Stephen Sommers Interview 2 by John Millar Previous "With Dracula after my wife read the script she said that Dracula had been played a hundred times by a hundred different guys, mainly badly, twice brilliantly, so how was I going to do it great? "Which is why I flew all the way to Prague to talk Richard Roxburgh into it. We met some really well known actors - I won't name them - and they loved the character but they said they were afraid of being compared with Bela Lugosi and Gary Oldman. But Richard Roxburgh was not afraid. "The reason I heard about him was that I was checking out all these Australian actresses for the role that Kate Beckinsale got and two of them said we had to get Richard Roxburgh to play Dracula. I didn't know the guy. I had seen him as the Duke in Moulin Rouge but who would have thought of him from that character as being Dracula? So I called Hugh Jackman and asked if he knew him and he said that when he was in drama school he said he always thought if he could be half the actor that Richard Roxburgh was he'd be happy. "So I watched some more of his stuff and thought that this was the guy. So he read it, loved it and had no fear, but he didn't want to spend another winter in Prague. So I flew all the way to Prague and talked him into it. "For Frankenstein's monster we got Shuler Hensley. I had seen Oklahoma!  on stage and afterwards Bob and I said his character was so great that just like the Frankenstein monster you felt sorry for him but you think that they have to kill him because he's so terrible. But we didn't think at that time of getting that actor for the role. Then several months later this actor gives this great audition and we ask what he's up to and he says he's playing Judd Fry on Broadway. We thought how dumb we had been in not casting him three months earlier. "I decided to cast Kate Beckinsale because I didn't think the role could be played by an American actress. We were looking for someone new and interesting and as we kept meeting with Hugh Jackman I realised that I couldn't get some 19 year old girl playing opposite him. I needed a beautiful, really talented woman and that narrowed it. So we went for Kate." Once he had his cast, Sommers stressed to them that there was a specific tone in his Van Helsing movie - that there were no monsters in this movie! "They are just people with really bad problems," says a chuckling Sommers. "The Wolfman is a man who turns into a wolf, Dracula is also a man and Frankenstein's monster, well he's seven different men. Mr Hyde of course is another case of a man transformed. And that's what I love about those old movies, they were really melodramas about the alcoholic, the drug addict, the nut next door. Inevitably, special effects technology has a big part to play in a Stephen Sommers movie. Dracula's fangs for example are computer generated. "You see them grow, so that's pretty cool," says Sommers. "And I don't think that has been in other movies. "Also a vampire has to open its mouth more than is humanly possible before they bite and what little blood they have in them drains from their face - so you get to see all that. And of course Dracula turns into a bat and he has a 15 foot wing span and that's fun." Dracula's flying Brides were only possible because the computerised wizardry had taken a giant leap forward by using a device that had been adapted to cover TV sport. "They tried to do a similar thing in the last two Matrix movies and couldn't pull it off. A lot of the stuff we do was not technically possible until we did this movie," says Sommers. "In the Matrix which was great stuff, they are on wires. They are zipping along but you know they are not really flying. We took the cable-cam system that is used in American football, where a camera whips across the field on a grid. "It was complicated. At 7.30 pm each night I'd meet with the cable-cam guys to discuss the shot I needed. They would stay up all night; it would take them 12 hours to set up one shot. I'd come in the next morning, shoot the shot and move on with my day. They would go to bed and then the next night they'd start again. "With this technique we had the Brides doing loop the loops and spinning around and managed to combine real humans with computer generated stuff." Sommers works closely with the computer geniuses of Industrial Light And Magic on his movies and this time round they spent a year and a half on effects. "I made sure they had enough time because I had a problem on The Mummy Returns with The Scorpion King, it wasn't up to most of our standards, it looked fake. I learned from that and so we made sure that there all these great special effects that everybody was kicking ass on," he says. The idea of having huge bats in the movie came about because Sommers reckons that normal sized bats just are not scary. "So who cares about a vampire changing into a bat! But if these bats had 15 feet wing spans and could really fly then ok! Then they're scary," he says. "So then I thought about Van Helsing using a gas propelled crossbow to shoot them down. It's totally feasible because although it looks fantastical it is a very mechanical thing." The deadly circular blades that Van Helsing uses as weapons again came through the research that Stephen Sommers made into the era in which his movie is set. "This is the Industrial Revolution at its grotesque peak," he says. "They were inventing all kinds of weird things back then and these blades work by springs - a sort of handgrip. Van Helsing whips them out of his jacket, pushes a button and the blades come out. A hand pump spins the blades. "I got the idea from one of my daughter's toys. It's one of those little things that looks like an umbrella that turns into this flying whirly. For the life of me I couldn't find that toy when I was trying to explain it to the props guys. I looked all over my house for that toy." Before a frame was filmed, Sommers was hard at work imagining how the world of this film would take shape. "My attitude was that my job was to take people to where their imaginations can't even go. We have created a Transylvania based in reality but with twists from things like The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari. I kept telling my production designer to watch that movie again. "I wanted it to be a Transylvania where our imaginations could go. When we went to Prague to film I didn't want to just shoot Prague, even though it is a city that I love. You'll never know that we shot all over Prague because we enhanced it and did all sorts of stuff because it had to be cooler than we ever imagined it. "I loved shooting in Prague. We got there just after the floods that had caused so much destruction. The hotel that we were going to stay in was wiped out, but none of our locations were affected. One location was this fantastic 400-year-old church where I set the vampire ball. Since it was a vampire ball it couldn't just be people dancing, so I got the girl who choreographed the Circe Du Soleil shows. We have jugglers, contortionists, and trapeze artistes, flame blowers - all that going on at the ball." So with all of this epic stuff going on it begs the question whether Van Helsing could become a franchise? "I have not thought about that," insists Stephen Sommers. "I guess it is that kind of movie but all I know is that I have promised my wife that I wouldn't read another script or think about another script until after next Christmas. This movie takes 15 hours a day; six or seven days a week and I want to spend time with my family." So will Sommers be thinking about making a third Mummy movie? Again the movie man is giving nothing away. "I haven't thought about it," he says with a smile. "I am really proud of my two Mummy movies; I had so much fun. I can never say never."		Home Interviews Antoine Fuqua Interview King Arthur Interview Arv Grewal Interview Asia Argento Interview Behind the Scenes of "War of the Worlds" Bernie Goldmann Interview Clive Owen Interview Dakota Fanning Interview Dennis Hopper Interview George A Romero Interview Greg Nicotero Interview The Hulk Press Conference Ang Lee Press Conference Ioan Gruffudd Interview John Leguizamo Interview Kathleen Kennedy Interview Keira Knightley Interview