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But over the years, Andersons film grew in reputation.
(Where were going, we wont need eyes to see.)
WhenEvent Horizonfirst came out, it didnt do great business and was savaged by critics.
It has been nice to see it find its audience over the years.
First, the movie has a very downer ending.
It doesnt tie everything up in a nice, neat bow at the end.
A lot of audiences they like certainty.
They like to know exactly what happened.
ButEvent Horizondoesnt do that.
Is Joely Richardson insane?
Is Sam Neill really there?
And it gives people a lot to talk about.
Did they really go to Hell?
Was it just a dimension?
Are they the ones haunting the house or is the house haunting them?
As a cinemagoer, I like being able to discuss the movie afterward.
But I think maybe that hurt us theatrically the first time out.
I said to Richard, How did you do that?
That was his approach.
If you could build it, build it.
Its a lot more difficult, but boy, does it look good.
All we had to do was wire removal.
And itll never date, because its real.
That was his advice.
So, something like I dont even know what to call it.
The, uh, giant rotating thing?The Third Containment, I believe it was called.
Did you build that actual thing at that size?You bet I did!
Theyre like, Really?
And I said, Not just that.
I want it to move.
Theyre like, No, thats insane.
You cant do that.
I talked to Richard: Why does it look so good?
And he said, Well, because we built it.
Thats why those visual effects look good.
So thats what we did.
When we could build it, we built it.
For the spaceships, obviously we cant build full scale, but we built big models.
Thank God we didnt go CG.
Because at that time, CG was around.Jurassic Parkhad just happened.
There was definitely the option to build all the spaceships in CG.
It wouldve been a lot easier, but the movie certainly wouldnt be holding up right now.
In fact, it wouldnt have held up a couple of years after its release.
Because nothing dates faster than cutting-edge CG.
Then you had to give yourself a crash course in special effects to make that movie.
I feel like my work has benefited from that since then.
OnEvent Horizon, I would say the big thing I learned was about actors.
I was very fortunate that I worked with a terrific cast of actors who were very, very giving.
Laurence Fishburne had worked with the best directors.
Theres an actor who could have gone, Ah, what does this kid know?
He was very, very kind; so was Sam Neill.
Thats another thing that I think distinguishesEvent Horizonfrom other sci-fi films of the era.
Its surprising to see these actors in a movie like this.
Was it difficult to convince them to do it?They were excited to do it.
Because I was casting them against bang out.
Fishburne was written as a Texan cowboy in the original script.
When we offered him the role, hes like, Oh, this is interesting.
I havent done a movie like this before.
Sam Neill, at that point, was the guy who saved the kids from the dinosaurs inJurassic Park.
He was right up there with Tom Hanks as the person you would most trust your children with.
I was putting these actors in a very different environment, and I think they really liked that.
I always think of Sam Neills character going basically crazy at the very end.
But every time I watch the film, Im reminded that its a gradual progression.
You see early on that weird obsessive quality of his.
Hes already a little off.I think if you rewatch the movie, hes pretty crazy at the start.
I mean, he hasnt gone crazy, but he definitely has the potential to.
Because one of the great jumps in the movie is where hes shaving at the start.
Somethings off about this guy.
Location and setting tend to play a big part in your films.
That was in Philip Eisners original screenplay.
The nature of the haunted house was something that I brought the idea of doing this Gothic-inspired creation.
For2001, they had all that research they did with NASA as to what it would really look like.
OnAlien, Ridley Scott had the genius stroke of employing H. R. Giger.
So he got one obsessive mans creativity that distilled down into this biomechanical creation.
You look at Gigers art books and its theAlienspaceship.
Its already all built in there.
I thought,Well, I dont have NASA, and I dont have Giger.
I need a strong inception point.
I was in Paris looking at Notre-Dame cathedral, and I thought, thats it.
It was meant to scare and intimidate the populace with the importance and power of God.
I said, We cant build anything that isnt in Notre-Dame.
The antenna dishes on top of theEvent Horizonare all based on the gargoyle clusters on the top of Notre-Dame.
The intricate steelwork is all based on the designs of the stained-glass windows.
I think that discipline to build it from those elements gave us a really original look.
You dont think about it, but subliminally its there.
Paramount was producingTitanicwith 20th Century Fox, and it was supposed to be a big summer movie.
Then, rather late in the day, James Cameron told them, You cant have it for summer.
Its going to be Christmas.
My movie was supposed to be in the fall.
Its a scary movie, Halloweeny.
That would be the appropriate release time.
But suddenly, Paramount didnt have a movie for the summertime.
So I was it: Youre going in the summer!
A more experienced filmmaker may have fought against that, going, Wait a second.
Youre not releasing my dark horror movie in the middle of summer.
But it was only my third movie and my second studio movie.
And Im like, Oh, really?
That sounds like you have a lot of enthusiasm for my film.
We only got four weeks to cut the movie after we wrapped principal photography.
So I was working during the day, and I could only edit at night.
Really, I only had three weeks to cut the picture.
The end result was we showed the movie and it really wasnt ready to be seen.
It was too long.
I hadnt had a chance to refine it, so it didnt test particularly well.
I dont think it was ever going to test well, because it had a bleak ending.
Im sure youve seen those test cards that people have to fill out.
Would you rate the movie Excellent, Very Good?
A movie that ends the wayEvent Horizondoes its so bleak.
Did you see the intestines and the stakes shoved through people and the eyes tearing out?
Gwyneth Paltrows head in a box that was never going to get good test results.
So we didnt get great test results.
The studio they were supportive, but you could see they were panicked.
They were horrified, because they saw all this graphic imagery that I realized they hadnt seen before.
We were shooting in London and sending the dailies back to Los Angeles.
But I think they were watching the main-unit dailies.
I think at that point, studios didnt bother watching the second-unit stuff.
When they saw it for the first time with an audience, they were horrified.
I remember a studio executive telling me, But this is the studio that makesStar Trek!
It was like I was besmirching the good name ofStar Trekby making this horrible movie out in space.
Over the years, there have been efforts to find previous cuts.
And I know there are deleted scenes that are extras on the 4K release.
So there wasnt that hunger for all of that behind-the-scenes stuff, deleted scenes, special editions.
WhenEvent Horizonstarted developing this cult audience, by that point it was too late.
The studio had thrown a lot of the stuff away, because they didnt archive it.
They didnt feel there was any need to.
Whose idea was it to have the guy holding out his eyeballs?
It might have been in Philips original screenplay.
I might have come up with that piece of sickness.
Im not quite sure.
Im glad you remember it.
Nothing scares people more than their own imaginations.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
