Writer/director Eric Heisserer reveals why he cast Paul Walker in Hours, and which death scene he wrote for Final Destination that was too extreme to film.
After I interviewed Paul Walker for Hours, the film’s publicist told me writer/director Eric Heisserer was available too if I was interested. Heisserer wasn’t on the schedule, but in fact I was interested since I only met him previously before the film premiered at SXSW. I had much more specific questions after seeing the film.
Walker plays Nolan, a father of a premature newborn born right when Hurricane Katrina hits New Orleans. As doctors, medical staff and patients flee the hospital, Nolan is left alone with his baby on a ventilator. When the power goes out, he find a hand cranked generator that’s only good for three minutes at a time, and less as its charge dwindles. Hours is Heisserer’s directorial debut. As a screenwriter he wrote the remakes of A Nightmare on Elm Street (along with other credited writers) and The Thing and the sequel Final Destination 5. We touched on those too, but I forgot to tell him that I still call it Fivenal Destination.
CraveOnline: It’s a great “what if” story, what if you’re abandoned in a hospital during this disaster. Do you know if there were any true stories of people left behind, whether babies or adults?
Eric Heisserer: There are countless abandon stories. Hospitals [too], but mainly from homes and hospices, retirement homes and a lot of small pockets of people. The story about the ventilator actually came from Charity Hospital which was overcrowded but still without power. The doctors, nurses and the staff there were the ones trying to keep the ICU equipment and the NICU equipment powered.
So it wasn’t as extreme as one person with no training.
No, that’s the fiction that I pulled from it.
Which I approve of. Like I said it’s a great “what if.” You have to think of the most extreme situation.
Yeah, and it supplied me with the story that I wanted to tell which is really about parenthood. I felt that was a more intimate relationship there between the life that’s struggling to stay alive and the father.
Did you know going in what Paul would go through to get this performance?
Well, I knew it would be brutal. [Laughs] There was no mistake about that. I love that he identified with Nolan right away and he talked about how when his daughter was born there were complications, and he recalled so vividly just the panic and the helplessness that he felt and the need to be able to try and do something. I thought that’s just a great emotion, a great mental state that he could pull himself back to for this movie, and I think he did.
How did you keep track of the time, the three minutes and when it dwindles to 2:47 and under two minutes?
That was pretty absurd. We did a lot of stuff that I guess are like method writing. Once we got the layout of the hospital, and we shot in an actual hospital in New Orleans for most of that, and we figured out the locations of the stairwells and the other major points, me and some of our crew ran it ourselves and timed it, timed everything. How long would it take to get to the roof and down? Where can you stop for a breather and all those things? We had to figure out the geography for that to try and make it as real as possible, and there were plenty of times when as we had prepped it for three minutes, or 2:47 or one and change, a lot of us were like, “No, you can’t do that.” Then our DP or our gaffer or somebody would make the run and go, “Oh yeah, that’s doable.”
Once you get into editing and you’re time cutting, does it really matter how accurate you are with the time?
We found that the narrative that you tell in the story once you get to post-production ends up being a lot more fluid. Time becomes a little more relative than the very strict boundaries we were forcing on ourselves during the shoot. We still had a lot of fun with it.
I figured you must have fudged it a few times and that’s okay. Maybe when I’m home I can look at the DVD timer display and count it, but in the theater I couldn’t time it.
Yeah, there are plenty of times like that.
So you shot in a real hospital. How did you set dress the Katrina conditions?
That’s an interesting situation for us because the hospital that we shot in had been abandoned since Katrina. In fact, there’s a shot in the movie that shows a wall calendar that had August of 2005. We found that just there on set. A lot of what you see is equipment and computers and books and stuff that were just left in the hospital. So it was very real and when we were filming, when we had everything lit and we were using the gurneys or the IV equipment around, it felt very authentic and real. If we were between shots or you went one floor up or down, suddenly you felt like you were in a ghost movie because you’re just around all these ancient pieces that had not been seen or touched in over five years.
Did you re-flood the hallways?
We did. We did some natural flooding. We first thought maybe we were going to have to use CG floods or CG water or a special effect to pull it off, but I didn’t like the look of any of those even in pre-vis. They didn’t feel very authentic at all, so my practical effects man came up with a great solution in which he brought in a giant standing pool, tore it down and we flooded the lobby and a couple of the hallways and just shot that. It was fun.
Is Paul essentially acting with a box, because there’s no real baby or even a prop except for the two shots where we see the baby?
Right, he is. He’s doing it all on his own. There were a couple of times when we could bring in a live baby and place it in the incubator so that he had a real person he could talk to. Even if she was off camera, it helped but that was rare. A lot of it was just him.
Eric Heisserer: Probably since my first produced credit. When Elm Street finally hit the theaters, I had the start of an itch to direct my own feature. I started putting it to the test with each successive movie that made it and began to hire storyboard artists on my own and board out sequences for the movie that I wrote to see how visual I could get and how close to what my director came up with. That was kind of just a little training ground for myself.
So how close did Nightmare get and how close did FInal Destination 5 get to the storyboards?
[Laughs] I would say both of those were quite different from the final product but I got very close on a handful of sequences in The Thing. That’s what gave me the confidence to try and tackle this.
Did you storyboard Hours then?
I did, but in my own stick figure way. Jaron [Presant], my director of photography, I would tell him, “This balloon is Nolan and this small balloon is the baby.”
What will your next film be?
I have a couple of projects that I’ve written that I’m hoping will be my next feature but they’re still on the horizon right now.
Do you think you could direct in the franchise realm like Nightmare on Elm Street, Final Destination and The Thing?
