The international thriller from the Session 9 director
Filmmaker Brad Anderson is responsible for what this writer considers to be one of the scariest movies ever made, the creepy horror flick Session 9, and his follow-up The Machinist, starring Christian, Bale was equally disturbing. The terror in his new thriller Transsiberian is not spiritual or psychological, but the very real danger that a young married couple played by Emily Mortimer and Woody Harrelson faces on a cross-country train ride through Russia that has them running afoul of drug smugglers and the corrupt local police. Co-starring Sir Ben Kingsley, Eduardo Noriega and Kate Mara, it furthers the comparisons between Anderson and Hitchcock with lots of unexpected twists along the way.
ShockTillYouDrop.com got on the phone with Anderson for a quick interview about the film and some of his upcoming projects including a musical set in Brazil that might not be quite as scary as some of his other recent work.
ShockTillYouDrop.com: I guess this is the first time you’ve worked with Will Conroy on a script, so how did you two first meet and decide to write this?
Brad Anderson: Will and I met on a couple other projects a while ago. His father is a writer, Frank Conroy, he wrote a great book that I always wanted to make into a movie and Will had written the screenplay and we kind of bonded over that. I had always been looking for something to collaborate with him that was something we could both sink our teeth into together, sort of a smart suspense thriller, that kind of thing. It just seemed like a logical collaboration.
Shock: So this wasn’t a script he’d been working on that you found and worked on it together?
Anderson: The genesis of it was my own trip on the Transsiberian about 25 years ago. I took the train after college and before I got into film and everything. I took the same train from China across Russia to Moscow and met a lot of really intriguing, odd characters and it was always just sort of stewing around in my brain that it would be a cool setting for a story or a cool movie. Years later, Will and I were batting around ideas and I had already started to come up with some concepts, sort of Hitchcockian type thriller concepts that were set on the train and we brainstormed. The initial premise came from my own trip years ago, and we just kind of built a story around certain ideas that were spawned by that trip.
Shock: Did you keep some kind of journal or log back then to know specific places where you’d want o set certain scenes?
Anderson: You mean when I first took the trip? No, actually not really. When I was traveling back then I was taking lots of pictures, so I had lots of photographs of the environment, but we did a lot of research which was easy to do on other people’s experiences, then ultimately, I took the train with a few of the other people, the producers and other people involved in the production of the movie, we went back, took the same train journey 25 years after I first took it. You know, to kind of get back into it and see what it was like and in this case, to see what was plausible. I took the train back in 1988, and we took the train a couple years ago, and it was the exact same journey. Same old train, the same kind of experience, the same atmosphere. It was kind of interesting that it was exactly as I remember it.
Shock: The first time you were there must have been towards the end of communism and it was only a year away from the Wall falling, so did you notice any major change in how people behaved since then?
Anderson: Yeah, that’s interesting that I was there during Glasnost, which was before the fall of the Soviet Union, and it was still the Soviet Union. Look, there were some changes in the cities along the way. You’ve got more modern conveniences and McDonald’s and cars and all that kind of stuff, of course, but in terms of the personalities of the Russian people, it wasn’t really that much different. They’re still very purposefully sort of closed-off, particularly in Eastern Russia where most of this story takes place, Moscow, St. Petersburg and Western Russia is very Europeanized, but when you go out to the Eastern part of the country, it’s still remote and things change a lot slower out there. In fact, oddly enough, it didn’t seem all that different beyond the cosmetic changes. The fundamental sphere of people seemed similar to what it was during the Soviet Union, which is strange.
Shock: Did you interview anyone who lived there about the drug trade or the Russian police before writing the script or did you know people you could talk to?
Anderson: We didn’t really interview them, but as I said, we did do research because we wanted the story to feel plausible. In fact, we found many examples of young European or Westerners using the train transit for the drug trade and even found a story of people using those Matryoshka dolls to squire drugs into Europe. And the corruption that ended up pretty strongly in the story was pretty accurate. The Russian police force even now still is notoriously working both sides of the field, so Grinko’s character is really pulled from the headlines, a guy who has no other choice but to pool with the bad guys to make a living is pretty real.
