I'm Scott Derrickson,
the writer and director of Deliver Us from Evil.
I'll start off, actually, by talking about these logos.
This Bruckheimer logo here, which I've always liked,
has no name on it,
because I did not want any names at the beginning of the movie.
I just wanted to go straight into the picture.
So Jerry took his name off of that
so that we could have a clean logo for the opening.
This was shot in Abu Dhabi.
It was 115 degrees the day that we filmed
these aerial shots and the shots on the ground,
so when the actors are running in this scene,
they're running in full combat... real combat gear
in 115 degree weather,
and it was brutal.
But it was a financially-motivated thing, shooting in Abu Dhabi.
We got a really good deal, a really good rebate there, and a good crew,
and we were able to shoot this whole sequence,
which was not affordable any other way.
That's why we did it there.
I wrote the original draft of what was called at the time Beware the Night.
I wrote it with my writing partner, Paul Harris Boardman,
and we wrote the first draft in 2004, I think it was,
and then three writers re-wrote the script
over the next seven or eight years.
And it wasn't until after I had made Sinister
and Sony came to me asking what I wanted to do next
and I told them about this project,
that this movie was revived, and this project was revived.
And I took the original draft that Paul and I wrote,
I read all the drafts,
and then I wrote a new draft.
I wrote a draft that was
updating a lot of things and rearranging a lot of things.
Jerry always felt that the movie needed an origin story
for the demon that is present in Santino.
What I liked about the idea in particular
was that I thought it had a lot of thematic resonance.
I like this, kind of, subtle idea
that possession is a kind of metaphor or analogy
for post-traumatic stress disorder.
I was one of those people who is vehemently against the Iraq War
from the get-go.
Never supported the invasion, think that it was an evil act.
And the number of civilians that were killed
is obviously a horrendous statistic.
Even though we lost a lot less soldiers than we did in Vietnam,
I think there's a real psychic damage that this war's done to this country,
and so the idea that these soldiers,
God loved these soldiers who went and fought this war.
So many of them bring back the pain and the trauma,
and post-traumatic stress disorder is a real epidemic in this country
from the two million-plus soldiers that cycled through that war.
So I like the idea of having some thematic resonance on that front.
Where is it?
Shooting in the Bronx, this was a tough movie to shoot,
because the Bronx at night, it was a grueling shoot.
It was cold a lot of times, and then it quickly got really hot.
And this night, in particular,
Eric Bana said was probably
the most difficult night of shooting, physically, that he'd ever done,
just because he's wearing this leather jacket, and it's freezing out,
and he just could not get warm.
And I remember, when he took his jacket and shirt off
at the end of this shoot night,
he was blue.
I almost killed Eric Bana this night.
But there's a lot of texture
created by the Bronx in this movie.
I always wanted the movie to have,
specifically the Bronx as a character,
and so we worked hard at these locations.
We looked for the right alley,
added a lot of weather effects to them to also create texture.
This scene here is really the introduction of the characters,
of Sarchie and his partner, Butler.
I'll talk first about the real Ralph
Sarchie. People wanna know a lot about him.
He is a real guy, obviously. The movie is based on real events.
But I know Ralph really well,
and I spent time with him back in 2004,
and spent a lot more time with him as we were working on this movie.
And he became the cop adviser on the movie,
so he was on set almost every day
as the guy who would make sure that these guys, these actors,
held their guns right and cleared rooms correctly,
and he made sure that everything was properly represented.
What's interesting about Ralph, to me,
is really what an amazing cop he was, first and foremost.
When I spent time with him in New York
before doing the last draft of the script,
and I really got to talking to the cops
in the 46 precinct where he worked,
I was so impressed with
how highly he was regarded as a police officer.
Now, the 46 precinct is,
or was at the time, in the '80s and early-90's when he was a street cop,
it was the highest arrests...
The highest record of arrests for any precinct in the country.
The FBI actually called it,
"The most dangerous square mile in America."
And Ralph was a sergeant undercover for Special Ops
in what was called the Street Crimes Division.
He was the head of a group of six guys who were undercover cops,
who drove the streets of the Bronx in the 46 precinct
in this high, high crime area,
and they looked for crimes in progress.
They were basically trying to get in and stop crimes
that were presently occurring.
So they were constantly sweeping the most dangerous buildings
and just lurking in the most dangerous areas
and following leads and investigating cases.
And his stories are unbelievable.
The number of fights that he was in, he'd been shot, I think twice,
and the number of things that he had seen
and the evil that he had seen as a cop
was astonishing to me,
as I got to know him better
and got to know the officers that worked with him.
His partner at the time is now the captain of Times Square,
and I spent some time with him also.
And my respect for Ralph as a cop really went through the roof
as I got to know what he was capable of doing as an officer.
And then when that translated into
his work as a paranormal investigator, or an assistant to an exorcist,
just then he becomes almost mythically fascinating.
Now, this actor here, Chris Coy,
is an actor that I found
while I was producing a movie in New Orleans for the Weinstein Company.
And I went down there to help out on this
movie that was having a lot of trouble,
and Chris was an actor in it.
When I saw him work, I was very impressed with him as an actor,
but also just as a guy, as I talked to him.
He was just unique. He was an interesting guy.
And as I got to talking to him, I wanted to know more about him.
And he was pretty humble about it,
but he's an 11-time national champion in mixed martial arts,
and a three-time world champion.
I don't know exactly what the league is that he fought in or whatever,
but he is a very dangerous individual.
So I told him that I had a role for him, when I was in New Orleans,
and I had a role for the movie that I was about to make as a director.
He didn't really believe me,
but I offered him the role, never auditioned him.
Never auditioned anybody else for the role.
He just was Jimmy.
He seemed like the right guy to do it, did an amazing job.
I think he could be an action star because of his martial arts expertise.
One night, when we were shooting this scene, in fact,
the camera was sitting on him
as we were changing lights around,
and he picked up that baton and just absently started twirling it around.
And the way he was twirling it, it was
very clear that he is a lethal individual
and can probably take any of us on the set.
Or maybe all of us at once.
Now, this whole idea of Sarchie being kind of a tough, heavy-handed cop
who beats on his perps a little bit, more than he ought to.
Now, this is taken from the real Ralph Sarchie,
that he was a brutal guy, he was a tough guy.
He was mixing it up in an era
when cops were not as regulated as they were.
I think it's okay for me to say that.
But Ralph was very helpful and very accommodating
in that he was not worried about being represented wrong
or being represented poorly or being represented in a bad light.
There's a nice humility to him and a selflessness to him,
and he's very aware of his own faults.
He does have a real temper, I've seen it.
And he knows he's got one.
It's part of what made him effective at
his job, I would imagine, at the time.
And it's part of what makes him interesting.
He's a flawed individual, like I said before, an endlessly fascinating one.
Now, Edgar Ramirez
was the only actor that I went to for the role of Father Mendoza.
Now, the real priest
that Sarchie was mentored by, influenced by,
brought into the world of the paranormal and exorcism by,
was an Irish bishop in New York called Bishop McKenna
and also another priest named Father Malachi Martin,
who wrote the scariest book I've ever read called Hostage to the Devil.
Which is a detailed case of...
A detailed account of five cases of possession and exorcism.
So, Father Malachi Martin and Bishop McKenna
were the two major influences on the real Ralph Sarchie
in his own life, in his own journey into exploring
the paranormal or investigating the paranormal
and assisting with exorcisms.
And I just didn't wanna write the same old Irish priest, you know,
which Malachi Martin and Bishop McKenna kind of exemplified,
but I wanted to do something different.
So I combined those two people into one
character and made him Latin American.
I think there is a lot of religious baggage that falls away
once you make a priest a Latin American priest.
I think the new pope has certainly done a lot
for the Church in terms of making people see
that the Church can be more progressive than we sometimes think.
Now, this scene here is in the Bronx Zoo.
We are the first movie in over 30 years to shoot in the Bronx Zoo.
I think the last movie may have been Altered States,
which is about 30 years ago.
The Bronx Zoo just doesn't let people shoot there.
They're very protective of their animals.
They're very protective of their own image.
And it was because the movie was based on a real Bronx officer
and because the Bronx was featured so heavily and visually in the movie,
they felt that we were trying to pay homage to the Bronx
and celebrate this individual, which is true.
And their big caveat
was you can't misrepresent how we cage our animals
and how we...
You know, what their environments are like.
And so we went through great detail to show these bigger open spaces,
like that gate that you just saw right there,
there's a big open space behind, where the lions are kept.
They really do have a lot of room to run free.
But this is all actually the Bronx Zoo.
And it was creepy at night, I have to say.
When everything shut down, you hear all those animals.
The animals, some of them sleep, a lot of them don't.
And this carousel, when I saw it during our location scout,
I wrote this little beat for it.
Because when I saw this carousel with all these insects on it,
I thought, "This is just too great to not use."
So I created this little scare moment
with Joel McHale as a little comic moment.
And just kind of building up some of the suspense.
These kinds of suspense sequences like this, they're a little bit of a trick.
A trick that I'm pretty good at.
Just knowing how to shoot and how to stage a scene
and milk the proper amount of tension and suspense for moments
that the audience creates...
You create within the audience a sense that something's coming.
This is a small one, not a really major one.
But they all have the same structure to them,
a slow building tension,
and then an eruption of some kind of violence or shock or surprise.
And I think that in this case, it's less about...
That's not really intended to be a jump scare.
It's more just the weirdness of it all.
This actress here,
who plays Jane Crenna, Olivia Horton,
is a British-trained actress, if I remember correctly,
and she would do these amazingly emotional scenes where she's crying
and sometimes she's acting possessed and doing all this crazy stuff,
and as soon as you yell, "Cut", her face goes normal,
and she'll laugh between takes and then go right back into this.
