By Valarie Thorpe

Christophe Gans, the French director who brought us the stunning Brotherhood of the Wolves, is describing a scene to us from his latest film Silent Hill. Sony very graciously invited Really Scary to the Toronto movie set earlier this year, where we sat in on a day of filming.

Gans continued on, with a very cool French accent we might add, “We have a recreation of the whole world of Silent Hill.” Gans points out from under a black drape that separates us from the primary filming area for the day.

At this point, we’ve just arrived on set and we’re about to watch the nurses scene being shot. And if you’ve played the video game this movie is based on, you know exactly how damn creepy this scene is going to be. We watch Radha Mitchell (Pitch Black), our protagonist Rose, as she tries to slowly maneuver through a hallway full of the faceless nurse entities.

The nurses are all played by professional dancers and the choreography is at the same time beautiful and grotesque. Gans described them as broken dolls and that’s an appropriate analogy - they torque and turn in a way that appears gruesome and yet it’s done with such a graceful fluidity that you can’t stop watching.

The set they’re on for this day’s shooting is one of more than 100. “We have maybe 107 different sets,” Gans said. “You have Silent Hill as in the game, the foggy world, Silent Hill in the darkness, flashbacks so you have Silent Hill as it was and Silent Hill as it is today.”

This meant that for every major set, there had to be four separate versions built - a massive undertaking.

“It’s not only an idea in the game, it’s an idea of the game,” Gans continues. “The game is built on different levels and I think that people enjoy the game because intellectually it’s very refreshing and very challenging to just superimpose action and level and structure and architecture. You have plenty of game playing on that and Silent Hill is one of the most challenging because you can be in a world and suddenly you’re in a different world with the same structure of the one that you have just explored. We tried to play with that a lot.”

Radha talked a bit about the sets as well. “…The sets are definitely characters in the film. And they have emotional states in that they change and you’ll see the same set and you’ll see it from a completely different perspective. So it’s sort of like a hallucination, a lot of it.”

After watching several hours of shooting, we move on to a press conference with the primary cast including Mitchell, Deborah Kara Unger, Sean Bean, Laurie Holden, Jodelle Ferland and producers Andrew Mason and Don Carmody, the legendary producer who brought us David Cronenberg’s Shivers and Rabid.

The first question was sent Radha’s way, when a fellow horror site writer asked what drew her to this project.

“I think the major attraction to me…was it’s directed by Christophe. And I saw that film [Brotherhood of the Wolves] and I was intrigued and fascinated because I thought it was a beautiful and exciting and strange and bizarre movie,” she said. “And so then I met Christophe and I was charmed, obviously, by him. And I guess that’s what it was. And then, since we’ve been making the film, we see the vision and the script comes alive. And it’s a very visual piece so when you read it you won’t necessarily understand what it is. But, since we’ve been working on the film, every day has just been an assault on the senses. And I guess today was just a sample of that.”

Deborah Unger, who portray’s Dahlia, has been a favorite of ours at Really Scary for a long time. She was phenomenal in David Fincher’s The Game and has worked with the aforementioned Cronenberg (in Crash) and David Lynch (Hotel Room - why the hell isn’t that on DVD for chrissakes?!). She mentioned to us she’s a genre site lurker so we of course shamelessly gave her our business card. Hi Deborah [Of course she saw that…don’t ruin our fantasy.]

“Dahlia’s been extraordinary because I think, to Christophe’s credit, and certainly the entire crew and special effects and design, he’s really, really captured the essence of her and then extended her into the psychological nightmare that would capture the imaginations of the gaming fans,” she said. “So it was a much deeper exploration than I anticipated…With Dahlia it’s been an extraordinary psychological journey for me, as an actor, to embrace this walker between worlds. And, as a mad and slightly cryptic prophet, akin to obviously the essence of the game, this has been just a delight to play.”

Then we all got to talking about the game itself and who was a fan of video gaming and all that.

“I’m not a very good player, to be honest,” Radha said. I’ve tried to play the game and especially to get familiar with the characters better. I mean, it’s really an amazing game, having just a limited sort of knowledge of it that I have. And it’s got a real sense of sort of poetry and melancholy and things you don’t expect in a video game. And then I guess that’s what’s attractive to me about it. But, in relation to actually getting through the game... <laughs> I’m always stuck on the fence. I can’t get off the fence. But I mean, I’m sure everybody has a different experience. And Christophe, I think he’s been known to spend like two to three days straight in his room, playing the game without leaving, without going to the bathroom.”

Deborah said that both she and Laurie Holder, her co-star, have played and both get stuck at the same spot. “By the same store, which is really annoying,” she said with a laugh.

“And it’s interesting,” Radha added. “because Laurie is playing Cybil and she looks exactly like Cybil in the game.”

“I do now,” Laurie said, generating a big laugh from the journalists. “I had hair before this movie. They chopped it all off for Cybil.”

Laurie later had one of the best descriptions of the movie we’ve heard yet, she said “I think of this one as a nightmare fairytale. It is elegant and I think of this as kind of a cross between Alice in Wonderland meets Dante’s Inferno. It’s very high art and frightening and violent and sexy and elegant all at the same time. Which I think is, you know, Christophe’s genius.”

Later in the evening, we had the honor of dining with Carmody where we in all likelihood drove the poor guy bonkers with our ongoing fangeeky tirade about all of this amazing work. He was exceedingly gracious and we want to pass along a big thanks to him, Gans, the cast, and Sony’s Amy Conley for providing this access to Really Scary and letting us bring the story to you.