Shock: When you went on the second train trip with the producers was that as much about location scouting as convincing them that it would be worth shooting a movie there?
Anderson: Heh. It was a little bit of both. Partly we were there to see what the logistics of thinking how we can make the film and also just to show them the cool trip this is and what an adventure it can be. They kind of got into it, but we partly over there to see if we could shoot the film in Russia. One of the ideas initially was we wanted to actually shoot the movie in Siberia and the places it actually occurred and maybe even shoot on the real train, but the logistics made it impossible and it would have been extraordinarily expensive and basically, you’re in the hands of the Russian mob if you do that, and that’s not a place we wanted to be. We ended up shooting in Lithuania and using that as a substitute for Russia, and a lot of the olden Russian trains they have there, but being in a place where it’s a little bit more doable.
Shock: When we talked to Sir Ben at Sundance, he said that you had a stretch of track where you could do everything. Did you try to do as much on the train as possible while the train is moving?
Anderson: One of the advantages of shooting in Lithuania is that they gave us 40 kilometers of train track and a big train with eight cars and a locomotive that we could basically drive up and down the track and use at our discretion, so it was kind of like having your own big train set, and that was great. There’s no way we would have been able to find that anywhere else. Somehow they let us get away with it, so that made shooting with the train doable and within our budget. All the interiors, the scenes within the train, which were a lot in the story, we knew we weren’t going to be able to shoot on a moving train, even on our set. We built a train set, it was incredibly difficult because it was such a small space, even when we could move walls and get in there and lift things up, it was still very complicated. We shot everything on a set, but we were determined to try and make it feel like we were on that train and make it feel pretty claustrophobic, dirty, rumbling nature of that train. We wanted to really make the experience feel accurate, but I think if we had done it on a real train, we’d probably still be shooting the movie right now. (chuckles)
Shock: The reason I asked is because Wes Anderson actually shot his movie “The Darjeeling Limited” on a real moving train.
Anderson: I read about that and I haven’t seen “Darjeeling Limited” but I don’t know. I guess maybe they had a little bit more space, but we had a lot of scenes on that train that there’s no way we could have done on a real one.
Shock: Did you cast Emily Mortimer and Woody Harrelson fairly early on? They seem like a pretty unlikely pairing, but it actually works for their characters and the story.
Anderson: Woody was cast early on, along with Ben Kingsley, but actually, at one point, we had another actress cast for the role of Jesse, but she literally when we were going to start shooting, she had an accident and was hospitalized, and it turned out she wasn’t able to fly over to Lithuania, so we scrambled the day before we were supposed to start to get another actress so the whole production didn’t get shut down. Emily was very high on my list, I always liked her, so we just went directly to her, so she read the script in the morning and was on a plane that night to Lithuania for two months to shoot our film. We couldn’t be happier. She was a total trooper and even the circumstances, she all the right in the world to complain or whatever but she never did. It turned out that she and Woody had a real connection so that turned out nicely even though at the time, it felt like a total disaster, but we were really happy with how it turned out with her.
Shock: That’s wild to hear because I think she gives one of her best performances and she seemed perfect for the role. I assumed you mostly used local film crews. How was that experience? Do they shoot a lot of movies in Lithuania?
Anderson: Most of the key people in the crew were from Spain because it was a Spanish production and the same people who worked on my other movie “The Machinist,” so they were friends, but of course we had a lot of Lithuanians helping us out and they were great. They pretty much all speak English and Russian, which was cool. Communication wasn’t as difficult as I was thinking it was going to be. I of course don’t speak any Lithuanian and I don’t even speak Spanish, but the reality in the modern world is that when you’re making a movie, it’s pretty English, so we managed to get by pretty well. The difficult part was that we shot the first part of the movie, the opening scenes, in China. We went there for a couple weeks, and that truly was a communication nightmare. Virtually none of the Chinese spoke English and just trying to impart your vision to people who have no idea what you’re talking about is kind of complicated. (laughs) That was certainly an interesting trip one way or the other.