There's no method acting,
no getting emotional in between takes, she didn't do that at all.
Jim Morrison.
- Yeah. - Doors.
Now, there's the first mention of The Doors in the movie.
The Doors become a running theme through the story.
Now, I knew that when I wrote the script
that The Doors music and the references
that we have for The Doors music
was gonna be incredibly expensive,
and I was so committed to it
that I made it a point of my deal that I would not sign my contract
and actually make the movie unless I was guaranteed
all use of Doors references in the script.
So, I think our production budget, I think, was around 18 million.
That's how much we spent actually making the movie.
All the rest of the money was for the producers and for the script fees
and rights and things like that.
But The Doors music, I think, added to that,
I don't know, maybe almost $2 million.
But I think it was worth it, because it's part of the story.
It's part of the storytelling,
and the use of the music, I think, is effective in the film.
Now, this section right here of the zoo, of inside of this den,
is not at the Bronx Zoo.
This was a set that was built by our production designer Bob Shaw.
Bob did a lot without a lot of money on this movie.
I think the movie looks a lot bigger than it actually is,
and that has a lot to do with Bob Shaw.
He gained that skill set working in television.
He was the Emmy Award-winning
production designer who created Boardwalk Empire,
the look for Boardwalk Empire that Martin Scorsese directed.
And I believe he won the Emmy for Mad Men also.
And he had done The Wolf of Wall Street as a production designer
just before doing this movie.
And it was...
it was a real pleasure working with him
because it was his ability to pull things like this off.
Now, these shots looking this way, that's at the Bronx Zoo,
the background is the zoo, this is a set,
so they were shot on different nights,
and you never see the two spaces really tied together.
These lions were quite a thing to be around,
I have to say, and to pull off visually
in the process of making the movie.
Now, Eric Bana, in playing Ralph Sarchie,
was the first person we made an official offer to on the movie, also.
And I've had pretty good luck with that,
with picking actors that I really wanna work with.
There were rumors that we made an offer to Mark Wahlberg.
Not true, never did that.
Even though I think Mark Wahlberg's an amazing actor.
What's unique to me about Eric Bana
is that he can play larger-than-life characters so well.
The role that he played in Chopper.
The character of Chopper,
one of the greatest performances I've ever seen.
He was amazing as Hoot in Black Hawk Down,
this kind of mythic character.
Nero in Star Trek, I think, is a role that he did so well.
People don't remember that it was him.
Of course, he was in makeup,
but he really carries half of the drama of that movie.
He was such a great villain.
And I just think that he's good with accents
and these kind of big, larger-than-life characters.
He's not afraid to do them.
He gets really into the character, gets really behind them.
And the other thing I'll say about Eric is that
may be the hardest-working actor I've worked with.
Every take is good to the end of the day.
He keeps his focus, he doesn't let up.
Never any unnecessary drama from him, which is always nice as an actor.
Now, this space here is not a real police station.
It was created...
The inside of this is created in a vacant room
in that building structure which you saw,
and it was created to look exactly like the 46 precinct.
So, if you walk in the 46 precinct in the Bronx,
what you'll see will look almost identical to this.
Same counter, same distance to the background,
same stuff on the walls.
And it was important to me to try to really capture
an authentic feeling of the Bronx.
There are worse ways to go.
Now, I'll say a few things.
I'm kinda working my way through the cast members, I know,
but I wanna get that out of the way first.
I wanna say something about Joel McHale in this movie.
I wrote the role for Joel.
Joel is my best friend in the world.
Has been for well over a decade.
I guess it's is going on 14 years now.
When he first moved from Seattle to Los Angeles,
he and I became very good friends, very fast.
So I knew him before he had an agent when he was driving around Los Angeles
trying to get into local plays for free.
And I've watched his entire career rise,
and he's watched mine at the same time.
And our families are very close.
I have two boys who are eight and 10 years old,
and he has two boys that are the same age.
And so we had kids at the same time, and so our families...
We spend almost every weekend together,
and I know Joel in a way, obviously, that other people don't.
He's very funny in his TV show Community, and as the host of The Soup
and the other various hosting jobs and movies that he's been in.
But the Joel that I know personally is so much like Butler.
And that's why I wrote the role for him, I struggled with the role.
The role seemed very pedestrian and non-interesting,
and I couldn't find an angle on the role that was working.
I liked the idea that he would be funny,
but even the kind of comedy I was trying to write for the role
wasn't really fitting the rest of the movie.
And I began to consider Joel, and I started thinking,
"What if Joel, instead of going into show business, went into the army?"
"Or went into the marines and became a marine and then became a cop?"
And this is who Joel would be.
I mean, there's a sociopathic side to Joel, there really is.
There's a violence to him. Well, first of all he's huge.
He's 6'4", he was a tight end for the University of Washington,
works out all the time.
And he has a knife fetish, he has hundreds of knives in his house.
Bayonets and lots of blades and...
He gave me a $6,000 Cold Steel blade for Christmas last year,
a blade that is specifically designed to kill people.
So, happy birthday, baby Jesus.
Here's my Cold Steel murder weapon.
But I think that he was very grateful to get this role,
because he was grateful to be able to come in
and show a little bit of a different side to himself.
He's always funny, he can't help himself,
but he would be a good cop.
And I've seen him when he really makes the turn
in that violent side.
Not angry, just kind of crazy side comes out.
And he's fierce, and so I buy him as a cop.
And he was a hard sell, the studio didn't get it,
Jerry Bruckheimer didn't really get it, nobody really wanted to hire him.
And they kept pushing other actors on me,
and I kept saying, "No", and I kept saying "No",
and nobody wanted to force anyone to do anything,
and eventually we were running out of time, and
I kind of won a war of attrition, I think,
because eventually we had to pick somebody,
and I made a few other concessions for the budget.
And I think doing that,
the studio was appreciative, Jerry was appreciative.
And they just said, "Okay, let's let him
have Joel and let's just trust him."
And as everybody started seeing dailies come in,
everybody could see that Joel was really working.
When we tested the film, we did quite a few audience tests,
and Joel scored very high.
I think he was typically the audience's favorite character.
Now, this location here is in the Bronx,
as are all the locations, and this is a real house,
and I picked this house because of the unusual hallway
that they're gonna walk down in a minute, it's so narrow.
Just take a look at how cramped it is,
you just don't see hallways like that in places other than the Bronx.
I mean, it's just very strange, the structural build of this house.
And this family is based on a real family
that Sarchie investigated.
Very much like this, that was an Italian family,
they weren't named the Alberghettis.
That's actually my agent's name, Adriana Alberghetti.
So I took her beautiful Italian name
and applied it to this family.
But he went and investigated this...
This family was having all kinds of
strange, paranormal occurrences happening.
Sounds that they were hearing all over the house, things moving,
and very, very bizarre experiences.
And Ralph showed me the video tape of his interviews with them,
and when he goes and investigates a person's house
who thinks there may be demonic activity,
he questions them and interrogates them in the same...
Not interrogates, that's the wrong word,
but he questions them in the same way that he does as a cop.
Which is, in the case of the family, it was a father and a mother,
and I believe a boy and a girl, a young
boy like this and then a teenage girl.
And he questioned all four of them individually.
Because he's looking for discrepancies in their story,
and he's asking lots of questions to see if there are any discrepancies,
because that's how you can find out if they're lying
or if they're making it up and trying to get attention.
Here's that ultra-narrow hallway that I love.
And when I saw the video tape...
I saw a lot of video tapes, which I'll talk about later, from Ralph.
But this video tape in particular was so compelling to me
because the family...
There was no evidence,
there was no visual evidence of the things that they were saying happened.
But I just knew that they believed it without any doubt.
They were scared. I mean, this was a family who was terrified,
and their stories are all lined up perfectly.
And I remember the teenage girl was chain smoking.
She was like 16, 17 maybe.
And as she began to tell the stories
her hands started trembling as she was talking,
and I just was so amazed at how frightened this family was,
how truly frightened they were, and they were embarrassed.
The father, in particular, was a shy man, kind of like this guy,
and he was really embarrassed to be saying the things that he was saying,
especially to an officer, to an NYPD officer.
But they had run out of options, they didn't know who else to talk to.
And I was so struck by it because I just knew that
they weren't making it up.
They weren't making up the fact
that something terrifying was happening to them.
And they seemed like such nice people and smart enough people
and certainly desperate people, and I felt for them.
I just felt lot of compassion for them.
Whatever was behind their experience,
they seemed like decent people, they seemed reasonable,
and they seemed to be telling the truth.
And you know, here is the thing about...
I'll say this, just philosophically,
about the paranormal and ghosts and the demonic and things like this.
I get asked a lot by reporters,
typically journalists doing reviews of my movies
and writing up pieces on the films that I work on.
I'm always asked about whether or not I believe in the paranormal,
if I believe in the demonic.
And even though words like supernatural,
I have some philosophical problems even with that term,
but yeah, I believe in these mysteries.
But I don't believe in them for the reasons that you might think.
I don't believe them because
I'm theologically predisposed to believe in them.
I have, I think, an open-minded enough view
of my own religious faith
that it could survive without belief
in the devil or the demonic or ghosts or any of that.
But what I have found is that
I really think that it's more reasonable
to believe in these things than not to.
It's my honest intellectual opinion.
I think that people believe in ghosts
not because they're religiously predisposed to believe in ghosts,
which is what skeptics are inclined to think.
I think people believe in ghosts because they've seen ghosts.
I think that anybody you ever meet will have either seen a ghost
or will know somebody credible who's seen a ghost.
Everybody you meet will have some kind of a paranormal story
or know somebody credible who has one.
And that's an awful lot of evidence.
That's millions and millions of testimonials.
And I think that preponderance of
evidence, and it is that, it is evidence,
is a kind of evidence that demands to be reckoned with.
