Staci Layne Wilson / Horror.com: I guess the natural first question is: How did the project of remaking Brian De Palma's Sisters come about for you?

Douglas Buck: I did a couple of short films that gained some notoriety on the International Genre Film Festival circuit. Through various contacts I'd heard, even about eight years ago, that Ed Pressman was interested in remaking Sisters. When I heard about it I thought it would be a perfect project for what I was interested in exploring. I can't say it was one of my favorite films, but it was a film I found very interesting. And when I heard Ed was thinking about remaking it I thought, "Wow, that could be something really perfect for me." I tried to get into his door with my previous films even eight years ago and couldn't get in. And again something came up about 3 or 4 years ago in which I heard again that he was interested in doing it.

This time I managed to get my short films to him and I believe he was really impressed by them. Then next thing you know we had a meeting and I told him I really wanted to remake Sisters. I guess his first question is "Well, you know obviously how would you be interested in doing it?" And I said "Well you know you could do it a Hitchcock way or a Polanski way; I'd say that De Palma did it more the Hitchcock way and I'd like to try it more the Polanski way." So Ed said, "Ok! Let's do it!"

Q: Are there any homages to the original in your version?

Douglas Buck: Well structurally there's still a lot of similarities. I pretty much... In structure it follows a lot. I mean I think we used the structure of the first film as a backbone for this film with a lot of different nuances. I really think that it uses the same structure of the first film but it is a very different film in what its talking about and what its exploring and what its interests are and some of the decisions I mean the ending is very different and the things that I prioritized in this film I think were different that what De Palma prioritized.

Q: Well, I've got to ask... are there any split screens?

Douglas Buck: Ah, no. The only homage that we did... there are no split screens. You know what I didn't really do and that's really not my thing, I mean De Palma is much more I think a reflective type of filmmaker. He's very aware of cinema and he plays with cinema very consciously and actually very amusingly. I think always in De Palma's films there's the thread of amusement running through his work even through the vicious murder scenes and every thing else there's always a humor in his work and I think part of it is the recognition of cinema itself and the use of cinema and I think even the split screen stuff is kind of funny. It's all suspenseful and entertaining and well done but there's something very self aware and also very entertaining about De Palma's stuff.

In my way I wasn't really interested in being as reflexive or self aware so I didn't use that. What I did do though is, one of the updates with this film is that we incorporate a lot of today's technology like video surveillance and things like that. So one of the things I tried to do was, we have one of the characters watching another character through video surveillance. They watch the character through various screens, through various hidden cameras. So he looks at a monitor and there's split screen on the monitor. So he has different views from the split screens. It didn't quite play out the way I wanted it to in the script in which it was actually even more of an homage. Like a character would go from one room to the next, to the next, to the next, and we'd follow him through the computer monitor. It didn't actually quite work out that way. So it's there, but not quite as an homage as I wanted it to be.

Q: Have you talked to Brian De Palma ever or have you heard anything about what he thinks about the remake?

Douglas Buck: No I've not heard anything. I actually, right before preproduction, you know he's one of my, you know heroes of the seventies. I mean the seventies Hollywood films were pretty much, when I was growing up, were a huge influence on me. Guys like De Palma and Scorsese and Friedkin and Coppola, you know all those guys were the guys I really admire and love. That to me was, and I'm not the only one of course who says this, but you know, it was the last golden age of Hollywood movies.

I never actually did get a chance [to talk to him] and I was hoping to, and I'm still hoping to -- the only thing now is that I'm nervous, of course, that he won't like the film. I'm willing to take whatever his criticisms are.

Q: How would you compare the pacing of your version of the Sisters to the general horror movie feel of the seventies? Is there a similarity? Because, nowadays we're so MTV and commercial and video oriented.

Douglas Buck: Yeah, I'm, again because of my influence of the seventies, I'm not a fan of all that MTV cutting and it's very strange because I guess you could say the name...Well one of the main directors who is such a heavy influence for moving us from the seventies type of film making into the MTV cutting, along with just a general MTV shift in society. With Oliver Stone, right, I mean he's somebody who came in the eighties who's sort of reflected some of the ideals of the seventies, sort of a viva la tour of the... a director of the seventies but brought in this whole MTV cutting style. I think it's weird, cause he was one of the huge transitional figures and but now I can't stand where we've gone. I find it very, for me personally, I find it very numbing and very distancing from the material. To name a perfect example there was the movie -- you ever hear of the movie, The Fan? It was a Michael Bay film and had Robert De Niro and Wesley Snipes in it.

