Kristen Stewart Recalls 'Insane' Nudity In 'On The Road'
'Twilight' actress tells MTV News she thinks people are being 'a little uptight' about the film's sex scenes.
For "Twilight" fans who thought the sex scene in "Breaking Dawn - Part 1" were revealing, Kristen Stewart hasn't showed you anything yet. When Stewart hits the big screen again in the film adaptation of Jack Kerouac's American classic "On the Road," she'll be revealing a lot more than skimpy lingerie. The film contains quite a few sex scenes, including a threesome between Stewart and co-stars Garrett Hedlund and Sam Riley. Talk about risqué!
"I wasn't scared, honestly," Stewart said in reference to the love scenes. "It's kind of insane to watch now. I'm like, 'Who is that?' But I think — as every actress says when they do this is — it just felt so right. It was so within a different world and so within a different environment that I don't even really feel — I mean, I am personally connected to it, of course — but it is something outside of myself."The film follows young drifters Dean Moriarty and his best friend Sal Paradise as the epitome of the Beat Generation. After Sal's father dies, the duo embarks on a trip across America with Dean's wife Marylou, a 16-year-old with an affinity for marijuana and sex.
The actress revealed that although her character is sexually promiscuous, the role didn't bother her. "I have kind of no qualms about it either," she said. "I think people are a little uptight."
The starlet believes she felt comfortable in part due to director Walter Salles. "I felt so safe with Walter," she revealed. "Nothing was ever, ever about taking your clothes off."
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Stewart's film will debut at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival along with her boyfriend Robert Pattinson's "Cosmopolis." When asked if there was a little healthy competition between her and her "Twilight" co-star, the actress said it's definitely there even though she hasn't been able to see his film yet.
"It's such weird timing. I think if it was us or them. I think we'd take the cake," the actress joked. "I haven't seen 'Cosmopolis' yet. I'm dying to see it. The first time I get to see it is actually in Cannes."
So, whose film will be better?
"Mine," Stewart said before breaking into a laugh.
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Korean Movies Get Racier to Fend off Hollywood
With red-letter days for both mothers and children, May is often considered the "Month of the Family" in Korea, but theaters across the country are filled with films that are anything but family-oriented. In fact, a whole crop of sexually explicit flicks await moviegoers this month.
"The Scent," which was released last month, features explicit scenes of actress Park Si-yeon in the nude that continue to draw viewers. "A Muse," which opened two weeks later, stirred controversy by showing sex scenes between a teenage girl and a man in his 70s. "The Taste of Money," which has been invited to the 65th Cannes Film Festival, will hit local theaters this week after already grabbing headlines for its steamy sex scenes between veteran actress Yoon Yeo-jeong (65) and Kim Kang-woo (34). The trend is likely to continue in June with the release of "Royal Concubine" starring actress Jo Yeo-jeong.
From left, "Royal Concubine," "The Scent," "A Muse," and "The Taste of Money" While these movies may contain powerful messages, such as remorse over growing old ("A Muse") or criticism of the importance people place on money ("The Taste of Money"), they are hardly congruent with a month traditionally associated with family values.
Nonetheless, this marketing strategy of relying on racy content worked well in 2010. In May and June of that year, "The Housemaid" and "The Servant" drew 2.3 million and 3 million moviegoers, respectively. As they generated a further W2 billion (US$1=W1,147) in DVD and other sales, movie industry bigwigs soon caught on to the fact that such films are well received even at this time of year.
Ramping up the level of sexually-explicit content in domestic films is also increasingly being viewed as a way to fend off Hollywood. Hollywood summer blockbusters swamp the market at this time of year, and 2012 is no exception, with the "The Avengers" drawing 5 million viewers since its release on April 26, and "Men in Black 3" expected to become another hit when it opens here on May 23.
"Korean moviemakers tend to shun releasing films in May," said Lee Chang-hyun at CJ E-and-M. "But R-rated films can compete with Hollywood blockbusters by targeting the niche market for adult viewers."
"The Scent," which was released last month, features explicit scenes of actress Park Si-yeon in the nude that continue to draw viewers. "A Muse," which opened two weeks later, stirred controversy by showing sex scenes between a teenage girl and a man in his 70s. "The Taste of Money," which has been invited to the 65th Cannes Film Festival, will hit local theaters this week after already grabbing headlines for its steamy sex scenes between veteran actress Yoon Yeo-jeong (65) and Kim Kang-woo (34). The trend is likely to continue in June with the release of "Royal Concubine" starring actress Jo Yeo-jeong.
From left, "Royal Concubine," "The Scent," "A Muse," and "The Taste of Money" Nonetheless, this marketing strategy of relying on racy content worked well in 2010. In May and June of that year, "The Housemaid" and "The Servant" drew 2.3 million and 3 million moviegoers, respectively. As they generated a further W2 billion (US$1=W1,147) in DVD and other sales, movie industry bigwigs soon caught on to the fact that such films are well received even at this time of year.
Ramping up the level of sexually-explicit content in domestic films is also increasingly being viewed as a way to fend off Hollywood. Hollywood summer blockbusters swamp the market at this time of year, and 2012 is no exception, with the "The Avengers" drawing 5 million viewers since its release on April 26, and "Men in Black 3" expected to become another hit when it opens here on May 23.
"Korean moviemakers tend to shun releasing films in May," said Lee Chang-hyun at CJ E-and-M. "But R-rated films can compete with Hollywood blockbusters by targeting the niche market for adult viewers."
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Will This Be The Next Big Movie With Unsimulated Sex?
A kind reader tipped us off to a listing on Backpage.com that asks for publicly recognized actors, one male and one female, to audition for a film that includes unsimulated sex. You know what that means? We could have another “Shortbus,” “Ken Park, “9 Songs,” or “Shame” on our hands!
Name Brand Actress/Actor Needed
Posted: Wednesday, April 25, 2012 5:08 PMReply: click hereIndependent (non-SAG)Las Vegas-based film production company seeking brave actress and actor with public name recognition for a project scheduled to begin shooting in 3-5 months. The roles will require the performance of graphic, unsimulated sex, but this is not porn, so no pros, please. Above-title credit guaranteed. Replies will be confidential. Actress will be paid $20,000, actor will be paid $10,000. All travel, lodging and incidental costs will be paid. Please respond with resume and head shot.• Location: Los Angeles, Las Vegas• Post ID: 22311776 losangeles
We’ve talked about unsimulated sex in mainstream films before (in fact, we talked about a bunch of different examples when Lars Von Trier announced “Nymphomaniac”), but hey, we never mind talking about it more! Reminisce with us. We’ve seen French films and German films with unsimulated sex, we’ve seen Donald Sutherland (possibly) have sex with Julie Christie on film, and whenever we feel like firing up the ol’ Netflix machine, we can go see “Caligula” (although some people say this shouldn’t count since Guccione allegedly shoehorned extra porn into that film at the last minute).
Anyway, we’re curious to see if anything big and fancy becomes of this Backpage post. Which big actors will get freaky for the cameras?
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I read Fifty Shades of Grey
INDIA LOPEZ
CHANGING TIMES: Fifty Shades of Grey made erotic fiction acceptable dinner-table conversation.
OPINION: Remember when I declared that I'd never watched porn? Well, a slight amendment to that - while I've still never seen a dirty movie, I'm no longer a stranger to the ways of erotica.
That's right - like millions of other women (and a fair few men), I indulged in E L James' Fifty Shades of Grey, the BDSM-themed "mummy porn" that's been dominating (excuse the pun) headlines of late. I first became aware of it last month, when a promo copy showed up on my desk. I sized up the grainy picture and cheesy blurb with a smirk, knowing it was headed straight for the wastepaper bin.
