"When I first got a clear look at Joe Johnston, director of big-budget extravaganzas like Jumanji, Hidalgo and Jurassic Park III, he in some ways screamed “old Hollywood” to me. Clean-cut, with graying hair, a blue button-up shirt, jeans and brown boots, he could have been a faded Rock Hudson-type star from the 1950s, perhaps just stepping off the set of a George Stevens or John Huston epic. Still, there was something apprehensive about the way he spoke, a careful choosing of the words. I couldn’t really blame him, though – his latest film is The Wolf Man, the endlessly delayed update of the classic Universal monster movie that he had the misfortune of signing on for only three weeks before the start of physical production. Read on for his thoughts on the use of CG, the pressure of coming onto the film so late in the process, and his negative feelings towards the oft-used term “director’s cut”."

BLOODY DISGUSTING: The title of the remake is “Wolfman” (one word) and the original was “Wolf Man” (two words). Is there any specific reason for that?

JOE JOHNSTON: Well, there’s two reasons. We wanted to separate from the original…you know, sonically it’s the same thing…but we wanted it to exist as a word, as its own entity…because it’s not a wolf, and it’s not a man, it’s something else. We just wanted to make it its own entity.

BD: Sort of playing up the “hybrid” aspect of the character.

JJ: Exactly.

BD: I know you came into this three weeks before principal photography. How difficult was that process for you?

JJ: Well, you normally get 16 or 18 weeks or something like that for prep. It’s not the ideal way to do it, of course, but the one big advantage it had was that I had to rely completely on instinct. And I had to just trust that, and say to myself, “what do I think this should be?” I don’t have time to sit analyze it, and review, and write a new scene, and have the writers come in. I have to say, “What’s my first impression of how it should be?” And when I forgot about that and either got talked into something else or had self-doubt, wondering if I was doing the right thing, I always came back to what my first impression was. The great thing about is that now I feel like, ok, I can trust my instinct. It works, you know? But it was sort of liberating in a way. Because everybody knows that three weeks of prep is nothing. There’s no way you can do it, so it’s not like I had to prove anything. I just had to start turning in dailies that looked great.

BD: Had you ever been in that situation before?

JJ: The only other time was the first movie I did, “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids”, where Stuart Gordon had left the project and I came in four weeks out, and [Disney] said that’s not enough, we’re gonna give you another four weeks. So I had eight weeks of prep, which is just sort of barely enough. But that was different in that I was salvaging something that was in a lot of trouble. And The Wolfman, while a director leaving is never an easy thing, it was a situation where Mark Romanek had made a lot of good choices. He had some great cast, he had some great locations, he had some sets that were under construction. And I was able to change enough stuff that I wanted to do. We wrote a lot of the scenes, but it wasn’t like, “oh my god, this is a total disaster, there’s no way to save it.” I sort of was able to drop in and steer it off in this direction.

BD: What specifically changed from Romanek’s version to yours?

JJ: Well, I actually put stuff back in the script that had been taken out. I put back three scenes that had been eliminated from David Self’s original draft. And they were taken out for budgetary reasons. And the movie needed them. And I put them back in. I said – cause they were asking me, “can you shoot this movie in 80 days?” And I said yes, I can shoot this movie in 80 days, but if we put these scenes back in, I can shoot the movie in 90 days, and it’ll be a much better movie. And they were all relationship scenes. There was no action at all. It was establishing how this guy felt about this person, and vice versa. The movie needed this stuff. One of them was the telescope scene where Lawrence and his father are looking at the moon, and he says “I wish things were different”. That had been cut. And there was a dinner scene that was cut – it’s not in the release cut, but it’s in the extended cut, and there’s a couple other things that we took pieces of but didn’t put the whole scene in. But Mark was trying to get the movie down to an affordable level. And I think that they went too far in places, cut out too much stuff. But it was always “R”, it was always an “R”-rated picture. But I really wanted to make sure that the violence and the gore…that it was organic to the story. I felt that there were a few places in the earliest draft I read where there was violence or a gory scene because it felt like, “gee, it’s been twelve minutes since the last gory scene, we better throw something in here”. It didn’t feel like it was really organic to the story.

BD: Sort of like punching a clock.

JJ: Yeah. Which you see in a lot of movies these days, I think. I think that there are filmmakers that are very conscious of what they think an audience wants to see. And I don’t think you should let an audience tell you what the film is. I think that when a film is working the audience isn’t conscious of, “gee, it’s been 15 minutes and I haven’t seen an action scene”. If they’re engaged in the characters, and they’re watching what’s on-screen, then that’s not an issue.

BD: Would it be fair to say that your film is more character-driven than Romanek’s vision of it?

JJ: Again, I don’t know what Romanek’s film was, and we’ll never know. But I just know that I wanted to emphasize certain aspects of the script which involved the character and relationships more than I had seen in the early drafts.

BD: I listened in on the press conference a little bit, and I heard you say that you didn’t have enough time before the physical production started to figure out the practical effects that you would’ve needed to use more of them. Had you had more time, would you have used more practical effects?

