think that also empowered a lot of people who maybe could put the equivalent of $5-10,000 together. That might make a good demo but believe me, a lot of the films - and I’m sure you see a good number of them, and this is not trying to be cheeky because I do know where Jekyll lives on the scale - but I’m seeing a lot of terrible stuff. Because five or ten thousand dollars doesn’t really do anything. Everybody has such great ideas. Or they’re making a zombie picture which they think is manageable and it really isn’t!" The crucial thing in any Jekyll and Hyde film is the make-up. Where did you get yours? "I had tried to get a production off the ground called Conjuring Aurora which is in production. It’s a comedy about a guy, played by me, who’s a magician who dreams of the big time. He dreams of the Vegas thing, the television thing, the Lance Burton thing - but he’s doing children’s parties and he lives in his van. He’s at the lowest end of his tether and through a series of circumstances, helping a friend out, he runs into a woman who dumps an eleven-year-old girl on him, who claims to be his daughter. Well, this shocks him no end. And they spend the film trying to find Lucy, the mother, and are they really father and daughter? “I had thought of this a few years ago. I had a little girl who played Tiny Tim to my Scrooge, and her mother was my attorney at that point! And this kid was fabulous, just charming. This brewed and I came up with a little story. She has since graduated from college. So I thought about it. I saw another little girl, watching a piece of theatre a few years ago, and that kind of reminded me of the story. Then along came The Sorcerer of Stonehenge School. To make a long story short, there is a sequence at the end of the script when my character is supposed to jump 40 years into the future. So I hunted around and I found Robert Yoho.
“Well, when I originally set the film up of course we didn’t make it, but I had met Bob and Bob stayed in the back of my mind. He was the first person I called and he said, ‘Of course I’m going to do it!’ On stage, I didn’t really do anything, I just changed the vocal and the physical and mussed my hair up. I had a dentist make a set of teeth and that also helped impede my speech to a degree. I played with a lot of rolling my Rs and melodramatic things with Hyde. So we got talking about him. “The first thing that went out the window, the first thing we agreed on, Bob and myself, was to get away from the primitive primate idea. Remember that for a number of years you couldn’t see the Frederick March version. When we were growing up it was the big mystery: why did they take it off the market. But everybody saw the photographs in Famous Monsters of the ape-like make-up. That’s the first thing out the window - we just don’t even go there. Then I think in talking about him, the key for me in some ways - and it doesn’t come up too obviously - is not the idea that he drinks the potion. Like the Tweety and Sylvester, where Tweety drinks the potion and becomes this other Tweety. I think the idea is that Jekyll drinks the potion and drops his mask. That’s what’s underneath. So we said: why don’t we think of a satyr, think of the Devil, and think of the Joker? Think of the medieval image of a grinning devil. And there’s one idea of taking that to its conclusion that didn’t fully get realised. In hindsight, when you’ve lived with a picture, you say, ‘Oh, there are all these little things I would have liked to have done.’ One, for instance: in setting it in 1900 and pulling in some of the modern technology, I really, really wanted, in hindsight, to put a 1900 automobile in Jekyll’s laboratory.” What was the make-up idea that didn’t get realised? “Some of the sketches actually have these bony horn things that have broken through the skin. It looks like a big zit on his forehead. But if you look carefully that’s actually starting to happen; there’s this white breakthrough on the other side as the ridge begins to build up. So we pulled back and that’s as far as we got. Stage three. Because some of the sketches have this kind of horn coming out. Perhaps I was a little nervous about that. In such a rapid conclusion, in the dark, people might say: ‘What the hell is that? Is that a piece of banana stuck on his head?’ I was really worried that we wouldn’t know what it was without him suddenly getting cloven hooves or something. We pulled that back but that’s really the idea; it’s his psychological side, it’s dropping that mask and then fantasising that. Well, if it went to its extreme, he’d have horns. It’s very, very subtle. The prosthetics just help pull his face. Even when he’s grimacing I’m trying to do it while physically staying grinning, but the prosthetics help that.” Go back to Part 1 of this very long interview where Mark Redfield discusses the origins and funding of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Official website: www.redfieldarts.com | ||
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