And for that reason, I think a truly open mind
will admit that there is something going on,
beyond our scientific, materialistic view of the world.
And I think that it's actually the materialist skeptic
who has the dogma that shapes
his experience more than the mystic or religious person is.
The materialist skeptic who has to dismiss everything based on dogma.
Has to dismiss all these millions of testimonials out there in the world.
Every single one of them has to be disregarded
based on a certain kind of dogma
that I don't think deserves that much power or credit.
Just because something can't be reproduced in a lab
doesn't mean that it didn't happen or isn't real.
But let me also clarify
that I'm a huge admirer of science.
Love science, I read science.
I'm a dilettante,
but I do read hard science and try to stay up,
especially with what's happening in the world of quantum mechanics
and theoretical physics and that sort of thing.
Certainly have followed the Large Hadron Collider very closely.
Amazing, fascinating stuff.
And have the highest respect for the scientific view of the world.
Some of my best friends are materialist skeptics.
But I think that both science and religion
are kind of propagating the same view of the world
that they have everything figured out.
And science and religion are really the two major forces
that inform the way we see everything.
And both of them seem to kind of disparage the other,
and both of them claim to know more than they know, in my opinion.
They both say, "Hey, we don't have all the answers,"
"but we have theories that probably explain everything."
And I would rather celebrate the mystery of what we don't know
and acknowledge
that there is just so much more mystery in the world
than we are sometimes comfortable with.
And that mystery is important to me, it's
what makes the world feel magical to me,
and I think it's one of the reasons why I make movies.
Certainly one of the reasons why I make movies
about these kinds of things.
Because it helps keep alive within myself
a sense of the mystery and the magic of the world.
I think people who love a smart genre film, a smart supernatural thriller,
people who love a smart horror film,
and same thing with science fiction and fantasy,
they want to hold that mysterious sense of the world.
This was an apartment building that Ralph
had actually arrested several people in.
He had great stories almost on every floor of this building.
And I remember shooting this
and knowing the music was gonna be really critical,
and I told Christopher Young, our composer,
that I needed a distinctive piece of music for this scene
that didn't fit the rest of the film.
I wanted it to kind of be a standalone sound.
And he created this beautiful string melody,
which if you listen to the score here by itself,
it's actually extraordinary.
It's one of my favorite pieces of music
that's ever been put in any of my films,
and I think it carries this scene,
and yet it's not invasive or intrusive, it's quite subtle.
And yet, the difference between the scene with that score
and the scene before that score is incredible.
This scene was one of the lesser interesting scenes in the movie
until Chris nailed that piece of score.
And he's the same composer I did
both Emily Rose and Sinister with.
So, this is my third adventure into scariness.
And I called this a supernatural thriller...
Audiences, when we tested the movie unanimously,
said it's more of a supernatural thriller than a horror film.
I take that as a compliment.
Because I think a lot of times
general audiences are kind of disparaging of the word "horror."
That it doesn't signify quality, which is not true,
but I think it is a consensus belief.
But I also do think that my target for this movie
that I was trying to hit,
was more of a smart cop procedural
supernatural thriller than a horror film.
And so, I was happy with that result.
And it is scary, in fact,
I would constantly say to Bob Shaw, our production designer,
and Scott Kevan, director of photography...
I kept saying to them, "It's not a horror film, but it is scary."
And the idea being that I wanted to shoot this
like a good crime thriller, like a procedural,
but there was gonna be these suspenseful scenes
and these jump scares.
And I like a good jump scare.
Some genre fans don't.
I don't like cheap scares, I don't like false scares,
but a good jump scare that reveals something new like this,
I think it's great.
I think that audiences can appreciate that.
This cat was probably the most gruesome prop
I've ever worked with in a movie.
It looked so real up close.
It was probably the only prop I've ever worked with
that I was genuinely uncomfortable around because it looked so real.
Built by Michael Marino, our makeup effects artist
who did incredible work in the movie.
Lulu, this little girl is fantastic in the movie.
Just such a delight. I love this kid.
And a gifted actress.
I think she's somebody who's gonna be acting her whole life.
She was built to be an actress.
She doesn't really understand the glamour of acting,
she doesn't understand the movie business or anything like that,
but she has acting in her DNA.
And I think she just finished wrapping a show for HBO.
So, her career is off and running.
It'll probably take off, and we'll see a lot more of her.
This is one of those scenes that could really be flat between lesser actors,
and Olivia Munn, who's so beautiful in every shot,
and Eric really worked out the beats of this
and made it feel realistic, to me at least.
Olivia and I are good friends,
and I've stayed close to her since this movie ended,
and I still have dinner with her on occasion.
Just really like her as a person.
First of all, she's one of the funniest people I've ever met.
She makes me laugh all the time.
But I was immediately impressed with her.
I'd seen her in Magic Mike,
and I had seen The Newsroom.
I watched The Newsroom because of her.
I think she's the best thing on that show.
And so I offered her the role,
and I was very happy that she wanted to do it.
And the first time that we spoke on the phone,
she wanted to go through the script and talk about some of her notes,
which is pretty typical for an actor to read a script
and then wanna talk with the director about certain concerns.
And what was so surprising to me,
'cause it had never happened with any actor before,
is that I was on the phone with her for
almost two hours talking through her notes,
and she had maybe 10 or 12 notes,
only two of them were about her character.
And the rest of her notes were questions
that she had about the rest of the movie.
And she caught three or four really good
logic problems that the script had,
some of them small, one of them big.
And I was so impressed that an actor had read the script so carefully
and wanted to be invested in a film
that made sense and that worked on all levels.
And she wasn't just thinking about herself or her own role,
but she was thinking about the movie in general.
Some great visual effects work here on these fish, I think.
That sequence looks real to me,
and I was always concerned that it wouldn't work,
this little violent action scene with fish in an aquarium.
- Sign it out with Smith. - Okay.
So, now we get back into in the movie,
we get back into Father Mendoza's character
as he comes to visit with Eric Bana,
and we start to get to know Mendoza here.
We start to get some of his thinking and some of his philosophy,
and I have to just say
that I never would've written a character
half as interesting as Mendoza is if it weren't for Edgar Ramirez.
I had written the character as a Latin American priest,
offered him the role and he actually passed, and he said,
"Look, the script is great,"
"but the role just isn't interesting enough for me."
I appreciated that, and I asked him to lunch.
And I asked him to explain to me what was not interesting about it,
and I wanted to get a sense from his point of view
what could make it more interesting.
When we met, I just hit it off with him, I'd never met him before.
We ended up having a three or four-hour conversation
about some of the big ideas of the script
and about our personal lives and about Mendoza.
His idea was to give...
it was his idea to give Mendoza this dark background,
the idea of this addict who had found God out of desperation
and had a sordid past.
And not only a sordid past,
but had stumbled even as a priest,
which he talks about later.
We started to talk about
why characters who are religious characters
are always represented as hypocritical
when they fail,
when they're failures, when they're moral failures.
And I became really interested in portraying this character
who was a devout, a man of God,
and somebody who was trying to help people,
but who was still flawed.
He drinks and smokes too much
and has this dark history
that he talks about later with Sarchie.
I suddenly was so interested in not only his character,
but I became much more interested in making the movie.
And so...
This is something that writers and directors,
I think, need to do more often.
Which is listen to your actors, create characters with them,
because actors, if they're smart,
can oftentimes have ideas that will deeply enrich
the character that you're trying to
portray and that you're trying to build,
because it's what they do.
Sometimes, they can't see the big picture
of the movie that you're making,
and oftentimes Edgar would have ideas that I would shoot down.
But I do think that the quality of that character,
not just in the performance but in the actual writing,
owes a lot to Edgar.
Joel does a good job with these scenes.
The scene is just pure exposition.
I mean, he's just spouting facts. It's like a Law and Order moment.
And it's a trick,
for an actor to say all of this and not be boring.
And somehow, Joel does it twice in this movie.
He just kind of states a bunch of facts that happened off camera.
And even though they were off camera,
he manages to make them compelling and interesting.
And the idea was to kind of recap the story up to this point
for the viewer,
and then get into some visual storytelling.
Now, this character that they're looking at here, Santino,
is not based on a real character.
The idea of the movie was to...
There was a case that Sarchie had that involved a house painter,
and that was a little bit of an inspiration, but not really.
The idea was to take some of these
stories that happened in Sarchie's life,
like the Alberghetti story that I talked about.
The exorcism itself that takes place,
various things that were a big part of Sarchie's life,
and then I had to string them together in a narrative that made sense.
And so, the narrative itself involving
the soldier who came back from the war
and brought this evil with him
that he picked up in this chamber underground,
that's all fiction.
I think the thing that makes the movie earn its "inspired by real events"
is, in part, the events that are represented,
but definitely it's Ralph Sarchie himself,
because Eric Bana is playing Ralph Sarchie.
If you ever meet the real Ralph Sarchie
or see any of the documentary material that's been made on him now,
Eric's got him down.
I mean, he talks like him, he moves like him, he thinks like him.
And I think that
the journey that this character takes,
the journey that this character takes in the movie,
is the journey that the real Ralph Sarchie took.
He was a lapsed Catholic. He was skeptical.
I mean, he was not involved in any of this at the time,
and he was an active police officer at the
time that it began to re-enter his life,
and he began to team up with this priest.
And I think that that's the interesting part of the story,
not the specifics of the Santino character
or the idea of spreading occult messages through this painting.
I think it's clever,
but it's not inspired by anything that was particularly true,
other than the fact that Ralph had one case that involved a house painter.
That's all.
I know about the cases,
both from talking to Ralph but also from his book.
This project originated as an adaptation.
Ralph Sarchie wrote a book called Beware the Night,
that Jerry Bruckheimer bought.
