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By Kenn Gold
 Tonight’s SCI FI Original Saturday movie is a contemporary twist on the classic Washington Irving tale, Sleepy Hollow. In this modern re-telling of Headless Horseman, Seven young friends on their way to a Halloween party take a shortcut, get lost and end up in a cursed rural town terrorized by the spirit of the Headless Horsemen. The Horseman needs to collect seven heads by midnight in order to return to the land of the living – and the townspeople want to sacrifice the young visitors to save themselves!
Recently actors Richard Moll (Night Court), Trish Coren, Joe Hartzler and director Anthony C Ferrante talked to MediaBlvd Magazine and others in a conference call discussing what led to the making of Headless Horseman.
Question> How did this project come together?
Anthony C. Ferrante> I think about a year ago Boo had aired on Sci-Fi and one of the companies that works with Sci-Fi was putting together a Headless Horsemen movie with the network. And they really liked Boo and thought it would be a good fit to have me come over and do Headless Horseman. And so the thing that's interesting is both movies have Halloween as the backdrop. Boo was intentional and Headless Horseman it was already in the existing script. And so, you know, it was a fun opportunity to go back and try to do a slightly different take on a horror movie set on Halloween.
And it's always great to bring back people that you've worked with in the past. And I got a chance to bring back Steve Felty who was also in Boo, who is the villain in Boo and is one of many scary people in Headless Horseman. And Trish who is really great as the lead in Boo as Jessie. You know, to be able to bring her onto this and to play a completely different role that people still don't recognize her until they go, wait a minute. That person looks familiar. So it's kind of cool to give her a chance to do something completely different with some humor.
 Richard Moll> I guess that means, Anthony, that all of us will be in your next film.
Trish Coren> Pretty much.
Anthony C. Ferrante> That's probably the case.
Richard Moll> It keeps getting larger. He keeps bringing more and more people with us.
Anthony C. Ferrante> Yes I know. It's pretty disturbing after awhile. It's like, oh yes, okay here's my cast. But there's no roles left.
Question> You're going to have to do a Biblical epic next to accommodate everybody.
Trish Coren> Exactly.
Anthony C. Ferrante> Yes.
Trish Coren> If there's a Halloween epic.
Anthony C. Ferrante> Trish, why don't you tell them a little bit about how you came onboard?
Trish Coren> Well Anthony called me. I think maybe two weeks before we had to be there?
Anthony C. Ferrante> I think maybe…
Trish Coren> Maybe like a week?
Anthony C. Ferrante> I think it was a week.
Trish Coren> It was very last minute. And I was in a panic mode for a couple of days because I didn't have a passport so.
Anthony C. Ferrante> We shot in Romania.
Trish Coren> I was running - yes, we shot in Romania. So, you know, it was very last minute for me. And I just pretty much, I, you know, I was very excited and I dropped everything. And I ran out and got my passport and wardrobe options for them and get organized so. So for me, it was kind of a frantic getting onboard. But once I was there it was great. And it's awesome to be able to work with Anthony again and just do it again. And like Anthony said, to be something completely different from Boo and from Libby - I mean from Jessie. So it was really great so.
Question> With a concept like Headless Horseman that's been done so many times and is really part of pop culture in general, does it add to the complexity trying to do yet a completely different take on something that's so well known? And how do you go about that making yourself different?
Anthony C. Ferrante> Well I'll say, first of all, you know, I mean I loved Sleepy Hollow and I was all bummed out when Tim Burton got an opportunity to do the Sleepy Hollow movie. And I said, “I'll never get to do a Sleepy Hollow film”. Which, you when you say that, the universe usually comes back and says, “okay here's a Sleepy Hollow film. Now do it for the craft service budget of Sleepy Hollow.” So the interesting thing about the script that came back is that they took the idea of Sleepy Hollow and said this is the real story. And it was kind of like the Friday the 13th movie but with the headless horseman.
And you know, we don't have a super large budget to be able to do huge epic sequences. So the idea is how can we make something really cool but make it a horror film, more of an old fashion, scary, guy in the woods going after people. And I think that was the most exciting challenge. How do you make it different. And one of the things that we had in the original script he didn't have a head the entire time. And I felt that at a certain point just removing heads with visual effects would get boring. And you can't really eliminate the guy at the end of the movie if he doesn't have a head.
So I figured it would be more interesting that with every head that gets chopped off his own head grows back. I thought that was our nice little twist because then we can have these different stages. And then by the end of the movie he's all in prosthetics. The production designers over there really did an amazing job with the look of the movie. It's really tricky to go and try to do that Ichabod Crane story all over again.
