A young couple has retreated to the wilderness for a romantic camping weekend-but the trip quickly spirals into a nightmare when they are car-jacked by an escaped convict and his girlfriend. Thrown together by chance, no one can imagine the terrifying horror that awaits the two couples at a remote and isolated gas station.

BD: First of all, congratulations on having two films recently completed (Splinter, The Grudge 3)!

TW: Thank you. It’s been quite a ride. The two films overlapped a little more than I originally expected, but in some ways that helped both projects, with one feeding off the energy and momentum of the other. They sort of pushed each other along.

BD: SPLINTER sort of happened under the radar, how did it get its start?

TW: In pretty much a “once in a life-time” type scenario, Splinter came my way basically out of the blue. A friend had mentioned my work to producer, Ted Kroeber, who sent me Ian Shorr’s script (then called Tooth & Nail). I met with Ted and producer Kai Barry, pitched them my take on the film, including the completely new element of the Splinter creature, and we all just really clicked. Legend has it that Ian Shorr wrote the original script in just 18 days during his junior year at USC, and Kai Barry undertook the re-write of the script, changing aspects of the story to suit the creature I had in my head, and to give the story and characters a tone that was closer to how I saw the film.

BD: What inspired you to make SPLINTER?

TW: As a filmmaker I was drawn to the siege and isolation aspects of the script, the challenge of bringing such a contained story to the screen in a way that would stay lively throughout, and be able to shock and excite an audience at the drop of a hat. There’s obviously a great legacy of films that explore similar themes, Alien, Dawn of the Dead, Night of the Living Dead, parts of 28 Days Later, Tremors, and of course The Thing... and many more. We definitely weren’t short on sources of inspiration. And as we developed the characters what became important was their individual stories. When you stick the audience in a confined space with a group of strangers doing battle against something horrible, and each other, you better make sure they are all interesting and fully realized characters. Otherwise, who cares?

BD: SPLINTER is a creature feature, right? Can you tell me about the monster?

TW: The Splinter creature was the combined brain-child of myself and my good friend George Cawood, and has been rattling around in both our heads for several years. The basic idea is a creature that takes over your body from the inside, regardless if you are dead, or alive and resisting. With just one prick of a splinter, it will burrow into your skin like a sea urchin spine, and start to grow its own network of tendons and muscles to take over your skeleton. It’s a completely dumb entity, it doesn’t know or care what you are, if you’re alive or dead, it just needs what’s inside you, your blood and tissue, and a skeleton to claim as its own. And it has no regard for how your skeleton is supposed to move either... that’s what really gets you.

BD: Now, to be clear, the monster is all practical or mostly practical?

TW: Shot for shot, more than 99% of the time you see any part of the creature it is completely practical. From the smallest to the biggest. On a few very rare occasions, shots that on our budget would have been completely impossible and unsafe to do with stunt performers, shots that we couldn’t edit around... we resorted to CG. It’s something I always try to avoid, and thankfully the team at Quantum Creation FX delivered physical effects that were totally camera ready, and we were able to shoot what was needed on set.

I don’t much enjoy the experience of directing on a greenscreen set, or asking actors to react to something that isn’t there on the day. And I have yet to meet an actor who feels differently. Acting opposite a tennis ball on a stick is hardly rewarding for an actor, and the results are seldom compelling for an audience.

BD: From the promo I saw, the creature seems to be pretty complex, where did the design come from and was it hard to bring it to life without the use of computers?

TW: The creature takes over the bodies of its victims. It distorts them and bends them however it needs to to attack its next target. But essentially, even at its most complex, it’s just a collection human limbs. The design is basically a broken human being.

For people who don’t like to think about snapped joints and horrifically twisted and disfigured bodies, the concept can be a little hard to wrap your head around. So I did use rudimentary computer animations to communicate to the crew and the performers how the thing would look, the unique type of movement it would have. It works on muscle-memory, it moves however it learned to move with the skeletons of the other creatures it has absorbed. And once it infects you, it doesn’t care what the limits of your joints are, it just breaks you. It can get pretty freaky looking.

But on the day, using a lot of great prosthetic make-up, puppeteered appendages, and the talents of some very skilled physical performers, we were able to do almost everything practically. We had three different people inside the costume for different moments in the film, sometimes changing from one shot to the next just to get a specific movement right. We had a mime, a stunt performer, and a national champion gymnast, all working to the point of exhaustion... sometimes beyond. It was not an easy job being in that suit. I have a ton of respect for those guys.

BD: What are some of your favorite creature features? What would you compare SPLINTER to?

TW: I’ll leave the comparisons to audiences, and critics, but my favorite creature films are a lot of the same movies that I already mentioned, 28 Days Later, Alien, etc. plus some great creatures like Predator, Starship Troopers, The Fly, Jurassic Park, The Descent, and of course anything brought to life by Ray Harryhausen.

BD: How bloody/violent is the film? Can you give us a taste of something we might see?

TW: It’s bloody, and it’s violent, and you get to see plenty. I don’t think that’s giving to much away, do you?

BD: SPLINTER is a low budget indie fare, how was it working with minimal assets?

TW: I have made short films for as little as a thousand dollars, and I’ve worked on visual effects sequences for movie where we spent more than an indie feature budget on a single shot. Sure Splinter had its challenges, but it was still the biggest budget I had worked with as a director, and it’s a testament to the resourcefulness of the producers that we had a very tight but not too insane schedule, and we were able to bring in the highest quality equipment, and assemble an amazing team to get the most from it.

Filmmaking is always a careful balancing act between desire and necessity no matter how big your budget. And I was able to take what I had learned working on the fringes of big budget movies, and bring those lessons to set, combined with the skills I have honed on all the micro-budget projects I have done, and get the most out of the resources we had.

BD: What were some of the best experiences on set, any disasters?

TW: I wouldn’t say there were any real disasters, no. We lost some time to weather, but we dried off and bounced right back. That’s one of the great things about a smaller, more nimble indie production, the reaction times are great. You can be all set to shoot an outdoor daylight scene, but when things change... suddenly you’re inside, shooting a night scene oblivious to the storm raging outside.

The best part of the experience was definitely working with such great actors, very rewarding. We shot many scenes in their entirety, with non-stop continuous takes. Pages and pages of a scene would play out in front of the camera in real time before I would say cut. This gave the actors a lot of freedom to experiment, and gave everyone a real sense that anything was possible, that anything could happen. Cinematographer Nelson Cragg and his crew worked very hard to light our locations in a way that would allow us to shoot pretty much in any direction, sometimes 360 degrees without a relight. He was also manning the main camera himself, so once the action started, it was up to him and the other camera operators to keep up. This created a palpable edge-of-your-seat energy on set that translated directly to the screen. It was a very exciting and energetic shoot.

BD: What’s next for you? More horror? Do you have any passion projects or more original projects you want to do?

TW: I have covered a few genres in my work so far, and I want to remain open to anything. But I have to say, horror is a ton of fun to direct, and without getting into too much detail, I have my hands on a few really great horror/thriller scripts right now, a really smartly written creature feature, a supernatural noir thriller, and a twisted take on a haunted house movie. I’m also reading a lot, and looking to the horizon I’m getting involved on the ground floor with several properties that are ripe for big screen adaptations.