

In the script’s NAR moments, Fishburne’s character was in such extreme situations that he could simply react – something made easier by practical sets and effects. He made copious notes in his script and something I would see quite frequently was ‘NAR.’ One time I went up to him and asked, ‘Fish, what does that mean?’ He said, ‘Paul, that means No Acting Required.” “They really helped me, and Fishburne in particular was a very giving man in terms of giving me pointers and nudging me in the right direction when it came to directing and judging good performances. “I think they all realized that it was only my third film and I didn’t come from a big theater background,” Anderson said. Anderson had the opportunity to collaborate with an ensemble of experienced actors for the first time in his career, and he made the most it. You don’t want to milk it too much.”īeyond the construction of Eisner’s script and Anderson’s sense of style, much credit for “Event Horizon” belongs to its sturdy cast. That was an important lesson for me, that horror is like comedy and there’s a right time to deliver the punch line. “So when Jason Isaacs turned up, nobody jumped. “Originally the bed was covered in maggots, which I thought was going to be great, but it was too much for the audience and they looked away,” Anderson said. One of the movie’s biggest scares happens when Lieutenant Commander D.J (Jason Isaacs) appears behind Lieutenant Peters (Kathleen Quinlan) just after she sees a vision of her dead son, but it didn’t work in the initial cut.
#Event horizon how to
Screenwriter Philip Eisner’s tale of astronauts going mad aboard a haunted spaceship was exactly what Anderson wanted after his second feature, the PG-13 martial arts opus “Mortal Kombat.” That movie was a hit, which gave Anderson more freedom to do what he wanted, and what he wanted was to scare the audience with a gory riff on horror movies like “Alien,” “The Shining,” and “The Haunting.” The challenge was figuring out how to honor their traditions without being enslaved by them, and Anderson solved that problem with his film’s key location.Īnderson’s ability to find futuristic sci-fi corollaries for the components of Notre Dame – turning the gargoyles into antenna clusters, for example – is a big part of why “Event Horizon” remains as eerie as, say, Robert Wise’s “The Haunting.”ĭuring the “Event Horizon” test screenings, Anderson learned another lesson from Wise’s film: Even in a film as bloody as “Event Horizon,” less could be more. To revisit the film is to understand how jarring its gothic visual style and relentless horror must have seemed in a summer that embraced gentler science-fiction hits like “Men in Black” and “Contact.”Ĭhloë Sevigny on 'Kids,' 'The Last Days of Disco,' and Nuking the '90s Status Quoĭogme 95 Was the Last Great Filmmaking MovementĦ0 Must-See New Movies to Watch This Fall Season
#Event horizon upgrade
Paramount has yet another version of “Event Horizon” out this month in a gorgeous 4K upgrade for the film’s 25th anniversary. “They started selling a lot of DVDs, and they would change the box without changing the movie, and they’d sell a lot of that version,” he said.


Once the studio realized what they had, they made the most of it.
