At 32, French filmmaker Alexandre Aja is already considered an old hand at scaring moviegoers. As the maker of horror films like Haute Tension, The Hills Have Eyes and Mirrors, he has effectively created his own benchmark. And now Aja brings to us Piranha 3D, another horror fest and another remake (after Mirrors) but this time in 3D. An e-mail chat...

What is it about horror that excites you so much?

I think my ability to deftly juggle gore and suspense gave me strength in mastering this genre. I have heard from my critics that no one else under 30 makes movies this savage — and disturbingly symptomatic. I have spent the last three years developing, co-writing and producing Piranha 3D with my old-time friend Gregory Levasseur. We hope the unusual mix of humour and gore will not only be an ode to the B-movies of the past, but will push genre conventions yet again and bring back good ol’ popcorn fun.

For me, the release of Piranha 3D means that it’s time to begin looking forward. Away from horror — and into outer space. The kind of outer space created in Japanese manga, that is. The kind that will be a tentpole-sized adaptation of Buichi Terasawa’s Cobra — The Space Pirate. I grew up dreaming about Cobra. My day was: finish school, run home and switch on the TV and I was hardly the only one. Kids did it in France, Italy, Spain, all over Western Europe. I am so surprised it never crossed the ocean and made the same impact in the US, because it is so big everywhere else.

This is also your third remake...

Remake is not my priority but when a franchise originator who created some cult classics himself asks you to jump into his shoes to recreate the same magic with your own inputs and if I see some scope to take some fun popcorn movie premise and deepen it, create more tension and drama, make it as artistic as it could possibly be, that fascinates me.

You have brought back Piranha after three decades. What was it about the original(s) that you loved so much?

Piranha is a desire for me to get back to the feeling of the ’80s. That kind of guilty pleasure movie that was so instantly cool when I was growing up. A movie where it could be as scary as it is fun — where there was a lot of nudity and gore — just an amazing, entertaining ride. I wanted to go back to that Spring Break under attack concept and I wanted to increase the fear, I wanted to increase the gore, I wanted to increase the action pieces, I wanted to develop the characters. I really wanted to make it feel really big and my co-producers let me do that.

You are the latest to hop onto the 3D bandwagon. How have you used the technology in the film?

I always wanted to generate the experience of watching a real horror movie in 3D and it was on our agenda since the script development stage of Piranha 3D. At the time, James Cameron’s Avatar was still a highly secretive project.

When you are making a movie, what you’re working on is to create the best emotion possible for the audience. You try to make a film that’s not only something that you want to watch on the screen, but something that becomes an experience, because fear and suspense is only about forgetting that you’re watching a movie. We shot the entire film in 2D then with the help of Inner D’s real D and Assimilate’s Scratch Digital Finishing Solution we converted it into 3D post-production.

We planned ahead for the shoot, knowing we would do a 2D-to-3D conversion. The underwater scenes were shot full frame, which gave more latitude in repositioning for 3D. We produced it with a single 35mm camera in anamorphic format for conversion to 3-D during post-production. Technicolor in Los Angeles processed the negative and scanned the film at 4K resolution. The file was down-resed to 2K. I believed 3D would heighten both the story and the FX and it didn’t take long for us to convince Dimension to apply Piranha to the ever-growing device in filmmaking. The 3D technology widened the tapestry of horror. You need to be sucked into that world and be underwater with all of the fish coming at you.

You have got an incredible and eclectic ensemble cast in the film...

We were working with even more than a thousand extras along with a bunch of well-known actors. Strength was the primary attribute I was looking for in the leading protagonist: Lake Victoria’s Sheriff Julie Forester, a mother who must contend with her rebellious older son, her two other younger children, a horde of Spring Break revelers partaking in all manner of debauchery and the unexpected arrival of the piranha.

I scoured Hollywood for someone that could face 20,000 kids every year and be tough, but someone who could show weakness when the disaster hits her own people, be human enough to bring the audience to that nightmare genre where after saving or trying to save a town, she has to save her family and her kids. I found my required qualities in Elisabeth Shue.

For Jake, Forester’s oldest son, I turned to Steven McQueen, grandson of the legendary Steve McQueen. He had that potential — a young Matt Dillon feel to him that was very interesting material for me to work as a filmmaker because he had that kind of naive way of saying things, and being that teenager that wants to experiment at Spring Break. But when danger shows up he has the skill and strength inside him to make a difference .

I called in Adam Scott, Jessica Szohr, Ving Rhames, Brooklynn Proulx, Sage Ryan and Jerry ’ Connell for the mayhem along with a few casting surprises like Christopher Lloyd as Mr Goodman, and Richard Dreyfuss as Matt Boyd. Goodman is almost a mad scientist kind of character and, of course, there is only one ‘Doc’ — Christopher Lloyd. Growing up with the Back to the Future movies, I didn’t think it was possible to get him. I have to thank Bob Weinstein for that. So I got Christopher Lloyd and he came for a very, very, very long day that I will describe as a week of shooting in one day, and he did an amazing performance that is going to please so many people.

How did you get Richard Dreyfuss to do the film?

The best cameo of the movie is something that came as a crazy idea when we were writing. We were always opening the movie with a fisherman in the middle of an earthquake, and getting killed by whatever is under the water. I was thinking about who can play that, and the idea of a version of Matt Hooper, the character from Jaws, retired from the ocean, fishing in the opening of the movie, came.

I never believed I could get Dreyfuss. Ultimately, the stars aligned and he showed up on set for that scene. He’s completely aware of what he’s doing. The wardrobe he has is the Matt Hooper wardrobe. The glasses are exactly designed for him as the Matt Hooper glasses in Jaws. Everything is the same. He is singing the same song, Show Me The Way To Go Home in the opening of the movie. And Richard was so playful with it. It’s not even a cameo, it’s better than that because it’s like another character is stepping from one movie to another movie and coming back.

How did you react to the Empire review: “By any sane cinematic standards, meretricious trash ... but thrown at you with such good-humoured glee that it’s hard to resist”?

I take it as a compliment. I just wanted to make a nice guilty pleasure movie that would be cool, scary, having lots of fun and a Spring Break craziness that turns into a huge disaster movie when the piranha show up and attack everyone. And I bet you’re going to have fun, you’re going to be scared.

Aja’s Fave Horror Films

Les Diaboliques
The Tenant
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
L’Abime des Morts-Vivants
NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD

Pratim D. Gupta