Inside Secrets: Chuck Russell Reveals Untold Stories Behind Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx’s Iconic Film Collateral
Ashely
Gotcha. So let’s dig into your latest film, which board which you directed and co-wrote maybe to start out and just give us a quick pitch or logline. What is this project all about?
Chuck Russell
It’s another, look, to me, it’s the third in my little personal trilogy of reinventing horror classics. If you count Elm Street 3, which we had to reinvent that, New Line wanted us to take the whole series back on track because Wes’s was genius. Elm Street 2 wasn’t that big of a success. And they said, what can we do to refresh in this? So Elm Street 3, which was very successful at the time, the blob which we completely reinvented and did some amazing physical effects, which were very difficult at the time. I’m laughing thinking about the days on the set with the full scale blob was not easy. And Witchboard is really everything I wanted to do in horror really one last time. It is a wonderful property. It was a hit in the 80s. It was the original Ouija board movie. And I wanted to make it about pendulum boards because I’ve been fascinated with pendulum boards, predated Ouija boards. Women were getting burned at the stake for having pendulum boards. They were outlawed by the Pope. So they were very, the church was very concerned about them at a certain point. And that is the birth of Ouija boards. They had to get rid of the pendulum in the board and they began to to seek spirits and information through the straight up alphabet with the planchette. So maybe that’s a little technical, but this is what I love the pendulum. It’s very cinematic. I couldn’t believe it hasn’t been in anybody’s movie that I’m aware of ever. And it goes all the way back to ancient Egypt. So it’s a very powerful occult device. It’s used to put curses, blessings, raised spirit, and it even crosses over into divination for water. That was one of the big purposes of the pendulum. So look, taking that story with a group of friends wanting to open a bistro restaurant in New Orleans. I loved that period of time after college and the original movie had a cast of this age. There’s a time right after college where we have our best friends and we’re just starting out in the world. I love that as a palette. And the witch board ends up being a portal to another world, another time. And the fun for me was I got to shoot in Montreal. So we did the witch portion of the story in the 1700s, all in France, which was authentic to the witch trials. So you’ll see Madison Iseman, Jamie Campbell Bauer from Stranger Things, Aaron Dominguez, and a wonderful young cast. And it’s dangerous and fun. And number one, it’s scary as hell.