JJ: If I had had 18 weeks of prep, I would’ve had time to meet with Rick. You know, part of the transformations that I wanted to do is things that you can’t do with existing mechanical effects. Not to say that they can’t be combined, but I wanted to see skin change color, and I wanted to see individual hairs grow and stuff like that. Things that are really hard to do with a mechanism like foam rubber. But there are things that we could’ve done very effectively with Rick’s stuff. You know, when you’re watching a sequence like that, if you say, “wait a minute, that’s not real, that’s CG”, that’s when CG doesn’t work. I think that you have to never be taken out of a movie by what you’re seeing, you know? And I think that’s the other thing that we were very careful about. Like when his fingers break and fall like that [holds up his fingers to indicate a shot from the first werewolf transformation], there was a version of that shot where his fingers fall and his other two fingers start to grow, and grow claws, and get hairy. And it was too much. All this stuff is happening at once. You believed these two fingers [indicating the fingers that are breaking], but you didn’t believe these two fingers [the ones that are growing claws and sprouting hair]. It’s really a fine line you’re walking where, you have to be conscious of when you’re breaking the suspension of disbelief. You don’t want the audience to ever say, “wait a minute, is that real?” If anything, they’re thinking about whether it’s real and they miss the next few shots.

BD: It can pull you out of the film as well.

JJ: Yeah, absolutely.

BD: As for the werewolf makeup itself, was that Benicio in the makeup or stunt actors?

JJ: Whenever it’s close enough to tell it’s Benicio, it’s him. There was one shot that was a close-up of the stunt guy that we re-shot, because I could tell it wasn’t Benicio. I don’t know if an audience could ever tell. Maybe they could, maybe not. But the weird thing is that even Benicio looked different on different days. The makeup was absolutely the same. Once Rick had cast it and applied it, it never changed. But in lighting, and in different weather, he looked different. So if it’s from [the waist up], it’s Benicio. Sometimes wider than that, actually. He’s in several shots where you see all of him. But Benicio had trouble with the feet. We had these high-heeled dog leg feet that were impossible to be in and move. So we ended up letting Benicio be in his shoes, and we extended the foot with CG. We did that with the stunt guys too, when they had to run and stuff. There’s a foot extension on them.

BD: Got it. So, I know the film was re-edited by Walter Murch following some test screenings. Was that a decision of the studio’s, or was that something you had a big hand in deciding?

JJ: Well, it was a mutual decision really. I mean, I recognized there were problems with it. It was really that it was slow up-front. When you go into a movie with Benicio del Toro as the Wolfman, you know he’s gonna get bit at some point, and you know he’s gonna transform into the Wolfman. That’s a given. And I think the audience was less patient than I was with that moment from the beginning of the film to where he turns into the Wolfman. Originally [that part] was over an hour. And they just weren’t patient enough. Even though there’s all this character development up front. So what we did was we moved the bite forward, by eliminating stuff before he got bit. And then we moved the time between the bite and the transformation, we condensed that. So that happened faster. But it still requires an audience to be patient while we establish who these characters are. I don’t think it would work as well, and then you’re ending up with something that, you know…I always thought we could have a monster film that is actually a love story, and that is a father-son story. How great would that be, you know?

BD: As far as the original film, how important was it for you to stay true to the spirit of that one?

JJ: Well, I didn’t necessarily feel like I had to stay true to the spirit, but I wanted to reference it. I wanted this to be an homage to that film, and we used all the same character names, we used the settings, and we used the poem from Maleva. But it goes a lot deeper than that, because there’s much more of a story in this one than there was in the original. But for fans of the original, I wanted to open with her poem, [which is] the one sort of iconic verse from the original. I just wanted to tell the fans that they were seeing something that held the original sacred in some way.

BD: And had you been a fan of the old Universal monster films before signing on for this?

JJ: Especially The Wolf Man. I mean, I probably saw it 30 times on TV, before the days of VCRs. When you saw it, Channel 13 on “Creature Features”, you knew you had to be there to watch it or you weren’t gonna see it again, so it was my favorite of the bunch.

BD: As far as sequel potential, do you foresee signing on for further sequels if this one does well? HUGE SPOILER

JJ: It would depend on what we could agree the story was about. I think that we’re sort of – even though we’re not telegraphing it, we don’t want the audience to think, “oh, here comes another sequel” – we’ve left ourselves open for it, with Hugo Weaving, with him being bitten at the end. But it would depend on what we could do differently, and you think it’s easier – we’ve done it once now, we can do it again. That’s not really true. It doesn’t get any easier. There’ll be a whole new set of problems, you know?

BD: The original franchise had the whole monster-mash element in the later ones, where they brought in Frankenstein and later the other Universal monsters. Is that a direction you would ever go if the opportunity arose?

JJ: I think that the original Wolf Man was a true classic, and I think that when they started introducing Frankenstein and the other characters, they became camp. I wouldn’t really want to do that. But I would be curious to see what kind of appetite the studio had for a sequel, which would be interesting.

BD: As far as the additional footage that I’m assuming that you’ll be putting on the DVD, what can we expect? Are there any action sequences that would be added or is it all relationship/character-building stuff?

JJ: Well, there’s action sequences, but most of them are in the deleted scenes. Most of the stuff that we put back in, I think it’s 17 minutes longer – a lot of it’s stuff up front, but there’s also, throughout the film, we basically let the scenes play a little bit longer. There’s a little bit of action stuff, but it’s mostly bits of scenes that worked, but we cut them out to shorten the film. You know, to get down to our 96 minutes. So it’s sort of a variety of stuff. But I won’t call it the “director’s cut”, it’s the “extended cut”. The release cut needs to be what you refer to as the “director’s cut”.

BD: I think “director’s cut” has sort of a negative connotation in some ways.

JJ: It does for me. You know, the “director’s cut” should be what is released, I think.