You mentioned earlier, Weekend at Bernie’s is another one.
Yeah, I do love Weekend at Bernie’s.
I don’t even want to mention how much I can talk about that movie. I love it so much. And then I have one final question, and I’m sorry, this will probably be annoying maybe. Can you tell us anything about Sprial and also–
Yeah, let me tell you the twist and who the killer is.
That’s what I’m looking for.
No, I know. That wouldn’t be fun though if you knew it now, and then it would… You know you want to wait.
No, I definitely want to wait, but just anything… More what I was talking about is it was supposed to come out this year and then all the… Tell us about the rollercoaster.
Well, it sucks. The roller-coaster is, it’s… First off, I am very lucky. I have a healthy family, and I am healthy, so I have nothing to complain about. So we’ll start with that. From an emotional standpoint, it sucks because you get so excited. We were so excited to show this movie to the world, and then something like COVID hits and you don’t have to wait a couple of days or a couple of weeks, you’re waiting a year. And I think that that sucks because we were all rushing so rapidly to get this movie done. And I remember I was in Toronto in March and it was… We were finishing the movie, and then we were told they were closing the border, and we had to get home. It’s a gut punch because you have so much excitement built up, and you just want people to see it so, so badly. But you obviously want to be safe, and nothing is worth getting sick over. Specifically, not a movie.
“It’s not a sequel. It is its own thing…”
But I’ll tell you some… It’s a much different Saw movie than I think people are expecting. Don’t come in expecting a sequel to Saw, because that’s not what it is. It’s not a sequel. It is its own thing, its own characters, and its own mythology. It exists inside the universe of Saw without being a Saw movie. And I think that Chris (Rock) had a great idea and he was really, really involved and really smart with his notes. And it was intimidating at first, because not only is he one of the funniest comedians in the world, he is a director and writer. So he’s this massive threat of creativity, but he could not have been more collaborative. And I think that he came in as a fan of the franchise, as a fan of horror, and he had really creative ideas. And I think that people that are fans of Chris Rock are going to be surprised. He is funny in it. I’m not going to lie. He says things that will make you laugh, but in the same respect, it is not a comedy in any respect.
Were both of these originally supposed to come out this year?
No, it was a weird thing. And I think the original plan was for them to hold this movie until after Spiral came out to capitalize on it, even though this movie was made way before Spiral. But obviously, you can’t hold a movie for years and years while waiting. So I think the original hope was if I’m a betting man that this was going to come out after Spiral and be able to say, “From the director of Spiral.” So I shot this in 2018, so a year and a half ago, and that sucks as well when you have to wait for a movie to come out, it sucks. But I was really excited that… Spiral could not be more different than this movie. Spiral is a lot more like Se7en. So I was really excited for people to be able to see how different they were, but they’ll still get to see it, they just have to wait a little bit longer.
That’s something that I’ve always liked about your work is that everything is very different from one, except for the franchise. But everything else is very different from one film to the next. And I think that you are an awesome director.
Thank you so much!
Death Of Me is available in theaters, On Demand, and Digital.
