"The Messengers" Special from the set - Q&A with John Corbett (Pt 1 of 2)
|
Believe it or not, actor John Corbett does not have a romantic role in The Messengers, the
The movie was filmed in
= = =
JC: My hair is getting long.
Q: Are you cultivating a 70s look for this role?
JC: Well, I have a band. I’ve been out playing country rock music, actually for the last year. I have a look that I want for the band. It’s this look, but I had a beard. I had a beard that matched this mustache. So when I took this job I said, ‘Look. There’s only one problem – I’m not going to cut my hair. So if that’s a problem, then…’ Because I had lost a job a month earlier. I lost the third lead in this Sandra Bullock/Keanu Reeves movie that they’re making in
Actually one is almost this long [indicates real shoulder-length hair] from Big Fat Greek Wedding. We did some reshoots and I had cut my hair, so I have like $24,000 worth of wigs. They’re like, $8,000 each. We agreed on a wig, and then they called me up on Friday — I was supposed to fly out on Easter Sunday — and they said, ‘You have an hour. You have until 5 p.m. to cut your hair. Or not. If not, we’re going to recast you.’ And I swear to God, by 5:05 they had recast me with Dylan Walsh from Nip/Tuck. I don’t know what was up with that, if they were planning to do it all along, but you know… So I’d lost one gig and I told these guys and they said ‘Sure’.
Q: Well, if you’re playing a drifter, you probably don’t get to the barber much anyway.
JC: [laughs] That’s the way I look at it. Yeah, so… But they didn’t like the beard, so now I’ve got this David Crosby look going on.
Q: Your character is supposed to be sort of mysterious, right? How much can you tell us about him?
JC: He’s a good-hearted drifter. [chuckles] You know, he helps the family work the farm. He’s there when strange things start happening. I guess he could be witness to some of [what happens] later on in this scene [shooting today]. Kristen tries to get out, and he helps her get out. Things are happening in the house that… You don’t really know what’s up with my guy. You don’t know quite where he fits in. He’s seemingly a good-hearted guy. Yeah.
Q: Wasn’t The Stranger kind of like that? Or… what was that series called?
JC: Oh. The Dean Devlin thing? The Visitor. We made 13 episodes of that.
Q: He was a drifter, and he was helping people. Kind of similar.
JC: Yep. Mysterious. Although, The Visitor had special powers.
Q: We don’t know if your character has special powers. You haven’t told us much.
JC: [laughs] Oh, OK. I can levitate and stop time. But that’s it. Other than that… [chuckles] No, I don’t have special powers in this one.
Q: Are you a fan of the genre?
JC: You know, I’m not really a fan of horror movies. I can’t really think of uh… give me some examples of some great horror movies.
Q: The Shining.
JC: The Shining, yeah.
Q: The Exorcist.
JC: I never saw the Exorcist.
Q: The Omen.
JC: Never saw The Omen.
Q: What about The Eye?
JC: I saw The Eye. I liked The Eye. It was quite good. Did you see it? It’s interesting. The Pang Brothers made it on a shoestring. It looks like a big-budget film. [Something about special effects… unintelligible] It think they made it for a million dollars. It’s impressive. Yeah. Give me a couple more.
Q: How about some more modern horror classics, like The Sixth Sense or The Others?
JC: I haven’t seen those movies.
Q: Signs?
JC: Signs. I didn’t see Signs. Shyamalan… But I did see The Village. I just saw War of the Worlds. Would that be considered a horror movie? I just saw War of the Worlds, I loved that. I’ve had some time off, so I’ve seen a couple of movies here [in
Q: There are some horror elements in those movies. A lot of people think that horror is just slasher movies, like A Nightmare on
JC: Um, I took this script… I wanted to be in this movie because the script was fairly bloody. And I thought it would be fun to be in a movie like that.
Q: But it’s being shot as a PG-13.
JC: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that was a shock to me, because I had it explained to me just a few days ago. On paper it has someone get stuck in the chest with a sickle, you know, and it comes out their stomach. It’s, you know… you read that and you think, ‘That’s gonna be cool.’ And then it turns into this nothing scene where you don’t even see anybody getting killed. That happens quite a bit in this script, where they didn’t follow through on what I thought, on paper, the scene was gonna look like.
So I went to one of the producers, and I said, ‘What the fuck, man? This isn’t going down the way [the script said] it was.’ And he’s like, ‘Well, we’re making this movie for 15 year old girls.’ And I thought were making a movie for my 45-year-old buddies. And so, for a month I was just trying to make a movie for my buddies to see.
Q: Well, ideally, it’ll be for both.
JC: Ideally, ideally. But I in no way was making a movie for 15-year-old girls. You know, I did a movie last year with Hilary Duff called Raise Your Voice. And I was aware I making a movie for 15-year-old girls, there. But in this one, I… the script was just so spooky. I thought we were making a Shining, or something like that, you know?
[to be continued…]