Marcel Langenegger - Exclusive Interview

Staci Layne Wilson: So with your film, you have got two of my favorite actors are in it with Hugh Jackman and Ewan McGregor. I have interviewed them both quite a few times and they are so funny. I don't think people realize what cut ups they are. Are they like that when you are working with them?

Marcel Langenegger: Oh, absolutely. They're funny. Of course in the movie they have to be professional, and they are very, very professional, which is somewhat expected, but I was really amazed how well prepared and how just remarkable they were. Especially Hugh — he had such a crazy schedule last year. He had three movies coming out. He did Happy Feet, The Prestige, Viva Laughlin, and he was shooting ours, so he was all over the world. He was always prepared straight off the plane coming from Egypt and things like that. He was amazing, and also this was very difficult: we shot all of Hugh Jackman's scenes back to back. And including the ending and all that, which [put his character in place] wasn't really at the start of the film. And so it was real difficult for Hugh to shoot so much out of sequence. But again, they were great guys. And yes, they are very funny. They joked a lot and then they had a great time, and Ewan and Hugh. We had a funny time on that shoot in many ways.

SLW: Yeah, I imagine you have to probably lighten it up a little bit. With such heavy subject matter, and all.

Marcel Langenegger: Yeah, that's true, although the subject matter is not that heavy. [It looks like it in the trailer.] It is more of a Hitchcock type thriller. There is quite a bit of humor in the script. It was written even much lighter than I actually filmed it. We kind of made it a little darker and heavier. There was a few jokes. Not a lot, but there was sarcasm and writing was just a good mix. And then when we were actually filming it, it became a bit darker and a bit heavier.

SLW: Huh. Well of course, Hitchcock had some great comedy in his movies, like Mr. and Mrs. Smith, The Trouble with Harry, and some things like that; so it's definitely not unexpected in a Hitchcockian thriller to have a little bit of humor.

Marcel Langenegger: Yeah.

SLW: So — to be honest with you, although I am sure you know, Fox didn't show the movie to any journalists to prepare, so it is difficult to ask informed questions…

Marcel Langenegger: I totally understand you, I don't quite know why they did not show the movie or what happened. I mean the whole thing [press junket] got a little bit upside down because Hugh Jackman couldn't come here, because his shoot for Australia [Baz Luhrmann's movie] was really in Australia with two movies, and so that's a couple of hurdles he's totally caught up in. Michelle Williams canceled every sort of public appearance.

SLW: Yeah, understandably.

Marcel Langenegger: And because of that they canceled all events. Also Ewan McGregor was caught up in London because he was playing Hamlet onstage every night. So the three leads in my movie were somewhat unavailable in the last couple weeks.

SLW: But you are available, and that is fine with me. Thank you for making the time. I would like to know if you could maybe sort of give me a quick rundown of what Deception is all about, for our readers? Even though it's a horror site, we also cover supernatural stuff, dark mysteries, thrillers, and the like.

Marcel Langenegger: Of course. The basic premise is that Ewan McGregor plays a guy named Jonathan McCoury who is a an auditor on Wall Street. And people like that are very lonely, because they are not very popular. They go from company to company for three weeks at a time trying to find fraud and mistakes in the bookkeeping. And then eventually they go to the next company. So they move from place to place. They are very isolated they work mostly at night. They often work with their cell phone and their laptop and kind of log onto all those documents and files to check.

Now this would make a perfect outfit for criminal, the audit manager has access to everything inside the company. And the writer Mark Bomback is his name, he said, I don't know why anyone never made a movie about a monitor, because he is such an easy target. So anyway, he did a bit of research and found out that the auditor was actually very, very lonely and very isolated. So he then came across another article in the New York Times about this Wall Street sex group which is some kind of a fast track dating service, and there is a long list of people and you join that list. You have to pay a fee to get in but also you have to be sponsored by somebody who brings you in, but you have to have a certain look, to be a certain age, a certain social class and a certain income and dedication. And then you're on that list. Once you are on the list. You can call somebody up on that list and just go out for dinner and have sex it is a very time efficient kind of service or group, especially the brokers on Wall Street. They have very very little time, because they work around-the-clock and you know Hong Kong markets open in the middle of the night in Europe is already open when you sleep. So if you trade globally, there is only two hours a day when none of the markets are open. So they don't have time for that dating sort of ritual so that is why this group exists and it exists in several cities as the research showed, so now. The idea is them that this lonely guy, Ewan, this company he works for me to this very slick charming handsome lawyer, who kind of befriends him just to smoke a joint together, and he takes them out to clubs and introduces him to some women. And then all of a sudden he starts to live, and he discovers that there is a light out of his mundane existence and then somehow the Hugh Jackman character brings him into this group, hooks them up with this group of and he has to go to a business trip. And in that group he meets this woman, and he meets another one and he has sex. All of a sudden he starts to live, and then he meets the Michelle Williams character, who kind of falls for, falls in love with. And then at one point, the murder mystery starts. And then it becomes a story about sex, love, murder.

SLW: Sounds intriguing.

Marcel Langenegger: It's a very classic Hitchcock kind of premise. The writer was a big Hitchcock fan. That's why there's tennis in the story. He takes him out for tennis match.

SLW: Ah, very Strangers on a Train!