And when I was hired in 2004 to adapt the script,
that's when I first read the book, and then flew to New York and met Ralph.
So it is an adaptation
of a real guy's memoirs.
And it's a challenge when you are adapting
non-fiction material into narrative film.
I've done it multiple times in my career as a writer.
In terms of movies that have gotten made,
The Exorcism of Emily Rose was based on
a non-fiction book called The Exorcism of Anneliese Michel
that the real Ralph Sarchie gave to me.
When I met him in 2004,
he was playing various exorcism recordings for me
and things that he had been a part of and videotapes...
He was showing me videotapes.
And he had an out-of-print copy of this book
called The Exorcism of Anneliese Michel,
and he gave it to me and said,
"This is one of the best-documented cases of possession that I've read,"
and so I read that book.
And when this movie didn't get made in 2004,
and other writers were hired on,
I optioned The Exorcism of Anneliese
Michel and turned that into Emily Rose.
So, Ralph is the reason I made that movie.
In the case of Devil's Knot,
I was dealing with even more,
I think, significant real-life characters.
Devil's Knot was an Atom Egoyan movie that was made,
starring Reese Witherspoon and Colin Firth.
And in that case,
the script-adaptation process was really difficult,
because I was not willing to fictionalize much of anything.
And I think the script suffers
dramatically because of that commitment.
But at the time that I was writing it,
Damien Echols was still on death row,
incorrectly convicted, unjustly convicted of capital murder,
and so I just wasn't willing to fictionalize anything.
I didn't wanna tamper with people's opinions about the case
with things that were not factual.
So that one was, I felt, very committed
to only sticking to the facts.
In the case of Emily Rose,
I felt committed to sticking to the stories about Anneliese Michel
as they were reported in her journals and by her family.
So when you see that scary stuff that happens to her in the movie,
leading all the way up to her death,
that's all pretty accurate in terms of what was reported, at least,
what people claim to have seen.
But I fictionalized the courtroom.
There was a court case,
and it is true that they were arguing.
The defense argued for the existence of the demonic
and the sentence for the priest in real life
was the same sentence that the character got in the movie.
But I fictionalized everything else.
Laura Linney's character wasn't real. It was completely made up.
In this case,
the liberties that I took with the fictional narrative
were pretty extreme.
Most of this is not real.
I mean, most of it, the specifics of the case are not real.
But things like this,
his marriage and the strain it took on his marriage,
very real.
The things that happened to his daughter,
the things that she claimed to have seen,
and the way this was bleeding into his personal life, very real.
His relationship with the priest, very real.
And certainly investigating the paranormal like this, specific cases,
and becoming an assistant to an exorcist, all real.
So, on the one hand,
there's a lot of narrative material that's fictional,
and on the other hand,
I watched this movie and I felt like I'm
being pretty true to Ralph Sarchie's story.
I love this actress who plays Lucinda Tratner.
It's one of the few roles
where an actress came in and read for me and reinvented the role.
I think the role, as written,
was much drier, much more expositional, in my mind,
and she brought a real emotion to it.
And she helped me understand
how to write in more of this theme of post-traumatic stress disorder.
This scene, to me, is about that.
And again, I have friends in the military,
family members in the military,
and I have so much compassion for this epidemic
of post-traumatic stress disorder
amongst young soldiers coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan,
and the number of suicides that...
The suicide rate is ridiculously high,
and so many of them become criminals and turn to violent crime.
And this scene, for me,
was about that tragedy.
This woman whose husband comes back from the war,
and he's not himself anymore.
And it's very subtle.
It's not a political movie, it's not a movie with a big political agenda,
but it's something that's important in our age, in our time,
and I think she probably is the best person representing it,
and it's why it was in this scene that I added these little...
The shots that you're gonna see that actually have war material
about post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, right there,
returning home from the war
next to these drives that have combat photography on them.
And I think good horror does that. I think good horror,
like good science fiction,
there's always some level of metaphor working
that is current, politically or sociologically.
And in this case, it has to do with this.
My only fear was that
people would oversimplify the complexity of this idea that I have
that you touch something evil, as we did with this invasion,
and that evil spreads.
I like that idea.
I was concerned that people would oversimplify that idea in their mind
and think that I'm implying that soldiers are possessed,
that's why they're soldiers.
Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Like this little match cut that we have here.
It's not something that I actually planned
when my editor was cutting the movie together.
While we were still shooting,
he asked me to shoot a close-up shot of the owl,
that shot right there,
so that he could create that little cut
of the bird on the wall to the owl on the shelf,
leading into the scene.
It's a great cut, and my editor deserves all the credit for it.
Like this little camera move,
being straight-on on her and kind of dropping down as she gets up.
This scene was a big part of the ad campaign for the movie,
and the subsequent scene that comes later,
with the owl coming off the shelf and rolling after her.
I think that these scenes, again, are
part of that trick that I know how to do.
It's almost like a joke.
I mean, I heard Ti West talk about horror as being,
good horror, being kind of like telling a joke.
And I really like that analogy,
that you either know how to tell a joke, or you don't.
You can't really explain to somebody
how to tell a joke so that it's funny.
It's just a knack.
You either have the knack for it, or you don't.
And creating a measure of tension
is leading into these kind of horrific things.
And I think, more specifically,
making the fantastical feel real amidst it,
that's just something that I kind of know how to do.
And a lot of it is rooted in my fandom for the genre,
the fact that I love these kinds of movies and that they are effective.
But I also think it's that I respect the
genre, that I respect these kinds of movies.
I think a lot of people who work in the genre actually don't.
Or they don't respect the audience,
and there's a gamesmanship mentality of messing with the audience
and standing above the audience and manipulating them.
And I never feel that way.
I'm trying to scare myself when I make these movies.
I'm trying to get my head into places that are disturbing
and create images that are both evocative and frightening to me.
And for me,
it's always an attempt to create the kind of
drama in visual storytelling
that would actually affect me.
And sometimes that seems to work.
This scene coming up at the end, it was very strange.
At the end of the scene...
We only reshot... We only did one...
No, we did three shots as reshoots for this movie
to clarify things that the audience was bumping on.
It was only a four-hour shoot.
Sometimes people reshoot for weeks. We reshot for four hours on this movie.
And one of the things that we reshot was this right here.
This little shot of Sarchie looking out the window
and seeing that Jimmy is gone,
before going back inside.
We flew Eric all the way from Australia to shoot this shot
because we didn't shoot it before I cut straight to here,
and the audience just did not like that he did not go after Jimmy.
And so, we created the shot to show
that he would've gone after Jimmy, but Jimmy's already gone.
And so, once we put that in, the audience was fine, but sometimes...
That's what test screenings are for, I think.
Test screenings will tell you what everybody is gonna bump on
that you don't see.
They're gonna tell you what's unintentionally funny,
when everybody laughs at the wrong thing.
Test screenings are good for that.
They're good for the, usually, small blind spot that you have.
Otherwise, I think they're pretty pointless.
Otherwise, I think you should make the movie you wanna make
and trust that people will get it.
This helmet cam, I love.
Chris Coy, the actor, is actually wearing this camera,
so this is not our director of photography operating.
This is attached to the camera that Chris is wearing,
and Chris Coy, the actor, is our camera operator in this scene.
Scott Kevan, our DP, was operated himself
along with a cameraman named Buzz,
who we hired because he was, I think, 6'6".
And Scott Kevan very smartly realized
that from my shooting style, that I
shoot a lot of over-the-shoulder shots,
and I like to be behind actors a lot.
And so he very smartly, for his crew,
hired a tall cameraman, because Eric is 6'4".
No, Eric is 6'2 ". Joel's 6'4".
But you need to have a cameraman
who's ideally a little bit taller than your actors
in order to get the kind of shots that you want.
This place that we shot here,
this is actually an active prison that we were shooting in.
And it had the look that I wanted, and the prison was very accommodating.
But we had to go through a lot of checkpoints
when we were moving in and out of the set,
because there'd be guards there
who would lock off a hallway and make sure it was clear
and then let us through,
and then lock off another hallway, and we'd go farther into it.
And every once in a while, it was very strange
because I don't know who they were and what they were doing,
but every once in a while, I'd find myself walking alone
down a hallway in this building,
and then two prison inmates would walk past me in orange jumpsuits.
I remember the first time that happened,
I thought, "Well, this is interesting."
I'd never been alone in a prison with prisoners like this.
But they were all very courteous and nice,
and they all seemed kind of interested in what we were doing.
Do you remember me?
This was our first day of shooting, this scene,
with Jane in this prison.
You always remember the first day of shooting,
for so many reasons.
You're getting to know your crew.
But there's a certain life that a movie takes on very quickly,
and you get a feeling about it.
And I remember shooting this day,
and what a good job I thought Olivia Horton did
playing this possessed girl.
And just seeing these two guys together and just thinking,
"This movie's gonna work."
And it was a pretty inspiring day,
because also, at one point,
after Olivia lets go of this torrent of words that are coming up
when she's speaking all these Latin words,
the first time that she did it,
the crew spontaneously erupted into applause for her,
which I loved.
Like I said before, it was a grueling shoot.
It ended up being a lot of long hours and a lot of weather,
and just a difficult show for so many various reasons.
And the schedule was tight.
And yet...
I think sometimes movies need to be hard
in order for a certain kind of quality to come through.
I think if we had a more comfortable shooting schedule or more money,
if we were in less of a pressure cooker,
and if we were shooting all on stages,
this movie wouldn't feel the way that it feels.
Because I think that this is a movie about people in duress,
and the cast and crew were in duress while they were making it.
So it was a very, very hard show to do.
Certainly the hardest movie I've ever worked on.
And I think that translated into the drama somehow
because everybody tried to translate it into the drama.