But then, in the most literal way possible, I learned the perils of judging a book by its cover. Because nestled within the crisp, virginal pages was a press release veritably dripping with accolades from every respected newspaper in Christendom.
Turns out this unassuming "romance novel" (as James calls it) was causing quite the stir. My mission was clear. As a social commentator, it was my duty to read on.
The first thing you should know is it's terribly written. I mean really, really badly. If you thought Twilight was unreadable, this will do your head in. It's clunky, adjective-ridden and repetitive (the words "he cried out as he found his release" must appear at least a dozen times).
James' turns of phrase are to writing what porno performances are to acting (I assume). They're truly awful, but you take comfort in your suspicion that she's not even trying. After all, the writing's not the point.
What you're really wondering is this: Is it sexy?
Well, it's explicit. I've read the odd Nora Roberts book in my time, and this is a whole different ballpark. As far as actual descriptions of sex go, you couldn't get much more detailed - no Mills and Boon-style euphemisms here.
That said, for all the bondage hype it's actually pretty vanilla. To give you some context (semi-spoiler alert), the story centres around Anastasia Steele, a 21-year-old virgin who falls for uber-rich entrepreneur Christian Grey. After making her sign a non-disclosure agreement, Grey confesses his secret - he's into the kink.
He invites Anastasia to become his "sub", which means obeying him in every aspect of her life: what she eats, what she wears, how often she exercises and how she acts (she has to call him "Sir" and avoid direct eye contact).
At this point, there's a bit of a plot twist when Grey discovers that Anastasia is a virgin. Horrified, he decides to break the habit of a lifetime and make love to her gently, so she can know what it's like before he unleashes the whips and so forth.
So while there's a lot of talk about sex toys and extreme BDSM, it never really eventuates. There's a little bit of bondage and spanking, but nothing gasp-worthy, and most of the sex is what you'd find in any run-of-the-mill matrimonial bed (again, I'm assuming).
If I had a genuine fetish for this kind of thing, I'd be pretty disappointed. Not just because the book is tame, but because, for all its lengthy descriptions of cable ties and riding crops, it ultimately paints Grey's desire to dominate as a character flaw. He had a messed-up childhood that, Anastasia surmises, must have "made him this way". The more he falls for her, the less he wants to dominate her.
Now, I don't know a lot about the BDSM scene, but I think in these enlightened times it's generally accepted that fetishes are A-OK.
As long as it's consensual and legal, you can do whatever floats your boat in the privacy of your own home. It doesn't make you a screw-up, and it doesn't mean you don't love your girlfriend if you want to tie her up now and then.
So while this particular fetish might be a novelty for readers of mainstream fiction, Fifty Shades of Grey isn't forging a bold new path of acceptance.
If anything, it reinforces the stereotype that kinksters are unhappy people who can be cured of their perversions by true love.
My other complaint is that Anastasia is just about the most unempowered heroine of all time. She has no desire to be Grey's sub, but she agrees to it because she's too afraid to lose him. It's a few shades away (so to speak) from a rape fantasy, but it definitely stretches the definition of "consensual".
Ulitmately, the only groundbreaking thing about Fifty Shades of Grey is the way it's made erotic fiction acceptable dinner-table conversation for the intellectual elite.
It doesn't shatter misconceptions about BDSM, and it doesn't reclaim powerful female sexuality.
Nor does it break the porn mould by depicting realistic sex - Anastasia climaxes three times during her very first sexual experience. (That's not normal...right?)
But let's be honest - if you pick up Fifty Shades of Grey, it's not intellectual stimulation you're after. Buy it, read it, tell your husband you're interested in the "social implications". If you keep your expectations realistic, it's bound to, ahem, do the trick.
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I do not believe in parallel cinema: Paoli Dam
Paoli Dam courted controversy with her Bollywood debut. She got noticed for nudity and sex scenes and there were even protests over her bare-back poster.
However, Paoli maintains that she will continue to do intimate scenes as she has no hang-ups with them. "I have no inhibitions as an actor," says Paoli who is now starring in Vikram Bhatt's next venture - Love Games which is a story about wife swapping. The story itself points to high sexual content. So, has Bhatt cast her again in his film because she has no problems with intimate scenes? The filmmaker says, "She is a very good actor who has no qualms about her sexuality."
Paoli, on her part, adds, "There is a thin line between vulgarity and sensuality which I am careful about. We needed bold scenes to portray the character of the wife in the film." Earlier, Paoli had also termed her role of a journalist turned sex worker in her first film as "bold". What defines bold for her? "Boldness is a genre of films that is high on erotic content. It doesn't, in anyway imply, vivid sex scenes to back weak scripts," Paoli justifies.
Before venturing into mainstream B-town, Paoli has worked in Bengali parallel cinema. Chatrak, a film on the socio-political life of a city, as she defines it, was a directorial endeavour by Sri Lanka-based filmmaker Vimukthi Jayasundara. It was termed as the boldest film ever made and sources reveal how viewers walked out of the theatres because of the explicit scenes between Paoli and Anubrata Basu. "I do not believe in parallel cinema. Every film is made for money and it is not different from the mainstream," she explains. So why did she star in Chatrak - which falls in the category of parallel cinema? "Because it was an international film. Plus, I got to walk the red carpet at Cannes 2011 and that is a dream come true for any actor."
Rumours are that once she became the blue-eyed girl in the Bhatt camp, she backed out of Choli ke Peeche, a film by an Italian director, in which she was supposed to go topless. "It did not work out as the schedule was postponed and the lead actor, Irrfan Khan, also backed out." she says. Does this mean that the sexy Bong siren will only star in big banner films? "The character, script, banner and co-actors definitely matter to me," she says.
However, Paoli maintains that she will continue to do intimate scenes as she has no hang-ups with them. "I have no inhibitions as an actor," says Paoli who is now starring in Vikram Bhatt's next venture - Love Games which is a story about wife swapping. The story itself points to high sexual content. So, has Bhatt cast her again in his film because she has no problems with intimate scenes? The filmmaker says, "She is a very good actor who has no qualms about her sexuality."
Paoli, on her part, adds, "There is a thin line between vulgarity and sensuality which I am careful about. We needed bold scenes to portray the character of the wife in the film." Earlier, Paoli had also termed her role of a journalist turned sex worker in her first film as "bold". What defines bold for her? "Boldness is a genre of films that is high on erotic content. It doesn't, in anyway imply, vivid sex scenes to back weak scripts," Paoli justifies.
Before venturing into mainstream B-town, Paoli has worked in Bengali parallel cinema. Chatrak, a film on the socio-political life of a city, as she defines it, was a directorial endeavour by Sri Lanka-based filmmaker Vimukthi Jayasundara. It was termed as the boldest film ever made and sources reveal how viewers walked out of the theatres because of the explicit scenes between Paoli and Anubrata Basu. "I do not believe in parallel cinema. Every film is made for money and it is not different from the mainstream," she explains. So why did she star in Chatrak - which falls in the category of parallel cinema? "Because it was an international film. Plus, I got to walk the red carpet at Cannes 2011 and that is a dream come true for any actor."
Rumours are that once she became the blue-eyed girl in the Bhatt camp, she backed out of Choli ke Peeche, a film by an Italian director, in which she was supposed to go topless. "It did not work out as the schedule was postponed and the lead actor, Irrfan Khan, also backed out." she says. Does this mean that the sexy Bong siren will only star in big banner films? "The character, script, banner and co-actors definitely matter to me," she says.
