We sat down and talked with horror auteur Larry Fessenden this week to discuss his 25 year retrospective for Glass Eye Pix, his indie horror production shingle, taking place at the ReRun Gastropub theater in Brooklyn; an excellent two-week retrospective that runs October 22 – November 4.
During our lengthy interview, he discussed the now-dead collaboration with Guillermo del Toro, a remake of “The Orphanage” that he has since departed. The issues? Evidently the same struggles scores of filmmakers point to when working on remakes.
“I eventually went to LA, we sat down and hashed out the script, then I went off and wrote it. I took his notes, Warner Bros. notes, New Line’s notes. It was a really good script. I was very excited about it. I was going to do it as a New England Gothic, truly shot in New England, and it didn’t pan out. WB wanted to shoot it in South Africa or something nutty. I mean, why do you remake a foreign film in another foreign land? I don’t understand the logic sometimes.”
But apparently there were bigger launchblockers than locations. “But that’s not why we parted ways. Basically, they felt that they couldn’t cast the kind of A-List star they were looking for with my indie reputation. But it was great, Guillermo has always been supportive, he reaches out to me, we might do something else possibly.”
A future del Toro-Fessenden pairing? Sign us up. Stay tuned for the full interview, where Fessenden discusses low-budget filmmaking, the world of modern horror, and his ill-fated desire to adapt “Werewolf By Night.”