They tried to make
good use of the difficulty of the shoot
and the results are up on the screen.
Now, we're leading into what is the scene
that made me really want to make the movie.
Which is this scene in the bar, in the underground bar.
This bar is based on real places they have in New York.
These kind of hideouts.
Sometimes within actual facilities.
In this case it's in a fire station.
Cops have their own hangouts.
Cop bars, firemen bars.
And I think that...
I always had in mind for this movie...
There's another Doors reference.
I always had in mind this idea
that the movie would be broken in half
by a scene in which
Sarchie and Mendoza trade philosophies,
for lack of a better way of putting it.
And I think that, for me,
it's probably my favorite scene in the movie.
The exorcism scene toward the end
is certainly the most dynamic scene in the movie.
But this scene was, for me,
why I wanted to make the movie.
And what I didn't wanna do with this scene,
is I didn't wanna propagate a point of view.
I mean, certainly Mendoza's point of view represents my own
better than Sarchie's point of view,
but that was never the goal.
And that's never my goal
in dealing with this kind of philosophical or religious material.
I have no interest in persuading an audience to think like me.
You know, I have interest in being truthful
and in representing the world as I see it or as I understand it,
but even that's a bit of an overstatement.
Because I'm more interested in challenging my own point of view
through the work that I do
than I am propagating my point of view.
But I think that for me,
this scene was much more
about Mendoza
talking intelligently and cogently
about why he believes the things that he does.
His whole argument here about the problem of good,
I think, is a really compelling philosophical argument.
That, he says if the world is just survival of the fittest,
then why are all the men in this room, all these cops and all these firemen,
willing to lay down their lives for perfect strangers?
There's something about the human heart that is divine,
that is magical, that is inexplicable
by, you know...
I've read theories about...
Evolutionary theories about self-sacrifice,
and I generally just don't buy them.
But I think that what he's saying here is even more compelling, which is,
sometimes you get to a place
where you either choose God or you die, you choose God or you're lost.
And that's true for a lot of people.
And I think that if there's one thing in the modern world
that is an indisputable evidence
of the reality of God, it's AA, Alcoholics Anonymous.
And I look at the number of people in my own life
whose lives have been profoundly transformed through that program.
I mean, just unbelievably transformed.
People who would have ended up in jail or dead.
And I find that to be
as good of an argument for God as any you are going to find.
Because that program is all about spiritual dependence.
It's all about becoming spiritually dependent
and outwardly focused
and a recognition that one cannot become good on one's own,
which I believe is true.
And yet here's Sarchie
representing also a legitimate point of view,
which is when these horrible things happen, where's God?
And I like that
Mendoza isn't too dismissive of that question,
but he does say that God is still in the
hearts of the people who try to change it.
And the people who try to do something about it, about the evil in the world.
And I just like the fact that this is a...
It's just a supernatural...
It's just a supernatural thriller with big bursts of action.
It's a Jerry Bruckheimer movie.
And it's a big summer release popcorn movie.
And then here's these two guys talking about God for five minutes
while The Doors Riders on the Storm plays underneath.
That gives me a thrill
and fills me with a sense of accomplishment
for having somehow convinced people to let me do it.
But it works. These are two real characters,
and I think this scene is pretty effective.
The real scene, by the way, was probably a good three minutes longer.
Mendoza has a bit more philosophizing from the script
and says some things that I really love.
I mean, that I really love.
But when it was all put together,
my editor wanted to leave everything in.
He thought that it worked great.
And I really felt like it was too much.
I felt like Mendoza was being a little too Yoda-like,
and having too much of an answer for everything.
And so we trimmed out a good three minutes or so.
This little sound montage was built
by my kickass sound designer, Paul Ottosson.
A two-time...
No, three-time Academy Award winner.
I think he won two Oscars for The Hurt Locker.
And another one for Zero Dark Thirty.
But I knew him before all that.
He was the sound designer on The Exorcism of Emily Rose.
And he collected all these sounds.
We did ADR with the actors, and...
The way that it's built really works.
I think the lo-fi quality of the recording is what makes it.
And that's what a good sound designer understands
is that what makes something effective
is sometimes not the obvious thing.
I think by dirtying everything up, it somehow makes it all feel real
and makes it feel effective.
That little recording was also a big part of the ad campaign,
or at least early on it was.
It was one the first things that was put out there
in teaser trailers and that sort of thing.
The interesting thing about exorcism,
he's talking about exorcism here,
is this idea that...
Exorcism is a fact.
It's what separates this kind of movie
from other types of horror films.
We all pretty much agree
that there's no such thing as werewolves, or vampires,
We certainly...
Most people believe in ghosts, or at least a lot of them do.
But that's still a subject of debate.
Nobody argues for the existence,
for or against the existence of exorcism.
It's a fact of life.
Happens a lot more often than you would think.
And I like what Mendoza says,
which is that most of it is bullshit.
I mean, most of it is.
And when I see these guys on television
claiming that there is a demon in everybody that they're talking to,
it's pretty revolting.
But in meeting Ralph
and in going into the process of writing the script
and then making The Exorcism of Emily Rose,
I really had an open mind early on about it.
I didn't have...
I believe in God, but I didn't have a theological...
To believe in the devil or the demonic. I didn't...
I wanted to go into it and explore it, not
theologically, or even philosophically.
I wanted to explore it practically.
And just see what was behind the phenomena,
what research could show me.
And the more I listened to
people talk about credible cases of possession,
or so-called credible cases of possession,
and the more I listened to audio recordings,
and especially the more I looked at video tapes,
some that were old ones and then some more recent ones that Ralph showed me.
They're so harrowing.
She's not hearing mice in the floor.
The one thing that you take away, first and foremost,
is that the people who
recognized by the church,
specifically the Catholic Church, as being possessed
and who undergo exorcism,
these are people in extraordinary suffering.
I mean, they are suffering
a kind of trauma that is indescribably bad.
And so when you see that, when you see that demonstrated,
even if you believe that it's all a psychiatric problem,
and not a spiritual one,
your heart just bleeds for these people and what they go through.
The men who I've met who are actual exorcists,
and talking with them,
the ones that I've met are such good people.
And they so earnestly want to help
these other people in their suffering.
And I showed those video tapes, I showed a bunch of the video tapes
to some of the actors.
I showed it to Olivia and to Eric.
Both of them didn't sleep for a while.
Eric told Olivia not to watch them.
He had seen them, and he just said, "Don't watch 'em."
He tried to spare her
weeks of sleeplessness.
Interestingly enough, I did not show them to Edgar Ramírez.
I gave Edgar the book Hostage to the Devil by Malachi Martin,
who was one of Sarchie's mentors.
And I told him the only research he needed to do
was to pick two of the five cases in that book and read it.
I said, "Pick any two that you want. Just pick two, read it."
"You won't have to do anymore research."
Because the book is written by an exorcist.
And the cases, I think,
are probably embellished in ways.
But, boy, is it an incredibly evocative and dynamic read.
It really put the spell on Edgar.
When I gave it to him, he read one chapter,
and then he slept, I guess, with the lights on for the rest of the shoot.
It really, I think, fucked him up at first.
And I think that... I can say that, right?
I can say, "Fuck?" Okay.
The guys in the booth are nodding at me and smiling.
And I think that...
I don't know, I think that showing that
material to the actors did a lot for the movie.
Because I think that everybody recognized
that, hey, whether you believe it or not,
we're talking about something that is out there.
We're talking about something that does happen.
We're talking about something that is worth at least considering
as a possible reality.
And I think that helped motivate everybody
to treat the material seriously
and for people to think of it as something that is real,
and to think of it as something that is serious.
And any time you're making a genre movie,
whether it's dealing with the demonic or not,
even if it is just dealing with werewolves
or vampires and monsters, ghosts,
its effectiveness is rooted in how real it feels.
And this is probably the big idea behind the movie from the get-go.
Jerry Bruckheimer, when he bought the book,
and when he hired myself and Paul Boardman
to write the first draft of the script.
What he said to us was that he wanted to make Serpico meets The Exorcist.
I just loved that idea.
I still think it's one of the greatest big picture concepts I've ever heard.
And that's really what this is.
It's kind of a '70s style cop thriller,
blended with an exorcism movie,
a possession and exorcism movie.
It's the reality of the cop drama,
the reality of a real cop and the evil that a real cop faces.
All of that blended, then, with the paranormal.
It makes the paranormal stuff scarier,
makes the paranormal stuff feel more real.
Because the whole movie is so grounded and so real.
And I think that was...
I think that was what made me want to make it.
I think that it was a fresh enough, an original enough idea
and a good enough idea that I just...
I wanted to see if I could pull it off.
But I also really love the scale,
even though this isn't a big movie.
It still has visual scale
with all these shots of the Bronx,
sets like the Bronx Zoo and things like that.
Horror has become incredibly contained in the last decade.
Sinister is a good example of it.
Jason Blum's under-$5-million model,
represented by Insidious and The Purge
and the Paranormal Activity movies and Sinister.
They have really forced horror
into a very small scale box.
And one of the things I was interested in about this movie,
is to make a scary movie that isn't so small.
Here's Joel's second ridiculously boring expositional scene
that he somehow makes work.
'Cause you need this information,
but he somehow sells it here,
which is pretty great.
He's wearing an Alice in Chains shirt there,
by the way, which we couldn't get rights to.
'Cause I told him I like the idea that he was...
You know, Joel's from Seattle.
And I said that I liked the idea that we play him as being from Seattle
and maybe he still wears some of these
shirts of bands from Seattle.
And I told him we couldn't get clearance on Alice in Chains.
And he pulled out his cell phone and called the guitarist
from Alice in Chains who he knew.
I didn't know he knew, but the guy said, "Yes", right then and there.
I don't think we ever got legal clearance.
