This was your directorial debut, how’d you find it?

I found it thrilling and exciting and I’d do it all over again.

From your history with Alexandre Aja I was expecting something more like a slasher, what made you go all psychological?

That’s what I like, you know? I think the monster within is a lot scarier than ghosts and a lot scarier than slasher movies. I think we’ve been desensitized to a lot of these horrors, I mean it’s gruesome to look at but we really know it’s fake. There’s something mysterious about a psychologically twisted person because it could be the neighbour next door who seems really nice but actually he’s a crazy killer, and I think that’s really scary. One of the big arguments I had with my producers was whether we made the lead character sort of a monster so it’s beauty and the beast, but I thought it’d be more interesting if he was a normal guy, the kind of guy a girl might find attractive to begin with so the situation is a bit more complicated.

Did you do a lot of work with Wes Bentley to get that?

No. You know the way the character was written there was a lot of range, he’s funny sometimes, scary sometimes and sympathetic sometimes. So we needed character actor who could hit those high points and low notes, and Wes Bentley is an incredible actor with an incredible range so he fit perfectly.

Some scenes seemed a big extreme, did you have to do many takes of Wes Bentley going nuts?

Well it was a low budget feature so we had very little time for multiple scenes, and the way Wes worked fitted that perfectly. He rehearses very little and likes to do few takes and he likes to get it fresh. I mean, he’s a character so he doesn’t drop the character, when he was off for lunch he was actually stalking Angela off the set: very strange and very bizarre. He really is a very involved and intense person who immerses himself in it. It was 2, 3, 4 takes maximum.

You’ve Alexandre [Aja] a long time and worked with him before, how did it go this time, with you both in such different roles?

The writing was a lot easier because it’s less stressful and you’re just having fun. Once you’re on set and he’s the producer and I’m the director it certainly gets a little tense! Especially when we’re dealing with intense actors and a very short shooting schedule and a dingy, grimy location nobody wants to be in. But our relationship is stronger because of it, nothing can get in the way of that.

As long as you can still go for a beer together it’s all fine.

We always can! There’s nothing we can’t get over and solve.

P2 is set at Christmas, did you have bad childhood experiences at that time?

Well as a Jew I had a terrible time at Christmas(!) No, I’m kidding.

I thought you might’ve been inspired by GREMLINS and decided the best movies were set at Christmas time…

(Laughs) Yeah, it’s very cute… No, I have a Western coming up, a comedy coming up, I have different genres. Kubrick to me is the ultimate film director because he took on such different stories and really brought them out and made wonderful movies that were all so different and I’d like to, without being pretentious, model my career after his. So I really don’t want to get stuck in one kind of… I mean I want to keep moving. Especially in this town where you make one type of film and they think that’s all you can do. It’s really hard not to be typecast as a director and a writer.

Kubrick’s a good choice there then. But that was a very sudden jump from GREMLINS, you don’t have anything against it do you?

No, no absolutely not. I though GREMLINS was very… uh… I love all genres as long as you’re entertained and as long as they carry a story and the characters are believable then I’m sold! As an audience member I cry very easily I jump like crazy, I love to go for the experience - that’s why I got involved in the first place. So absolutely not, I think that every movie has its own merit and I respect all of them. I certainly know how difficult they are to make so I wouldn’t criticise!

As I think Kubrick himself said “Every film has something to teach us”. You’re even living up to his legacy in your interviews!

(Laughs) Uhh, yeah. I’m always afraid to mention his name for fear of looking pretentious. It’s just he’s such a legendary filmmaker I hope maybe one day I could make one film that could equal anything he’s done. He’s a master filmmaker.

What’s the scariest place you’ve ever been trapped?

Wow, you know I can’t say I’ve had a… there must be something… I’ve never been locked up. The scariest place I’ve been trapped is probably my own body!

P2 is out in the UK now. The next interview to go live will be Morgan Spurlock. Will I get the GREMLINS reference in? Will I switch to TRON? Check back to find out…

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Directed by: Franck Khalfoun

Written by: Franck Khalfoun (screenplay), Alexandre Aja (screenplay/story), Gregory Levasseur (screenplay/story)

Starring: Rachel Nichols, Wes Bentley, Philip Atkin, Stephanie Moore, Miranda Edwards

Distributed by Tartan Distribution

Film will be released in the U.K. on May 2nd 2008

Review by Michael Edwards

What could be scarier than being locked in a dark car-park with nobody around? How about if you were in the boot of a car in the carpark? Sound freaky? Well, I guess it does. How about if it was Christmas too, and you were a sexy rich businessperson of some sort? And you were being pursued by a lonely car park attendant and his dog? Last question before I start making statements: ever wonder why some films just take stuff a bit too far and end up being a bit crap?

So, here we are again, another tacky horror film. Just as I was beginning to feel spoilt with such great chillers as The Orphanage (review HERE) and [Rec] (review HERE) it all gets smashed to pieces by P2 and that disastrously poor remake of The Eye (review HERE). The premise of this film, which I’ve touched on above, is that Angela, a beautiful high-flying businesswoman (she might be a lawyer or an insurance salesperson or something), sets off to go home after a long, hard day. She reaches her car on the second level of the car park under her swanky office building and realises it won’t start. She calls a cab but the porter has disappeared so she can’t get out. Suddenly we jump cut to her being wrestled to the ground, her mouth covered in a chloroform-soaked cloth. The next thing we know she is being held prisoner by a lonely and mildly psychotic security guard. From here the tale becomes one of the captive trying to flee the captor. Oh and it’s Christmas (why give it a May release date?!)

It’s really quite a simple concept but it just doesn’t quite work, and I think the crux of why this film has taken a plausible (if uninspired) horror concept and gotten a bit lost somewhere is the decision to mess up the working relationship between Franck Khalfoun and Alexandre Aja. Khalfoun was a great actor in SWITCHBLADE ROMANCE (US: HIGH TENSION), on which Aja was co-writer and director, but joining Aja and Levasseur on the writing side and having a stab at the directing appears to have taken what is a palatable slasher plot and mutated it into some bumbling psychological horror that fails to live up to its potential. Psychotic security guard Thomas is meant to be scary because he’s just an ordinary guy, but Wes Bentley is too good-looking to be convincingly ordinary and lonely, and too bad an actor to pull of an scenes of insanity without the audience bursting out into spontaneous laughter. What’s more the film is riddled with cliches: there is nothing I hate more than a moment of silence before ‘BANG!’ A dog barks, or someone walks round a corner from the dark. The psychological cliches are even worse as the film plays on the most overused and outdated cinematic tool of the ‘masculine gaze’ which relies so heavily on all us guys loving to see Rachel Nichols inexplicably doused with water and running around in a clingy dress being pursued by a guy who is watching her on CCTV. The predictable moment when she subverts this male control fantasy not only undermines the reliance of this movie on it, but also fails to provide any excitement as the blundering Thomas was a weak and useless villain from the start.

On the positive side, a rottweiler does get its head bashed in with a tyre iron, and there are plenty of ridiculous chase and fight scenes which will make you provide a few laughs, but as a horror film P2 sucks, pure and simple. If you enjoy inadvertent pastiche to the back-to-basics horrors that offer little more than loud noises and ridiculous acts of violence perpetrated by poorly devised two-dimensional characters then P2 is an hour and a half well spent, otherwise I’d save your hard-earned cash for something better.

P2 is released in UK cinemas on 2nd of May.

For more background on the movie straight from the horse’s mouth, I had a phone chat with Alexandre Aja which can be read HERE.