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Netflix To Stream New Horror Series 'Hemlock Grove'
Looking more and more like a cable network, Netflix today announced plans to offer streaming customers Hemlock Grove, a brand new horror series from the actor and director Eli Roth, who among other things directed the creepy films Hostel and Hostel: Part II. (You might also remember him from a memorable role he had in the film Inglorious Basterds.)
Netflix said that the series is “a gripping tale of murder, mystery and monsters set in a ravaged Pennsylvania steel town.” The series stars Famke Janssen and Bill Skarsgard, and will be available starting in early 2013.
Here’s the company’s brief description of the series:
“Hemlock Grove” starts with the body of a young girl, mangled and murdered in the shadow of the former Godfrey steel mill. Some suspect an escapee from the White Tower, a biotech facility owned by the former steel magnates. Others believe the killer could be Peter, a 17-year-old Gypsy kid from the wrong side of the tracks, who tells his classmates he’s a werewolf. Or it could be Roman (Skarsgard), the arrogant Godfrey scion, whose sister Shelley is disturbingly deformed and whose mother, Olivia (Janssen), the otherworldly beautiful and controlling grand dame of Hemlock Grove.Taking matters a notch or two too far, Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos says in a statement that the series is “a sly blend of J.D. Salinger and Mary Shelley.”
As the crime goes unsolved and outlandish rumors mount, Peter and Roman decide to find the killer themselves, confronting unspeakable truths about themselves and Hemlock Grove as the mystery unfolds.”
The first season of the series will be 13 episodes in January 2013.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemlock_Grove_%28TV_series%29
"This is a 13-hour independent movie": Eli Roth and Brian McGreevy Talk 'Hemlock Grove' on KCRW
May 1, 2012 4:44 PM | by Alison Willmore
"Hostel" director Eli Roth took to KCRW for a really interesting episode of "The Business" in which he and writer Brian McGreevy talked about their upcoming Netflix horror series "Hemlock Grove." The 13-episode gothic mystery is one of Netflix's recent high-profile ventures into original programming. In addition to working on the show, McGreevy wrote the novel on which the show is based, which came out on March 27th. Roth is executive producing and will helm the pilot and, schedule permitting, the last two episodes, which will be the first things he's directed that he didn't also write. You can listen to the complete radio show online, and below are a few of the most intriguing highlights from the interview.
It's Not TV. It's Netflix.
Roth and McGreevy were adamant about this being a new form -- since "Hemlock Grove" will go up on the site all at once, they haven't approached it in the same way that they would a show that would be released in weekly installments. "We saw Netflix as a new medium," Roth explained. "If people want to watch the whole thing straight through they can. And to us that was so exciting because modern people watch things on their iPad, they're watching things at home. They're not sitting waiting for 9 o'clock Thursday night, they're DVRing everything and watching when they have time."
"The idea here is that this is a 13-hour independent movie," said McGreevy. "The tradition in the network model is the procedural, something where you can shuffle the deck, pull out any individual episode and watch it out of sequence, because their profits are coming primarily from syndication. With Netflix, they see that in this century that's not actually how people prefer to consume content. They 'binge watch.' That completely changes how you're approaching the architecture of the season, because you're designing the entire run to work as a coherent unit."
McGreevy started writing the book before the current YA paranormal craze took off, and noted that "if you look sheerly at a plot and character level, there are some weird parallels between the way Stephenie Meyer approaches this kind of storytelling and the way I do -- with the major exception that I'm way more interested in seeing teenagers actually have sex." As Roth continued, "He's writing it for adults. All the 'Twilight' fans, they're going to graduate. They're going to be in college and they're going to want something that's tailored to college."
Netflix Is Playing Moneyball
Pitching Netflix is apparently very different from the typical network. McGreevy compared it to sabermetrics: "They hit a button and they can vector this and this and make decisions. I'm not saying that this is a miracle or that they can predict the future, but it's less about the whims of someone at the moment and whether or not the executive is having acid reflux when you're pitching."
"We get to have as much violence as is necessary, language, nudity"
"They have exact data on everything," added Roth. "They know exactly how many people have rented my films, how many people watch horror movies, how many people watch murder television show mysteries... I had a very high rating for Netflix, so they were really happy to have me on board. It really feels like Twitter, except with movies. It's incredible." For Netflix, it was also a process of selling a season of a show rather than a pilot. "It's all or nothing," Roth said, which was a plus, because McGreevy already has three novels mapped out and "so we knew where the major macro arc of the story was going."There Will Be Sex and Violence
"We never realistically considered pitching it to networks," McGreevy noted. "Thematically speaking, we wanted to keep some of the more intense material -- the book itself has its moments, and when you have Eli Roth, who's a major creative collaborator in this project, you're not going for the PG-13 take." He went on explain that they're working with the French studio Gaumont and wanted to maintain "a very European sensibility in the storytelling," to have a "much more adult approach to the violence and sexuality."
Later, Roth added, "We get to have as much violence as is necessary, language, nudity -- whatever best serves the story, we can do it. It finally feels like, for me, the medium is at a place where it's so exciting that I can come in and really do my thing."
"Hemlock Grove" starts shooting June 6th, and is tentatively slated to go live on Netflix on January 2013.
Event Coverage: Eli Roth and Brian McGreevy Talk Hemlock Grove
With The Walking Dead raising record numbers for its second season finale, and American Horror Story fans eager for its re-conceptualized return, there’s a glut of horror-oriented TV in the pipeline, including Hannibal, Mockingbird Lane (The Munsters revamp), 666 Park Avenue, and an Untitled Kevin Williamson pilot. Come January, when one or two of these titles will likely be on the chopping block, Hemlock Grove will premiere with not just a single hour, but an entire thirteen-episode season, available for marathon viewing. But unlike the above-mentioned shows, you won’t be able to DVR it.
Hemlock Grove, executive produced by Eli Roth and Brian McGreevy (author of the novel it’s based on, along with a handsomely drawn prequel comic), will be available exclusively on Netflix Instant. The Pennsylvania-set series will explore biotechnology run amok, gypsies and billionaires, teenage sex, adult sex, a murder mystery, psychic manipulation closer to Jesse Custer’s Word of God more than Jedi mind tricks, a girl claiming impregnation by an angel, a boy who feels a testicular tingle when things are about to get hairy, arranged meet-ups with prostitutes in malls, an “Elephant Girl” who writes hyper-articulate emails but never speaks, a special agent from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service hunting some seriously big game, and the practice of ingesting a worm from a corpse to channel the spirit of the deceased. Oh, and a werewolf and a maybe-vampire (as with The Hunger and Near Dark, “vampire” is never uttered).
The book is a quick, cutting read recommended for fans of transgressive fiction as much as horror. There’s nothing twee, ‘tween or teen about it. But that hasn’t stopped knee-jerk Twilight comparisons at the very mention of mythical monsters who happen to be in high school.
Eli Roth and Brian McGreevy sat for a spirited panel discussion and Q-and-A at New York’s 92YTribeca last week, confident that those dismissing the show based on its familiar subject matter will come to embrace it.
“Even when we [Roth and Eric Newman, also executive producing the series] did The Last Exorcism, people went, ‘How could you make another exorcism movie?’ And then six months later there’s another found footage exorcism movie. And people still go see it. If you do something well and you have an original take on something, then absolutely go for it,” Roth said. “You know the audience has seen Twilight, has seen True Blood, has seen everything, so you have to do something that’s different, but also embraces those fans who’ve seen it. We wanted to do a show [that asks] what if you really had these powers, but were in high school? Like, what would you do – not have sex? So I said, I want to see the show where [a vampiric character] hypnotizes girls – the cheerleader in class gets her period, and he follows her into the bathroom and goes down on her.”
“This was Eli’s first note on the show. I was text messaging friends about that, and they were like, ‘Wait, are you guys actually related but just now met?’” McGreevy said.