I just said, "Just wear the shirt. Nobody will bother you."
Love this building, love this hallway. Love this location.
Again, that Bob Shaw, our production designer, found.
Bob was...
When I used to say to him all the time,
"It's not a horror film, but it is scary."
He made shirts for us, for the crew in pre-production that said exactly that.
On the front of it, it said, "It's not a horror film."
And on the back, it said, "But it is scary."
He thought that was...
He thought me saying that was funny enough
that he decided to tease me with some shirts.
There is something about children in jeopardy,
it always works.
In fact, my friend Rian Johnson who directed Looper,
he was the first person...
He was one of the first three people I let see an early cut of the movie
when I was still editing it.
And he came to the editing room as a favor and watched the movie.
I just wanted his feedback and wanted to get his notes.
He's such an excellent director.
When the movie was over, I walked into the editing room
and the first words out of his mouth were,
"Why do you hate children so much?"
Which I thought was pretty hysterical.
This scene of this actress Lulu, who plays Christina,
screaming and crying.
I was sitting at the monitor this whole day with her mother.
And her mother was just tortured this day.
Because Christina... Or Lulu playing Christina really emotes.
I mean, she really cries and she really screams.
She's not just pretending, she's a little method actress.
Again, it's kind of her DNA that she knows how to do it.
I talked to her like an adult and told her
what the scene was and she just did it.
But every time we were doing these takes, her mom at the monitor,
I just felt so bad for her.
Because she would cover her mouth and her eyes would water
just hearing her own child suffering like that.
That's a start.
This was a scene that we shot twice.
The first night that we shot...
And there's a few takes in here from the first night.
But Edgar was so sick. He was so sick.
I felt so bad for him.
And he had a fever, I believe.
We're shooting in the rain, and it was in the middle of the night.
This is another one of those nights that was freezing cold.
And he was trying so hard to do his best job,
but he was, I think, on the border of being delirious.
So, we shot a lot of it...
But all of this stuff here, this whole back story,
this is the stuff that I came up with, with Edgar.
That he would...
That he wouldn't just be somebody who
sees that Sarchie has a dark past
and knows that Sarchie is hiding it.
But that he has his own dark past.
And he had the experience of failing,
of doing something bad
and something consequential.
And dealing with the guilt of that and the burden of that.
And then finding relief and finding grace
to move past it in his life.
I really love that this is a priest character who's not perfect
and still struggles with himself,
and knows it and recognizes it.
I think that's really interesting.
Because, religious characters,
they are kind of the last
kind of free rein, "go ahead and stereotype them" kinda characters.
There's not a lot of characters in movies that you can
kind of freely stereotype, I think.
I think religious people and southerners.
You can still stereotype southerners.
And religious southerners,
they are a stereotype, right?
There are no smart, integrous, competent,
religious southerners, are there?
I'm being sarcastic.
I love this line.
"A saint is not a moral exemplar. A saint is a life giver."
This was something that I heard somebody say once
amidst a conversation.
And I was so struck by it.
A friend of mine named Michael Bruner.
I actually named Erin Bruner, Laura Linney's character, after him
in The Exorcism of Emily Rose.
He's an ordained minister
and a theology professor.
And I was having a conversation with him,
and he said that and I was...
it was one of those statements
that was very unlikely to me when I heard it,
and it rang so deeply true.
And I felt that it had a place in this movie
because that's Mendoza.
He's not a moral exemplar, but he is a life giver.
He's not demonstrating what people should do with their lives.
He's just demonstrating grace,
and he's demonstrating an attempt to give life.
This scene here, I remember Ralph Sarchie,
the real cop, Ralph Sarchie, showing...
Watch Joel lower his shotgun as Eric goes by.
I remember Sarchie showing them moment by moment,
everything they got to do when they clear this room.
He said, "Okay, when you first come into the room,"
"you're gonna do what we call 'Slicing the Pie'."
And he described how, when you enter a room,
depending on which direction the room opens to,
you kind of cut it diagonally.
And one guy goes one way and one goes the other way.
And you got to watch your weapons
so that your barrel never crosses the path of your partner.
And so what they did there was completely realistic,
by-the-book
sweeping of a room.
In the way that cops clearing a room would do.
Now, this use of The Doors, People Are Strange
is personally my favorite use of music in the movie.
I think some people think it's odd
or weird or maybe unintentionally funny.
I just love it. I love the ironic feel that it has.
There's not a lot of moments...
There are probably more moments in Sinister than in this movie
that I have that feeling of just pure visual cinema.
But this little moment of them walking down this hallway,
knowing that the guy they've looked for is here
and hearing this song playing.
This moment, for me, is one of those moments when
I really like this movie, you know?
And I like the look on Eric's face
because his radar is going off and he knows something is wrong.
And the shot right here, the intensity on his face, the focus,
is just great.
And then, of course, the reveal that Santino was actually in there.
So, this...
This whole sequence coming up here
was probably the most
technically complicated sequence to pull off
because every shot is a new location.
This basement...
There is a lot of real estate that needs to be covered.
In the script it's a pretty elaborate scene.
And you don't find basements like this outside of the Bronx.
I mean, we looked all over,
and we couldn't even find very many
places where we could shoot this scene.
But this basement, when I walked in here, the size of this basement,
it's enormous.
And the visual...
Look at this just beautiful free production design.
It's so...
All the pipes and concrete and dust and dirt.
It's just dank and dripping, and it's massive.
And so we...
I fell in love with this place,
and that's Sean actually standing up on those pipes.
He insisted on going up there himself.
Sean Harris who plays Santino.
And we almost lost this place,
which I didn't know what we were going to do if we lost it,
because I didn't wanna have to piece it together
using multiple basements.
We really didn't have that much time in the schedule.
I needed to be able to shoot it all in one clay,
which we did.
And it's one of the many reasons why
I love the interior architecture of the Bronx.
Just these visually interesting spaces everywhere you turn.
This is a little moment drawn from Aliens, or Alien,
the reveal of the alien up in the piping.
Visible, but not visible.
The idea of his face paint here
is that it's a holdover of his face paint from his character,
from Santino's character in Iraq.
That he still paints his face and covers himself with this paint,
which I always thought was a creepy, and a weird idea.
And the face paint helps make him a little bit scarier.
Now, this next scene coming up here,
with Pop Goes the Weasel.
This is, again, probably the third time
that we've done this in the movie.
You get a character walking slowly down a hallway or a corridor,
and it just creates tension. People know that...
And I think it's just because without realizing psychologically,
people know that if they're walking down a corridor slowly,
the tension starts to build because something has to be at the end of it.
And you don't know what it is.
And in this case, it's an actual piano playing Pop Goes the Weasel.
And that begins
what will be the biggest action scene in the movie.
Both, the fight that Eric Bana has with Chris Coy,
that Sarchie has with Jimmy here.
And the knife fight scene that's coming up.
Now, watch. If you wanna just...
You get a little glimpse of Chris Coy's speed and agility
as a mixed martial arts fighter.
He gets flipped here.
He did all of his own stunts. Chris did all of them.
And then he bites him, gets him down.
Watch how fast he gets behind Sarchie.
He's there and then he's behind him and right there,
as soon as that leg comes around him, Sarchie...
Chris can get it behind you that quickly,
and if he gets that arm under your neck, you're dead.
That's it, he can kill you.
And I just love seeing that shot.
And seeing the speed and agility of a guy
who spent most of his life learning how to do that.
Now, this sequence here, this knife fight, was a lot of work.
It was a lot of work to choreograph.
I wanted it to feel realistic.
I didn't want it to be a comic book kind of fight.
I wanted it to feel like a real knife fight would feel.
It wouldn't be too long.
It's going to be longer than most knife fights
because both fighters are very skilled.
But this Army Ranger tomahawk
that Santino's fighting with,
and the double knives that Joel's fighting
with, that Butler's fighting with.
And I just love that
you've got this knife fight in the middle of this supernatural thriller.
This was another one of the things that made me want to do the movie.
It was that I was trying to blend different genres.
Action, thriller, horror, drama,
and have good solid evidences.
By the way, that shot of Joel hitting the wall there,
the close-up shot of Joel hitting the wall,
it's a stunt guy hitting the wall.
And he hit the wall so hard three times in three different takes.
And I was surprised by it.
The stunt guys always surprise me.
And Joel asked him after the third take,
"How do you that? How do you hit the wall that hard?"
'Cause you can hear it. You can hear his head hit the wall.
And his answer was, "I knock myself out."
And he did. He knocked himself out the third time.
Look at Edgar's body position here.
Edgar came up with this himself. He did his own research.
And he knew to get down on his knees in this position
and hold his hand in this position.
I didn't have to tell him.
The best way for me to put it,
I didn't tell him, "Hey, look cool when
you're doing this exorcism stuff."
I never said that. I never thought it.
I told him I wanted him to do his research
about gestures and that sort of thing.
But Edgar really took it as his responsibility to create
interesting visual positions for himself,
and motions for himself, both here and in the big exorcism scene
that's coming up at the end.
This hallway was so tight and all this action...
Gosh, it feels like we shot in there forever.
And it was hot. Hot, hot, hot.
I remember people just sweating profusely.
And Sean had a real hard time during this knife fight too.
And the reason why was because the guy that he trained with...
They trained separately. They didn't train with each other.
Joel and Sean Harris had different schedules.
So they trained separately for the fight,
and they never actually fought each other
until we started shooting.
And Sean didn't know that Joel's arms were gonna be as long as they were.
Joel is very tall and Joel has really long arms even for his height.
And Sean struggled.
Sean got hit a few times, cut a few times,
and was actually fighting for his life, I think,
during some of that knife fight.
This is another one of those pure cinema moments, I think.
The look on Chris' face with this cross
and then all the subjective sound giving way to the song.
