Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald Interview (Ring Two generics) by Martyn Palmer When you hear of certain bizarre incidents and water related accidents which happened on the set of Ring Two it's easy to let the imagination slip into overdrive. After all we are talking about the latest instalment in one of the scariest series of films of modern times; both in the Japanese original, with Ringu and Ringu 2, and with the Hollywood made adaptation, The Ring, starring Naomi Watts as a reporter and single mother who investigates the origins of a mysterious video tape which seems to result in the death of anyone within a week of watching it. Foreboding with a terrible sense of dread, atmospheric and genuinely frightening, the films have become a modern cinematic phenomenon and have led to Hollywood looking towards Japanese directors and writers and acknowledging that they have invigorated the horror genre. And if any one director can take credit for this it's Hideo Nakata. How fitting then, that Nakata - who directed Ringu and Ringu 2 - should accept the challenge of directing The Ring Two. As Laurie MacDonald, who along with her husband and partner, Walter F. Parkes, produced both The Ring and its sequel, says: “It's absolutely perfect that Hideo should direct this one. It's like The Ring itself, it completes the circle.” But what of those rather strange incidents on set? For the first two weeks of filming the cast and crew were based at St Luke's Hospital in Pasadena, California, and were disrupted by a series of odd setbacks. First they discovered that a skunk had built a lair underneath the floorboards, delivered her babies and then promptly abandoned them - leaving her noisy and distinctly pungent offspring behind. Next a water pipe burst and then the air conditioning broke down, causing damaging flooding in the production office. At this point Nakata and his assistant decided to call in a Japanese Shinto priest to perform a purification ceremony. Shinto is an ancient Japanese religion and priests often perform purification rituals to rid buildings of evil spirits. “There had been a number of unlucky occurrences on our hospital set,” said Parkes. “And Hideo had a Shinto priest come in and do a purification blessing on out set, which was a new one for us as producers.” And did it help? “It seemed to but we'll have to wait and see. Wait until the movie opens,” says MacDonald. This husband and wife team have been responsible for some of the most popular, and critically acclaimed movies of recent years. Parkes and MacDonald produced The Ring in 2002 which went on to become one of the year's biggest sleeper hits. That same year they also served as a producer on Steven Spielberg's Minority Report, which starred Tom Cruise, and Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can, with Leonardo Di Caprio and Tom Cruise. Towards the end of 2004, they produced the highly successful Lemony's Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. The couple's earlier credits include Men In Black and the hugely successful sequel and Parkes was executive producer on the Oscar winning Gladiator and the Sam Mendes directed Road To Perdition. Parkes has been Oscar nominated himself on three occasions - for the documentary California Reich, for writing, with Lawrence Lasker, the original screenplay for WarGames and as a producer for a Best Picture nomination for Awakenings. Parkes and MacDonald are the co head of DreamWorks' motion pictures division. This interview was conducted as The Ring Two neared the final stages of completion. Q: How has it been working with Hideo? WP: It's been a constant pleasure. He has a kind of a precision and a calm which is partially who he is as an individual and partially maybe indicative of the culture from which he comes. It's been a very collaborative experience and yet when you see the movie I think you will agree he has retained some of the stylistic sensibilities that you would associate with his other movies whilst stepping up into this kind of larger Hollywood context. Q: There's a kind of symmetry to Hideo directing this one… WP: I think so… LM: It's like The Ring, it completes the circle WP: Unless you are just looking to capitalise on the economic success you know and you go with anyone just to deliver the scares, it's hard to get a really good director to do a sequel of a successful movie. Good directors A want to do their own work and B don't want to be in the shadow of the success of the first director. When it was clear that Gore (Verbinski) couldn't do it because of his responsibilities on Pirates of Caribbean at that time Hideo was not available, he was working on a project at MGM. It's really why we went to a very interesting first time director, a commercials director and we worked with this man for quite some time and it became clear as we got closer to production, about ten weeks out, that he too was resisting the idea that this was a sequel, he wanted to turn this into something that was wholly original. And you know you want the worth of the original but there is also a basic obligation to make good on the story elements of the first movie and to push them further. So when it was clear that that didn't come together it was just Lady Luck because it turned out that Hideo's movie at MGM had fallen apart. And we sent him the script and he committed immediately and you know there was no such issues for Hideo. He did not feel he was in the shadow of Gore because Gore was initially in the shadow of Hideo and as the real creator of the original mythology he was able to grab on to it without any of those issues. Which was just very lucky for us. 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