Q: Colin, what attracted you to this project?
A: I had done a lot of dramatic films and dramatic roles back to back for three or four years. I literally said to my agent, “I'd love to do something that's really, really different and that has some comedy to it, something that's fun.”
Then this came along. I was dubious about it, because I had seen the original when I was 11 or 12 and I loved it. I particularly loved how Chris Sarandon played Jerry and I had a little boy crush on him, so I didn't want to like the script when I read it. I said, “They're remaking ‘Fright Night.’ That could be a really bad idea,” but then I just really just loved the script and saw how this could be a lot of fun.
It was also very contingent on who was directing it, since that would determine whether the film worked or not. When I heard that Craig Gillespie was involved and we sat down and spoke, I realized it would be a blast to play a character that is unbridled by any human sense of fear, remorse, regret or compassion. The screenwriter, Marti Noxon, designed the character in a very particular way. She wanted Jerry to be the kind of vampire that is more malevolent, violent and cruel than the vampires who have been presented onscreen in recent years.
Q: What attracted you to this project, Craig?
A: Marti Noxon's script. I hadn’t really been dying to do a vampire movie. I felt like there was so much of the vampire stuff out there and I'd been working on a couple of smaller projects I was trying to develop. Then DreamWorks sent me the script for “Fright Night” and it was a great blend of horror and humor. I love mixing genres and I couldn't stop thinking about it and visualizing it, so I went for it.
Q: Did you consciously try to bring a sense of humour into the role, Colin?
A: No, I never felt any pressure to bring humor into the film. I think that was left up to David Tennant and Christoper Mintz-Plasse. Their two characters had a lot of the humorous dialogue and those boys know their way around humor. I was the horror and they were the humour.
Q: Craig, were you conscious of that as a director, that there was a split between humour and horror?
A: No. It had to be a horror movie. I wanted to make sure that the audience was genuinely scared at times and on the edge of their seats. The humor comes second and it’s about figuring out how much you can get away with. Much of the time, it's a great release in the middle of scary moments, but even as we were editing, we might decide that there was one too many jokes in a scene. It's a constant battle.
For Colin’s character, it was more important that he was having fun as a villain. That's what makes great villains for me, is that they have a sense of humor about what they're doing and they seem to enjoying it, as hellacious as it is. That part, he got down in spades. He was having fun with his cruelty.
Q: Was it obvious at the beginning that you would shoot this film in 3-D?
A: In my first meeting at DreamWorks, they told me that they wanted to make the movie in 3-D. I thought, “All right, I've seen these huge tentpole movies like "Avatar" and "Alice in Wonderland" in 3-D. Wouldn’t it be kind of cool to do a horror film where you've got two guys walking down a corridor and you want to look around them and see what's at the end of it?” I really got into the idea and had a great time shooting it that way.
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