Exclusive: David Gelb interview for The Lazarus Effect [Frightfest 2015]

Exclusive: David Gelb interview for The Lazarus Effect, which screens at FrightFest 2015.

Olivia Wilde made her name with her roles in television shows House and The O.C, since then her career has gone from strength to strength. Sticking mainly to the independent film circuit she is known for making interesting decisions when it comes to roles and none more so than that of her role in new horror The Lazarus Effect.

Directed by David Gelb, better known for his work in the documentary field, The Lazarus Effect takes elements from all the great mad scientist films from Frankenstein to Flatliners, which some elements of Pet Sematary thrown in for good measure.

Ahead of the UK premiere THN got the chance to talk all about The Lazarus Effect with Gelb as well as the climate of the horror genre and his leading lady.

So what is The Lazarus Effect all about?

The Lazarus Effect is about a group of medical students who are on the cusp of discovering how to bring the dead back to life. The film is really about that classic moral conundrum of just because you have the scientific ability to do something, should you do it? Not just because you can.

This goes back to stories like Frankenstein and all the different kind of mad scientists genre where we’re so obsessed with our ability to do something that we haven’t thought whether or not we should. So that’s essentially what it’s about. Then one of the characters dies and they bring her back to life and terrible, terrible things happen. I guess it’s a tale about what are the limits to where humans are going, what are the consequences of playing God. It’s very much a traditional horror film in that sense. We thought it would be fun to do an update on that kind of film. It’s very much a homage to some of those films that I loved watching when I was growing up. But then set it in a modern laboratory.

Where did the idea come from?

The idea actually came from a script written by Luke Dawson and then I worked on revisions with Jeremy Slater. The idea kinda came from the basis of what happens when you die? If you were going to be brought back to life how would you change? What would be different about you? We also play with the notion that when you die your Hell is a very personal Hell. It’s the worst moments and nightmares of your life and you’re trapped in them. I liked the idea of that Hell and the horror of the film coming from something that is already inside of you rather than an external force. The demons that haunt us are those that we create ourselves.

What were your influences / inspirations whilst making Lazarus Effect?

A lot of the types of horror films I watched growing up starting with Frankenstein films like Re-Animator, The Shining, Rosemary’s Baby we thought about with regards to Zoe’s character. She’s someone who’s losing control of her body but not understanding what’s happening to her which is part of the horror of Rosemary’s Baby that we really appreciated.

The film Akira, the Japanese animated film, a classic from the eighties. It’s about someone in a group of friends who essentially gets the power of God and doesn’t know what to do with it. They end up going insane because of it.

So we wanted to play all of these different things off against each other and create a fun horror movie where you’ve got a bunch of good friends meddling with things that they shouldn’t be meddling with and then dealing with one of their friends losing their mind. They were a lot of the factors we were thinking about when we were discussing what kind of movie we wanted to make.

You’ve previously done a lot of documentary work how, does fiction differ?

Well when I was younger I always loved film, I never thought I’d be a documentary maker. I always thought I would do fictional films. I guess in college being able to work over summer doing behind the scenes documentaries for other people’s films, or doing music videos or behind the scenes shorts for charities, I built up a skill in documentary. It’s where life took me I suppose. Then I had the idea to do a film about a great sushi chef and the documentary career developed, but I always wanted to do narrative films.

I thought that maybe doing a low budget horror film with a legendary producer like Jason Blum would be a good opportunity for me. He had worked with the directors of Catfish and let them work on Paranormal Activity so he had a precedent for taking risks with directors. So I thought it’d be a great place to start down this narrative path.

You have Olivia Wilde as your leading lady, what about her made you think she was the one?

I think Olivia Wilde is such an interesting actress and I don’t really think she’s had the opportunity to play this kind of part. I know that she loves horror films and had similar experiences to myself where she would always try and scare her younger siblings when she was growing up. We had a lot of things in common.

She is incredible because she is able to..she’s so likeable, funny and of course she’s beautiful, but she’s incredibly funny and she’s incredibly likeable and has a great instinct. But she’s also able to play this other side. Where after her character experiences a real transformation where her id takes over. She has a lot of pent up rage and she was really able to play this dark version of herself.