Being a Netflix original – produced by Gaumont International Television, also behind the Hannibal series – the show has no ratings board or advertisers to appease, permitting Roth (who’s directing the first episode, along with the final two of the season), McGreevy and company to write and shoot without fear of censorship.
“That’s what I liked about it, “ Roth said. “That we could do something that was adult subject matter, and if we want to go dark and violent, we can. If we want to have the language, we can. We have the freedom to do something like it’s on cable... to go as R-rated or as NC-17 as we want. Where the teenagers could really behave like modern adolescents.”
This prompted McGreevy to ask the audience, “We all actually want to see teenagers having sex, am I right? I believe that I am. I’m banking on it.”
“He doesn’t mean in real life. He means when you watch a movie,” Roth clarified, laughing. “The point is, ‘let’s not be afraid to go dark.’
It’s actually a drama set in this world and has the themes of vampires and werewolves and monster mythology, Frankenstein mythology. It’s this new biotech world. But what I loved about is it’s set [on the outskirts of] Pittsburgh, this classic American town – you think of Deer Hunter-Pennsylvania. But going there now, where we’re going to shoot, there are these old steel mills that are like rotting corpses. It’s like these graveyards of a past America. Grass is growing over them, but they still have the American flag hanging onto them. But there’s also the biotech world that’s taken over, that’s the future, and there’s all sorts of strange experiments going on. That’s what really interested me – how [Brian] took it from this town he grew up in and setting the story in this world. And we wanted to make a show that was really going to be more like Twin Peaks. That for us is the benchmark of great television that we love. And I think the medium is now at a place where we can certainly appeal to my taste, and the type of stuff that I like to do. When we first sat down we talked about Twin Peaks, which was so smart and so different and daring... and was scary and beautifully done.’’
As of this writing, the quickly growing cast includes Famke Janssen as the ice queen widow of a steel magnate, Dougray Scott as a psychiatrist with his own issues, Landon Liboiron (Terra Nova, Altitude) as openly lycanthropic “Gypsy trailer trash,” and Bill Skarsgard (son of Stellan, brother of Alexander) as a blue blood who may like the red stuff.Of the ensemble, McGreevy said, “I think that we’ve hired the best people, and sometimes those people have a name, and sometimes they don’t. But it’s quality first.”
Yet to be cast are the crucial characters of Shelley, a seven-and-a-half-foot tall Frankenstein-ian creation, and Nicolae, the grandfather who passed the werewolf gene down to Liboiron’s character, Peter. The latter role will be significantly expanded from the novel, which, at 318 pages, is not exactly Game of Thrones-dense. To accommodate the thirteen-episode order, characters who were supporting and periphery in the book will have ample screentime, fleshing out the story’s many subplots.
McGreevy has a second Hemlock Grove novel nearing completion, with a third fully outlined, so expect at least two more seasons should the series find a following.
The show’s writing staff has been holding weekly screenings at the home of director-producer Deran Sarafian (Lost, Fringe, horror geek trivia: star of Zombi 3), who in addition to executive producing along with Roth, McGreevy, and Lee Shipman, will helm a few episodes. The movies they’ve watched so far for inspiration include Rosemary’s Baby, The Shining, Silence of the Lambs and The Vanishing (1988), echoing Roth’s mantra of “let’s not be afraid to go dark.” This week: a field trip to The Cabin in the Woods.
Roth was quick to point out that while he’s heavily involved in the show’s development, he’s not doing extensive script work, leaving that to McGreevy and Shipman, who together have Harker and Zorro Reborn in development as features.
“Right now they’re writing all the episodes with the writing staff,” Roth said. “So after they’re done, I’ll sit down with them and go through it and do my pass – my dialogue ideas or other scene ideas. And it’s more of a collaboration. I wouldn’t even call it rewriting. It’s just me sitting and contributing my ideas.”
And yet what will surely be a signature show moment, nowhere to found in the novel, was all Roth.
“When you all are sitting there and reading the A.V. Club recap, and they’re like, ‘Uh, holy shit – Roman just performed cunnilingus on a girl having her period,’ I’d love to take credit for that,” McGreevy said.
Roth laughed. “The truth of the matter is we’re all victims of our own reputation. Anything that’s thoughtful and poetic and well-researched will go to Brian, and of course it’ll be, ‘Oh, more typical Eli Roth moments with that person getting tortured!’”
McGreevy leapt to Roth’s defense at this. “You watch an Eli Roth movie, you might’ve heard about Eli Roth’s reputation. When you actually watch the movie, [the shots] are classically composed, the editing is very stately... they’re not about doing shock value bullshit for the sake of shock value bullshit.
For Roth, the hiatus from directing movies is a rewarding one, as he believes he’s helping pioneer an exciting new medium.“Netflix comes along, and here’s this great medium where on one day the entire show is on – boom, like that, there’s all 13 episodes. So you can watch it like a 13-hour movie if you want, and we’re going to approach it like that. When I watch shows, I ingest like 4-5 episodes at a time. That’s what our viewing habits are like now,” Roth said.
“If we’re talking just money on its own terms, Netflix could buy and sell any movie studio in the world, so it’s more than just money,” McGreevy added. “It’s about culture of Hollywood filmmaking. Eli’s never made a movie for a movie studio, and I feel that’s not by accident.”
Despite the creative freedom, Roth made it clear that while the show will be shocking at times, he’s putting story before gory.
“We want to make a show that’s accessible, and I think there’s a place for movies like Human Centipede and Serbian Film, but we’re not doing that. What’s great about the medium is we have the freedom to do whatever we want, and it’s really up to our own creative boundaries and tastes. And this is why it’s really good to have other tastes in there like Deran Sarafian and Mark Verheiden [Hemlock Grove’s showrunner, previously on Battlestar Galactica and Heroes] and Sheila Callaghan [the wrtiting staff’s first hire, playwright of That Pretty Pretty; or, The Rape Play]. It’s really whatever best serves the story, and that’s how it should be. [Netflix and Gaumont] are letting us do what we want, but it’s up to us to censor ourselves. We don’t want to make a show where you watch one epsiode and go, ‘Oh God, why did I see that?’ I want people to watch the show and go, ‘Holy fuck, I can’t believe what they did on Hemlock Grove. Did you see that transformation scene? That was awesome, I want to watch more.’ I think there’s a fine line between kicking an audience’s ass and making them feel like they’ve been kicked in the balls.”
McGreevy agreed. “Yeah. We’re aiming for the ass, not the balls.”
After the Q-and-A, I had the opportunity to asking McGreevy a few questions:
Shock: The novel features an incredibly vivid werewolf transformation. The visuals themselves - including the creature eating the "man coat" it just shed - are horrific, but they're presented as part of this biological process, natural instead of supernatural. Like something you'd see on BBC's Planet Earth series. On camera, it has potential to rival the big benchmark - the one found in An American Werewolf in London. It'll be quite ambitious to pull off practically, but CGI could rob it of the tactility that made is so powerful on the page. What's the plan for capturing that?
McGreevy: We are trying use as little CGI as possible.
Shock: Has an effects company been lined up for the show? Tom Savini has that make-up effects school in Pennsylvania, so I’m sure there’ll be no shortage of applicants for that department...
McGreevy: We actually took a tour of the Savini school for the hell out of it. The person we are now talking to is Los Angeles-based. Can't say his name yet, but it's very exciting.
Shock: Has adapting to suit the 13 episode format been a challenge? What can fans of the novel can expect to see expanded?
McGreevy: The show will be more of an ensemble than the book. There's a lot going on between major scenes to be explored, and a roomful of talented sickos generating ideas...