Q: Yeah. I saw that.

Douglas Buck: It's amazing because it's a film that I watched, and I just was so annoyed and so offended by the constant barrage of loud noises, quick cutting and just endless stimulation which was doing nothing but pushing me out of the movie until my wife mentioned to me while we were watching it, that what a great performance it was by De Niro. As I watched it and I've re-watched it since, I do realize it's a really great performance by De Niro and actually Wesley Snipes is very good in it too. The only thing that's destroying the film and pushing you away from the performance and from the characters is the editing style and the sound mixing. I think that's exactly what films are doing today, they're completely moving you away from character and the interest of what's going on just literally to stimulate you every second as if you're a child you know. As if you're a baby who constantly needs to be ... you know, who's never given any faith of having an attention span. Never giving you the respect of having an attention span, but the reverse actually saying "Don't worry, we are going to give you some stimulation, some candy, every two seconds."

What I'm really interested in, in cinema, and again it goes back to my two favorite influences: Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovsky. Even today, or some days, I have a hard time actually sitting through their films because you really have to commit. It's not that I have a hard time, but I have a hard time giving that commitment cause when you watch those movies you literally have to go into that world and you have to sit there and you have to allow the film to wash over you. They're not going to come to you, you have to go to them.

I definitely appreciate that more. Sisters is a fairly quick cutting film as compared to my previous movies which are very much, I would say, on the slow side. On the deliberate side, you know? Slowly paced and deliberately paced. It's faster than that but at the same time it will not be of that quick cutting kind of, easy consumption kind of film making or film viewing. Even my editor a few times had said, "Well we can ... you know to bridge this gap, we can have like a flash cut or something like that," you know, one of those newfangled kind of ways of you know you just make a noise and no one notices. I said "No! I would rather we fail on a transition by going with what I intended and with what standard cinema presents than to just add in some kind of effect to disguise or to conceal some kind of flaw." I would rather show the flaw.

Q: So I take it it's not Domino 2?

Douglas Buck: Right! So that was my long winded testament. [laughs]

Q: So who is the movie aimed at? Not PG-13, I take it?

Douglas Buck: No it's definitely going to be a hard rated R film. You know a hard rated R and if it's un-rated, you know NC-17, that would be my ultimate... not necessarily my ultimate goal, but I wanted it to be a very hard film and a very disturbing film and a very perverse film. I don't think it's a PG-13 movie and actually I don't believe horror films in general should be PG-13. If they're PG-13 it really turns me off and makes me believe it's more of a marketing movie than it is the vision of someone who really wants to make a horror film. I think that usually bears out to be the case.

Q: You talked a little bit about the visuals from a technical standpoint in the movie, but what about from a more concrete standpoint, like the sets and your locations and your costumes. What is the overall look of the film?

Douglas Buck: Definitely what I wanted to do with the movie was to create a timeless feel to it. I'm exactly the opposite of creating pop culture references. Like, if I could burn down every McDonalds or Starbucks or any of that stuff that references today's consumerist, capitalist world, I would do that. Since I can't...

Q: So none of the characters have a MySpace or anything like that?

Douglas Buck: [laughs] No, exactly! So I decided, I gave then each like some sort of timelessness. I mean with the doctor who Stephen Rea plays, what I tried to do is basically place him anywhere from the twenties to the thirties to the forties. The children at his clinic all have this strange very timeless feel to them. We didn't have the big budget to do it exactly like I wanted to do, so basically we could only get the feel of that rather than completely get that. With Chloë's character, she plays Grace Collier, the reporter from the original one. For some reason she's the only one name that we didn't change. We changed everybody else's name but we left Grace Collier as Grace Collier. Don't ask me why but that's what we decided to do. So with her we went with a more seventies feel. She even drives a 1971 Gremlin. But we never say that she's from the seventies. We just dress her in that look and she drives that Gremlin car.

