Stephen Sommers Interview - Q & A by John Millar Q:   How did you get the brilliant idea of bringing all these classic creatures together in Van Helsing? A:   People think that the studio came to me with the idea after the success of the two Mummy movies, but after that I told Stacey Snider - who has no interest in monsters - that I wanted to do as small movie. I said that I had no idea what it might be but I had to do it. So I went off to write it and one day while sitting in the apartment in which I write I was looking at all these old posters of the classic monsters that I love. I was staring at them and thinking...Well I don't want to do a Dracula movie because it has been done. Coppola did a good one. Frankenstein has also been done before and I didn't want to spend two years of my life on a Wolfman movie. So I wondered whether they could all be put together. I thought I'd look at the original classic monster movies all over again. So that's what I did and the only sequel that I watched was The Bride Of Frankenstein which is also really great. When I watched them one after the other I really fell in love with the characters again. You forget how good they are. It's like seeing The Good, The Bad and The Ugly the day I got here after film school. That was like...Oh my God! It was brilliant film making! At high school when I first saw it, it was just a cool western and after film school I knew it was the work of a master but at high school I didn't know Sergio Leone from anybody. After seeing the monster DVDs again I thought that Frankenstein's monster was like Lenny in Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men. You feel so sorry for him because he doesn't know what he's doing. He's also like The Elephant Man because he's so scary and then you realise that underneath Frankenstein's monster is a great tragic figure. The Wolfman is like an alcoholic or a drug addict. He could be your brother or best friend during the day. He's nice and noble but at night when the demons - be they alcohol, drugs or the full moon - over take him he's not comfortable in his own skin. So he rips off his skin and becomes this monster. But I told all the actors that there are no monsters in this movie, they are just people with really bad problems. And that's what I stuck to. 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. Q:  How did you decide on Van Helsing as the conduit that brings it all together? A:   I saw the movies and thought that all these characters could fit into the same world, Gothic, Eastern European, with lots of atmosphere. But I didn't want the story just to be my hero taking on the three bad monsters, which I'm sure most people would think was what was going to happen. I wanted it to be much more complex and much more fun. When I figured out the story I came up with the idea of Dracula desperately needing something that he could only get from Frankenstein's monster. So in the movie Dracula has this secret that he desperately needs something and only Frankenstein's monster - in the whole planet - can provide it. So right away these two were connected. Then I interwove The Wolfman into that. So suddenly I had this great story - not just three bad monsters. So I needed my hero and as I was watching stuff I thought it had to be Van Helsing. But I didn't know enough about him so I went back and read Bram Stoker's Dracula book. I knew Peter Cushing had played him in movies and I had seen Anthony Hopkins play him in the Coppola movie. But I knew I had to do something different, to take him to another level. First I had to change his name from Abraham Van Helsing. I called him Gabriel because - no offence to Abraham Lincoln or the Biblical Abraham - it's just not a good hero's name. I loved the fact that Van Helsing was worldly, spiritual and a vampire hunter. The fact that he believes in vampires and is correct and knows how to deal with him made him a really interesting character. But I had to develop those ideas and thought that what if my guy was trained from monks and mullahs from Tibet to Istanbul? I take on things that I'm interested in...like the Masons and the Knights Templar...so I thought about the idea that Van Helsing worked for this ancient, secret religious society? I also thought about the fact that all these monsters 'died' at the end of the 19th century -they were all written in the 19th century - because the 20th century became so technical. So if they all 'died' off in literature then who killed them? So what if it was this secret society who had decided that their job was to vanquish this type of evil from the Earth! So I figured that Van Helsing worked for these guys and that they were based under the Vatican. That's how my mind works. Q:   Because these are much loved characters you are going to be under great scrutiny from the fans aren't you? A:    If the movie had been about Van Helsing taking on the three monsters they should slaughter me because that's so easy - anybody could have come up with that idea. It's a great story that really works and is my bullet proof vest. And when you watch it you'll know that whoever made this movie loves this stuff, so that's my other bullet proof vest. Q:    How does Jekyll and Hyde fit into all this? A:    In the movie it is how we introduce Van Helsing. Van Helsing has been hunting Hyde. He missed him in London and now he catches up with him inside Notre Dame. Q:    Is that the movie's big opening? A:   No. This movie has a few big openings. The movie opens in black and white. The studio was cool. Like I say Stacey Snider has a zero interest in monsters and she loves this movie! She is all about great stories well told and great characters well realised - that is her thing and that's what she loved about this. I always wrote that the entire sequence was in black and white. It fits because the opening sequence is sort of the climax of the original Frankenstein movie condensed into seven minutes. The opening line in my movie is 'It's alive!, It's alive! It's alive!' It's paying honour to the original. For the people who know, remember and love the original monster movies, I'm going to blow their socks off. I kept all the iconography. Frankenstein's monster has the flat head and the bolts in the neck but we went the extra mile - not in a weird way, he's not flying or anything like that. Q:   Where did those circular blades that Van Helsing uses as weapons come from? A:   This is the Industrial Revolution at its grotesque peak. They were inventing all kinds of weird things back then. 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. Q:   How did you decide on the style of the movie? A:   To kill vampires they have to be shot with silver arrows or silver spikes. Now bats don't scare me 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! So to shoot them down I thought about a gas propelled crossbow. It's totally feasible because although it looks fantastical it is a very mechanical thing. As far as the world of this film was concerned 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. Q:   Was Hugh Jackman your first choice to be Van Helsing? A:   Every time I finish a script I give it to Bob Ducsay who has edited all my films since film school and is producing to me. On The Mummy he said it's Brendan Fraser. When I asked why, Bob said because he is big, strong and handsome; he can take a punch, throw a punch and he has a great sense of humour. When I gave him Van Helsing, Bob said it was Hugh Jackman. At that time I hadn't seen X-Men. I knew who he was but I had only seen him in one movie. But Bob said to trust him so I went out and saw a bunch of Hugh's stuff. I saw X-Men and thought this guy was great! So he was our only choice. Q:   How do you avoid parody? A:   That's the key. Stacey Snider asked if Igor was going to be like Marty Feldman in Young Frankenstein. And I said to trust me. Igor has a couple of funny lines but he's creepy, nasty and evil. So although he is funny it is key that he is really nasty. At the end of the day it's all about getting great actors. No-one is expecting to come out of this movie loving Frankenstein's monster but I guarantee that when you see it you'll think he's great. For that role 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 he says he's playing Judd Fry on Broadway. We thought how dumb we had been in not casting him three months earlier. 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 made 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. 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