Hemlock Grove Author Brian McGreevey on Adapting His Werewolf Novel For Netflix
Brian McGreevy's debut novel, Hemlock Grove, is a werewolf-and-vampire-replete murder mystery. But if your thoughts just veered into Twilight territory, please shut them up: This is not prepubescent catnip with an overarching abstinence message. There's plenty of sex, and even more gore. McGreevy is already developing his book, published by FSG and on shelves next week, into an original series for Netflix, with horror maestro Eli Roth directing, and Famke Janssen and Bill Skarsgard (yes, Alex's baby brother is also breaking into the business via vampire show) as two of the central characters. We spoke to the author-turned-producer about writing Hemlock, adapting it to the screen, and working with Roth.GQ: What inspired you to sit down and write this book?
McGreevy: A deeply, deeply abnormal brain. I reached a point in my relationship with my own work—I was in graduate school for an M.F.A. at the time—when I realized I wasn't very good at realism. And so I wanted to do something that had a level of imagination I found more compelling, but still anchor it in a world that was as familiar to me as possible. And so I thought, all right, I'm just gonna take a shitload of monsters and stick 'em in my high school.
GQ: So the Hemlock Grove school is literally based on your high school?
McGreevy: Inspired by, I'd say. Actually, the town ends up being a sort of Through the Looking Glass version of Pittsburgh, where I'm from. The economic history of the town reflects the economic history of Pittsburgh, which did transition from heavy misery into healthcare and biotechnology, and does have a fairly significant class divide, which is really exhibited with the two protagonists, Peter and Roman. In Pittsburgh traditionally, the poorer you were, the closer you lived to the river and the further you were in upper management, the higher you were on the hill. And there was actually an equalizer after that because the highest thing on the hill was the cemetery.
GQ: The characters Shelley and Roman, for instance, just on a name level, even, are a homage to two of the great monster novels of yore. Were those books important to you?
McGreevy: Actually the movies were, more so. I'm probably not nearly as well read in the genre as I should be, with the exception that my favorite book in childhood is a collection of Greek mythology that probably had about as much impact on my creative development as anything else. There's one chapter in the book called "Katabasis," which is a reference to a motif in Greek mythology of when a hero goes on a ritualized descent into the underworld.
GQ: Obviously werewolf books and paranormal books have become very mass-market, but this is FSG and it clearly doesn't read like Twilight. Were you consciously steering away from making it that kind of book?
McGreevy: I wasn't really consciously doing anything. When I started writing this, it was early 2006, before this huge paranormal craze we're in now. I learned about Twilight over the course of writing this book. I saw the parallels and was thinking, Oh, that's interesting, I guess I'm more interested in watching teenagers actually have sex than Stephenie Meyer.
From my perspective, you're asking about what most people would call genre elements, but they're not considered genre elements, for instance, if they show up in, like, Elizabethan drama. To me, it's just using another color in our narrative palette. Within publishing—actually really any time you get in one of these industries, whether it's film or books or any kind of system that's immersed in capitalizing on others—the "type" of art gets proscribed very, very quickly because the advertising industry has essentially taken over our brains and there's this idea of If It's This, It Can't Be This. And so for me, psychologically and thematically, I wanted to write something with the complexity of, I guess in the end, a Farrar Strauss novel, but I also wanted some werewolves in there tearing shit up because it's awesome. I didn't see these things as exclusive ends.
I recently read a collection of directors' interviews because I find movie directors to be fascinating subjects. Among widely, widely different directors working at very different times, they were asked the question, "Who do you make your movies for?" The answer across the board for every one of these guys was, "You can only make movies for yourself." If you're fundamentally doing it for yourself, the more authentically you do that, the more you're gonna reach your audience. My feeling is "Fuck audiences, I care about these characters." And that's fine. Trying to please your audience is like trying to please your children. In the end, you're ruining them.
GQ: Your book is a kind of a return to a highbrow monster novel, which hasn't really been around so much lately.
McGreevy: Oh, sure. To my mind, many of the better writers working today can't touch Shirley Jackson, and that's not just that she's writing cool stuff. I mean, just the quality of her prose. I'm also a fan of Marquez, and when people talk about his magical realism, I think, What does that even mean? If it's magical, it's not realism! He's just justifying writing a fantasy novel. Western culture, man—now's the time I start ranting about how we're severed from the feminine principle.
GQ: Bring it on.
McGreevy: We're so masculinized in our life that living in this world alongside our child selves is something that you're only permitted to do with actual children. There are so many times where you hear about someone who takes their kids to a Pixar movie or something and are like, "Oh, I actually liked it, I really liked it." Emphasis there on "actually." Why is that a surprise? Scientific materialism has created so much of how we think and how we let ourselves think that, as a culture in general, we're actually pretty desperate to feel something more interesting than that. My mother and stepfather are both Presbyterian ministers and I do not think that it's an accident that the decline of the grip of religion on mass consciousness has coincided with the advent of motion picture technology.
To me, the narrative is something that people require not just to make sense of their outer experience but also their inner experience. And there's something inherently chauvinistic about it. I tend to—I'm curious about people, and when I meet people I will generally ask them why they ended up in their particular line of work. What's striking is when the answer to that question is a movie that inspired them at a very young age to go in that direction and it changed the course of their entire life. I mean, it does have the power to change lives and it also has the power to make life infinitely more colorful.
GQ: Before you started Hemlock Grove, you were primarily writing screenplays?
McGreevy: Well, I was paying my rent writing screenplays while I worked on Hemlock. I identified pretty early on in my psychological development that I don't have a particular aptitude for getting up in the morning and I don't really have any marketable skills. So literally the only possible day job for me was working as a Hollywood screenwriter. For me, being a novelist was always the primary interest.
GQ: That's a lot of writing per day, between screenplays and working on your book. Are you a person who can sit down and write all day?
McGreevy: No, I'm not and I don't believe those people exist. You can sit down and do computer programming all day but it's sort of, like, the thing with real writing if you compare it to physical exercise is that you can maintain a trot for a while but you can't maintain a sprint or you'll fucking die. People will say, "Oh, I had an eight-hour writing day." It's like, no, you had a three-hour writing day and five hours of dicking around.
GQ: There were scenes in the book, particularly I'm thinking of the cafeteria scene with Peter and Letha, that had super-sharp and funny dialogue. It almost already felt like a TV or movie scene. Do you think that was an influence of working on screenplays at the same time or is that just your writing style?
McGreevy: It's not by accident that I'm also a screenwriter. At a certain point, it becomes chicken and egg for me to try to disassociate them. When see screenwriting as the best iteration of dramatic writing. And when I say best, what I mean is I would submit that if any great dramatic writer in history was alive today that he or she would be working in film. The best dramatic minds of the last hundred years all have been because it's insanely attractive. You get to work with 44 faces having emotions and music playing—it's a great art form. It's possibly unsurpassable in terms of its ability to generate pure feeling, which is what dramatic writers are trying to do. And so for me as a novelist, prose operates in a fundamentally different way from dramatic writing, but that's not to say they're inherently opposed. I tend to think in images more and I also tend to think in terms of objectives. You have your setting, you have your two characters in that scene, and they have their agenda. That's the guide and then they get to run and play.
GQ: Hemlock Grove is now slated to be an original series on Netflix, and you're the executive producer. Tell me about how all this came to be.
McGreevy: I don't think you can work in iterations of the same project at the same time and not destroy your brain. And so the book was a book until it was done. I didn't start pursuing the book-to-film situation until after. And there's this larger diaspora of literary novelists to TV, which I consider very logical and it's really interesting to see the results of that.
