Director Toby Wilkins, who makes his feature debut with the survival horror monster flick Splinter this Halloween, is a visual-effects master who has had his eye on the director's chair for several years.
His long list of credits includes comedies such as Rush Hour 2 and Cats and Dogs, as well as a long list of SF&F projects like Ghosts of the Abyss, Bulletproof Monk and The Adventures of Pluto Nash.
Wilkins' short film Kidney Thieves took the audience award at the 2006 Austin Film Festival. Wilkins also directed a series of Grudge shorts for Sam Raimi's horror label Ghost House prior to the release of The Grudge 2. Raimi and company were apparently pleased with his work and eventually hired Wilkins to direct the forthcoming direct-to-DVD sequel The Grudge 3.
Wilkins' low-budget Splinter opens this month. Set almost entirely in a single location with only four cast members, it pits a small group against an unstoppable creature that takes possession of its prey and feeds off the bodies. Splinter stars Paulo Costanzo, Jill Wagner, Shea Whigham and newcomer Rachel Kerbs.
Splinter is employing a creative release strategy. It opens in limited theatrical release on Halloween, but is also available via on-demand cable services and will debut Oct. 29 on HDNet as well.
SCI FI Wire sat down with Wilkins on Oct. 15 in Hollywood for an exclusive interview about Splinter and The Grudge 3. (Minor spoilers ahead!)
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Jill Wagner stars in Splinter.
You come from a varied background in digital effects. When you decided to direct a feature, what was it about Splinter that appealed to you?
Wilkins: The script really plucked at the heart strings and reminded me of the movies that I loved when I was growing up--Dawn of the Dead, Alien, Assault on Precinct 13--the contained, seige-type movies where what's really being explored by the movie is how these situations are affecting the characters that we are getting to know.
The characters are around for a while and the audience gets a sense of who they are and how they're dealing with the situation and how they're rising above it or failing to and how their flaws are playing into the story. So all of those elements that I think we've sort of drifted away from in the past decade, it ignores the fact that it is integral to the moviegoing experience to identify with the characters and to feel empathy for them.
When this script landed on my desk, I knew [it] could be done at the budget and level of production that I was going to be able to get as a first-time director. It was really exciting to me that I could revisit all those things I loved as a kid.
Tell me about creating the Splinter creature, if it even is really a creature.
Wilkins: It's funny, because we keep calling it a creature because there's nothing else to say. It's a thing, an entity, a substance or an infection.
But you're not saying it's from outer space or anything like that?
Wilkins: No, I think it's always been here. The genesis of the creature was, years before the script even landed on my desk, it was an ongoing conversation that my friend George Haywood and I had. "Wouldn't it be interesting to see how the human skeleton could be used by a totally non-human entity controlling it?"
If it were puppetteered from the inside by something that had no regard for which way your joints were supposed to bend or no idea of pain, speed, gravity, which way is up or down or whatever, how would this entity make the skeleton move? Then it expanded into how would it spread? What would its mechanism be? How would you get infected by it? And it became what is essentially now the Splinter creature.
This also isn't your typical horror antagonist, racing after its victims.
Wilkins: It has two states: sort of a live state and a dormant state. The dormant state is like the spines of a sea urchin. They just sort of lay in wait for some unsuspecting creature to come along and prick itself. Then it burrows into your skin, and once it starts feeding off the nutrients in your blood and muscle structure, it starts to multiply and take over and build its own tendons and skeletal structure around your skeleton. It can't manufacture its own skeleton. It's just this substance, like a mold or a fungus.
Whenever it breaks the substance of your skin, it makes new splinters, so it affects the next victim by brushing against it or slamming into it or tearing through it.
It's essentially a dumb animal. It doesn't have a brain. It just has the innate instincts that are in its DNA and the muscle memory of what it's supposed to do to propagate its species.
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Paulo Costanzo (from left), Jill Wagner and Shea Whigham in Toby Wilkins' Splinter.
You clearly set it up for a continuation of the story. Do you see the next installment as a continuation of the low-budget, single-set strategy or would you want to expand the world?
Wilkins: The creature design exploration sketches we got from Quantum Creation Effects were amazing. It was based on this wireframe version I did of the human body being distorted and broken and how it would move. They delivered a dozen sketches, and I had to pick one that was going to be the bulk of what we see in the movie. And then I looked at the other 11 and and held it up and said, "This is the sequel." I want to take over a whole town.
The "man of science" character of Seth Belzer is unexpected in a survival horror movie like this.
Wilkins: With the male character, I didn't want him to be this classic horror-movie machismo character. With Paulo, I definitely needed a sense of humor and charm, because he had to have been able to win over this gorgeous girl as a nerdy geek character. And also [to be able to] state what's going on in a way without making huge leaps. A lot of "I think" type of sentences. His character, when he auditioned, just nailed what I saw as Seth. He has that intensity, almost a Woody Allen-level intensity to his character.
The scene where he drops the body temperature is one of the most memorable.
Wilkins: It's kind of a stretch, but he actually did a lot of research into what happens when people get that cold on the way down and then what happens when they start to warm back up again. A lot of his performance, that is his interpretation of what happens when people come out of hypothermia. It's all pretty accurate, and the temperature measurements are possible.
Have you finished your work on The Grudge 3?
Wilkins: We're at the very tail of post [production].
It's direct to DVD?
Wilkins: Direct to DVD is what I've been told, although I have no release date for it yet.
Where does this take the series, and how does it connect to the first two?
Wilkins: I can't really [talk about it]. I've been told not to, partly because they haven't given me any accurate information of release or any of that stuff. They certainly don't want any story on this out there, so I can't really speak to where I've taken this or any of that stuff.
I can tell you it's fun to try and fill those shoes. [Grudge creator] Takashi's [Shimizu] made, what, six of those movie now? It's the same with doing the Grudge short films. It was just a real honor to step in and get my head inside that world. It was a lot of fun.
Why have they decided not to go theatrical with this one?
Wilkins: They had a huge success with Boogeyman 2, which was their first direct-to-DVD release. Theatrical releasing is extremely difficult now. There are a third more independent films now being released in theaters than there were two or three years ago. And there are less theaters taking independent films. If you aren't a hundred-million-dollar movie, the ability to get out to an audience is extremely compromised right now.
On that note, Splinter has an unusual release pattern.
Wilkins: Splinter, in addition to its theatrical release, is on video on demand. And they're sneak-previwing it on HDNet two days before it opens in theaters. As a filmmaker, to sit there and realize there are people who want to see the movie and aren't going to be able to for months, it's devastating.
What Magnolia's doing on Splinter is bringing it all together and shortening that window. It's groundbreaking in a lot of ways. We'll see.
-Jeff Otto