We talked a lot about the film Black Swan, about how there are two sides to this film. Then how to manifest the dark side, the part that you keep bottled up. She was incredible at being able to play a really kind of likeable character for the first half of the film and then she takes a sharp turn. It’s quite a burden for an actress to be able to do that and make it convincing for the audience, but I think that she really nailed it.

The film screens at Frightfest this weekend, what’s your favourite scary movie?

My favourite scary movie? I would have to say The Shining really affected me. I guess watching it as a child, I was pretty young and my cousin showed it me when I was maybe nine or ten years old. That movie really freaked me out. I’ve never looked at hallways the same way after that. Watching that movie as a kid, the character through which you experience a lot of the scary stuff in the movie is Danny, the kid. It’s just, that really resonated with me. I like the use of music and the ambiguity of the shining and how they explain so little.

When you’re making a film for a studio there’s a lot of pressure to explain everything. They don’t want the audience to be confused at all. So I really admire how they were able to make the film with very little explanation. The audience never got that there was a logic in what was happening and that they just don’t quite understand it. I like the mystery of having Jack Nicholson in the photo, it’s just so mysterious and so scary.

And recently?

I thought that It Follows was amazing. I love that movie. I loved how you’re always looking over the character’s shoulder to see if it is coming. Again they don’t explain anything other than the rules you need to survive.

Then I had the chance to see a film called The Witch which I think is coming out later this year. That movie is incredibly freaky. It’s set in the Puritan times, it felt so authentic. Even the language was very much so. I read that it was based on actual texts from the time. So the characters are speaking using thou and thine and various archaic versions of English. I think the movie is so scary, the music is incredible. I think those two films show that there is definitely hope for the horror genre because they’re absolutely terrifying.

I think It Follows did pretty well in the States, originally it was just going to be on video on demand and then they expanded it. Actually I have a trailer company in Los Angeles and we work on theatrical trailers, and we had the privilege of making one for It Follows so we’ve been in love with that movie for sometime and it’s cool that everyone in the world gets to see it because it is incredible.

Why do you think attendee’s should make the time for Lazarus Effect?

If you watch The Lazarus Effect you get to enjoy a lot of your favourite horror archetypes in a modern laboratory setting with an incredible cast of actors. It’s basically like Frankenstein’s monster in modern day science. If you want to see an incredible performance from Olivia Wilde as she turns from a lovely and brilliant scientist into a manifestation of her own personal Hell then I highly recommend you check out The Lazarus Effect.

>What projects are you working on currently?

Well we’ve just completed Chef’s Table which is on Netflix. It’s basically six documentaries about the world’s greatest chefs, but shot in the style of Jiro Dreams of Sushi which was my first feature film. This is a documentary series that is almost a continuation of that.

Then there is my documentary, A Faster Horse. Which is about the story of the Ford Mustang. The Mustang is the ultimate American car. It has quite a fascinating story, and the film is about the building of the fiftieth anniversary model under extraordinary economic pressure, but also under incredible pressure from the fans.

The fans are incredibly hard to please, in the car world making a new Mustang is kind of like making the new Star Wars. So there’s an incredible amount of scrutiny, everyone has their opinion on what it should look like and how it should be. So we’ve got this story of these engineers who are under this incredible pressure and they have to be incredibly ingenious and creative in order to solve all these problems.

It’s also a story about how the car is made because just how Jiro Dreams of Sushi shone a light on the craft of making sushi, a lot of people think it’s just fish and rice, this is really a film about the incredible amount of work that goes into making a car that looks good, drives well and that is safe and affordable. It’s an incredible amount of engineering with thousands of unique parts being made by tens of thousand of people and there’s one guy who has this billion dollar investment on his shoulders. I guess that’s the jist of A Faster Horse. I think the trailer comes out the beginning of next month.

The Lazarus Effect screens on Monday 31st August as part of the Frightfest line-up, before being released on home entertainment platforms from 19th October.