I came in with two non-negotiable conditions about turning this book into a show. The first was, this is not just an R, this is a hard R. Don't try to make this PG-13 to make it remotely marketable to what you're going to perceive as its target demographic—teenagers. That's not going to happen. You can pry my rape scene from my cold dead hands. I have no interest in seeing it neutered. Non-negotiable condition number two was that I'm also executive producer. When producers hear that, it's like sticking needles in their ears because the last thing they want is a writer to also be EP. One of my producing partners on the project had not only read the book in its entirety, he read it twice. I tell him my terms are and he thinks about it and is like, "Alright, well, that makes my job much harder, but cool." And then we ended up getting such an innovative deal for this project with Netflix. If I had left this to the hands of professionals who just wanted to make the most money off it upfront—like, for example, when we decided to do the TV route, we learned that NBC was in the market for a horror show. I had the beauty of veto power.
GQ: Yeah, I can't imagine seeing a girl kissing a half-bodied corpse on NBC. What are Netflix's standards like in terms of showing gruesome and/or sex scenes?
McGreevy: Let's just say that there's no FCC on the Internet. And for those who are unfamiliar with Netflix's first original series House of Cards they picked it up with a 26-episode commitment, which is basically like Martin Luther nailing a "fuck you" on the Catholic Church's door. There are people in this industry who don't understand the significance of that. They're just sort of scratching their heads. For me, when I saw that, I'm like, "Oh, well that's the future." At the time, I was shopping around another TV show. I saw that and was like, "Well, now things are different." You can either adapt or you can die slowly. There are a lot of people dying slowly, which we'll see play out. There are so many people in this industry who are like, "No, I have to finish my dinner on the Titanic."
GQ: Where are you guys in the process now? How much of it is written and have you started filming?
McGreevy: Right now, we're doing a huge amount of writing. There's a ton of writing to do when you're adapting a novel into 13 hours. There's going to be some interesting casting news too, which we'll release shortly.
GQ: And how's working with Eli Roth?
McGreevy: The Eli relationship was very serendipitous, actually, because the guy has had a pretty interesting biography all around but what a lot of people don't know is that he was a protege of David Lynch's and was actually working for Lynch transferring the second season of Twin Peaks onto DVD. He also does an astoundingly spot-on David Lynch impression. People have been trying to get Eli to do TV for years because at this point, he's one of the only working names in the genre whose name has any cache. Because he had pioneered the movement that is so infamous, the perception is, "Oh, he's that guy who does that." But going back to this idea that, okay, just 'cause you're one thing, it doesn't mean you can't be another thing. He didn't really have an interest in being pigeonholed as "that guy" his entire career, and so there's a reason he didn't sell Hostel the TV show, which he quite easily could have, and it's because creatively it seems limiting. And so when this book was brought to him, he was like, 'Oh, holy shit. This is my Twin Peaks.'
Updated May 16 2012
Expectations that Pittsburgh would soon be home to a locally-produced, one-hour drama series evaporated this week when financing issues led the Netflix streaming series "Hemlock Grove" to pull up stakes and move to another location.
The production was expected to employ 150 film industry workers, some of whom had already started pre-production work.
Produced by Gaumont International Television and based on a novel of the same name by Western Pennsylvania native Brian McGreevy, "Hemlock Grove" filming was slated to commence next month at a studio location in Monroeville. A local production office has been open in Pittsburgh for several weeks.
Mr. McGreevy and the TV show's director/executive producer, Eli Roth ("Hostel"), were slated to appear at a public reading from Mr. McGreevy's novel at an East Carson Street bar May 17.
That event was canceled without explanation Thursday, though it was still listed on the villasouthside.com website this morning.
"It's heartbreaking to me personally," Mr. McGreevy said from Chicago where he was in transit from Pittsburgh back to Los Angeles. "I got to Pittsburgh a week ago and we were full steam ahead and then we hit an obstruction that was insurmountable and then I was told to pack up."
Mr. McGreevy said the production is "exploring other avenues" for filming locations and a new location has not been firmed up. In a letter to the Pittsburgh Film Office board of directors, PFO director Dawn Keezer said "Hemlock Grove" will set up shop in Toronto.
"It just comes down to economics," Mr. McGreevy said. "There were complications that, frankly, I don't completely understand."
Australian actress Penelope Mitchell has been cast in a regular role in Netflix’s new original series Hemlock Grove, from Eli Roth and Gaumont International TV, joining previously cast Famke Janssen, Bill Skarsgard and Landon Liboiron. Written by Brian McGreevey and Lee Shipman based on McGreevy’s upcoming goth horror novel, Hemlock Grove revolves around the murder of a young girl found close to the former Godfrey steel mill. The suspects in her killing include Peter (Liboiron), a 17-year-old Gypsy kid from the wrong side of the tracks, and Roman (Skarsgard), the arrogant Godfrey scion, whose sister Shelley is disturbingly deformed and whose mother, Olivia (Janssen), the beautiful and controlling grand dame of Hemlock Grove. In the end, Peter and Roman decide to find the killer themselves. Mitchell, repped by APA and Australia’s JM Agency, will play Roman’s cousin, Letha Godfrey.
Australian actress Freya Tingley (Beneath The Waves) has been cast as a regular in Netflix’s Famke Janssen-starring original series Hemlock Grove, from Eli Roth and Gaumont International TV. Written by Brian McGreevey and Lee Shipman based on McGreevy’s upcoming goth horror novel, Hemlock Grove revolves around the murder of a young girl found close to the former Godfrey steel mill. The suspects in her killing include Peter (Landon Liboiron), a 17-year-old Gypsy kid from the wrong side of the tracks, and Roman (Bill Skarsgard), the arrogant Godfrey scion, whose sister Shelley is disturbingly deformed and whose mother, Olivia (Janssen), is the beautiful and controlling grand dame of Hemlock Grove. Tingley, repped by Gersh and Ken Jacobson, will play Christina Wendall, a precocious and friendly, self-dubbed novelist who interviews Peter after catching him swimming in her grandfather’s pond.
Tingley, who narrowly missed out on the lead role in block- buster The Hunger Games, will fly to Toronto next month to begin filming Hemlock Grove, a series based on Brian McGreevy's gothic horror novel, which has all the hallmarks of a cult classic.
The Mt Claremont teenager will play 14-year-old Christina Wendall as her co-stars - a werewolf and a vampire - attempt to solve the murder of a young girl.
Now based in Los Angeles where she lives with her mother, Coppelia, Tingley has also starred in short films and played Hat Lamb in the TV adaptation of Cloudstreet. The former Methodist Ladies' College student has the grit and determination to make it in Hollywood.
"I always wanted to do something creative and I was dead-set on becoming an actress," Tingley said. "I'm very determined.
(read: desperate to succeed so expect nudity from Freya in near future)
"I've read the first episode and I've read the book and I just loved it. There's a large fan base out there for vampires and werewolves but the show isn't aimed at teenagers. It's more like True Blood.
"It's great being able to work with people so respected in the industry. I'm really excited."
Netflix, which will screen Hemlock Grove next year, anticipates immediate success and bypassed making a pilot to test support.
There are also two more books in the pipeline so Tingley won't be short of work if a second series is commissioned.
Tingley's mother said her daughter had worked hard and sacrificed many "regular teenage things" for a shot at the red carpet.
"It's a bit surreal," she said. "You always wonder what your children are going to be when they grow up and then you wake up one day and realise she is going to be a Hollywood actor."
McGreevy: A deeply, deeply abnormal brain. I reached a point in my relationship with my own work—I was in graduate school for an M.F.A. at the time—when I realized I wasn't very good at realism. And so I wanted to do something that had a level of imagination I found more compelling, but still anchor it in a world that was as familiar to me as possible. And so I thought, all right, I'm just gonna take a shitload of monsters and stick 'em in my high school.
