The story follows a security guard at a high-end department store who begins to investigate mysterious deaths occurring in front of the stores' mirrors. He soon discovers that there are murderous reflections out for revenge.

BD: So you’re Alexander Aja, everyone knows you love doing these gory movies. You say you’re doing a ghost movie, and yet it looks like your goriest movie yet! I was thinking it was gonna be this PG-13 type thing!

AA: That pissed me off so much (laughs)! When I was shooting the movie all these people online were saying “Oh he’s doing this PG-13, sort of Japanese ghost movie, remake whatever.” I mean, it’s based on a Korean movie, but the idea is original, the characters are original. I wanted to make a movie that explored the other side of the genre, but I wanted to make a movie in the vein of The Shining. And The Shining is a very shocking, graphic, kind of in your face movie. And like everyone else, I’m kind of pissed off about all these PG-13 movies that aren’t scary, that are not efficient. They don’t show you anything. “Less is more” is the bullshit everyone at the studios is feeding you. No! I want to see it! If I don’t see anything I can’t get into the movie.

BD: With High Tension, you kind of started the whole new wave of French filmmakers either getting their films released over here, or coming here to make their next films, can you talk about that?

AA: I never thought about sort of opening the gate with High Tension. I made High Tension with a very low budget, for me it was like important to do a tribute to the films that made me want to make movies in the first place. And it was a big success. So I am very happy that High Tension helped [other French directors].

BD: Last year you wrote and produced P2, but didn’t direct it yourself. Are we going to see more projects like that, where you sort of help a new filmmaker get his foot in the door?

AA: P2 was a story I had in a drawer for a long time, and I wanted to see it on screen. But it was a bit similar to High Tension, and I didn’t want to repeat myself, so I just got someone else [Franck Khalfoun]. And I would like to do that again, yes.

BD: Some of your older films have still not been released in the States, has there been any talk about getting them released on DVD over here?

AA: I think Furia is being released on DVD soon. Furia is a very different movie, it’s a sci-fi movie. It’s very violent, but its completely different. We’ll see. People may someday will get to see Furia and appreciate it.

BD: Back to Mirrors, we’ve seen the jaw ripping scene; where does that fall in the sort of spectrum of gore effects? Is that the biggest one, or is it actually tame compared to some of the others?

AA: That may be one of the goriest scenes of the movie... but there are many others!

BD: It looks like you are using visual effects more than you did in the past, how was that for you, being used to doing everything practically?

AA: It’s not like the usual CGI, there’s no monsters or whatever. But it’s a lot of visual effects, very elaborate and seamless reflection effects, where you have the reflection staying in the mirror while the person walks away. It’s not too much of a challenge to achieve those.

BD: OK, they are telling me to wrap it up, so can you talk about Piranha a bit?

AA: Piranha is a very challenging movie, huge budget. I wanted to do something completely different from my usual movies. I want to make the ultimate blood bath, killer fish during spring break movie, and all of that in 3-D! 


BD: And it’s gonna be fun like the original, not a serious hardcore Aja style movie?

AA: Yeah, it’s going to be really fun and entertaining, in the vein of Dead Alive (or Brain Dead). Gory but fun!

MIRRORS arrives in theaters August 15th