[Sndbox] 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' Steamy Babes

[Charles]

'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' Steamy Babes



  10-15-2003 - 7:59 AM | Interviews  Movies  

In Theatres Friday

By Fred Topel

Horror movies have traditionally been vehicles for hot girls to take their clothes off and get killed. Only the final girl, the virginal fully clothed one, could survive in the end. In the late ‘90s, we traded nudity for more kick-ass heroines. Neve Campbell and Jennifer Love Hewitt fought against their ghost faces and fisherman slicker guys. So the new Texas Chainsaw Massacre is updated for the ‘90s with some strong heroines of its own. Star Jessica Biel, known best for her TV work on 7th Heaven, takes a dramatic turn as a survivor against the Leatherface massacre.

“I don’t want to break away from any image,” Biel insists. “7th Heaven has been wonderful to me. The only thing they ever gave me was a strong character who was a normal girl who made mistakes, like every other kid makes, but who is still smart and who’s an athlete which is a good thing for girls to look up to and I think that image is a really great image. It was never a conscious choice. Texas Chainsaw Massacre came along, I met with [director] Marcus [Nispel] and I thought, ‘I have to be part of this.’ It was never like, ‘Okay, Rules of Attraction, I’ll look hot and sexy and older. And in Texas now I’m strong and cool.’ It was never like ‘Let’s get away from that image.’ It just kind of happened.”

However, Biel does appreciate the depth into which a film allows her to get into character, as opposed to the frantic shooting schedule of a TV show. “Right now I’m really enjoying working on film. I’m really enjoying the process of really getting to know a character and making up a backstory and knowing I’m only going to be a part of this character’s life for three months. And really diving into it. And the process is so slow. It’s so different from television. I expected to get on set and fly through eight pages like we do on 7th Heaven, and you go through maybe two sometimes. I like the process of having 15 takes if we want and trying so many different ways to say something. Or, literally stopping everything, halting production and talking to the director for two hours because you can. I really am enjoying that at the moment.”

Compared to the original Texas Chainsaw, Biel had a lot of work to build a character on her own. “I used the original a little bit but not necessarily to research my character. I kind of had an idea of what I wanted to do with her, but this was to see what happened in the original movie that I didn’t like, what I thought we could improve upon. There was no character development at all. I didn’t even care about the characters. I was watching like ‘Well, die already.’ The only person I was really interested in was the main girl who was I thought really good. And especially when she gets alone by herself. The other characters were just so, you know, whatever, they were swimming in the water in the lake and they were cute and they were in love, blah blah blah. I didn’t even know them. I didn’t feel like I knew them at all and couldn’t relate to them. And that’s what I really wanted to change, that’s what I noticed. I was like, ‘This has got to change immediately because that’s the only way people are going to like this movie is if they like these characters and they want them to stay alive.’”

© 2003 New Line

That said, Biel would not say her character was a reflection of herself. “I always wonder if I wouldn’t just freeze. I think her brain’s working a lot quicker than mine would have worked. I think I would have frozen and might have just- - I don't know. I hope I wouldn’t leave my friends. I might’ve just taken off. I’d like to think that I would make the same choices that she would make. I mean, I thought she did a pretty good job. She did make some mistakes of course, but all in all it was pretty good.”

The film’s other heroine, Erica Leerhsen, got her acting start in the horror genre. As the Wicca girl in Blair Witch 2, she explored cerebral horror. Now she gets down in the dirt of Texas. Getting into character was not a problem when placed in scenes with Leatherface (Andrew Bryniarski).

© 2003 New Line

“He’s such a huge guy and he was asked to do all of his own stunts, jumping off things with all that stuff on him and it’s not exactly the safest thing for anyone to be doing,” Leerhsen said. “And he took a toll. And we were dealing with someone who was exhausted and didn’t have the energy to make it safe for you all the time. I felt like I actually had to defend my own life when I was in a scene with him. Like if I didn’t get that barrel down, he was not stopping. And that barrel weighed about 80 pounds because it was just thrown in at the last minute, and I’m not that strong. And I had to constantly keep picking it up and putting it there and it was like every time before we shoot it, I’d hear the chainsaw start to go and I’d be like, ‘I’m gonna die.’ You make your own safety calls sometimes just because it’s not every day that people deal with a chainsaw that has sparks coming out of it that’s getting this close to your face. And of course it’s closer on the actual day than anyone planned it would ever be. And you just have to make that call and that’s the hardest thing for me, to be emotionally in a scene and the state the character was in, but having to physically make sure I didn’t get hurt. But that’s not what the character is thinking. The character is thinking, ‘I have to save my life’ so it was like bouncing those two things but keeping that adrenalized kind of thing that you would actually have in that situation, of that kind of panic. My character was very panicky, but would have that fear, that adrenaline but adrenaline’s dangerous when you’re dealing with that kind of stuff.

© 2003 New Line

All of the film’s screaming made her hoarse. “So hoarse. There’s one shot where it was such a highly technical move in the van, we had to react to that about 40 or 50 times. And at that point, you can’t even scream anymore. It was like the third day of shooting and both Jessica and I lost our voices because we were just like over and over and over. And at any moment they could get the camera right and that shot’s making it in the movie and that’s your reaction. So it’s got to be as intense every single time, and it was really hard.”

Leerhsen was not so familiar with the original film, and was relieved that it betrayed her expectations of typical slasher films. “When I heard Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I thought of more like the sequels and stuff. I thought it was going to be like this slasher, horror movie and when I watched it, it was such an intelligent psychological thriller. I loved the way it used the real dead bodies, because that’s so much scarier than showing some fake prosthetic thing in a way. I loved it and I saw exactly why it has such a place in film history.”

 

Charles Mims

http://www.the-sandbox.org

 

 

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