Patrick Lussier
 May 2003

When Patrick Lussier's Dracula 2000 hit the screen, a new twist on the Dracula mythos was born, and with it, a successful franchise.  Having directed Dracula II: Ascension and Dracula III: Legacy both slated for direct-to-video release, and with a few eagerly anticipated and buzz worthy works looming on the horizon, Mr. Lussier was nice enough to spend more than a few moments chatting with us about projects past, present and future!  As a sidebar, this was my first phone interview, and I would like to say a special thanks to Patrick for being a genuinely great guy and helping things to go smoothly!

Underland Online: I would like to talk a little bit about your background…you began with editing films, which had been kind of varied, then you edited Wes Craven’s New Nightmare…

 Patrick Lussier: Then it became less varied (laughs).

 Yeah, it looks like you became almost his official editor so-to-speak!  What was it like working with so much of his work?

 It was great!  I mean, working with the genre, the horror genre, I don’t think was anything that I had planned to get into, but I think that it was something I had always enjoyed.  Umm, and then as fortune would have it, I managed to work with Wes back in…on his TV show, back in 1991, Nightmare Café.  And we, uh, hit it off, and he asked me, you know, when I do my next feature, I’d love you to cut it.  That was almost two years later though, ya know, he went through a lot of development on Village of the Damned, and came close to doing that and then that fell apart, and I believe <it> went to John Carpenter.  Then New Nightmare came along, and he tracked me down, and then we, my wife and I, won the Green Card lottery and got to come down from Vancouver Canada, and I got to cut New Nightmare, which was great, ya know, and a wonderful opportunity.  After that, I kept with Wes for about 9 years.

What was it about his work, do you think, that kept you going with him?

 We just kind of seemed to hit it off, in terms of my being able to look at what he was shooting…and I got what it was he was doing, and understood how it was supposed to go together and how it was supposed to work. And you know, it was just kind of…and it wasn’t anything that either of us ever analyzed, it was just…kind of worked out.

Director Patrick Lussier contemplating Dracula's

(Stephen Billington) predicament, on the set of 

Dracula II: Ascension.

 Right…well, working with so many horror flicks, how do you think that helped you with your eventual career as a director?  Do you think you would have gotten into directing had you…

 I think that working with horror, gave me a real window into directing.  You know, genre pictures are routinely something that can be done for a smaller price and are kind of guaranteed a certain return…

Definitely...

 And given that…they are more likely for somebody to take a chance, you know, and I was very fortunate that Bob Weinstein and Angie and Dimension Films…having cut a few films for them (both Scream and Scream 2 and Mimic) at that time…and they had said, you know, would you like to direct a direct-to-video film?  I kind of leapt at the chance, and that was Prophecy III, and I had cut Halloween H20 while we were in development…preproduction on that, and directed Prophecy III and then while I was cutting that, was cutting Music of the Heart and Scream 3 at the same time so (laughs)

A busy guy! (laughs)

 Yeah, it was an exciting time…

 So, what do you think it was about sitting in that editor’s chair that you later could use in your director’s role?

 Well, you just kind of…it gave you a shorthand for what you needed to put things together; for what the components were, for uh, the building blocks that allowed you to know when you had something.  And when your working with smaller budgets it allowed you to look at the amount of time you have and the amount of money you have, and get the best out of it; cause you know what you are going to use and what your not going to use.  You know “I’m not going to need this because I’m never going to use it, I am going to need these three things because they’re important.”  In terms of shooting and performances, things like that, you know that, uh, if this part of it tanks, then it’s going to be critical, because the rest of it we’re not…we’re going to play on a different shot.

 Now, with editing a film…I noticed that you did edit, or at least co-edit Dracula 2000…

 Yeah!

 …I didn’t however see your name attached to Dracula II, or even the upcoming Dracula III…

 Yeah, I mean I…we cut at my house and, yeah, I did some editing on them, but I left most of it to Lisa…Lisa Romaniw, who…

 Has that been hard for you?  The um...Sort of taking a back seat…

 No, not really…because there are certain scenes where I’d just kind of nudge her when I’d come in (laughs) or where I’d been at it in the middle of the night tinkering away, and when she and Greg, the assistant, would arrive in the morning, they’d be kind of like, “Oh! I guess you’ve been tinkering away!” (laughs) But they were great with that and the decision was not to take any credit on that.