The song
was something that Edgar had found online and sent to me.
It was just a song that was part of some kind of ritual.
It wasn't a guy singing, it was just a song.
And he said, "Hey, what do you think about me singing during the exorcism?"
And I was like, "That sounds ridiculous."
And I think that's really all I said.
I don't think I encouraged him at all to do it.
And in the first take that we did of this
he just broke in to that little song.
And you could feel the whole crew...
The surprise from everybody, me included.
Because it was so effective, it worked so well.
And Chris Coy, the actor, didn't know it was going to happen either.
And the way he, kind of... His body softens and he just rolls with it.
That's what good actors do, they'll surprise you
with their resources
and their homework and their preparation, if they're good.
If they're good actors.
Address is 144 and Rider.
Repeat, 144 and Rider.
The scene coming up is another scene that I love in the movie
just 'cause it's not typical.
This was shot... That's Christ Crucified
by Diego Velázquez.
A painting that I love, I've seen the original painting of that
in the Prado Museum in Spain.
And I was deeply moved by that painting when I saw it.
That's why I asked for a copy of it for this scene.
But this great view here, it's the top building of a hospital.
The hospital scene...
A hospital scene that we shot and cut out of the movie.
And this little chapel Bob Shaw built
at the top of this hospital.
This is another piece of pure cinema filmmaking that I really love.
I picked this music before we started shooting.
I found this obscure track
and designed the scene while listening to it in my headphones.
And having done Sinister, I really fell in love with Super 8 film
and just found that there's a quality about Super 8 film stock
and Super 8 camera jitter and Super 8 movement
that is not like anything else, it's not like anything else.
You can imitate it all you want,
with all the apps in the world on your cell phone
and with all the visual effects that you want,
and it's never gonna feel like Super 8 really
feels, especially when it's projected.
And there was something about
telling the story in this
particular stock of Super 8 with this music playing
that, I think, turned out quite well.
I think this is an effective scene, because this is the...
This is the psychic wound
that our character's been feeling the entire movie.
And so I felt the burden as a director to not just show this scene
but to make it
a kind of special event.
And we're paying off all these audio
sounds, the static, the children playing,
the wet thumping, which is in the drips,
which are coming up as he attacks Marvin.
And we shot it all in one afternoon, the Super 8 stock.
It's always a little unnerving because there's no monitor,
so as a director you can't see what's actually being captured.
And it's all kind of messy.
And it's unnerving too because you get what you get.
The Super 8 film stock is a volatile stock.
And this particular stock is, and I wanted it, though,
because of the color registration of it and the contrast level of it.
And Scott Kevan did an amazing job testing it.
Scott Kevan was my Director of Photography.
He just did an amazing job at getting the sensitivity just right
and getting the exposure just right in all of these scenes.
And part of it was that I knew it was going to be this bloody.
And it needed to be somewhat desaturated, so that it didn't feel...
Didn't feel distractingly exploitative.
Eric was really worried about this scene
because he thought the audience might turn on him
and turn on his character, and I just told him,
they needed to be close to it.
Because he's confessing to
an extraordinarily dark, dark thing that he did.
And even though I think most American audiences will feel like,
"Fuck, yeah, he got what he deserved, pedophile."
I think it's exactly what Mendoza says,
he gave him vengeance and not justice.
And vengeance destroys the avenger.
And that's the last beat for me that was a call-back to this thematic idea
of the resonating evil of the Iraq War.
'Cause I do think that the war ultimately
was a violent act of displaced vengeance after 9/11.
And the dark chain of events that that set off
for so many people.
The worst of which are the 100,000 Iraqi civilians
that were killed as a result of the war.
But, I think that, again, it's all very subtle.
And hopefully most people don't see it, and that's the way it should be.
But it's there if you want to see it.
I just think that these little gestures that Edgar does,
I just buy them, I believe that he's a priest in this movie.
This music that's playing here, by the way, is still part of the same track.
There's no...
There's no switching of the tracks there. It
just ends at this beautiful choral music.
This scene became one of the iconic...
If anything is iconic in this movie, I'm not sure that's the right word.
But it's one of the more iconic moments from the ad campaign,
specifically this owl.
Boy, did they milk the owl in the
trailers and in the advertising campaign.
When I did it, I didn't think too much Of it.
We built the owl, it's our own construction.
And that little "ha-ha-hoo" sound that's our editor.
It's so funny because he...
I just came in to watch a cut one day,
and he pulled out the little microphone,
connected it to his computer
and recorded
that voice, "Ha-ha-hoo."
And that's just the editor, in our editing room.
And when I heard it I thought, "That's so low-tech."
And it's just the way stuffed animals sound, and so we kept it.
And it went from
this little spontaneous thing he did in the editing room
to the ad campaign.
This scream from Lulu is just awesome, I think.
I love this image of Santino coming toward her.
And the scream that she gives there is pretty powerful
and, boy, did her mother have a hard time with that.
Her mother is so sweet, and I just really love that family.
So, nice jump scare for the audience here.
Nobody could see that moment coming.
But I like shots like this too.
Because we've been in quite a few claustrophobic scenes for a while,
and now some of these longer shots of the streets
give us more of a sense of the Bronx
and what the locations look like,
and one of the few shots of the Bronx
that is daytime and not night.
The look of the movie was certainly inspired by '70s cinema.
Specifically '70s New York cinema.
Not The French Connection,
which is probably the most iconic '70s cop movie.
But, movies like Serpico,
The Panic in Needle Park,
The Seven-Ups, a Roy Scheider movie,
Shaft.
All of those movies portrayed a gritty quality
of New York City and just city life that I really like.
And Bob Shaw and I looked at those movies quite carefully
and selected certain key frames.
And our general aesthetic on the movie
was to make a movie that was not too saturated,
that had a lot of neutral color in the
frame, but then had pops of particular color
and the neutrality of the colors surrounding the frame
would make the color that was present more dynamic.
Now this reveal here of Santino with all these carvings in his body
was something that we came up with in pre-production.
I had the idea of body paint revealed on Santino.
I think that's what may have been in the script.
And then as I talked to Sean Harris about it, we talked about,
"Why? Why would he do that?"
And we were having a little bit of trouble,
and I think Sean may have been the one that first suggested
that maybe he'd been cutting himself, and I think that...
I don't remember whose ideas
were the primary contributing ideas,
but myself and Sean and Mike Marino, our makeup effects artist,
eventually came up with this idea
to put all of the carvings of the message
that he's been painting into his own body.
And that, that would be really pretty horrific.
And it is horrific looking, I think, and very effective.
I don't think any of us quite reckoned
with what we were doing to ourselves by making that decision
because it's like 250 or 270 prosthetics
that are applied to Sean's body every time he shoots with his shirt off.
And so we're talking about a totality of, maybe,
eight or nine hours in the chair
between putting it on and then taking it off.
'Cause they need to be taken off, the prosthetics,
and protected and used again.
And so, Sean never complained about it.
He would come in...
This is a beautiful shot here, by the way, Scott Kevan's photography.
This is pretty extraordinary.
I always had this image in my mind
of Santino being carried in
with some of these markings on his back, or paint on his back,
in this case carvings, and seeing him from the back like this.
This is one of those images I saw in my head very early on.
And the rain, obviously, adds a lot of texture to it.
But, anyway, the prosthetics were just a lot of work.
And sometimes Sean would sleep in them.
Sometimes he would even sleep at the stage,
which he was never asked to do.
He just did it, 'cause he found it to be easier
than taking it all off and going home and getting less rest.
And he just did what he had to do.
So, now we begin the exorcism scene.
And I've held off until now to talk about Sean Harris.
Sean is a remarkably gifted actor,
and I think that the things that he does in this scene
are some of the greatest acting moments
that I've seen in anything I've made.
I did not audition Sean, interestingly enough.
I auditioned a lot of actors. I looked at a lot of actors.
I could not find anybody that I thought could pull off the role
and make the role interesting.
And I cast Sean...
Let me put it this way,
I'm more proud of my decision to cast Sean,
probably, than any other casting choice I've made
because it was a pure instinctive choice.
I had seen Harry Brown,
and in the movie Harry Brown with Michael Caine,
there's one scene that Sean has with Harry Brown
where he plays a junkie and he shoots
a heroin concoction into his arm with a gun trained on Michael Caine.
And there's a deep violence
that emanates from him in that scene that is so complex and powerful.
And when I went back and looked at that
scene as I was thinking about actors,
Sean came to mind, I remembered loving him in that scene.
And he was in Prometheus.
He's the guy who goes crazy and kills everybody in Prometheus.
So I went and looked at the scene again, and
when I looked at the scene more closely,
I just knew Sean could do this.
I knew that he...
He was the only actor that I felt a weird calm about
and a sense of confidence about.
And we made him an offer.
And I never spoke to him about it,
and we just offered him the movie, and he said yes.
And I think that one of the reasons that Sean worked so hard
was because of that confidence.
Because of the confidence I demonstrated to him,
that I didn't ask to talk to him first, I didn't ask him to audition.
And it's not like he's a major movie star
that everybody would sign off on.
Everybody just trusted me, that I said,
"This guy can do it. I'm telling you this guy can do it."
And sure enough, he came and he did it.
And this scene...
The things that he does are really hard to do.
It's really hard. It's like Jennifer Carpenter in Emily Rose.
It's incredibly easy for this stuff to look stupid and seem stupid,
and yet, if it's truthful and if it's coming from a deep place,
it can be some of the most harrowing
and some of the most powerful acting that you're likely to see.
Let's begin.
These six stages of exorcism
were originally written in Malachi Martin's book, Hostage to the Devil
and then they were reprinted in Deliver Us From Evil, the book,
Ralph Sarchie's book, Beware the Night,
which is now called, Deliver Us From Evil.
