(left to right) - Director Marc Schoelermann, writer Mark Neveldine and writer Brian Taylor. Image Copyright(C) Movie Jungle International, INC. This image may not
be used or duplicated elsewhere without express written permission.
*NOTE READER DISCRETION IS ADVISED. THE FOLLOWING CONTENT MAY UPSET SENSITIVE READERS. CONTENT INVOLVES MORGUES AND THE DECEASED AND MAY BE FOUND OFFENSIVE BY SOME*
About Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor (Writers):
Born in Watertown, New York, U.S.A. on May 11th, 1973, Mark Neveldine’s short career thus far consisted of a few minor acting roles and crew work including stunt work on 1998’s “The Siege” starring Bruce Willis and Denzel Washington until writing his real career maker “Crank” alongside Brian Taylor.
The film starred Jason Statham and received good critical acclaim as well as decent praise from viewers.
Even less experienced was Brian Taylor with just some work on “The Mothman Prophecies” as a rotoscope artist and as an extreme visual effects creator on the flop “Biker Boyz.”
In truth, the real maker of their career was their writing/directing shot at “Crank.” Whether they’re here to stay is still to be determined.
About Marc Schoelermann (Director):
Born in Hannover, Germany on October 14th, 1971.
There’s not much to be known about Marc Schoelermann other than directing a few shorts. This is his first full length feature.
Question:
They’re asked about making this film.
Brian Taylor:
“Yeah we wanted to do something…we wanted to really test an audience. Take people to a place they’ve never really been to, a place that’s very dark.”
Question:
About working with Marc Schoelermann on this.
Brian Taylor:
“Marc’s a visual master and we saw a lot of work that he did with these giant budget commercials and it was just incredibly impressive, we hadn’t seen anything like it. And he’s a technician. He came and talked to us and he had such a simple approach to this movie and we loved it. It was I want to walk into a morgue with these people…I don’t want to overstylize this movie. And again, like I said in the panel, we didn’t have a lot of money to make this film and it looks like it shot for $35 million dollars.”
Question:
Can you say what the budget was?
Brian Taylor:
“I don’t really know.”
Mark Neveldine:
He jokingly says “It think it was about 32 dollars!”
Brian Taylor:
“I mean the visual style of ‘Crank’ is a big part of ‘Crank’ and it would have been completely wrong for this movie. So we knew we needed somebody who had a vision that really suited this material and we saw Marc’s stuff and he was the guy, his look is the look of ‘Pathology.’ It’s dark, it’s tense, everything is in shadow, it sucks you in, you want to see more and it reveals only in pieces. It’s not a flashy, in your face movie, it’s a movie that will seduce you in the course of the film into a dark place, visually and psychologically.”
*Marc Schoelermann’s phone rings*
Mark Schoelermann – “Sorry about that!”
Question:
I ask Schoelermann about this being his first full length film and his experience.
Marc Schoelermann:
“You just hope that you can manage to basically tell the story and not get distracted by something like a phone!” he says as now not only his phone but Mark Neveldine’s rings as well.
*laughter*
Mark Neveldine:
“It’s basically like making one hundred and eighty 30 second commercials in thirty days right?”
Marc Schoelermann:
“In a way yeah, the challenge is to maintain being able to tell the story, that’s the biggest difference. You just have to focus to tell the story, to make sure that the character arc…”
Mark Neveldine:
“I’ll tell you it wasn’t that difficult for Marc because he’s kind of a geek, he was so f#cking prepared for this movie. He had a script with so many Post-It notes in it that our script was probably about this long and it was like this high…”*laughter* “I mean it, I’m telling you every specific shot, the feeling about the shot, the colors, the movements, what he wanted to do, and he knew it. So when he got to set we wrapped early every single day but one.”
Brian Taylor:
“I think the reason a lot of people come from the commercial side and do features and are very successful is because commercials aren’t really a lot of flash, they really are a story compressed into the most tight form possible. Like you have to communicate sometimes a pretty complicated story that an agency gives you, and you gotta communicate it so comically and so efficiently. And so, when they come into the feature world, they know story and they know story a lot of times better than some film student who has only worked in narrative and could get lost. It allows them to really focus on what’s important in every scene.”
(left to right) - Director Marc Schoelermann, writer Mark Neveldine and writer Brian Taylor. Image Copyright(C) Movie Jungle International, INC. This image may not
be used or duplicated elsewhere without express written permission.
Question:
Is there any aspect of these characters that you drew from your personal lives?
Mark Neveldine:
“Always, in any script you know for sure. Our need for whether it’s adrenalin or our need to see something different. We talked about when we go to the morgue, we always want to see something different. We’ve seen over a thousand dead bodies and we have this weird, morbid fascination. We get there in the morning, we check in with Craig Harvey down at the L.A. County Morgue, we’re looking for something new you know. We’re always challenging ourselves as writers, directors, camera operators, as people, to just keep reinventing everyday you know.”
Brian Taylor:
“We talked about it in ‘Crank,’ the Statham character and a lot of things that happened to him are really like our lives broken into little pieces and then shoved into one day. And, definitely when you look at Milo’s character and Michael Weston’s character in ‘Pathology,’ we have that, you know.”
Question:
They’re asked about the usage of the morgues.
Brian Taylor:
“Well, you know Mark would live in a morgue if he could…I’m talking about Mark Neveldine. So…you want to tackle this?” he says to Neveldine and laughs.
Mark Neveldine:
He says he had a “crazy fascination” with Pathologists and moves on with “I had seen three people in my life killed; one at a very young age. It’s just always been an interest of mine.”
They both talk a bit more about their love for being in a morgue “it’s a great place to be.” Brian Taylor states “We’re only half-joking or maybe not even half-joking when we say we did this movie to allow us access to those kind of places.”
Marc Schoelermann talks about people caught driving under the influence and taken down to the morgue “we saw a couple of them standing and waiting in line, so it’s not that a restricted place, I mean it’s just a place you don’t want to think about.”
Question:
They’re asked about their most memorable time in a morgue.
Mark Neveldine:
“Probably the toughest was the first time I saw a baby on the table and the baby was cut, just torn apart you. I had seen so many bodies at this point and this was a moment that actually took me aback and I said ‘Ok, this is kind of f#cked up.” That’s where I might kind of lose a little bit of fascination when a person is under sixteen.”
Brian Taylor:
“One thing I found amazing is the speed at which they do their work. A body comes in, it basically looks like a person who is sleeping, that they could just sit right up. Most of the wounds are pretty extreme. The doctors gather round, they go to work, within twenty seconds it’s unrecognizable as a human being; the face is peeled back, the guts are opened up, everything’s out on the table. It’s just like it’s amazing, they work fast! They’re cutting the ribs with the garden shears, pulling it out..and then…they find what they need to find and they throw everything back in, they stitch them up, pull the face down and woah! He’s back.”
Mark Neveldine:
“They put all the organs including the brain into a biohazard red bag and then they put it in the stomach, flatten it out and sew the person back up.”
Brian Taylor:
“It’s like the little bag of giblets that you get with a turkey in a plastic bag, you gotta pull it out. Same thing.”
…urgh…what a way to end an interview.
Everything after this was basically irrelevant except for Brian Taylor talking about the fact that they don’t have a favorite genre of sorts and they ‘love everything.’