Now, you’ve mentioned Prophecy 3, which was your directorial debut.  When you had to make that switch from editing to directing, was that like a gain of control for you? Or a loss of control because someone else now would be…

 Umm, I was very fortunate that Peter, Peter Devaney Flanagan, who cut that, who also was my co-editor on Dracula 2000…  He and I had worked together for a long time and it was great and I had a lot of confidence with him in the cutting room and knew that he would do a great job.  And, yeah, part of you is always thinking, wow, you know I just…all the control you have in editing.  And when you’re directing it is such a bigger thing, there are so many other voices, there are so many other concerns, there are so many other things that come up on any given day, and there is a lot more to it, but I think it is a lot more exciting!  Yeah, I think you had less control, but at the same time you have a much bigger canvas on which to play with.

Make-Up Effects Designer Gary Tunnicliffe (left) 

and Patrick Lussier (right), pose with John Light.  

Check out the blue-screen makeup that will allow 

a gruesome injury to be digitally added later.

 As far as expectations, like you’ve mentioned, I am sure that you bumped in to a lot of that just by taking the name Dracula for this recent series of films.

 Oh Yeah!

 Especially putting that modern twist…a modern setting, and definitely a modern vibe to it.  What were some of the hardships of facing such a daunting task of recreating a classic horror figure?

 Well, for which one do you mean, because all…

 Well, like for Dracula 2000, the first…

 For Dracula 2000, well one of the big things was how do we bring him into the new age?  It was interesting in terms of Dracula 2000 and Dracula II: Ascension, in how…like there hasn’t been like 85 other Dracula movies! (laughs)  Then we have the audacity of calling it Drac II…

(Laughs)

In the original pitch for Dracula 2000 had the story at the beginning, where we thought you know, Van Helsing essentially becomes a junkie, hooked on Dracula’s blood.  He kept him down in the basement, and it allowed him to kind of let his guard down. Thieves come and steal the body, which was all part of the original pitch that we did for Dimension, and the place where it deviated was immediately after that…that the thieves knew exactly what they were stealing…they were stealing for immortality.  They didn’t care who Dracula was, they didn’t care what he was, they didn’t care what his past was, they only cared what it could bring them…which is the story that we told in Drac II…

 Yeah…

 Then Dimension came back and said, we want you to tell that original story.  Which uhh, that was part of our modern twist on it, was to do kind of a Silence of the Lambs kind of version of it.  At the time, there was a lot of discussion that they wanted something bigger and grander and much more in keeping with the original Dracula story, the Bram Stoker story.  That was kind of an updating of that.  So we went back into that and it was a great opportunity to do that. It is a very different story than the one we had planned, but it was still a lot

 of fun to do…

 Well, in Dracula 2000 I did notice a lot of references to the original Dracula material…the captain tied to the wheel of a plane, versus the Demeter…

 Yeah…you don’t actually see it on the plane, but the call numbers on the plane are DMTER

 …the great line “I never drink…coffee”, the giant Bela Lugosi mask in the Mardis Gras scene; lots of things that kind of gave reference to the source material.  However, in Dracula II: Ascension, when viewing it, seemed like a much more straight forward “vampire movie”

 Well, in Drac II, one of the things that we…  One of the big debates when we did Dracula 2000 was that originally when we started off there was never going to be any mention of the word Dracula.  No one was ever going to say his name, nobody would ever say what he was, and it was never going to be acknowledged.  And then as we became more of a traditional Dracula story, we realized we couldn’t do that…we had to give the devil its due and placate that.  In the sequel, these characters don’t know that he is Dracula, and what’s more, they don’t care.

 Yeah…

 This is an anomaly that they find in a morgue, a burned husk, and they swapped this burned husk for another one so that Simon and Mary officially take…  The body they have locked up at the end of Dracula 2000 is the wrong body, because these people have taken it.  The only person that knows who he is, you know, played by Jason Scott Lee, is the vampire hunter.  There is a pact between him and the people he works for that he <Dracula> is never given a name…that they don’t call him by name because he doesn’t deserve it.  To give him a name, is to give credence to him.

CONTINUED...