The Devil's Rock
Sunday, October 16, 2011 at 10:01PM Nexus got to talk with Gina Varela, who plays the demonic entity causing havoc in the New Zealand made horror film, The Devil’s Rock. Born in Wellington and raised in Greece, Gina has played parts in New Zealand films and TV for the past 10 years, including the role of Donna in The Market, a South Auckland take on Romeo and Juliet. Now she’s back, this time on the big screen and this time playing the ultimate in sexy evil.
What scares you?
All kinds of things. Dolls, sharks and coming home alone to a dark, empty house with images of a scary movie playing in my mind. I sometimes get so frightened that I’m scared stiff! Completely self inflicted but very real at the same time.
Can you remember the first time you felt afraid while watching a movie?
I saw a LOT of late 70’s and 80’s horror when I was growing up. Too much, too soon some might say but it has certainly given me a real appreciation for the genre as an adult. I think my earliest memory of feeling terrified was about age 5 and watching Jaws on TV. I was so disturbed that even the water in the toilet freaked me out for weeks! Linda Blair, Freddy Krueger and that little punk Chucky all took turns at terrorising me over the years though.
Who are the people in the film industry that inspire you?
People who just get out there and make films, tell stories and shake things up a bit. I love Tarantino and Rodriguez. Jonathan Levine (the writer/director behind a little film called The Wackness) and if I could mirror any acting career it would be the awesome Marisa Tomei’s career.
What aspects of the Nazi mythos make it such good fodder for horror films?
The Nazi’s provoke such an extreme reaction in people, their obscene thirst for power and seriously skewed view of this world. If you do a little research you read about the wacky fanatics that were all around Hitler. People like Heinrich Himmler, a crazed chicken farmer completely obsessed with the occult and harnessing its power. The whole thing is so gravely unsettling.
In your new film you play the devil made manifest as a beautiful woman. What do you think it would be like to meet the devil?
I imagine the temperature would plummet and all the air would get sucked out of the room. Evil, pure evil.
The devil is usually portrayed as a male character in both religious material and popular culture. As a female, what do you think you were able to bring to the role, and how is your portrayal different to those we’ve seen before?
Women have the capacity to be much more evil, calculating and vengeful in my experience “Hell hath no fury.... etc etc” I’m often cast as mean, maniacal characters which is a little worrying - think it has something to do with my black eyes! In the lead up to filming we had decided to keep her very still and controlled when she was in true Demon form. Paul Campion wanted something similar to The Queen Borg from Star Trek, extremely menacing and powerful in her stillness. There is some serious talk of a Devil’s Rock sequel and we’ll have much more time and money to really explore that Demon character. Fingers crossed!
As an actress, do you think that fear is an easier response to provoke in an audience than other emotions? Is fear more straightforward to manipulate than say despair or joy, or is that a simplification of why we get scared?
I actually think it’s the complete opposite! Joy, laughter, happiness and conversely despair are all more universal, simple and pure human emotions, while fear is far more multi faceted and quite unique to each individual. Sure, there are stock standard scary things like ‘the dark’, an assailant and say spiders but to really scare someone, to leave behind an iconically scary movie scene I think is a much harder feat.
New Zealand has an interesting horror pedigree with films such as Braindead and Black Sheep. What unique elements do you think New Zealanders bring to the genre?
Braindead was actually the first horror film I watched over.... and over.... and over again. I loved it! New Zealanders are just cool, they’re a little bit kooky and they have a real sense of fun and commitment to a project. Nothing is sacrosanct and this leads to a unique horror flavour. It’s a great place to make a horror film with some seriously talented folk (Kiwi’s and foreigners alike) at Weta Workshop which is the real secret weapon. Without doubt the crew on The Devil’s Rock was the best team I’ve had the opportunity to work with to date. More Kiwi horror for me please.
Paul Campion Interview
Paul Campion, director of The Devil’s Rock, is best known for his work on…. Well, just about any major film with special effects. From Avatar to Lord of the Rings, to Sin City and beyond, Paul has been killing it. This time around he’s created a film with Kiwi characters in it! At the height of WW2, in the days before the Normandy landings, two New Zealand SAS soldiers land on an island of the French coast to give the Germans some scares. When they arrive, they find a suspiciously low number of Germans and a LOT of scares.
What is the most horrifying scene in movie history?
For me it's actually a scene from Saving Private Ryan. There are some shocking moments in the final act, but the one that gets me every time is the fight to the death between the German soldier and the American Private Mellish, culminating in the German soldier slowly pushing a knife into Mellish's heart as he begs the German to stop. It still makes me feel physically queasy – there's no blood, it's not gratuitous, just painfully slow to watch, and the whole scene is made worse by having the second American soldier listening to the fight only feet away on the stairs, but being so scared he's unable to save Mellish.