Marcel Langenegger:  That's an homage. So the way it is written, you know, he wrote the Hitchcock blonde in, which is Michelle Williams. He wrapped it all into a thriller with a bit of intrigue with a bit of sex. A bit of everything, actually, he felt that those kind of movies… they have not been in the cinema for a while.

SLW: So Marcel, as the director of a Hitchcockian nod, do we get to see a little cameo of you anywhere in here?

Marcel Langenegger: [laughter] Good question. Actually, yes, there is one cameo, you will see my hand, because we had to film the inside of a cell phone, because the cell phone plays a role in this film, because he connects to the list through the cell phone. I'm holding a cell phone and typing, you know, so that is my hand. And I play guitar on some of the soundtrack.

SLW: Do you really? Sounds like you've gone above and beyond.

Marcel Langenegger: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We did this movie for relatively low budget, because it was an independent movie while we did it.

SLW: Where was it shot?

Marcel Langenegger: In New York. It could've been Toronto, but we decided to shoot it in New York. And then you know, we can't afford a full orchestra as far as the budget that we had. So the composer brought in some guitars and things. And we ended up playing some and that was a my little contribution. I thought it was one of the best moments in this whole thing. You know, you were sitting in the sound studio, and they screen the movie for you. And then you play guitar as you see it, it's cool.

SLW: Nice way to unwind. So now: Maggie Q. I noticed is in this and since she usually plays a badass, I was wondering if she's up to her wicked ways again in Deception?

Marcel Langenegger: She plays an ex-lover of Hugh Jackman and she shows up to meet him again. And you know, obviously he's… Hugh Jackman plays the bad guy, and he is the key that the Ewan character is able to solve, if possible, and then move a little foreword to as what is going on. Ewan's character gets blackmailed and pulled into… he gets framed for a murder and he basically has almost no way out, because the whole thing is so cleverly set up. But because he is an accountant, he is really smart. So he decides to get at the top of things, and he is able to fight back. And then it sort of goes to the next level. And then you don't know who wins.

SLW: Of course not, we don't want to give that away.

Marcel Langenegger: We don't want to give that up, but we know there are surprises coming.

SLW: We love the rated R. films, and there have been so many watered-down PG-13 movies lately… Can you talk a little bit about more of some of the salacious details, maybe? You mentioned some gore, is it like CSI type gore, dead bodies and such, or violence?

Marcel Langenegger: Yeah, exactly. There is a dead body, there are corpses. You know, there is, we see a dead body. We see a beautiful dead body, actually. There is some blood splatter, there is a little bit of that. We are in a morgue. We are shooting in a real morgue, which was freaky on its own. Then we ended up in a hospital in Coney Island. Coney Island is not Beverly Hills, you know, and we were in that hospital and we were in that morgue shooting. It was really… Natasha Henstridge was in that scene and she had to go into a body bag alive. She went into a plastic bag in a morgue where it smelled so badly, and it was really crazy and I felt sorry for her. She had to go through this, because know, you are on a gurney and there was still blood on the bottom of the gurney. They cleaned the surfaces of course but the wheels and things like that were full of blood and the smell of formaldehyde and corpses. When we location-scouted that place, there were actually a couple of corpses standing around!

SLW: Wow, really adds to the ambience.

Marcel Langenegger: That was a little intense, and we were there for a day almost. For the people working there it is the most normal thing. So I was not even aware that we could be slightly disturbed by all of that. And then there was the whole writing on the blackboard and somebody made note of the work day on the blackboard: Took liver out, 430 g, The heart seems to be okay. It's in a room, 42. You know, somebody took a corpse apart and wrote up the details. So yeah…

SLW: I know that in the thriller, of course we want to build suspense. And as a director, how do you find the best way to do that is? Is it the expression of the actors? Is that the music that you add later? Is it the cinematography? How do you pace suspense?

Marcel Langenegger: It's everything together, you know, it's a combination of all these elements together that work through with one goal. Just to build the suspense. Of course it always starts with the actor, but it also starts the way it is shot, the way it is filmed, the way the camera moves. That is a big element. The camera had a big factor in this movie. The camera became almost a character, because the whole movie is told from Ewan's perspective. So the camera kind of followed his part of the story. From the beginning he's the accountant, he's rigid and stiff and dull and boring, and the camera is very steady and stable. And as the story moves on, it becomes more complex and the camera becomes more complex. And when nothing makes sense, the camera, you know you have extreme angles and extreme lenses and strange camera moves. It kind of follows his story very much. And then of course there is the music, which is a huge, huge part in filming suspense. And you know, there is a difficult sort of music, that scene that sort of violent, holding that kind of suspense. The composer really tried to break out a little bit and try to kind of come up with a bit of a different way of building suspense —  the most creative thing I thought he did, was when there was a murder about to happen, we have this music that begins traditionally and then he changed it into a waltz. And that waltz played a little bit out of tune. It makes it so freaky. I should mention the lighting, as well: in a thriller, suspense lighting is very important or the lack of lighting. Shadows, darkness. The lack of a sense of space. The lack of a sense of orientation all these kind of things and you know, they are little things that all work together for one common goal.

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Deception opens nationwide on Friday, April 25, 2008. Here is the Official Website.

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