THE FOLLOWING QUESTION AND RESPONSE IS SOMEWHAT OF A SPOILER FOR THE MOVIE. BE WARNED!
Shock: You have a very deliberate red herring in the movie where people might expect the movie to be about a missing husband, and then it turns out that’s not what the movie is about at all. Did you want to deliberately throw people off with that?
Anderson: Sure, I think with these kinds of movies, you want to keep the audience guessing as much as you can, to a degree. You don’t want it all spelled out and all the mystery explained as you go along, so keeping each of the characters sort of enigmatic and mystery was what we wanted to do. We get to know them gradually over the course of the movie. It’s not like we know exactly what each person’s motivations or their secrets are, but they’re slowly revealed to us. It’s sort of the way I prefer those kinds of movies, where they don’t spell it all out for you at the very beginning. You slowly understand who these people are and who you’re going to be sharing the next hour and a half with.
Shock: You’ve been doing a lot more TV work recently including “Fear Itself” and “Masters of Horror.” Have you been developing any scripts in the time since “The Machinist” so you might know what you’ll do next filmwise?
Anderson: Of course, I’ve got a couple different projects in development. I’m hoping my next thing is actually going to be a totally different, 180-degree departure. I’m trying to get a musical off the ground actually, a sort of labor of love project I’ve had for a few years, this romantic story set in Brazil in the early â60s with a lot of great Brazilian music. I’ve been trying to get that happening and trying to get the financing in place. But you know, like all these smaller independent films, it’s always sort of a question of getting the money and whichever one falls into place first is the one you end up doing.
Shock: Have you been able to bring anything from your TV work into filmmaking, such as the faster pace of filming?
Anderson: Well, you know, TV, it’s a lot faster, but then again, the movies I do are all pretty small budget and pretty fast, too. These aren’t like 6 month shoots, so we’re always working quickly and I’m used to that accelerated production approach. I don’t know. I think maybe it’s the other way around. I try to bring things I pick up making films into the TV stuff and doing “Masters of Horror” and “Fear Itself”,that was like making mini-movies really, more than making a TV episode. You’re making a little independent film, so I kind of understood that process.
Shock: There’s a movie on your IMDB page called “All Lost Souls.” Is that something you might still get to?
Anderson: Yeah, it’s another project that’s in development that’s sort of like a dark serial killer movie, and we’re waiting to get a script for that and see what happens.
Shock: You’ve done a lot of horror movies and thrillers in the last few years, and I was curious whether that was something you were trying to get away from at all.
Anderson: Yeah, I don’t feel that I’m beholden to any particular genre. I like all kinds of movies, comedies, romance, horror, thrillers. The last few films I’ve been more inclined to do these darker movies, but now I want to try something a little lighter, more fun, and you never want to be pigeonholed and I want to keep doing different kinds of stories in different ways. You want to challenge yourself as a filmmaker. You don’t want to fall into a rut just telling the same story in the same way with each movie, it’s kind of boring.
Shock: Do you find the Hitchcock comparisons flattering or is it just lazy journalism and an easy way to label you?
Anderson: Well, I dunno. I think it’s true. There is a sort of parallel. I mean, we didn’t consciously try to pay homage to Hitchcock, but I love Hitchcock’s films and if anything “The Machinist” was more of a Hitchcock movie than this, but usually, I like those movies with that tempo and Hitchcock made a number of movies on trains, so it kind of made sense. But however people want to find a connection or way to get into the movie, that’s cool by me.
Transsiberian opens in New York at the Angelika Film Center on Friday, July 18.
Source: Edward Douglas
