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Alexandre Aja
Following his horror hits High Tension (AKA Switchblade Romance) and The Hills Have Eyes, Alexandre Aja turns producer and co-writer for new terror fable P2. SciFiNow speaks exclusively to the French filmmaker
P2 opened in the US in early November but failed to set the box office on fire. As it’s set during the festive season do you think it might have fared better with a Christmas release?
I am not so sure. Even when we were filming we knew that it would be impossible to get an opening at Christmas, however, I think another problem was the title. Looking back, we shouldn’t have called it P2 because not enough people knew what the title meant. I had to explain to people that it referred to the levels of a parking garage, you know – P1, P2, P3 and so on…
So why, after the success of The Hills Have Eyes, did you decide not to direct P2?
After High Tension I thought it would be interesting to do a survival thriller and I did think about making P2 as my next film. But, as I began to work on The Hills Have Eyes, my co-writer on P2, Franck Khalfoun, began to get more involved with the project and had all of these great ideas for the camerawork, how to film it and what kind of actors he was looking for, so it made sense for him to direct. I was on set for the entire shoot and we have remained best friends – there were no fights or anything!
Do you view P2 as a slasher movie?
No it is definitely not a slasher movie. In fact, I think of it more as a love story, just a very twisted one.
Where did the idea to set P2 entirely in one enclosed space come from?
Basically, when I was writing High Tension I wanted the whole movie to take place in a house but then I realised that being in the same place for the entire movie posed its own problems. So the idea for P2 was to think of somewhere that you could trap somebody but which would not become a bore for the audience. So we came up with the idea of a parking garage because everyone, at least once in their life, has walked alone around one of these and heard footsteps or can’t find their car or thought that someone was following them.
It is also a lot less gory than High Tension and The Hills Have Eyes…
That was down to Frank and I, when we began writing the script it was much more like a slasher film – in particular the movie Maniac. In the early draft we had this guy who was stalking this terrified girl but who was also killing all these random characters. It was like that for the whole movie but we changed that and I prefer the direction that we went in instead – it relies a lot more on suspense.
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