The Blood Spills
If you don’t know the climactic ending to the book or original movie, you may want to stop reading now or skip ahead to the interviews.
Essentially, Carrie going to the prom with Tommy is a set-up as Chris and Billy have rigged a bucket of pig’s blood over the stage to tip over and drench Carrie in blood during their ceremony. Carrie being covered in blood is such a memorable image from the first movie that it was featured on the poster and that’s exactly what they were going to do todaydrop a bucket full of fake blood on actress Chloé Moretz.
But first they had to do a couple test runs and the entire area was covered in plastic as Chloe and Ansel’s doubles came on stage wearing their outfits and held hands while the crew systematically motioned them into the exact right spot. While they had been fairly faithful in terms of the look of things with an old metal bucket hanging from the lighting rig, the five gallons of fake blood would actually be poured from a metal canister that resembled a spotlight. They gave it a couple goes with the first try barely hitting the double’s head, instead hitting her in the back of her shoulders although with enough force to splatter fake blood on the white suit worn by Ansel’s double.
As the doubles went off to change and they cleaned up, Peirce came over to chat with the press, telling us how they had spent weeks testing the blood with different types of liquids of varying thicknesses and viscosities to get the exact look and amount of splatter they wanted to have in this pivotal sequence.
Fortunately, the second attempt was glorious, hitting Chloe’s double in just the right place to leave her drenched from the head down with the fake blood, and back in the press area, as we waited for our next interview, that second blood splatter played on a loop in slow motion on the monitors behind us, which was quite surreal to have as a background.
Then came the moment of truth and Chloe came out, clearly nervous about the scene they were about to film. We were told this would be shot with three cameras in order to capture the moment since they’d only have one go with Chloe. After splattering her with blood, the clean-up and resetting process would take many hours, and being under 18, Chloe also could only work 9 and a half hours on any given day.
At this point, a couple dozen of the background extras had reconvened in front of the stage for the scene and they did a run-through rehearsal without the blood drop just to make sure in the audience. One girl in the audience said something to the couple which we couldn’t hear to which Tommy reacts, and then one of the girls in the audience starts cackling and points to a green screen where Chris would be broadcasting Carrie’s ordeal in the girls’ locker room. The rest of the extras look up at that screen and they also start laughing. (When we watched the shot back later, we realized you couldn’t even see the audience at least from the long shot.)
Once Peirce was happy with how things played out, they were ready to spill some blood and the first blood drop went really well with Moretz’s reactiondropping the flowers she was holding and glaring angrilybeing almost perfect.
Unfortunately, all that fake blood left the stage absolutely pooling with the stuff, so Peirce’s assistant director, who seemed kind of grouchy that day, warned that the floor might be slippery. That didn’t keep Ansel from taking a nasty tumble after cameras stopped rolling, but he seemed fine as he and Chloe were taken backstage to clean up.
Mayhem Ensues
“We’ve done a lot of work on this film to have this sort of hybrid of old school camera tricks, stunt, special effects. Everything from things like we’re doing some reverse printing, we’re doing a lot of physical effects but we’re also trying to appeal to the modern aesthetic for an action film and for a effects movie. We’ve been trying really hard to find that place where we can do digital work that doesn’t feel forced, that doesn’t hijack the narrative that supports what we’re trying to do.”
“One of the big areas I’ve been focusing on is Carrie’s telekinetic force and what it is,” Berardi told us. “In the early days of prep I showed Kim a bunch of crazy footage just to get a sense of the palette. We showed her stuff that was shot at a thousand frames per second. Where we were stopping time. We showed her things that were reverse printed and digitally enhanced with limb replacements.”
The latter part was especially handy for something that Berardi calls the “Danse Macabre” where Carrie uses her powers to animate some of her classmates. “I am finishing another movie now called Mama’ and we’re doing some pretty extreme contortionist type work where it’s part digital, part puppeteered, where we’ve actually puppeteered actors with rods, giving them this kind of crazy motion. We showed her some pretty grotesque footage of real people breaking bones. We had a bunch old skate board footage where people would do these tricks and would land and they would break and their arm would be Lots of movie reference and we kind of found a palette that started to be really physical but needed digital enhancement.”
Berardi told us that Carrie uses different levels of telekinesis (or TK) from 1 to 10 over the course of the movie with the amount of force being dictated by notes Peirce made in the script, and as you can imagine, her revenge on Billy and Chris probably is up there. (We know how they die but we’re not going to spoil it for you.) The biggest effect for the movie though is for when the White house is destroyed at the end of the movie, something they couldn’t afford to do in the original movie. As mentioned above, they found a real house for the exteriors and Berardi scanned it so rather than destroying a set or doing it in miniature, they can do all of the destruction digitally. Berardi admitted that a “disproportionate amount” of the FX work was going into the prom scene and the destruction of the house.
Now that you have the general gist of what we saw on set, you can go to Page 3 to read a full interview with Chloé Moretz, Page 4 for an even more extensive interview with director Kimberly Peirce and/or Page 5 for our interview with producer Kevin Misher, all which will answer a lot of the questions you may have about some of the earlier decisions that went into the production.
You can see how all of it turned out when Carrie opens nationwide on Friday, October 18th.