It's Washington Irving, really great story. It's been done to death. And the only way to kind of tweak it and this is what I think Sci-Fi does really well is to take a concept that you know and then kind of put a whole other spin on it. And that's what Headless Horseman was. It was very fun getting into the universe. And owing to the story but doing your own thing. So certainly the pumpkin had to be in there. It wasn't in the original draft. But we had to find a way to put the pumpkin on the head because that's sort of an iconic image. And I think there's even a reference to Ichabod Crane and the town on one of the signs that says Crane's Feed. So there's a lot of in jokes in the movie. But they're very thinly veiled.
Richard Moll> It was on fire and they threw it at me. It was great.
Anthony C. Ferrante> What? What'd you say Richard?
Richard Moll> They set the pumpkin on fire and they threw it at me. And that's how they got it in the film.
Anthony C. Ferrante> Yes we set you on fire, didn't we?
Richard Moll> Well just a little bit. You know, but who's complaining really. I mean they have other wardrobe. They can replace.
Anthony C. Ferrante> Yes that was pretty terrifying -- our lead actor and then suddenly the flaming pumpkin hits Richard, like I think I'm on fire. No it wasn't that bad. But…
Richard Moll> You know, but Anthony was very compassionate about that whole thing. He said stop whining, let's move on. Come on. It’s money. So, you know, I was on fire. But, you know, third degree burns, you know, what am I going to do? Complain? I don't think so.
Question> What was it like filming a horror movie in Romania? I mean when you say that, that just sounds like it's really cool. Did you have any unique experiences doing that?
Richard Moll> I managed to get out alive which I consider a bit of a moral triumph.
Trish Coren> Yes.
Joe Hartzler> The one thing you have to know about Romania is that these people, they don't put dogs in like cages. Dogs are everywhere. They all look exactly alike. Somewhere there's a mother dog giving birth to identical puppies all over Romania.
Richard Moll> And some dogs are actually served on the dinner table as well which is a very lovely...It's like Mexico, they keep their dogs on their roofs so they can't get away. So they've got them there when dinner comes around and, you know.
Anthony C. Ferrante> Actually what happened the first day I got there in Romania, it was in the middle of the night. I was going to walk to where our hotel was about a ten minutes away from the studio. And I didn't know about the dogs. So it's probably 12 o'clock at night. I was going to go talk to the line producer. There was no car so I just decided to go there. And suddenly you start hearing the dogs barking out in the woods and then it starts multiplying. And then by the time I got to the edge of the driveway, one dog appeared. Then another dog appeared. And I'm going I'm in a horror movie. And they started barking at me. So I'm like cautiously walking back. It was like - it was really, really scary. And then the lady who was in the reception area, she comes out and goes get away, get away with the dogs. And they’d go away. And I'm like, great I'm an idiot.
Trish Coren> There were very definitely parts of Romania that I mean it was, you know, it's I don't know. It's very…
Joe Hartzler> It's definitely a country that got out of communism in the early 90s, right? I mean…
Trish Coren> Right, I mean it's still recovering. And it's creepy. You know, there are places that like some of the woods that we shot in that I definitely felt that I was in Romania and I was filming a horror movie. And then we got to go see some of the castles in Transylvania over one of our days off and that was really cool. That kind of was something that we did just to kind of see the other parts of the area. And it was just beautiful. It's a really beautiful country when you get out into the country and in the mountains, the mountain area. Yes, it was great. The castles are really for me a highlight.
Anthony C. Ferrante> And I think one of the things too that is a misnomer is they have a full infrastructure over there. I mean it's not like we're filming in some third world country. I mean, you know, they don't have dollies or anything like that. They have a studio over there. And it's just like walking onto the Burbank lot on Warner Brothers. They have all the toys, picture cars, cranes. They have sound stages. We built a couple sets. I mean it's actually pretty cool. We would never have been able to pull off what we pulled off here in America just because, you know, the dollar's so much better there. And, you know, they have a lot of stuff in place already so. And they've got a great crew, really talented people over there. They were just really wonderful to work with.
Richard Moll> He's lying. It is a third world country. And, you know, I've worked in several of them over there. I've got the corner on the market in Eastern Europe. I spent a year in Bulgaria one month doing a film called Spiders II. And that was an egregious experience. And I've also worked in -- I go back far enough that it was called Yugoslavia then -- but I've worked in Ziggurat and some of these places, Ljubljana, which I believe is now Croatia. So they all have contiguous borders. So I say with great pride that I've visited all of those countries. None of them will let me back in but I don't know what that means. But still it's an experience.
Headless Horsemen airs on SCI FI tonight, the evening of October 27th at 9PM Eastern! |
