One of my favorite films this year is Joe Dante’s 3-D family horror film, The Hole, which follows brothers Dane and Lucas and their neighbor Julie who discover a bottomless hole in their basement that brings their nightmares to life. While on the red carpet arrivals for last night’s 2009 Spike Scream Awards (airing Tuesday, October 27 at 10:00PM ET/PT) we caught up with Chris Massoglia, who plays the older brother in the film. While everyone is focusing on his role in Cirque du Freak, we took some time to talk 3-D and evil marionettes (is there anything better?).
While I was lucky enough to catch this sucker at the Toronto International Film Festival this past September (read my review), Massoglia has yet to see the final film.

“I haven’t seen it yet, maybe at the AFI fest, hopefully I can come out for it,” he tells Bloody Disgusting. “The shoot was awesome, it was cool. We were in Canada, and it was a really fun shoot because we filmed for a month, then had a two-week break over Christmas, and then filmed for another month. We went up and skied during Christmas. Working with Joe Dante was really awesome, ” he exclaims adding that he had never seen a Dante film until now. “Before [THE HOLE] I had not seen any, but I had heard of `em. Then he (Dante) gave me the `Burbs, which was randomly hilarious.”

THE HOLE was shot in 3-D… REAL 3-D, not that post-production bull sh*t. Massoglia explains that it wasn’t all that different of an experience.

“As far as an acting standpoint it wasn’t that different. It was filmed with real 3D cameras; it wasn’t transferred to 3D. They had one camera down here and one on top and then they had mirrors doing the effect. Acting wise it wasn’t that much different – there were some things with blocking, like if there was an over the shoulder shot you had to be careful not to move your shoulder or your shoulder would be out in the audience,” he jokes.

Without giving too much away, there’s an incredible marionette sequence in the film, which Massoglia had some input with.

“I don’t actually fight the marionette, but I run in after the fight.”

“Did you see him working with it, its an actual marionette right?” I asked.

“Yeah, it’s awesome. They had puppeteers doing it the entire time. I actually did ADR a couple weeks ago and they wanted me to do some of the voice stuff for the marionette. I saw the footage and it looks really cool.”

While the marionettes were all practical, the finale of the film has a heavy does of CGI.

“It was really cool at the end of the movie, it goes into a totally different world of your fears and all that. It was cool, I did a lot of CG with VAMPIRES ASSISTANT, so I was used to it. There wasn’t that much green screen in the whole movie thought.”

THE HOLE is looking for a distributor as we speak so hopefully you’ll be able to enjoy it sometime in 2010.