Gore Verbinski: ”The cure for health is modern gothic”
Fans of the 2002 remake of The Ring, directed by Gore Verbinski in 2002, are eagerly awaiting the director's return to the horror genre with The Cure for Health . From the looks of it, the film starring Dane DeHaan, Jason Isaacs and Mia Goth will be equally disturbing and frightening.On a late rainy evening in Manhattan, the CFO of a certain company in his own office has a heart attack. A little later, the viewer meets Lockhart ( Dane DeHaan ), one of the company's young employees, who is sent to Switzerland by the board of co-founders to find and return a recovering financier who suddenly decided to extend treatment. water procedures "in one of the Alpine castles. Barely arriving at the place, Lockhart feels unkind: everything looks unnaturally perfect, everyone is dressed in white ... The cynical Lockhart wants to quickly find a leader and get on a plane to the States, trying to leave the hospital gets into a car accident. Forced to stay in the castle during rehabilitation,  While this year promises to be even more than the previous one, filled with remakes and sequels, " Health Cure ", on the contrary, seems to be something like the original early thrillers by David Fincher. The film's shocking vibe is clearly calculated to keep the viewer in constant tension. After the press preview of the first thirty minutes of the new work, Verbinski spoke about the main components of his vision for the project and where his main idea came from. At first glance, it seems that you are dealing with a film adaptation - the title of the picture resembles the title of a typical book bestseller. But it turns out that this is an absolutely independent work. We are screenwriter Justin Hayes and I are both fans of Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain , which tells the story of a group of people clinging to their ailments in a sanatorium, but denying the inevitable impending World War I. We are exploring the same sense of denial as Mann . But we have our own history and our own language. You can say this is modern gothic.  It is in the interiors of the sanatorium that we see a terrible picture - a gallery of people ending their days here. We are afraid of going to a madhouse just because someone thinks we are insane. Interesting that you mentioned an insane asylum. There is a fragment in the first quarter of the film, where it is clearly seen that our hero is already ripe for the diagnosis. Yes, and the place has - it is calm, there is no cellular connection, the clock has stopped, the computer has died ... So, maybe there is something wrong with you? Maybe it's time to reboot? This place is just some kind of tiramisu. The facade is beautiful, but behind it lies the cure, and behind the cure is what happened two hundred years ago. And even deeper - a vague premonition that everything will happen again.  At first this place looks blissful and life-affirming, but pretty quickly the viewer will start to shake from the fact that absolutely everyone is walking around in white: sisters, doctors, patients ... Until the hero was here, Manhattan reality was unique and unshakable. And now he is in a much more mysterious world. Both visually and in terms of sound, I wanted to make it look as if the viewer was coming here. And he doesn't seem to mind being here at first. This is an attempt to reconcile with the idea that we are born, go to school, then to work, and then die. But how is that? Just sitting in your pants until prostate cancer is life? Is there something else?  How long ago did you and Justin start developing the ribbon idea? Right after Lone Ranger? Yes. I was thinking about denying reality, about a sense of momentary security, despite which something is happening right now. The feeling of something inevitable, akin to a spot on an X-ray, pulls the hero towards epiphany and towards the camera at the end of the corridor. This is witchcraft, a kind of spell in which you can weave everything - music, picture, characters, plot. I would like to think that the feeling of an unknown action taking place, which the hero does not hear and does not understand, is generally a separate person. Thinking about such things was the first steps towards this idea.  A psychiatrist would ask if this has a Hollywood analogy? This is an interesting question because the rise of a genre tends to reflect the spirit of the times. You saw the films of the 50s, which seem to be about monsters, but in fact about the "red threat". It seems to me that in Health Cure we are exploring the syndrome of denial. We all remember history well, but again and again we rush at full speed, we see a wall in front, but we do not turn the steering wheel. Because we live like this, the rest is not interesting to us. Everyone wants a personal doctor to diagnose “You are forgiven,” right?“You're not perfect. And it is not to blame for anything, because it is imperfect ”- a great idea to grab onto. All these rich men, directors, leaders remained in the boarding house, clinging to their diagnosis, standing up in its defense, and calmed down. The bad news for them is that they are sick. But there is also a good one - there is a medicine. I think that everyone who finds themselves in this place is a kind of lotophagous, as if in an opium dope repeating: "Bloodletting helps a lot, I like it." They are just waiting for the next procedure. Many will say that your film is much more relevant now than when you started working on it. I agree. By itself, this picture is by no means a social criticism, nor was " The Bell ", but in the context of such a phenomenon as the spirit of the times, in the context of a practically tangible existential crisis, it, I hope , will be able to affect the viewer so much that after four days he will say: “Some kind of strange feeling. Something I feel uneasy. And this is clearly because of that movie. ”  Lead actor Dane DeHaan resembles Jimmy Stewart in some character traits, but brighter and more versatile. He looks arrogant and arrogant, and, empathizing with him, you certainly note that he definitely belongs to the world of unprincipled and cruel people. When did you finally decide that Dane will play Lockhart? I've always been a fan of him. I saw Dane in a small episode in the thriller The Place Beyond the Pines and immediately wanted to work with him somehow. When we started developing " Medicine ", I just could not get his type out of my head. We talked a lot about not letting the viewer sympathize with Lockhart from the start, that would be wrong. We had to give him a lot of space to transform. He's really sick. You know, this is a modern disease of a financial trader. He doesn't want to be like his father at any cost, he wants to be upstairs, and he doesn't care how many heads he has to go to to get there. And the more DeHaan enhances this side of the character's character, the more powerful the effect is,  At one of the press conferences you talked about how you found a castle for filming. But your team probably had to complete a lot of interiors. No, just a few. We built a couple of corridors, but most importantly, we managed to find a huge old hospital in the suburbs of Berlin. After the First World War, Hitler was treated in it. The hospital is very old and has a rich history: for some time it housed a Soviet hospital, but now the complex is completely abandoned. We planted new grass on the lawns, repainted the walls, repaired the roof ... It would seem that for scenes with water we had to build huge tanks and other similar objects, but most of them were already available. First, we came to Germany together with my operator behind the scenes to work quietly, without attracting attention. He was determined to find exactly what we need, to grasp the very essence of what we, in fact, have achieved.  Medicine for Health will be released in USA on February 16 . Source: Collider The Topic of Article: Gore Verbinski: ”The cure for health is modern gothic”. |
