IFFI 2024 | Director Chuck Russell interview: On a death battle between The Mask, The Scorpion King and Freddy Krueger

If Chuck Russell could, he would make a movie about film fanatics burning film critics at the stake, and make it the most hilarious horror comedy of the 21st century! This outrageous assumption comes from my hilariously candid chat with the American filmmaker behind wacky titles such as The Mask, The Scorpion King, The Blob, and more. Sitting down with The Hindu after a session at the 55th International Film Festival of India (IFFI) in Goa, Russell is at his spontaneous best.

“Let’s first kill the critics. Remember, they are called critics, so they think their job is to be mean and critical. The real question is, are the audiences seeing the films?” poses Russell.

I had just stated how attempts from young Indian filmmakers to speak in an under-explored genre, such as pure-genre horror, are often scrutinised as mere emulations of the West. Whether it’s a serial killer or military killing, he says, the human condition of being fascinated with murder is universal, something that makes pure genre horror universally appealing. An advocate for lesser-explored sub-genres in horror, Russell stresses watching horror as a cathartic experience. “If you can face death in a film, and walk out with your arm around your girlfriend, everything’s okay. I believe that horror and comedy release endorphins.”

In over 40 years of making Hollywood movies, most of which are cult-classic adaptations or remakes, Chuck Russell has become notorious for putting the wildest of spins on the source material. Take The Mask for instance; with the help of Jim Carrey’s genius, Russell put a hilarious new twist on Mike Richardson’s green cartoonish troublemaker. Russell says he never imagined it would become the pop-culture phenomenon it turned out to be.

“Here’s what happened: as a young producer, I did a movie called Back To School with Rodney Dangerfield. It was a big hit in America, and I thought I had become a hot young producer, but it tanked overseas. So I wanted to do a comedy as a director — I wanted it to go universal and I wanted it to need no language.” Jim Carrey’s hyper-enthusiastic slapstick school of acting, to Russell, seemed similar to great silent film stars like Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. “I thought that silent humour — with music and inspiration from Looney Tunes and all that — could play in different languages and succeed where I failed in my other film.”

You can never make Russell do a remake he isn’t fully convinced about. “I was once offered a Luc Besson action movie remake. Why would I do that? Luc Besson is still alive! I only remake if something can be improved upon.” And he found that X-factor in each of what he calls his trilogy of experiments in the classic horror genre — “it so happens that the Elm Street series at that time,” Russell directed A Nightmare on Elm Street 3, “The Blob from the original, and Witchboard are great basic ideas that I can explode with modern technology and modern characters.” Witchboard, which premiered earlier this year at the Fantasia International Film Festival, is a remake of Kevin Tenney’s 1986 film. The film, he adds, was his last of such remake experiments.

Given his history with remakes and adaptations, one is naturally intrigued by how he decides what to reimagine and what to discard.

“It’s not intellectual for me. I’ll take a basic archetype of an idea and literally deconstruct it, explode it into something bigger and wilder.” With Elm Street, Russell wanted to make something new that would take the film series beyond what franchise creator Wes Craven had achieved. “It actually worked and the third film became a fan favourite. May God bless Wes!.”

With 1988’s The Blob, which was a remake of Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr’s 1958 sci-fi horror film, it was the underlying concept of a pure-evil amoeba that consumes everything around it. “You can’t outthink the Blob. The Blob is the ultimate simplicity boiled down to pure evil. Even back in the day, the original film was pathetically funny. Even the word ‘Blob’ makes me laugh! Even the word ‘Witchboard’ makes me laugh. It sounds like Switchboard!”

The idea of what a Witchboard is, and the wormhole of information that his research on witchcraft took him to, sealed the deal to make the film. “The original Witchboard movie was the first Ouija board movie. I realized that there’s no witch in the original film. I really made my investigation of the witch in the 1700s and its effect today.”

In his studies of the cult — “which I do very carefully because evil is real kids,” he warns — Russell learned that it was the Pendulum boards that got witches burnt at the stake. “Ouija boards exist because the pope, in the 1700s, outlawed Pendulum boards. You could potentially be burnt at a stake and called a witch if you had them. So I discovered this in my own studies of the supernatural and I was fascinated. They’re all dangerous, but as a filmmaker, it’s just a great thing to film.”

Such a concept, he adds, allowed him to go back to practical effects. “So I can use it as a vehicle to try everything I ever wanted to try, going in and out of dreams, in and out of hallucinations, and in and out of good and evil.”

In his talk, Russell mentioned his fascination for rebranding popular stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger (in Eraser) and Dwayne Johnson (The Scorpion King). The director explains a trick he used to make these stars feel comfortable while shooting dangerous stunt sequences — to do the stunts himself in front of them!

“I’m very conscious that they are human beings; their knees hurt especially if someone has been doing it for a while and I’m extremely safety conscious. These are actually dangerous stunts — and I give my hat to Tom Cruise. The biggest interesting trick is that these stars see me do it. I will not tell a star, while sitting in my chair, to climb on top of that train car right there and do this or that.”

So Arnold’s fight scene on top of that rail car in Eraser? Russell was there with him before filming the scene. “It’s like, ‘If the director can do it, why would I complain?’ But it’s also a good skill set because you need to know what you’re asking them to do. It may look easy to you but it might hurt them. So whether there is a stuntman or we are employing CGI, I’ll be there with them, and if they don’t like it, then we’re going to cut the scene.”

As we wrap up our conversation, I ask him who would prevail in a death battle: Freddy Krueger, Scorpion King, or The Mask? “Gosh, that’s tough. I think Scorpion King would bite the dust. Sorry, Dwayne. But between The Mask and Freddy Krueger? That’s tough, but I think I would give it to The Mask because he has the power of the good in his hands.”