Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on October 1, 2012, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Do you believe in psychic phenomena? It’s an oft-pondered question that’s at the heart of Red Lights (on DVD and Blu-ray from Millennium Entertainment), the second thriller feature by Spanish-born director Rodrigo Cortés. Fango spoke to the filmmaker about his Lights collaborators, his other 2012 paranormal film, Apartment 143 (which he scripted), and his breakout film Buried.
Red Lights stars Cillian Murphy (who discusses it here) and Sigourney Weaver as Tom Buckley and Margaret Matheson, paranormal researchers who actually spend a good deal of their time exposing fake and fraudulent psychics and occult phenomena. They may have met their match in Simon Silver (Robert De Niro), a world-famous mind-reader who is ending a lengthy retirement to step back into the spotlight. It’s an expansive story that’s quite a switch from Buried, in which the entire running time is spent trapped with Ryan Reynolds–playing a U.S. truck driver kidnapped in Iraq–inside a coffinlike box (see our review here).
What kind of adjustments did you have to make as a director from Buried to the much bigger Red Lights?
Actually, it’s the same approach. When I did Buried, I never felt I was doing a small film or an experimental one. To me, it was like a super-production that happened inside a box. You use the same tools—you just direct—and of course there are certain differences, but they are not major. It’s only that on Red Lights, I had more actors and more locations. Instead of going every day to the same set, I changed from one to another. But at the end of the day, I was still telling a story, so there were no major adjustments.
Are the paranormal, and paranormal debunkers, themes you’ve been interested in for a long time?
More than the theme itself, what interested me is how those phenomena affect people. I’m more interested in the way beliefs are created, the places they come from.
How did you settle on Cillian Murphy for the lead?
For the character of Tom, I needed someone with two faces, in a way. At the beginning of the film, Tom is very innocent, in a way. He’s like a Boy Scout with a very innocent gaze, like a young deer. And then things change, and he becomes much more dark and enigmatic. Cillian has both qualities, and he describes this very long arc in an amazing way.
How about Elizabeth Olsen as Sally, the student who becomes involved with Tom? Did you cast her before her star ascended?
I actually didn’t know her; none of her films had yet been released. I just auditioned about 30 actresses, and she was the best one. She was amazing. When she did the audition, she was reading my lines, but it was like they were her lines. It felt like everything was happening inside her head at that very moment, in an organic, natural way. She brought so much life to the character, and I needed Sally to have that. This is someone you want to be close to Tom through his dark journey. Then, when she was already cast, was when everything happened with Martha Marcy May Marlene and all that stuff, so it was perfect timing.
Your 2nd-unit director on Red Lights was Nacho Cerdá, who’s well-known for his own horror films, including The Abandoned and the shorts Aftermath and Genesis. How did you come to collaborate with him?
He has worked many times with my DP on Red Lights, Xavi Giménez, and I thought he was the perfect choice. On one hand, I gave him a list of things I wanted him to shoot, but on the other, I also gave him the freedom to do anything he felt would be useful, so he could give me some material that came through his eyes—which he did. For instance, in the theater sequence where everything starts to tremble, he shot reactions of the people or things falling. Or if you remember that moment where the Russian psychic is screaming, and moving objects with her mind—that footage. Sometimes, when I had three cameras in big scenes, I gave him one of those so he could get some of the visuals.
You spun off some of your paranormal research for Red Lights into the screenplay for the found-footage paranormal-investigation movie Apartment 143 (a.k.a. Emergo), which came out earlier this year.
When you do a year and a half of research, you have tons and tons of material—I had about 10 notebooks’ worth—and of course, not all of that can be used in one single film. And I felt that I had so much research that, in a way, I pushed myself to do something with it. It’s not that there were certain scenes I didn’t use in Red Lights or something like that, but rather that this research could have been used for 10 different films, and I needed to do at least one more. But Apartment 143 is so, so different; it’s like the other side of the coin. We have just one case that happens in three days and three nights in one apartment. It’s a very low-budget film. And we don’t have debunkers, just a multidisciplinary team of metapsychic investigators.
How was it seeing your material directed by a different filmmaker, Carles Torrens?
It’s actually very rewarding in many ways, and I was very involved in the film, even in the postproduction. But no matter how involved you are, everything’s filtered through another vision, another way of interpreting your stuff and making it go to a different place. And in that sense, you’re surprised. When you direct your own script, there’s not so much of a margin for surprise, because you know yourself. For instance, I never admire the things I do, because they look very natural to me since they came out of my own brain. It’s only when you see things made by other people that you wonder, “How the hell did they do that?” So when you see your own material directed by a talented filmmaker, it’s very rewarding in that sense.
You did an amazing job sustaining tension for 90 minutes in a confined space in Buried. What was the biggest challenge on that film?
Probably just believing it was possible, because before we did it, everybody thought we were totally crazy. So making that jump over common sense was the most difficult part. In a way, the hardest thing you have to do in a case like this is stop thinking about it, because if you use logic, logic tells you it’s impossible. I decided to just go with no limitations, no thinking about the space, and shoot it as if it was, I don’t know, a chase in the streets of New York—with no limitations at all. First I figured out what I wanted to do, and then I found out the way to do it. If I had gone the opposite way, first thinking about what I could do, the movie would been much more limited.
Did you do any research into similar real-life kidnapping cases?
No, I didn’t. I wanted to create a Hitchcockian film, and to me the political part, for instance, was not important. Iraq was the MacGuffin in a way, to use the Hitchcockian term. I was interested in the emotional side, working with the actor to create very truthful, powerful feelings, and establishing an entire world inside that box with perfect control of timing, pace, narrative and, again, emotions. So I didn’t want to do any research. To me, it was the story of this guy, and I wanted to make the best possible version of that.
Ryan Reynolds was an interesting casting choice; he was mostly known for comedy at the time. How did you settle on him for the lead?
Well, I had always admired him, actually. He’s an amazing actor. I remember seeing The Nines, a film directed by John August, in which he does three roles. It’s a very small but amazing film, and I was in shock when I saw it. I had never seen that control of timing. And though it may sound paradoxical, being so good with comedy made him perfect for Buried, because I needed this perfect control of nuance that you only find in comedy. I remember when I spoke with Chris Sparling, the writer of Buried, for the first time, I told him, “You don’t know it, but you have written a comedy.” Of course, it isn’t a comedy, or if it was it would’ve been written by Kafka! But it has the skeleton, the structure of a comedy. In terms of pace and structure, it has the same elements. And with Ryan, you have someone with perfect control of timing, this way of holding a line delivery for two seconds in a very specific way so it creates a new effect. He had to show these endless emotions, from fear to hunger to hope to joy to despair, and not many actors can do that the way Ryan did. I was sure from the very first moment that he was the right choice.
What are you working on now? Do you have any other projects in the works?
I’m looking for that idea that becomes a voice inside my head that I have to listen to. I’ve been working nonstop for three years on those three projects—Buried, Apartment 143 and Red Lights—from Monday to Sunday, 15-18 hours a day. So my next project should be sleeping [laughs] for four days in a row. I’m reading scripts, I’m reading novels, I just want to make something that really means something to me. Many stories I would happily spend two hours with, but there are not so many I would spend two years with.