GQ: So the Hemlock Grove school is literally based on your high school?
McGreevy: Inspired by, I'd say. Actually, the town ends up being a sort of Through the Looking Glass version of Pittsburgh, where I'm from. The economic history of the town reflects the economic history of Pittsburgh, which did transition from heavy misery into healthcare and biotechnology, and does have a fairly significant class divide, which is really exhibited with the two protagonists, Peter and Roman. In Pittsburgh traditionally, the poorer you were, the closer you lived to the river and the further you were in upper management, the higher you were on the hill. And there was actually an equalizer after that because the highest thing on the hill was the cemetery.
GQ: The characters Shelley and Roman, for instance, just on a name level, even, are a homage to two of the great monster novels of yore. Were those books important to you?
McGreevy: Actually the movies were, more so. I'm probably not nearly as well read in the genre as I should be, with the exception that my favorite book in childhood is a collection of Greek mythology that probably had about as much impact on my creative development as anything else. There's one chapter in the book called "Katabasis," which is a reference to a motif in Greek mythology of when a hero goes on a ritualized descent into the underworld.
GQ: Obviously werewolf books and paranormal books have become very mass-market, but this is FSG and it clearly doesn't read like Twilight. Were you consciously steering away from making it that kind of book?
McGreevy: I wasn't really consciously doing anything. When I started writing this, it was early 2006, before this huge paranormal craze we're in now. I learned about Twilight over the course of writing this book. I saw the parallels and was thinking, Oh, that's interesting, I guess I'm more interested in watching teenagers actually have sex than Stephenie Meyer.
From my perspective, you're asking about what most people would call genre elements, but they're not considered genre elements, for instance, if they show up in, like, Elizabethan drama. To me, it's just using another color in our narrative palette. Within publishing—actually really any time you get in one of these industries, whether it's film or books or any kind of system that's immersed in capitalizing on others—the "type" of art gets proscribed very, very quickly because the advertising industry has essentially taken over our brains and there's this idea of If It's This, It Can't Be This. And so for me, psychologically and thematically, I wanted to write something with the complexity of, I guess in the end, a Farrar Strauss novel, but I also wanted some werewolves in there tearing shit up because it's awesome. I didn't see these things as exclusive ends.
I recently read a collection of directors' interviews because I find movie directors to be fascinating subjects. Among widely, widely different directors working at very different times, they were asked the question, "Who do you make your movies for?" The answer across the board for every one of these guys was, "You can only make movies for yourself." If you're fundamentally doing it for yourself, the more authentically you do that, the more you're gonna reach your audience. My feeling is "Fuck audiences, I care about these characters." And that's fine. Trying to please your audience is like trying to please your children. In the end, you're ruining them.
GQ: Your book is a kind of a return to a highbrow monster novel, which hasn't really been around so much lately.
McGreevy: Oh, sure. To my mind, many of the better writers working today can't touch Shirley Jackson, and that's not just that she's writing cool stuff. I mean, just the quality of her prose. I'm also a fan of Marquez, and when people talk about his magical realism, I think, What does that even mean? If it's magical, it's not realism! He's just justifying writing a fantasy novel. Western culture, man—now's the time I start ranting about how we're severed from the feminine principle.
GQ: Bring it on.
McGreevy: We're so masculinized in our life that living in this world alongside our child selves is something that you're only permitted to do with actual children. There are so many times where you hear about someone who takes their kids to a Pixar movie or something and are like, "Oh, I actually liked it, I really liked it." Emphasis there on "actually." Why is that a surprise? Scientific materialism has created so much of how we think and how we let ourselves think that, as a culture in general, we're actually pretty desperate to feel something more interesting than that. My mother and stepfather are both Presbyterian ministers and I do not think that it's an accident that the decline of the grip of religion on mass consciousness has coincided with the advent of motion picture technology.
To me, the narrative is something that people require not just to make sense of their outer experience but also their inner experience. And there's something inherently chauvinistic about it. I tend to—I'm curious about people, and when I meet people I will generally ask them why they ended up in their particular line of work. What's striking is when the answer to that question is a movie that inspired them at a very young age to go in that direction and it changed the course of their entire life. I mean, it does have the power to change lives and it also has the power to make life infinitely more colorful.
GQ: Before you started Hemlock Grove, you were primarily writing screenplays?
McGreevy: Well, I was paying my rent writing screenplays while I worked on Hemlock. I identified pretty early on in my psychological development that I don't have a particular aptitude for getting up in the morning and I don't really have any marketable skills. So literally the only possible day job for me was working as a Hollywood screenwriter. For me, being a novelist was always the primary interest.
GQ: That's a lot of writing per day, between screenplays and working on your book. Are you a person who can sit down and write all day?
McGreevy: No, I'm not and I don't believe those people exist. You can sit down and do computer programming all day but it's sort of, like, the thing with real writing if you compare it to physical exercise is that you can maintain a trot for a while but you can't maintain a sprint or you'll fucking die. People will say, "Oh, I had an eight-hour writing day." It's like, no, you had a three-hour writing day and five hours of dicking around.
GQ: There were scenes in the book, particularly I'm thinking of the cafeteria scene with Peter and Letha, that had super-sharp and funny dialogue. It almost already felt like a TV or movie scene. Do you think that was an influence of working on screenplays at the same time or is that just your writing style?
McGreevy: It's not by accident that I'm also a screenwriter. At a certain point, it becomes chicken and egg for me to try to disassociate them. When see screenwriting as the best iteration of dramatic writing. And when I say best, what I mean is I would submit that if any great dramatic writer in history was alive today that he or she would be working in film. The best dramatic minds of the last hundred years all have been because it's insanely attractive. You get to work with 44 faces having emotions and music playing—it's a great art form. It's possibly unsurpassable in terms of its ability to generate pure feeling, which is what dramatic writers are trying to do. And so for me as a novelist, prose operates in a fundamentally different way from dramatic writing, but that's not to say they're inherently opposed. I tend to think in images more and I also tend to think in terms of objectives. You have your setting, you have your two characters in that scene, and they have their agenda. That's the guide and then they get to run and play.
GQ: Hemlock Grove is now slated to be an original series on Netflix, and you're the executive producer. Tell me about how all this came to be.
McGreevy: I don't think you can work in iterations of the same project at the same time and not destroy your brain. And so the book was a book until it was done. I didn't start pursuing the book-to-film situation until after. And there's this larger diaspora of literary novelists to TV, which I consider very logical and it's really interesting to see the results of that.
I came in with two non-negotiable conditions about turning this book into a show. The first was, this is not just an R, this is a hard R. Don't try to make this PG-13 to make it remotely marketable to what you're going to perceive as its target demographic—teenagers. That's not going to happen. You can pry my rape scene from my cold dead hands. I have no interest in seeing it neutered. Non-negotiable condition number two was that I'm also executive producer. When producers hear that, it's like sticking needles in their ears because the last thing they want is a writer to also be EP. One of my producing partners on the project had not only read the book in its entirety, he read it twice. I tell him my terms are and he thinks about it and is like, "Alright, well, that makes my job much harder, but cool." And then we ended up getting such an innovative deal for this project with Netflix. If I had left this to the hands of professionals who just wanted to make the most money off it upfront—like, for example, when we decided to do the TV route, we learned that NBC was in the market for a horror show. I had the beauty of veto power.
GQ: Yeah, I can't imagine seeing a girl kissing a half-bodied corpse on NBC. What are Netflix's standards like in terms of showing gruesome and/or sex scenes?