I don’t think so. I think I have to stick with original properties. That leaves those amazing franchises for more capable directors.
Were those easier as a screenwriter, to write within a franchise?
I don’t know if anything’s ever been easier. I’d say that it’s always a double-edged sword. It’s easier in that you have so much character development already done for you. Someone’s paved that way so we know who this character is, we know who these villains are or we know what the stakes are for certain scenarios, like with Freddy Krueger. The hard thing then is to develop a storyline that’s different from the ones that have come before so you can justify why you’re making another movie, but also similar enough that it feels like it’s part of the same world. That dance is a very difficult one to do.
I know the intention with Nightmare was to reinvent and reboot, but I thought if you wanted to you could see it as Nightmare 9. Is that an insult to you?
No.
Or was it intentional that certain fans could maybe see it either way?
I do believe that there was an ambiguity there. Now, whether that was purposeful or accidental is up to debate but we found the deeper into the Nightmare culture that we got, the more divided everyone was with their opinion of what the franchise is. Everyone’s Freddy Krueger was a little bit different, their favorite version of him. There is the slapstick comedy Krueger or the scary as hell version and it was hard to try and service all of those masters.
Did you write the line “How’s this for a wet dream?” or did they improvise it?
I believe that was a line from someone who came in and did some rewrite work.
Well, it’s from Nightmare 4 so it was a surprise to see that one in there.
Yeah.
Did you have any good Final Destination deaths that didn’t make it into 5?
[Laughs] Yeah, there were a couple of Final Destination deaths that were just too much. In fact, the original death at the health spa wasn’t the Buddha and acupuncture. It was actually death by colonic. We just deemed that was too much. That was just like a bridge too far.
That’s where Final Destination draws the line.
Apparently so. [Laughs]
Was writing the script to Hours different than writing those projects?
Very much. It really was. I had no established franchise to lean on for the basics. I had to cook this with ingredients in my own kitchen so to speak. It was scarier in that it dealt with a lot of fears and emotions and ideas that I was looking at, that I was facing personally, so there was a lot of me invested in it. That makes its telling and its success or failure that much more risky I guess.
Knowing you were writing a movie for one person, was Paul your first choice?
I wasn’t thinking of any one actor when I wrote it and Paul was certainly not the first on the list. I looked at and met with a number of actors over the course of nine months.
Other name actors?
They fell into one of three categories. One category would be the really big names that I think were all a little squeamish about working with first time directors, their agents especially. [Laughs] Then you had ones that are looking to make a comeback, to have a resurgence but were otherwise off the radar. That made it very difficult to get funding. Then you had the other category of actors who could get it funded but it was hard for me to tell if they’d be right for the role.
I went through a lot of those and I went into the meeting with Paul thinking that I would likely say no to him as well because I didn’t know if I could see him in it. Then I spent 15 minutes with him and I heard his story about when his daughter was born. There’s a kind of honesty to Paul’s performance. Some are chameleons in that they can adopt some other role and then some actors have a sense of the more they show of themselves, the more they can embody the role of that character. I thought that he and Nolan were close enough in real life that this would work.
Could you have done this story even if there weren’t a real Hurricane Katrina?
Certainly. In fact, we talked about that for a while, not making it [Katrina]. The deal was that there were so many really terrifying real moments from Katrina that if we were to do a fictionalized thing, it was weird to fictionalize so many of these moments that actually happened which is why we use those interstitial devices, the footage, from CNN and from other news broadcasts to remind you. Yes, people shot at helicopters. Yes, there were problems with illness and snakes. There are plenty of other stories that just couldn’t find it into the movie that we heard about.
Was casting Genesis Rodriguez’s part difficult because you had to explain to an actress she’s not going to be in very much of the movie?
Thankfully, I think they got that. Genesis certainly connected with it right away that while she only had a small slice of the screen time, she was arguably the most important character because it’s the whole reason why Nolan goes on this journey. So she did a great job. She even cooperated with my crazy shooting schedule for her and I appreciated that.
She has to come back to appear in his mind, and you were shooting in sequence?
Yeah, and I didn’t want to shoot that out of order just to work her days through. We brought her in at the very beginning so we had all the happy flashback scenes at the first of our shoot and I saw that Paul really liked Genesis. He just loved hanging out with her and then I took her away from him and I threw him in this hospital. For about two and a half weeks, he’s mostly all by himself so that on the last day of shooting is when we shot the scene where she came back and we flew her back in. At that point in time, he was so desperate to see her again that I think there was just a lot more on the line.
Shooting chronologically is a luxury most films don’t have. Was that easy to schedule given the single location?
Not especially. It required some serious choreography from members of my crew, but they knew at the same time that it was going to be so much easier on them to shoot chronologically because they could track so many things that had to be monitored. Both my wardrobe and my makeup departments had big timetables, really like excel spreadsheets almost, that tracked the different phases of his clothes, the deterioration, when does he get cut, when does this wetness happen, how do they deal with this on his face or whatever else. If we did a take that I liked where he got a little dirty on some excursion to the ambulance for instance, then wardrobe is like, “All right, we’re going to make sure we keep that going.” It was just a lot of attention to detail that I was happy that my crew committed to.
How does New Orleans feel about doing Katrina stories?
Well, considering every member of the crew had a Katrina story themselves and lived through it, I feel like they were great at keeping us all honest and keeping this authentic. As my producer said, they’re kind of our bullshit police, which I appreciated. I feel like because we were telling a personal story and we weren’t trying to manipulate the events of Katrina to fit something and we weren’t going the massive 2012 style apocalyptic movie, I think we got a thumbs up from them. We’ll find out [when it’s released].
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