It's a real concept.
It's something that, that exorcist and Ralph Sarchie talk about
being the actual rhythm of exorcisms.
One of the questions I get asked a lot of times
about these demon possession tales
that I've told is,
what is the motivation for the demon? What is the capability of the demon?
And I love The Exorcist.
I love the fact that the original cut of The Exorcist has no explanation
for why a demon does what it does.
I think there's a real mystery to evil.
I think there's always a real mystery to evil.
And William Peter Blatty and William
Friedkin had a falling out for 25 years
over Friedkin's decision to cut the scene
on the staircase during the exorcism
when Father Merrin explains the agenda of the demon,
when he talks about how...
I think the point is to just make us despair.
What he says is very beautiful, but when I saw the cut,
the 25th Anniversary cut of the movie when Friedkin put that scene back,
I felt that it took away from the power of the movie,
that the mystery of evil was better captured
without that explanation.
Now, with this movie the idea that I had was for the demon to have
the same kind of purposelessness
in that his only purpose is to make us despair
and to spread death, to spread horror,
and that there's a mystery to that.
But, I liked the idea of a more calculated demon, nonetheless,
one that strategically gets away,
that strategically sets up Sarchie in the basement,
that fights Butler.
That becomes a very dangerous kind of enemy.
If you got a...
In this case, a perpetrator, a character that a cop is chasing,
and he's actually demon possessed,
there's something awesome to me about that idea
that opened up the possibilities for the movie,
and, I think, separates it from the other
possession movies that we've seen.
It's not just watching the girl in the dorm room
or the little girl in the bed get possessed and do freaky stuff.
Speaking of freaky stuff,
that's probably the most extreme
gore moment or graphic moment in the movie when...
This was the only scene that made me concerned
that I might have to even cut it to keep an R-rating and not be NC-17.
This guy taking a big chunk out of his own leg
is pretty gruesome and shocking.
When you see this with an audience,
you can feel a strong reaction to it.
No one is expecting to see anything like that, even in this movie.
Now, at this point in the shooting process...
This was a very difficult scene to shoot.
We're in tight quarters, we were...
I was having a lot of conflict with the
studio at this point over the budget
and the schedule, and we were under tremendous pressure,
but, boy, did these actors hang in there.
And this moment here is the moment when Sean Harris
literally lost his mind on set.
I shouldn't say that because it was acting,
but Sean went to a place that I've never seen an actor go.
Look at the look in his eyes, he is gone.
I mean, he went into some kind of a trance
for the next two minutes of this movie.
Two or three minutes of this movie.
When we were shooting this from that stigmata shot on, Sean...
Hence a good need for some good comic relief with the, "Oh, my fuck" line.
But Sean really did.
He went into a trance state this night
when we were shooting the rest of this scene,
and all the stuff when he was speaking Spanish...
Between takes he was retching and speaking a kind of gibberish at times.
When the makeup guys were taking off his prosthetics,
he was speaking in tongues or some weird thing.
He was really making people scared.
And he wasn't doing it for show.
It was just not Sean.
He's the last guy in the world who would do that.
But he really went into a dark, weird place.
And these lines, when you look at the look in his eyes,
he's just not there.
And this crazy sound that he makes, it just happened.
And I remember having a really dreadful feeling being around him
as we shot this.
And after we took the prosthetics off that night, we...
I was worried about him.
I was literally worried for his safety.
And I know he hadn't slept much,
he'd been awake for a long time
when we went to shoot this section of the movie.
And so when we finished it,
I had a couple of crew members drive him home
and walk with him to his apartment, into his apartment,
get him in bed and stay in his apartment until he fell asleep.
I just wanted to make sure that he got home safe and he got to sleep
'cause I knew he was deeply sleep-deprived.
And the next morning, when I saw him,
he was back to himself
and he had no memory of shooting this night.
And I believe him.
He wasn't being fanciful about it, he just didn't remember it.
And he said, he remembered during the stigmata scene...
As he put it, he said, "I remember an expansion and a pop."
And when he told me that
I just felt grateful that we didn't break Sean Harris
and cause irreparable mental and spiritual damage,
because the next day he was back to himself and completely fine
and completely unfazed and unafraid of whatever
rabbit hole he had gone down to, to finish out this scene.
But whenever I watch this scene, I do feel like I'm watching
some incredibly transformative acting.
And Edgar, I think,
kind of went into this place with him.
'Cause the scene...
From that moment on, the scene becomes pretty intimate between
Mendoza and Santino,
and Edgar was really playing off of the extremity of what Sean was doing.
This is what you want. This is, as a director...
This is what, as a director, what you do.
We built a beautiful set. And Bob Shaw...
You can't really see it objectively, but you can see it in the frame.
The room is shaped slightly triangularly.
It gets more narrow as it goes down toward Sean's side of the room,
which no room would ever be built that way,
but it creates a visual dynamism that's powerful,
that lets me get the whole room in these wider shots.
I told them to make the ceilings really low
so we could keep the ceilings in some of the shots.
You've got great makeup, you've got a great set...
Scott Kevan and I talked for a long
time about the different camera styles,
when to use an image shaker to shake the camera,
when to use a shutter angle change to make the image more sharp.
There was a lot of technical preparation for this scene,
but in the end, all of that is just creating an arena
within which you let actors do what actors do.
And in this case I've got three world-class actors
in a very small space, under tremendous duress,
at the end of a very difficult shoot,
and they all just did what they do.
They all went into this place, and all three of them,
I think, come alive in this scene,
and this is a scene I am really pleased with.
I'm really pleased with the drama of it.
I'm pleased with the performances
and the storytelling, and it's not boring.
Exorcism movies, it almost feels like they've run their course.
There hadn't been any good ones in a long time.
And I think that Emily Rose started a revival of the genre,
which I am happy with and proud of.
And Paranormal Activity being the other movie that really
brought the demonic back to the theaters.
But there have been a lot of bad ones and mediocre ones,
and I was a little nervous to do this again.
And I just felt like, how can I make
another exorcism scene that's interesting
after The Exorcist and after Emily Rose
and after all the Paranormal Activity movies
that are demonic possession movies?
And somehow this just worked.
It just worked out here
and it was a tremendous effort on everybody's behalf.
And this moment I find...
And this moment, right here, I find moving.
I think it depends on who you are,
but this moment of Santino coming back to his own senses,
the demon having been released...
And this look on Edgar's face...
This is actors taking it very seriously.
And thank God that Edgar and Sean
made this moment work.
It was a moment that I...
They're doing what was written in the script.
But I didn't think it would be easy, and
they made it work and feel realistic.
Some people think that after the possession
Santino shouldn't be able to remember anything, I don't know why that is.
I've actually met people who've gone through
sanctioned, authorized exorcisms,
and they remember a lot about their past and about their experiences.
In fact, it's contrary to the mythic or popular opinion
that if you're possessed when you...
This isn't The Exorcist, when you come back
you're not going to remember anything.
One of the things about possessed people,
if you read M. Scott Peck's psychiatric
take on the phenomenon, People of the Lie,
he talks about one of the distinctive qualities of possession
from a psychiatric point of view
is that a person is very aware of a
second entity that's within themselves,
without demonstrating typical psychosis
or multiple personality disorder, or schizophrenia.
And it's interesting, the way he breaks down
what he believes is the need for a psychiatric category of evil.
Not a book I recommend for everybody,
but if you're interested in the subject
matter, it's pretty compelling.
This piece of music is by Moby,
and tonally I just felt like
it fit what the movie needed.
And for people who know my movies,
they know that it wouldn't be that surprising if you open this van
and there's Jen and Christina dead
and the movie ends that way.
Emily Rose ended dark, and Sinister ended even darker.
But in this case, given the subject
matter, and the kind of movie that it is,
I really wanted there to be a payoff for Sarchie.
I wanted there to be some joy at the end of the movie
and a reward for his suffering
and for his family's suffering and...
So I shot a lot of this stuff at high speed,
and I didn't have the music in mind at first for this track,
and I wasn't sure what I was gonna use.
But this Moby piece seemed to fit it perfectly.
Watching it now, maybe it's a little long, it's a little drawn out.
It didn't feel that way in the edit room, though, so...
I really like this final image with the three of them.
We even tried a test screening once
where we did a freeze frame with just these three
and cut the baptism scene.
There was something nice about that, but
it was too abrupt for the audience.
And you need this denouement,
this breath of relief after all of the drama.
Do you renounce Satan and all of his works?
If you look to the left, that guy with the dark hair is a CG face
because that was Joel McHale
because in the first draft or the first
cut of the movie, Joel does not die.
So we had to...
But when we decided Joel dies during the knife fight,
we fixed that shot.
And it was the audience that said that Joel needed to die.
They loved his character,
but they felt that it was important that he died.
And so when I called Joel to let him know,
I said, "The good news..."
After the test screening, I said, "The good news is..."
"that the audience loves you, you're their favorite character."
"The bad news is you won't be in the sequel."
This credit sequence was done by
this guy Aaron who did the credit sequence
for Sinister, also for The Conjuring, I believe.
And, gosh, I love this credit sequence.
I just think...
It's obviously calling back on the magazine art that was done in the room
with Griggs' apartment.
But the use of this imagery with The Doors music, I think,
is a really good way to end this movie.
And it kind of symbolizes how the movie feels to me.
It's pop, it's fun,
it's got a visceral energy to it.
Action, horror, thriller,
dark, kind of twisted,
and yet really entertaining.
And it is...
it is a Jerry Bruckheimer film.
And Jerry was a huge help to me in post in putting this movie together,
especially in post.
You really understand why he has got so many great films under his belt.
But, that's it.
So I'll sign off now as the credits roll out.
Thank you, and I appreciate you listening.