McGreevy: Let's just say that there's no FCC on the Internet. And for those who are unfamiliar with Netflix's first original series House of Cards they picked it up with a 26-episode commitment, which is basically like Martin Luther nailing a "fuck you" on the Catholic Church's door. There are people in this industry who don't understand the significance of that. They're just sort of scratching their heads. For me, when I saw that, I'm like, "Oh, well that's the future." At the time, I was shopping around another TV show. I saw that and was like, "Well, now things are different." You can either adapt or you can die slowly. There are a lot of people dying slowly, which we'll see play out. There are so many people in this industry who are like, "No, I have to finish my dinner on the Titanic."
GQ: Where are you guys in the process now? How much of it is written and have you started filming?
McGreevy: Right now, we're doing a huge amount of writing. There's a ton of writing to do when you're adapting a novel into 13 hours. There's going to be some interesting casting news too, which we'll release shortly.
GQ: And how's working with Eli Roth?
McGreevy: The Eli relationship was very serendipitous, actually, because the guy has had a pretty interesting biography all around but what a lot of people don't know is that he was a protege of David Lynch's and was actually working for Lynch transferring the second season of Twin Peaks onto DVD. He also does an astoundingly spot-on David Lynch impression. People have been trying to get Eli to do TV for years because at this point, he's one of the only working names in the genre whose name has any cache. Because he had pioneered the movement that is so infamous, the perception is, "Oh, he's that guy who does that." But going back to this idea that, okay, just 'cause you're one thing, it doesn't mean you can't be another thing. He didn't really have an interest in being pigeonholed as "that guy" his entire career, and so there's a reason he didn't sell Hostel the TV show, which he quite easily could have, and it's because creatively it seems limiting. And so when this book was brought to him, he was like, 'Oh, holy shit. This is my Twin Peaks.'
Updated May 16 2012
Pittsburgh-set TV series 'Hemlock Grove' pulls out a month before filming
The production was expected to employ 150 film industry workers, some of whom had already started pre-production work.
Produced by Gaumont International Television and based on a novel of the same name by Western Pennsylvania native Brian McGreevy, "Hemlock Grove" filming was slated to commence next month at a studio location in Monroeville. A local production office has been open in Pittsburgh for several weeks.
Mr. McGreevy and the TV show's director/executive producer, Eli Roth ("Hostel"), were slated to appear at a public reading from Mr. McGreevy's novel at an East Carson Street bar May 17.
That event was canceled without explanation Thursday, though it was still listed on the villasouthside.com website this morning.
"It's heartbreaking to me personally," Mr. McGreevy said from Chicago where he was in transit from Pittsburgh back to Los Angeles. "I got to Pittsburgh a week ago and we were full steam ahead and then we hit an obstruction that was insurmountable and then I was told to pack up."
Mr. McGreevy said the production is "exploring other avenues" for filming locations and a new location has not been firmed up. In a letter to the Pittsburgh Film Office board of directors, PFO director Dawn Keezer said "Hemlock Grove" will set up shop in Toronto.
"It just comes down to economics," Mr. McGreevy said. "There were complications that, frankly, I don't completely understand."
Australian actress Penelope Mitchell has been cast in a regular role in Netflix’s new original series Hemlock Grove, from Eli Roth and Gaumont International TV, joining previously cast Famke Janssen, Bill Skarsgard and Landon Liboiron. Written by Brian McGreevey and Lee Shipman based on McGreevy’s upcoming goth horror novel, Hemlock Grove revolves around the murder of a young girl found close to the former Godfrey steel mill. The suspects in her killing include Peter (Liboiron), a 17-year-old Gypsy kid from the wrong side of the tracks, and Roman (Skarsgard), the arrogant Godfrey scion, whose sister Shelley is disturbingly deformed and whose mother, Olivia (Janssen), the beautiful and controlling grand dame of Hemlock Grove. In the end, Peter and Roman decide to find the killer themselves. Mitchell, repped by APA and Australia’s JM Agency, will play Roman’s cousin, Letha Godfrey.
Australian actress Freya Tingley (Beneath The Waves) has been cast as a regular in Netflix’s Famke Janssen-starring original series Hemlock Grove, from Eli Roth and Gaumont International TV. Written by Brian McGreevey and Lee Shipman based on McGreevy’s upcoming goth horror novel, Hemlock Grove revolves around the murder of a young girl found close to the former Godfrey steel mill. The suspects in her killing include Peter (Landon Liboiron), a 17-year-old Gypsy kid from the wrong side of the tracks, and Roman (Bill Skarsgard), the arrogant Godfrey scion, whose sister Shelley is disturbingly deformed and whose mother, Olivia (Janssen), is the beautiful and controlling grand dame of Hemlock Grove. Tingley, repped by Gersh and Ken Jacobson, will play Christina Wendall, a precocious and friendly, self-dubbed novelist who interviews Peter after catching him swimming in her grandfather’s pond.Perth teen's horror run to fame
May 16, 2012, 6:26 am
After landing a lead role in a new US horror TV series alongside X-Men star Famke Janssen and Hollywood heart-throb Dougray Scott, 18-year-old Perth actor Freya Tingley looks set to become our latest hit export.Tingley, who narrowly missed out on the lead role in block- buster The Hunger Games, will fly to Toronto next month to begin filming Hemlock Grove, a series based on Brian McGreevy's gothic horror novel, which has all the hallmarks of a cult classic.
The Mt Claremont teenager will play 14-year-old Christina Wendall as her co-stars - a werewolf and a vampire - attempt to solve the murder of a young girl.
Now based in Los Angeles where she lives with her mother, Coppelia, Tingley has also starred in short films and played Hat Lamb in the TV adaptation of Cloudstreet. The former Methodist Ladies' College student has the grit and determination to make it in Hollywood."I always wanted to do something creative and I was dead-set on becoming an actress," Tingley said. "I'm very determined.
(read: desperate to succeed so expect nudity from Freya in near future)
"I've read the first episode and I've read the book and I just loved it. There's a large fan base out there for vampires and werewolves but the show isn't aimed at teenagers. It's more like True Blood.
"It's great being able to work with people so respected in the industry. I'm really excited."
Netflix, which will screen Hemlock Grove next year, anticipates immediate success and bypassed making a pilot to test support.
There are also two more books in the pipeline so Tingley won't be short of work if a second series is commissioned.
Tingley's mother said her daughter had worked hard and sacrificed many "regular teenage things" for a shot at the red carpet.
"It's a bit surreal," she said. "You always wonder what your children are going to be when they grow up and then you wake up one day and realise she is going to be a Hollywood actor."
the Nudity Speculator : Eli Roth. One name to rule them all with casual explicit nudity. Bit disapointed with non-American female leads. The good news is you can expect nudity from the Aussie starlets. Usually the main reason they are hired in first place (unless you are Cate Blanchett, niece of FOX owner or sucking an American cock). Perhaps Freya is too young to show anything. Still she is from liberal land of Oz and for them nakedness is state of mind. I'm pretty sure and willing to bet Penelope Mitchell will go one better than her cousin Radha by going the whole nine yards. Her character calls for it. Meanwhile I sense Famke Janssen will go the route of Olga in Magic City. She will be nude but at the same time not the fappable kind. There will be galore of nudity from guest-stars and local (Canadian?) actors.
Bryan Brown plea for Aussies artists and skilled techs to stay home and develop the movie industry has fallen on deaf ears. Nearly all are now based in US. The British film industry is dead and buried. It appears Australia will fold quickly as well. The famous quote "There are more stars in Hollywood than in the heavens" could finally ring true. Pity the local actresses are being squeezed out in favor of the cheap labor willing to work hard, strip on screen and take crap from the greedy big wigs.
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