Even with the cigarettes and stuff. We had prop cigarettes made because I wanted cigarettes made... I had them all smoke. Basically they all sit in cafes, and they all sit everywhere and they smoke. As if every place in the world hadn't cut out smoking cigarettes like they did. You know, you just find all of these rules and regulations... I'm not a smoker, and I actually don't really like being around people who smoke. I cough and gag. Nonsmokers are a drag but at the same time I just so against these rules and regulations that are stamped upon us at restaurants and bars you're not allowed to... You know there's not even a smoking section. It's like "NO!" So I basically have most of the characters sitting in cafes and everywhere else and they're smoking all the time. Just to sort of reference other times and have people think, "Where are we? What place is this?'" you know. To give it it's own world, to create its own world. Even the cigarette labels and other labels like bottled water and stuff like that, I had... I basically had to fight with the line producer, I mean because these were budgetary things but I wanted no labels on everything. I didn't want to see "Aquafina" on the water. I didn't want to see "Marlboro Lights" on the cigarettes so I created fake labels. Ones that don't attach to anything, ones that don't attach to any known place because I wanted to stay away from that. So basically that's it.

I wanted to create a timeless place that's not attached, a timeless era that's not really attached to any specific place. Again, because of the budget, there is places where things say "Vancouver" and things like that cause that's where we shot it, but that's only because I couldn't remove them. I wanted to even more complete. But I do think you get that feeling when you watch the film that it has a very timeless quality to it.

Q: On the writing credits, it's yourself and John Freitas. How did you connect with him?

Douglas Buck: John, he was a professor of mine. I took classes in early 60mm film production. We became very good friends and realized we both had very similar interests in genre films -- and in every other type of film, though he has this great love for musicals which I can't say I completely embrace, though I do watch them on occasion but I don't love them quite like he does. Even though there was a time when I played with the idea of turning Sisters into a musical, but of course no one had any interest in that.

Q: I can't imagine why! [laughs]

Douglas Buck: That went away quick. But I still think it could be a really interesting Broadway play or something like that. If you wanted to do a really sick, perverse play, that would be a good one to pick. But anyway, that's an aside, so: John was always the consultant and somewhat collaborator on [my previous] films. And on top of it, I used to sit in on his classes on film theory and he used to teach. You'd watch a film in one of his classes, and then he would do like a two hour lecture on it.

One of the films he did in his class was Sisters. So when it came time to do Sisters I said, "John, what do you think? How about we write this together?" The rest is history so to speak. We have another project too that we've written together and we're looking to do, so it's not the only project I've written with him.

Q: Is it pretty bloody?

Douglas Buck: Ah, yeah. It's actually very bloody. There's a couple of brutal murders and things get very bloody but hopefully not in a very perverse way, not just in a slasher type way. A very painful way. That was my intention, to make it quite painful. I guess the blood flows quite freely. Because it was such a tight movie, the schedule was so tight and the preproduction was so tight. As a matter of fact, it was all so tight, I would never do... One thing, I will never do a film under these conditions again cause it was just too... There was absolutely no chance of anything slipping. There was no time to think about anything. Everything had to be pushed forward very fast.

The problem is that when certain effects didn't work, certain effects that I really wanted to get into the movie, that really made sense thematically and everything else, there just wasn't time to do. They didn't work the first time and we didn't really have time to test them, so we had to throw a lot of things out of the way. Things that I think would have made the film far more shocking and far more brutal. Believe me, I was devastated when these things didn't happen.

In watching the dailys since, I realize that we still have... The scenes are quite brutal and I think quite gripping.

Q: Where are you in the process?

Douglas Buck: Well we're just finished. We are going to be finished this week with as assembly cut. The editor's here. I'm in Montreal now, you know. I came back to Montreal and I'm working with my editor in the basement. I'm actually originally from New York and I go back and forth. My wife and daughter just moved here to Montreal. I go back and forth between New York and Montreal, but I'm going to edit the film here. The editor came from Vancouver and is finishing the assembly cut. We're kind of going through some stuff and starting Monday, I'm going to start really getting in there. Over the next ten weeks, bang out my director's cut.

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Be sure and read interviews part two [1] (the casting of Sisters) and three [2] (the business of horror remakes)