I nabbed this interview from an about.com site, and if you want to read the rest of it (only the first part is here), or figure out the name of the journalist doing the interview (which I couldn't seem to find anywhere), Click here. When you get there, you can either look around for the journalist's name or click on the 'next' linkage below to get to the part with Johnathon Schaech and Alexis Thorpe included. The journalist's speech will be under "J"
As a journalist, interviewing stars of a movie you haven't seen is awkward. Usually you just hang around other reporters and listen to their questions to get the gist of what's going on. Wouldn't you know it, I got the stars of The Forsaken all to myself when I hadn't even seen the preview for the film. I tried the official website but had technical problems. I think they knew I was winging it, but they were cool. Dawson's Creek and Final Destination's Kerr Smith, Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Phina Oruche (Giles' girlfriend), That Thing You Do and Houdini's Jonathan Schaech and Young and the Restless's Alexis Thorpe star in the vampire road chase from director J.S. Cardone. The interview began with Smith and Oruche.
J: Why don't you start by telling me about your characters?
Kerr Smith: I play Sean McGraw. He's basically newly started out in the workforce, looking for some excitement to stir up his life a little bit. So, he ends up taking this Mercedes from Los Angeles to Florida to make some extra money. He picks up a hitchhiker [played by Roswell's Brendan Fehr] in Arizona, in the middle of nowhere and that's where everything begins. That's the big mistake and it turns out the guy he's picking up is hunting a bunch of vampires. In the process, I get bitten and we're all transforming and our bodies are dying and we're trying to kill the vampires basically to cure ourselve
Phina Oruche: My character name is Cym and I'm sort of like your worst nightmare. I looked at the character as [an example of] you don't know who people are just because something comes to you in a beautiful form. I'm the girlfriend of the head guy that they're hunting, Kit, and I feel like my role is to lure the prey into the fold. We go around looking like a group of bad, sexy, crazy, party kind of people but underneath that is really a danger and a darkness and he, [Sean], certainly gets the adventure he's looking for. To me it's like a quintessential tale of good versus evil, but it's a modern day twist. One of the things the director, [J.S. Cardone] told me was, "Think of it like a virus. Think of it like AIDS or any of the things that we're concerned about now that you can't necessarily tell who's got it by whether they're attractive or not." So, my character is trouble. She looks a certain way and when I was trying to create my character and find a place to come from, I thought that one of the most obvious references of Forsaken is people who have stepped away from God. That's the way I looked at it rather than look at it as a vampire necessarily. I just looked at it as how else can people prey on other people and so she's sort of wild, wild fun.
KS: You attract your prey through sex. Remember that one scene we did? I'm trying to drive away and she's like two inches from my face. I'm like [sigh] you're hot.
J: Is this movie different than the standard vampire movie?
KS: Plenty different, that's what I loved about this script. It's not your typical Dracula formula. They don't have fangs.
PO: We have guns, not fangs
KS: Yeah, they kill with weapons. They don't really have superhuman powers, although Jonathan I guess might because he's one of the old originals. But it's treated as a blood disorder and a disease and the transformation is something that can be postponed through the use of medication. It makes it more real in a sense rather than fictitious Dracula coffin stake through the heart kind of thing. It's not really a vampire movie. It's a car chase movie.
PO: It looks like a dark road picture to me. I read it like a road movie. That's how it read to me when I first read it. My idea of what the vampire genre is is not what this picture is about to me. Every time I hear the word vampire I go ugh, because it's not a genre that I particularly know very well.
J: Does it have more in common then with the postmodern horror film?
PO: I think it's closer to that in genre than the old fashioned.
KS: It's just more real, more believable. These vampires simply need to kill, drink blood to live. Period. That's it. If they don't they die. It's really a simple formula.
J: Will the studio try to market it like the usual teen horror movies?
KS: They will. This will be heavily marketed on the WB obviously with three or four of us on different shows, but the script is a step above most of the crap that's out there. There are all these teen movies out there right now and I think they're slowly coming to an end and this is not a teen movie.
PO: This is not a teen movie. This is not a paddy cake formulaic kind of script. It has twists and turns that I haven't seen in a long time in film and I don't think it's part of that pack. Of course the teenagers will go and see it.
KS: It'll be rated R. Johnathon Schaech enters.