June 2007 - Horrorphile

Horrorphile

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Horrorphile - June 2007

LESBIAN WEREWOLVES

June 29th 2007 00:28

There’s a new movie currently in production in New York City. Not due for release until next year, it’s a little diddy called Jack & Diane; a romantic-horror, to be more precise. A second feature written and directed by a guy called Bradley Rust Gray. The only cast members confirmed are Ellen Page (Hard Candy) and Olivia Thirlby (United 93).

According to the director the synopsis is thus: “Diane (Page) is a shy and innocent seventeen-year-old with intensely fierce innards. She is desperate to discover sex but wants to fall in love first. Her pent up sexual frustration occasionally rips through her dreams in the shape of a werewolf. Jack (Thilby) is a scab covered skateboarding girl who hides a fragile heart. She holds an idealized version of love based on a tragic affair which took her brother’s life.

One night, while spending the week with her aunt in New York, Diane loses her way home. She runs into Jack and the two end up in a club where they collide into a dreamy, frenzied night of kissing. At dawn, with mushy red lips, they are barely able to separate. This is the start of an intense love affair which is fated by circumstance.

When Jack discovers that Diane is leaving the country in a week she tries to push her away. Diane struggles to keep their love alive while hiding the secret that her newly awakened sexual desire occasionally turns her into a werewolf.”

Olivia Thirlby to play Jack

Director Gray explains the background to writing the original screenplay: “Five years ago I met two girls holding hands on a New York sidewalk. One was carrying a skateboard and wearing a cowboy hat. The other had fuzzy blonde hair and a big smile. Their names were Jack and Diane. I moved abroad and lost touch with the girls. But when I returned to the States, I knew their story was the next film I wanted to make. I decided to imagine their voices and create my own world for them.

My focus in making Jack & Diane is to carefully examine what happens when two young people fall in love for the first time. Diane is shy and innocent, with an inner raging passion. Jack is a tough skinned skateboard girl who is hiding a fragile heart. This collision of Diane and Jack’s unique personalities creates a vulnerable energy as they nervously lose themselves in each other.

Certain parts of the film expand into dreamlike and often violent imagery. I see these moments as a manifestation of Diane’s inner desire for love and acceptance. It is not until Jack also takes on these unusual transformations that she can understand how Diane feels and the two can finally unite their souls.

Ellen Page to play Diane

When I wrote my first narrative feature, Salt, I wanted to incorporate folklore into the story by adapting an Icelandic legend about a girl who turns into a seal. As I began writing Jack & Diane, I felt a similar instinct to re-visit this theme. Making an American story, it seemed natural to investigate the idea that Diane would turn into a werewolf. What separates the film from the contemporary werewolf genre is that Diane’s werewolf manifestation represents her repressed inability to orgasm. It is an unconscious connection to her sexuality and a part of her love that has never been realized.”

Well, this sounds like a very cool movie. Especially as it has Ellen Page in the lead, and she is a superb actor. Reminds me of another gritty NYC chick flick called All Over Me from about ten years ago. As far as I’m concerned any movie tackling lycanthropes from a fresh perspective gets my blood pumping.

According to an online press-kit Jack & Diane will be an intimate character study shot with a small crew using hand-held cameras and capturing as much natural light and location shooting as possible. The press-kit uses street and apartment location pics and film stills to illustrate the intended look and visual atmosphere for the movie. Larry Clark’s authentic Kids, French cult thriller Mauvais Sang (Bad Blood) and a Japanese domestic drama Nobody Knows are three movies visually referenced.

Jack & Diane sounds like Laws of Gravity meets Ginger Snaps. I’m so down with it.

SFX make-up courtesy Gabe Bartalos

The special effects for the movie are being handled by The Brothers Quay, a critically-lauded stop-motion/animation filmmaking duo, (they made an extraordinary short in 1986 called The Street of Crocodiles which is one of my all-time favourite animated films) and Gabe Bartalos, a make-up whiz who created the astonishing effects for experimental art filmmaker Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle of films. He also did the blood and gore for cult horror Brain Damage (1988).

The Brothers Quay will be unearthing the interior of Diane's body. These animated moments surface throughout the film at times of charged emotional stress. The world within Diane is a combination of blood, hair and teeth. For example the hair growing between her organs creates a braided rope that spells out the title of the film, and other suggestive patterns.

Werewolf design

The animatronic design for the werewolf creature will be based on a skinned polar bear head. Since the creature emerges from within Diane’s sexual frustration it opens the possibilities of a new lycanthropic interpretation, rather than a traditional werewolf representation. With this in mind, Gabe Bartalos and director Gray intend to create an animal that’s never been seen before; a creature that stems from Diane’s inner desires, and also links the Brother’s Quay’s unique vision of the world inside Diane.

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