Piranha 3D Interview with Alexandre Aja
Earlier this year I had a chat to the very French mastermind behind Piranha 3D, Alexandre Aja!
What inspired you to jump on-board the project and make the film? Who approached you to join the project?
I received the script, the premise, the beginning of the Piranha story, after I had just moved to Hollywood looking for a project to do in English. The story was really interesting because it was not written as a straight horror movie; it was much more like ‘Porkies’ or ‘American Pie’, than a monster movie. And I thought it had such an interesting tone, and then I went to do ‘The Hills have Eyes’, but I kept that script in mind, and I was always coming back to; “that would be soo fun for me to do a ‘real horror’ movie, but more in the tone of ‘The Gremlins’. More like a comedy.
What sort of splatter flicks are you into?
The latest movie that really referenced this was Peter Jackson, with ‘Brain Dead’, where it is a horror movie but the gore is really funny and never really scary. I love that, I grew up watching these movies and loving them. So, after ‘The Hills have eyes’, I was thinking about the script again and somehow, someone heard me, and came back and said; “aye, are you still interested in the Piranha film?” and I said yes, let me go back to that script that I read a couple of years before. And I want to take, the same story as written, with Piranha at Spring Break, but I wanted to develop the characters, bringing more fun, Bikinis, a tone of gore, and a tone of over the top, like an adult version of The Gremlins. The 80’s had specific ideology of shifting from one tone to the next, the ability to go from laughing to utter horrified, to sexy to stripper gore, this has been completely lost in the modern horror genre, where you have to stay in one direction, you have to stay in the tone you establish from the very beginning, and I just wanted to fuck all those conventions, and just do something very free where you can go from ‘The Grinch’, to the laugh, to the ‘OMG’. You know, a whole lot of emotions that you have and that we are playing with.
On the genre, the film is definitely a modern take on the ‘splatter film’ with
‘Wild Wild Girls’, the nudity, and the dancing, did you feel that the 80’s gore & Blood, is not enough for a modern audience?
It is all my fault. I am guilty as charged. I wanted to make a guilty pleasure, the movie I would have loved to see when I was fifteen, and that includes naked girls when they are not justified. Spring break is such an interesting time, it is such a specific phenomenon that only exists in the US, where there is soo much of that nudity all the time. If you’re are a girl and a guy gives you a big necklace then you have to flash your tits, it is like an unwritten law. It was very coherent with the world of showing this, and the idea of having some subtext of being more on the side of the Piranha, as once again, the Spring break is such a nice metaphor for ‘The American Society’, with profanities, and truth and evils, and Spring Break allows them to be completely free for one week, before going back to the everyday lives. And there is something very critical about that, that all the women are like consumption, and I wanted the girls to look like they’re from MTV and have the Piranha really attack this world. Sometimes I think we are also on the side of the Piranha which is very enjoyable, and sometimes we are on the side of the people from the town, I very much like that sort of multiple POV story telling.
Inspiration films?
For this film ‘The Gremlin’s was my first real emotion, because Gremlins is the dark side of Steven Spielberg, it is like jaws is a masterpiece. It started as a very nice family movie, and it gets into very dark places afterwards, and when I first read the script for Piranha I wanted to take that feeling that I first had as a kid, and just bring it into a more adult world. The idea for this one was to also go back to the super gore of the early Peter Jackson & Sam Rammy works, ‘Brain Dead’, were gore was dark humour and so laughable, not only scary.
Goal of the Film?
The film might be the most bloody and gory movie I have made so far, but it is definitely not as intense or traumatising like ‘The Chainsaw Massacre’ or ‘The Hills’ absolutely not, it is not the tone here, the main goal was to entertain, making this movie was like drawing the blue print of a rolla coaster, it was really creating a theme park attraction, not in a commercial way like ‘yo I want you to be happy’, I wanted to make something that is just fun from beginning to end with different visual emotions, grossed out, to being very very amused, to laughing to feeling suspense, and just to create an adventure action ride, not necessarily doing something that was story of character driven. It was really about the ride, and a fun experience!
It is the first film you have shot in 3D? How was it?
3D becomes an obvious choice for the movie during the writing process. Where we are talking about entertaining and creating that roller coaster and theme park attraction, 3D was like an extra layer to go in that direction and to create the best experience possible for the audience, so that they can be in the middle of that lake with all the bikinis, and limbs, and body parts, flying at you as you are in the massacre, but then I release that I couldn’t shoot the real 3D technology because of reasons like shooting underwater, the sun reflects differently on the surface of the water creating different lighting in both eyes, so we had to do a conversion for post production.
Everything was thought about the 3D, but then it was quite a surprise to have a conversion process that took another 6months, a freedom with creating the space and creating the depth, all the different layers, where it is an endless field. And I think it is definitely good technology, but it is such an amazing technology.
The set was a bit of a party environment?
It was a very good vibe because we had the chance to have amazing extras, selected one by one, and cast one by one, because I wanted to make sure that they’d be able to die in a believable way, screaming in a believable way, not stupid, silly extras, doing something really wrong on the background of the image. They were very involved and we were like a big family of a thousand people, and it was really fun, very hard to focus at times, but we are shooting the spring break, we are not living the spring break, not go and join the party?
Casting?
The studio and the producer thought it was completely crazy to cast every extra, but I said you know what you are going to receive extras one by one, dance, ask them to do crazy things. We had all these different Bra sets left from spring break, when you go to spring break you have all these different bra sets for different parties, so we decided to use these bra sets as a code, to say, the black bra set means you know to die, the red means you know how to dance, so that is was very easy to organise the set. We were very scared about that, and today I am very happy with the result.
To refresh anyone's minds; here is the trailer link: PIRANHA 3D
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