THE STARS:
Josh Jackson • Rachael Taylor
DIRECTOR: Masayuki Ochiai
U.S. RELEASE: March 21 2008, Nationwide
THE CONCEPT:
Photographer Benjamin Shaw (Jackson), and his new wife Jane (Taylor) are in Tokyo for a lucrative fashion shoot. While driving on a mountain road their car crashes into a woman standing in the middle of the road, who has materialized from nowhere, but after they regain consciousness they cannot find any trace of the girl. When Ben begins his fashion shoot, mysterious white blurs, eerily evocative of a Human form, begin to materialize in all of his photos, and Jane believes the blurs are the dead girl from the accident.
THE COMMENT:
RACHAEL TAYLER on doing a Horror film:
“You’re dealing with fairly complex human issues and the spectrum of emotions you play are potentially wider, you’re dealing with ideas of revenge and death, deceit and betrayal and all that stuff. I find that kind of pleasurable as an actor. It gives you more to play with and you’re exploring things that you probably wouldn’t get to explore on a daily basis, like the Supernatural.”
JOSH JACKSON:
“What attracted me to Shutter was playing the character. In a straight ahead drama, generally the arc and the transition that the character goes through, while it may be internally severe, it is sort of [limiting]. When you’re doing a Horror film you have the potential of doing something much broader and a much more shocking shift, so for me to be able to start here and then end up as somebody totally different was fun for me.”
TAYLOR:
“I was a big fan of the original film. I didn’t use it in terms of performance, but it was one of the main reasons I wanted to make this movie. It’s an excellent movie and it was a great jumping off point. Our version is different; it’s more of a reinterpretation than a remake, because we shift the perspective a lot. What I wanted to bring to it was a strong female story. I’m not interested in making a film about a blonde girl in a ghost house having horrible things happen to her. What I wanted the story to be about, and what I really fought to occur, is that she would be very proactive and be a strong female character trying to figure out this mystery, and interpret these supernatural events rather than things happening to her.”
JACKSON on whether he believes in spiritual photography:
“I’ve never had the experience of it. I don’t really work on absolutes, I think it’s impossible to say absolutely yes or no to just about anything. It’s like my issues with faith, I’m not a man of faith, I have a real hard time when people of faith tell me something is absolutely correct, but then it would be hypocritical for me to say it’s absolutely incorrect. So I’ve never had a ghost moment, I’ve never had a ghost in my [camera] but I don’t deny that it’s possible.”
TAYLOR:
“I think [ghosts are] really interesting, it’s a real phenomenon which is really cool. There actually are photographs that have inexplicable images in them, whether or not you want to consider them as supernatural images is up to you. There are photographs that you can’t explain the element in the picture, it’s not a watermark or a technical problem, so it’s fascination. And I like what it represents, which is that it’s how a supernatural being can articulate something that they really need to say if the emotion is potent and strong enough, and it’s about their finding a way to get their message across to us, and in this case it is using the medium of photography.”
JACKSON on working with Japanese director Masayuki Ochiai:
“There were certainly moments of difficulty, because I think when we would get into the meat of a language heavy scene, it was difficult for him to follow along because he understands only a little bit of English. But in terms of communicating with the actors, or the rest of the Westerners on set, he had a phenomenal translator who was able to not only translate correctly the words, but had lived in the States so could contextualize this is not what I’m saying but how I’m saying it that’s important.”
