Producer Dennis Berardi Talks Skinwalkers

While on set of Skinwalkers a couple weeks back we got a lengthy block of time with producer Dennis Berardi who gave a good look at the history and philosophy of the film. And we may not have been allowed to actually see the wolf suits but between Berardi's comments here and director James Isaac's in the following article you can get a pretty clear picture of what they're aiming for ...

Q: Can you describe the origins of the project?

A: Skinwalkers came about around five years ago when Jim Isaac and I, Jim being the director of the film and my partner in Red Moon Films, came across the script. We’d known the writers for some time and they developed this script and wanted us to take a look. They thought it was something special and they knew that we were after something that was genre based, put story first, had an opportunity to have visuals support narrative and have a situation where we could exercise our creative muscles and our visual background. We read it and we loved it.

Q: Do you think the werewolf genre lends itself to more storytelling than the vampire thing, which has just been so over done? I mean, werewolves are intrinsically human so there’s a human element to the story, the internal conflict between the different parts of their nature.

A: Absolutely. That’s the whole point. The werewolf mythology and the back story of a werewolf is just really interesting for us. It represents the beast that is within us all and that’s what really connected with us. In this story the moralistic choice that our heroes are making to keep the beast down and the more naturalistic choice that our bad guys are making to embrace the beast and do whatever the heck they want to do, for us that was the heart of the werewolf mythology.

Q: To what degree does the story have its roots in Native American mythology and were you worried about cultural appropriation at all?

A: We were somewhat concerned about cultural appropriation but we did some research into the legend of the skinwalker and found that it actually did exist, that there is a Navajo legend of men being able to be possessed by the spirit of an animal, to walk with the beast, and there are believers of this today. Taking a page out of that didn’t feel like appropriation. It’s a fun story, I think it plays the moralistic side of that and also demonstrates a bit of a perversion as well so it captures the legend, I think, in an admirable way.

Q: It’s a good thing, I think. The werewolf mythology has been in the realm of eastern Europe for so long that it’s good that you’re spreading the cheer around a little bit.

A: Spreading the cheer around, sure, but we also made a stylistic choice in this film to not be gothic, to be more of a western motif and base it in North American tribal mythology as opposed to going into Eastern Europe and the gothic type stuff which has been done to death.

Q: You think the fans are tired of that?

A: I think it’s been done to death. Certainly all the vampire stuff has got a very gothic look. It’s not that we’re doing this just to be different but we just fell in love with that look and feel.

Q: Is this film going to be CGI driven?

A: It’s not CGI driven. I mean, we’ve got a lot of visual effects and special effects, yes, and we’re doing a lot of digital work. But for the most part we’re trying to achieve as much as we can practically, which comes down to great writing, great locations, Stan Winston who is doing our werewolves. The werewolves are going to be real actors walking around in fantastic prosthetic makeup. The CGI will support the practical.

Q: Are the transformations going to be CGI?

A: No. The transformations will not be CGI.

Q: Right on.

A: Yeah, and I’m an effects guy myself. I own Mister X, which is a CGI company. We just wanted to keep it story based and really zero in on the actors’ performances for the transformations.

Q: How scary is it going to be? What rating are you going for?

A: We’re going to be an R. It will be an R and it’s going to be scary. You’ll know you’re in a horror film. You’re going to be on the edge of your seat. It’ll be a fun ride and there’ll be a good story going on between Rachel [Rhona Mitra] and her son Timothy [Matthew Knight] and Varek [Jason Behr], Varek’s story, Jonas’ [Elias Koteas] sacrifice … there’s a lot going on in this story.

Q: Is this Jim’s first film since Jason X?

A: After Jason X as a director this is his first, yes. It’s taken a long time to develop Skinwalkers as it does these days to develop a movie at this price point.

Q: The casting is interesting in that there are no jump off the page names. Is this more of an ensemble piece?

A: That’s the idea, exactly. We’re thrilled with the cast. Jason Behr, Rhona Mitra, Elias Koteas, Sarah Carter, all the way down the line it’s amazing. We took Alien, the first Alien, as our model. That was an ensemble piece where, at that point, nobody had huge star status. It was just a great performance piece with fantastic actors all the way down the line and what a great model. We wanted twelve great actors in this film and that was our guide.

Q: Can you give us a ball park budget for this?

A: Around twenty five million.

Q: What are the plans for distribution?

A: We have Lion’s Gate distributing in North America. They’re huge fans of the script and they’ve been up on set and they love it. We have their full support and we’re really happy that they’re our distributor. They’re really experienced genre guys and have been supportive all the way through.

Q: Back on the casting, you have a lot of older faces, they’re not your typical WB stars, which is refreshing. What do you have in mind to market it?

A: It gives us more options, for sure. We were primarily looking for great actors who had some sort of appeal that the audience could connect with. We do have the young kid cool factor with Sarah and Shawn Roberts, Rhona and Jason Behr. But also we’ve got the goods all the way through, this is a performance piece for them. Look at Jonas and Elias Koteas, just a fantastic character actor anchoring this cast in a lot of ways. All the way through we were looking for a cast that could deliver on that level but also had chemistry. It came together in a fantastic, wonderful way. Serendipity with the casting in terms of the chemistry. We saw it as we went through the process, we really saw it at the first read through when we got them all together in a room and just watched. It was fabulous. We knew at that point that we were on to something.

Q: Why shoot the film in Canada? Is it actually set in Canada or is it more in some amorphous North American location?

A: It’s set … it’s fairly amorphous but we were going for the western feel. I’d say somewhere Midwest. Sort of sunny. But the locations … look at this location, it’s great. We are partly urban at the end of our story as well, so we needed to be close to an urban center and the locations in an around Ontario have been great.

Q: What was the process trying to cast the child actor? How difficult was that?

A: We did a lot of searching. Matthew Knight, our casting director Dierdre helped us out with this, but Matthew was coming off of The Greatest Game Ever Played which I worked with him on. I was doing the visual effects for that movie for Disney and I thought he was amazing. I don’t know if you’ve seen that film but he’s a really great actor. For eleven years old he’s a real pro. He came in and auditioned and just blew us away. We auditioned probably twenty kids and it wasn’t even close. He can really act, a real pro at that age.

Q: Can you talk a little more about the importance of story and the human element. There seems to be a real trend right now to take a lot of the classic horror figures and reimage them, people are reviving a lot of the old monsters.

A: Well, if you look at the werewolf, for us it was all about what had been done with that particular genre before. We’re fans of the genre but for the most part what you get are dog-like creatures. What we want to do is connect with our audience so that when Varek [Jason Behr] transforms you still know it’s Varek and he still gets to emote and you still connect with him. If, after the transformation, you don’t understand that it’s Varek then I think we will have failed. So we went with a very humanistic design for the creatures more for story reasons than any other reason. It the audience loses sight of the fact that it’s still Varek in that werewolf makeup then we’re in trouble. The designs are just amazing. They’re very humanistic, they’re upright, they’re not on all fours ever. I think it’s a great combination representing the beast within that a lot of us can connect to. I think if we went too far, made it too beast-like it would stop resonating with us. For the most part this is a metaphor for everything that exists in us and if we stopped connecting with the audience on that level then I think the story would suffer.