Fear St. Nicholas and his wrath…
Haddonfield. Crystal Lake. Springwood. Woodsboro. What do they all have in common? These quaint little havens were terrorized by a slasher instantly removing them from any tourist destination guide. And unfortunately, you might have to add Amsterdam to that list (sorry four-twenty, fiends) because St. Nicholas is coming to town in the Dutch horror film Saint and he’s ready to carve up the community with a lethal, golden staff and his army of decayed, armed assistants (Black Peters).
Saint is the latest horror picture from filmmaker Dick Maas, whose previous credits include The Lift (later remade as The Shaft starring Naomi Watts and directed by Maas), Amsterdamned, Killer Babes and a Young Indiana Jones Chronicles episode set in Transylvania. Released last year overseas, the slasher flick – which finds a scarred, enraged St. Nicholas terrorizing Amsterdam on Sinterklaas-avond (December 5) – is playing to Tribeca Film Festival audiences this week and Shock was offered the opportunity to talk to Maas.
Shock Till You Drop: St. Nicholas has a horror villain. Kind of a no-brainer idea, right? How did this come about for you?
Dick Maas: I like all kinds of genres. I did these comedies, thrillers, action movies and it was time again to do a horror movie and I was looking for a subject. I thought, well, one of the biggest things on the minds of people is this St. Nicholas celebration every year. I thought that’s a nice subject to try and do something with that with this old man giving presents to children every year and try to make the guy an evil one and that was the starting point. Then, of course, I had to try and find a structure for the story because I didn’t want just to make a slasher movie with a guy in a suit killing children and people. I tried to give the movie an epic scope, and it took years to find the right structure for the screenplay. That was the starting point.
You know, the way the script grew I had several different drafts and several different protagonists. For a long time, I even had the police guy as the hero, but I changed that around so now it’s one of the other guys and I had a version starting with the girls. But it’s not about the girls, it’s about the boy and he becomes the leading man. But, that all just came naturally when scripting.
Shock: Surprisingly, the film takes a cue from John Carpenter’s The Fog. You’re obviously a fan of that one.
Maas: Yeah, I like the movie as well, but I think it’s very difficult to have a movieâ¦I needed a fog in the movie. I was aware of it and I was trying to do different things just to be not compared to John Carpenter because also in the beginning we have the steadicam shot of the girls walking home and, of course, everybody says that’s Halloween. Of course I knew it looked like Halloween That’s not a bad thing, actually. I kept it in there as an homage to John Carpenter.
Shock: The film is already pretty violent, but is there an even more explicit cut that you had to tone back. Or is what is on the screen your intended vision?
Maas: What you see is what we shot and what I wanted to shoot. We didn’t tone anything down because I myself am not a real fan of a lot of blood and gore. I think the amount I have is fine for the story, and I’m not afraid to have some limbs cut off or to decapitate people, but I don’t always lean on the gory side of it because that’s not a thing that I’m especially fond of. I think what’s more important for me is the suspense in the movie, the thriller elements, the interaction between the characters and the comedic elements. What you see here, I don’t have any more gore left for the DVD or something. I put it all in the movie.
If you try to make a movie that portrays St. Nicholas as an evil guy, well, we knew we would get some protest. There are St. Nicholas Societies that protested the movie and tried to prevent the movie from being made, but they didn’t succeed. We had a sort of protest again when we had to have to have the poster made and on the poster there’s St. Nicholas and his horse in silhouette against the Amsterdam skyline. That was a poster that was going up in Holland in the weeks before the release. They also tried to go to the court to try to prevent us from putting the poster up, but they didn’t succeed and we won the legal battle. The good thing about all the protests and so forth were that the awareness of the movie was very good and everybody knew the movie was coming, so it did cause that. There was a lot of reasons that it did very well at the box office.
Shock: You and I are speaking a day after the film scored U.S. distribution, so congrats on IFC picking it up. Now, are they looking at a holiday 2011 release here in the States?
Maas: Yeah, there is talk about that. We’re not sure, there’s talk about releasing it around September for theatrical and VOD release and then a DVD release in December. We don’t know if it’s going to end up exactly like that. We’re just discussing it now.
Shock: Design-wise, were there various incarnations for the burned St. Nicholas visage?
Maas: No, what is on screen is pretty much what I had in mind because I started out a few years ago working out the concepts of what I thought would be the look of St. Nicholas. And, we made pretty detailed sketches of him and I don’t think much changed. We were really going by those sketches – by the half-burned face, his clothing and the mouth appearance. We prepared a long time before shooting and everyone was on the same page.
Shock: You mentioned “scope” earlier. Were you working from a smaller or larger budget than you’re used to and what challenges did you have bringing that sense of scope to the screen?
Maas: The problem was we had a limited budget. I think it cost around $5 million. Well, I’ve made movies in the past that were $30 million and I’ve made movies that were a few hundred dollars. I have had a broad range of budgets and for a movie that was this scope with these kinds of special effects, we had to really think hard about, for instance, the visual effects of the horse chase across the roofs. Plan it out very carefully to stay within the budget. Normally, you would have CGI to get the horse across the rooftops, but we didn’t have that money, so for 99-percent of that sequence we used a real horse and shot it against a green screen. We had to come up with solutions as to how to have a galloping horse in front of a green screen and how to do that. We put it on a treadmill and had it galloping. There was a guy on its back and we made a scaffolding three meters high and 50 meters long against green screen and had the horse go over that. Then we shot for real on the rooftops of Amsterdam with big lighting setups, so it was time consuming and difficult, but it was the only way for us to do it this way, to stay within the budget.
Shock: Do you have plans for a follow-up, since this film leaves the door wide open for a Saint 2? And what can you tell me about another production you have, Quiz?
Maas: About the sequel, we definitely left it open for a sequel. Depending on the interest and the response we will get from foreign countries or from the USA, we might do a sequel. I already have a storyline for a sequel, so we’re depending on what people think of it. The other project we’re working on now is Quiz and that’s another movie we are casting right now. Hopefully we can shoot it in July or August of this year and that’s a thriller.
For images and trailers from the film follow this link.
Source: Ryan Turek, Managing Editor
