An article by Jamie Stuart
The gala premiere of The Ring,
DreamWorks’ remake of the Japanese horror film, kicked off Lincoln Center’s
Scary Movies series the day before it opened nationwide -- and ultimately earned
$15 million at the box office to claim the number one spot. On hand was its star
Naomi Watts, and her boyfriend Heath Ledger, as well as the film’s producer
Walter F. Parkes.
The Ring continues a trend in modern cinema, following Stanley
Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut and David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (the
picture that catapulted Watts into stardom), in that they’ve successfully
begun chipping away at cinema’s literary narrative conventions. According to
these films, not everything requires clean justification. It’s more about the
feel of the film than the think of it.
Directed by Gore Verbinski, The Ring features lush atmosphere and
uncomfortable themes. With the help of cinematographer Bojan Bazelli they’ve
crafted images that recall Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula
and Tarsem’s The Cell. The story borrows anxieties from horror classics
like Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (included in Scary Movies) and David
Cronenberg’s Videodrome, recycling them into a contemporary setting.
After the feature finished, Gavin Smith, editor of Film Comment Magazine,
moderated an audience Q&A with Naomi Watts and Walter F. Parkes.
Parkes, who resembles the actor Chris Sarandon, mixed with a dash of George
Hamilton sleek, explained how an executive introduced him to the original Ring:
“He said it got him freaked out. That’s always a good sign in this case! So,
we said, ‘We’ll look at it right away -- we’ll see it this weekend.’ He
said, ‘No, you have to see it now!’ So, he brought over a tape of this movie
-- a really badly dubbed tape of it. We put it in the machine I think around
4:00 in the afternoon. Quite honestly, by 7 or 7:30 that evening we had bought
the U.S. rights. It was that stunning for us.”
Once the project was in motion, and Gore Verbinski had jumped aboard to direct
his third straight feature for DreamWorks, the next logical step was to begin
the casting process. After an extended search the filmmakers chose Naomi Watts,
who was still largely unknown.
There has yet to be a movie that fully captures Naomi Watts’ exquisiteness on
film. In person, she’s intense yet vulnerable, determined yet delicate -- a
crystal shard brimming with golden, fizzy champagne. Perhaps this separation
exists because in real life she’s a movie star, but on screen she’s a genuine actress.
After Mulholland Drive Naomi was offered a large selection of projects. The
Ring came to her while she was shooting a feature in the South of Wales. “Mulholland
Drive had not been released yet. It was being viewed by various people in
America, private screenings, and luckily Walter and Gore were 2 of the people
who saw it. So the script was sent to me.”
Naomi was staying with her mother in the country during a weekend hiatus from
shooting, when the script was faxed to her. She amusingly recalled, “She’s
got one of those 15 year old fax machines, and the paper doesn’t cut -- it
just curls. And of course, we ran out of paper halfway through the night. So, I
read 60 pages and got the rest later.”
She continued, “Immediately, I was really, really fascinated by the script.”
As an actress starring in her first big budget studio feature, one would have
expected Naomi to try and glam up as much as possible. On the contrary, as the
camera looms in close-up early on, we can see visible signs of age -- the
antithesis of what most women would want to portray on screen.
For Naomi, however, these imperfections are what attracted her to the character
of Rachel Keller, a single mother battling a supernatural video tape that
murders its viewers. She offered, “Yeah, I was specifically drawn to it for
that reason. I felt that yes, this is a genre film, the plot is the driving
force -- but because it’s so powerful and so simple, there was room for quite
a strong character. She’s a really good female who’s complex, flawed right
from the beginning, but based in reality.”
Her choice isn’t the only aspect of The Ring that runs against the
grain. Many decisions were made with regard to the film’s lack of clarity.
Parkes addressed this by telling the audience of 800: “The line we had to try
and walk was a very fine one. It was to what extent to make the movie
clear...the origin, etc. It’s actually quite a bit more murky, or I should say
ambiguous, in the Japanese piece. We wanted to make it more accessible to an
American audience, but never wanted to lose the essential mystery of the piece.
Cause I think that’s part of what stays with you after seeing the movie. We
tried to be quite true to the spirit of the original.”
Their decisions are wise, though occasionally maddening. They correctly
understood that for horror to truly work, it’s essential for evil to be
ambiguous. It can’t be ambiguous based on a simple lack of understanding -- it
must be deterministically so. It’s by choice. And this lack of clarity
symbolizes a lack of control, and this is the source of all that scares.
Horror films can never be clear-cut morality tales. Such a black and white
scenario negates ambiguity. The film’s protagonists must somehow be implicit.
Rachel’s flaw is that she’s become too career oriented, and her lack of
attention toward her son leads him to become involved in the tape’s murderous ways.
Naomi revealed, “She’s incredibly guilt-ridden, and she’s doing whatever
she can to survive again, but in a different way she’s losing touch with
what’s going on. The thought of losing him and bringing him into this
place is really crushing to her. She’s basically in an incredible moral
dilemma at the end of the movie.”
Not only is Rachel implicit in The Ring’s mechanics, but the film
itself bears its essential motif: a ring. For anybody paying attention to all of
the reoccurring “rings” (coffee stains, wood patterns), they’ll be sure to
notice the appearance of one about every 20 minutes or so in the upper right
hand corner of the screen. Are the filmmakers being clever? Is it the work of
some mysterious force? No, it’s just the reel changes.
One thing is clear: DreamWorks’ gamble to remake a relatively obscure Japanese
film and cast it with an untested star has paid off. Naomi Watts can relax, too.
She’ll no longer be known as the star of an incomprehensible David Lynch film
or as Nicole Kidman’s best friend.
With her newfound stardom, does Naomi have any fears of straying from her level
of craft? It appears unlikely. She refreshingly admitted, “I think when
material comes to you, speaks to you, then that’s why you do it. I always want
to try and challenge myself and create new things. I think I’ve done that.”
(Scary
Movies runs from October 17-31 at the Walter Reade
Theater.)
-Copyright
2002 by
Jamie Stuart