Why did you choose World War 2 as a back drop to your film? Would it be as scary if say, terrorists were trying to unleash the same kind of evil into the modern world?
That would've been a completely different film – possibly similar to Frank Darabonts film of Steven King's The Mist, where the US military are conducting experiments and release monsters from another dimension. Our film was always meant to be based around WW2, the German occupation of the Channel Islands, the German fortifications there and the Bad Books, which are genuine books of witchcraft which really exist in the Channel Islands – I found one 250year old version in a vault in a library in Guernsey. That was the story we wanted to tell, weaving all those elements together.
You have worked in special effects for a lot of films that Weta have played a part in. Is it an easy transition to move from that and your work on short films in to creating, directing and producing a full blown feature?
For the technical side of filmmaking I think it was a fairly easy transition, as I'd spent 10 years working in post production, so I was already very familiar with the whole digital side of things, but it was a huge learning curve dealing with the live action side – particularly working with actors and learning how to work with the crew onset. There's also the side that people don't think about, which is the business side of filmmaking. You need to have a thorough understanding of the whole economics of filmmaking, how every decision you're making as a director will affect everything from raising the finance to where the money is spent making the film to how it's marketed and sold. You're making a product that has to be sold in a very competitive marketplace and learning how that side of things works was a huge eye opener.
To what degree do you feel that horror movies are becoming clichéd, blockbuster, teenzploitation time waster? Do you feel that modern horror is a shadow of its former self?
There does seem to be a trend to turn out lots of 'pg13' style horror films that are aimed primarily at teenagers and also the increasing trend for remakes, because it's easier to remake a film that already has a brand name and the marketing built in than to create something original – it's simply the economics of filmmaking – it's a lot harder to convince the public to watch something they've never heard of. The other issue though is it's just so much harder to come up with a new story these days – the horror genre more than any other has been thoroughly mined and audiences are so savvy now it's just so tough to tell a really original story.
I think perhaps the heyday was in the late 70's and 80's with Alien, Exorcist, The Thing American Werewolf in London, Nightmare on Elm Street, Evil Dead 1 & 2 , Hellraiser etc. There have been very few horror films since then that have had the same impact. I loved the whole Japanese horror movement – Ju-on, Ringu, Dark Water (all the originals, not the US remakes) – I think those have been the best thing to happen in horror films in the past couple of decades, but even then it's now been done and that bubble seems to have burst. The best film I've seen recently is the original Let the Right One in, which I think is a masterpiece, horrific, beautiful, funny and very poignant – it's definitely up there as one of the great horror films for me.
A lot of excellent media has been released over the past thirty years involving Nazi occultism (Indiana Jones, Wolfenstein, Dead Snow). Is this a movie trope that is here to stay?
Yes, I don't think they're going to go away for a long time. Everything has become so politically correct and it's harder and harder to find a group of bad guys that you can use as the enemy in a film without someone somewhere getting offended – except for the Nazi's – no one is ever going to get upset however badly they're portrayed.
Are Nazis inherently scary, even without all the supernatural aspects?
Absolutely frightening. The origins of the Nazi party go back to secret occult societies and the belief in the mystical powers of a pure Aryan race. To help prepare Matt Sunderland for his role as a Nazi occult expert in the film, I showed him some documentaries on YouTube about Nazi's and the occult and it's very frightening stuff –everything from Hitler's belief in finding mystical and religious artifacts that might help him win the war to the creation of baby factories – specially selected young women picked to breed with pure Aryan young men to create a genetically pure and physically perfect babies that would be brought up in isolation and brainwashed to become the master race on earth.
Although you've just released this film, do you have any other movie ideas you can hint at?
I'm currently writing two scripts with Paul Finch, who co-wrote The Devil's Rock. The first is called Scorpion Raiders, a WW2 true story about the Long Range Desert Group, a combined New Zealand and British special forces unit that operated in teams of heavily armed trucks deep behind enemy lines in the deserts of North Africa. I learnt about this particular unit while doing research for the Devil's Rock and specifically New Zealand's involvement in the war. This particular story is about a raid carried out by the Long Range Desert Group, who drove 2000kms across the most inhospitable desert on earth to attack and destroy an enemy airfield. The raid itself was a success but the escape turned into a near disaster, with almost all their vehicles destroyed and they had to escape back across the desert on foot. It's an incredible true story of bravery and heroism, very much Lawrence of Arabia meets Black Hawk Down.
The second project is called Dark Hollow, based on the novel by US horror author Brian Keene – it's a classic monster movie, about a satyr - a mythical half man half goat creature (like Mr Tumnus but evil and horny) that begins seducing and abducting the women of a small Pennsylvanian town and killing off the men who try to stop it.
Lastly we've just started talking about making a sequel to The Devil's Rock, which will be a little more mainstream – less talking, more action, characters, action and more demons.
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