Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald Interview 2 (Ring Two generics) by Martyn Palmer Previous Q: It's like there's some cross pollination of ideas within this mini genre… LM: Absolutely, because Gore didn't just love the idea of The Ring, he loved Hideo's movie and certainly there are certain key images…although Gore is a very visual director and he invented much of the movie but he loved and he adopted from Hideo. I think the whole thing of the spare, framed, sort of under populated world came from the original. And Hideo really loved Ring, the movie Gore made and there are aspects of it that he brought into his movie and it's funny we were talking earlier, when they wanted to re-release the DVD, before this movie comes out, and they like to put new material on if possible and they asked us to create a small film to bridge the first movie and this one. And a really interesting young filmmaker, who had never made a feature but he had made a really interesting short, came in and made this 12 minute film and even in that one you get the sense of him taking the motifs and the language of Ring and then making something very new for him. So yeah, there's a kind of film language that has grown up around this. Q: Western cinema seems to be looking toward Japanese filmmakers in this genre. What is it that they bring to it, do you think? WP: You know usually The Ring is credited with being the first of those Asian remakes and you know our interest in it was not just the genre or the fact that it was Japanese, it was just Ringu was a fabulous movie. LM: And it was a phenomenon in Japan which told you that there was something that was connecting to an audience, but very different culturally. WP: And what we had noticed as parents of now teenaged children that our kids growing up in an American cultural environment that had a steady influx of Japanese pop icons, I mean you grow up in America now and for those kids Pokemon was as important as Mickey Mouse and as they become older there is a fascination for Anime and Manga and other aspects of Japanese pop culture. So there might be a kind of acceptance of that iconography that is now there present in the teenage audience. LM: I do think too, that the reason that the Japanese are so comfortable in the genre is that the spiritual world and the real world are not disconnected in their every day lives. So I think they have a particular affinity with the genre. WP: This became very clear to us when on the second week on production on the Ring when there had been a number of unlucky occurrences on our hospital set… LM: (laughs) Involving water which is a big motif on our movie… WP: And Hideo had a Shinto priest come and do a purification blessing on our set, which was a new one for us as producers. Q: You're kidding … LM: No, we are not kidding at all. We had a Shinto priest on the set.. WP: We chanted and clapped our hands and … LM: And swept the evil spirits away! Q: And did it work? WP: It seemed to, it was the end of the problems. LM: It seemed to but we'll have to wait and see. Wait until the movie opens.., Q: Now that's a little bit spooky… LM: Isn't it. That world in the Japanese culture isn't separate. You can be a very rational successful lawyer and you stop at the Shinto shrine on your way to work. The two things aren't exclusive at all and they live hand in hand. Q: What had happened on set? LM: You know I wasn't there for all of it, but they were all water related.. WP: There was one bad portent which was a mother skunk abandoned her babies underneath one of our major sets at the hospital. LM: You couldn't work with it.. WP: The babies were there and had to be rescued but the fact that the mother had abandoned the baby skunks did not bode well. LM: And then we had a pipe burst and a whole bunch of things. Q: Where did you film? WP: As with the first one we did about three weeks up in the Pacific north west, Seattle area in the first one and Astoria (Oregon) on this one and the rest was done on sound stages. LM: Actually the two productions were very similar. We had more special effects in this.. WP: This was a bigger budget than Hideo has worked with before.. Q: What do you think are the hallmarks of this genre of horror film? What comes with the Asian approach to it in comparison to a western approach? LM: Hideo in particular has a different approach to how the scares come and how you release the audience from that moment. WP: Oddly enough it's closer to what Kubrick was going for in The Shining. LM: If you remember when The Shining came out people thought it was very interesting but it wasn't that commercial because they were so different for an American audience because it sustained that sense of dread. I love that movie and I think it's scarier because it does that. But traditionally American horror of the last twenty years, say, has become more predictable in its rhythms and it's about how many scares per minute you get. With this the first movie build very slowly, and that certain comes from Hideo, I don't know whether it's true of a lot of Japanese directors. 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