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Interview with Drew Goddard, Director of The Cabin In The Woods - SciFiNow

Interview with Drew Goddard, Director of The Cabin In The Woods

Buffy, Angel and Cloverfield writer Drew Goddard on working with Joss Whedon and new horror film The Cabin In The Woods

What were your motivations behind The Cabin In The Woods?

This movie started out from a place of love, we just love movies and the genre and we came to it wanting to make the ultimate horror movie or at least the best horror movie that we knew how to make. I wanted to write a love letter to it while still tweaking some parts of it.

It was your first experience of directing; what was that like?  

Oh it’s the best job in the world (laughs). And we get to go so insane with this movie  that it definitely gave me the chance to try on a lot of different hats and really swing from the fences for my first movie. I hope they let me do it again.

(Left to right) Co-writer Joss Whedon and writer/director Drew Goddard on the set of The Cabin In The Woods

You’ve written for some of the biggest, most influential genre TV shows (Buffy, Angel, Lost, Alias); what do you feel you’ve brought to the genre?

I certainly learned a lot from being on those shows and the thing I learned was to never be afraid to take chances and try different things. From Buffy to Lost, the thing they had in common was that nobody thought they would work, both JJ and Joss were told ‘this is crazy why are you trying to do this?’ and they did it anyway and I try to keep that spirit alive and not be afraid to be different and weird (laughs).

From having worked in TV and film, do you feel the budget ever limits your ambitions?

Nah the truth is we didn’t really have that big of a budget and it felt like TV ’cause there were all these compromises that you have to make but luckily I never felt like the story itself was being compromised and we got to do everything we wanted.

Did you get any tips from JJ about how to keep the movie under wraps?

We just knew that this is a movie that plays better the less you know about it, the less you know the more fun you’re going to have and I feel like people who have seen the movie understand that and so luckily a lot of people are doing the work for us in protecting the movie. I don’t think people want to ruin it because they know it’s just better the less you know about it.

The Cabin In The Woods is out in cinemas now. To read the full interview, check out May’s issue of SciFiNow!