He’s back!


Jason Voorhees, iconic movie villian, returns to the screen after a nine-year absence in the 10th installment of the classic Friday the 13th film series (the first film was released in 1980). First-time director Jim Isaac, who has an extensive background working in special effects, had been looking for an original angle to update the character of Jason, while still retaining the visceral thrills that fans of the series have come to expect. Isaac approached series creator Sean Cunningham, with whom he had collaborated previously. As it turns out, Cunningham was also imagining fresh and exciting ways to reinvent the character.



The two filmmakers, along with producer Noel Cunningham and screenwriter Todd Farmer, arranged for a spirited brainstorming session where a variety of ideas were tossed around. As Noel Cunningham remembers, “we spent hours talking about what we liked about the Friday the 13th movies and what we thought would make it better and different, and ‘Jason in Space’ was one of the ideas that came up. We all looked at each other and said, ‘Hey now, this one could be pretty interesting.’”



According to Jim Isaac, “we all left the meeting with this crazy sci-fi idea about a bunch of kids in the future on an archeological field trip to a dead planet – Old Earth – which has been devastated by global warming. The students dig up a bunch of trinkets and end up discovering a frozen Jason and taking him back to their spacecraft, where all hell breaks loose.”

“We all had the same vision for the movie,” producer Noel Cunningham said, “which made it easy to go forward with because we all liked the concept – a good scary, fun, funny, sexy, action-horror movie in space. Sean and I had known Jim Isaac for about twelve years, and with his effects background, he was the perfect person to direct Jason X. It’s a very effects-heavy film, so Jim’s expertise was really important. He really has a feel for the material.”



When he read the resulting script, says executive producer Sean S. Cunningham, “I got very excited. I wanted to take Jason X to a completely new level, like nothing anyone has ever seen before, with lots of unexpected twists and turns. But more importantly, I wanted to give the characters and story a real innovative jolt of creativity and depth. So when I saw what Jim Isaac, Todd Farmer and Noel Cunningham had done with the new material, I knew that we really had something special.”



Key to the success of the film was the participation of Kane Hodder, the actor who had, over the three previous installments, managed to bring life to the infamous character of Jason Voorhees, a relentless figure of evil who wears a hockey mask and carries a razor-sharp machete.

“I love my work,” Kane Hodder said, lowering his voice to a menacing tone. “I've been a stunt man for twenty-three years and a stunt coordinator. I think that's probably the best background to have when you play a character like Jason. It's all physical and there’s no dialogue to remember!”



“I can tell you that of all the scripts that I have read for the Friday the 13th movies, Jason X is definitely my personal favorite,” adds Hodder. “I had a little hesitation when I heard about the new story line, but once I read the script, I was thrilled. And having filmmakers that really enjoy working with the Jason character – like Sean Cunningham, of course, who created it, and Noel Cunningham, and especially Jim Isaac, who is also a big fan – definitely helps me, because Jim lets me have my input. Not because I’d hack off his arm or something if he didn’t, but because I don't think anybody really knows the Jason character like I do.”



Hodder takes his portrayal of Jason very seriously, going so far as to have the word KILL tattooed in blue-black ink on the inside of his lower lip! “I like playing the character, what can I say?!” Hodder says good-naturedly. “I get all my aggressions out here on the set so I can go home and be nice and calm. It's a good release of tension, especially when you are growling and throwing people around. I really enjoy it because you know the characters need to be interesting for people to like the movie. But at the same time everybody goes to see what Jason is going to do to people, so I'm all for having pressure on me for that. I enjoy it.”

“Kane Hodder – who is Jason – certainly has his own ideas as to who Jason is and what the character would do,” says director Jim Isaac. “But, on the other hand, I want to make a story that's totally new and exciting and unpredictable, and so part of that is making Jason a little bit more exciting, in startling new ways. Jason still does what Jason does best, the kind of stuff the true fans will love, but he’s not just walking around in the dark being scary with his machete. We have a few surprises for the fans. We decided to create a new Jason, one who is bigger, badder and way cooler than anyone can imagine.”



Summing up the essence of what makes the character of Jason so universally terrifying, Isaac says that, “although Jason is visually simple with the hockey mask with the two round eyes, he’s very straightforward, archetypal and powerful. He’s a killing machine!
You can't plead with him and can't really trick him. He's a straight line to you, like a shark tracking blood in the water. So it's very difficult for you to fight him because he just doesn't care what you do. He’s indifferent. He will just kill you. And that’s it, that's what he does. He has absolutely no remorse whatsoever. It's not really even a battle. You can do your mojo kung fu and all that Hong Kong martial arts stuff. Jason doesn't care. He just kills you. And that makes him very, very scary.”

While on set, Hodder’s screen persona managed to get under the skin of some members of the young cast. “Yeah, Kane’s a bit imposing,” said Lexa Doig, who plays Rowan, the woman who gets frozen in time (and eventually thawed out over four hundred years later). “Because when I first met Kane, he’s a very big, physically imposing man. He was also a very nice person. And then to see him in his get-up is just freaky. The first time I saw him, he had the prosthetics on his head, but didn’t have the mask on yet. So he was still Kane and, ‘Oh, wow, that’s really neat,’ and you can see the fact that the prosthetics aren’t really real. So I turned around and I was doing something and then I turned back and he had his mask on. It was a little shocking and a little bit too freaky for me.”



“I know what you mean,” agrees Chuck Campbell, the actor who plays tech-genius Tsunaron. Kane is a big man to begin with. But put him in all that Jason garb and he’s even bigger. It doesn’t really take a lot of acting to run down the hall when he’s coming at you!”



Of all the actors, the least intimidated by Hodder was Lisa Ryder, cast as the android KAY-EM 14 who engages Jason in an epic head-on battle. “Kane’s afraid of me,” said Ryder slyly, “because I like to kick his butt. I wanted to put a little ‘chick-spin’ on this android. The thing about this script that appealed to me was that there are a lot of female hero figures in it. All the women have attitude, all of them are strong, all of them are fighters, all of them are intelligent and that’s one thing that makes this script different than some of the other horror films out there.”

When it came time to cast the role of Dr. Wimmer, the government scientist who meets a grisly fate at the film’s opening, the filmmakers enlisted noted director David Cronenberg, whom Jim Isaac has worked with previously on The Fly, Naked Lunch and eXistenZ. “We got up our nerve and asked David to play a role in the film,” says Isaac. “He said he would gladly do it under one condition: that we would kill off his character! So, of course, we did it. It was especially gruesome, too. It was wonderful having David on the set. He’s a real pro.”



Isaac’s goal from the start was to assemble a talented and creative filmmaking team, many of whom he had teamed with previously via his special effects work. “My idea was to get some ingenious people together, take over some soundstages located on an abandoned air force base outside Toronto and really put the money on the big screen,” says Isaac. “I wanted to work with talented people who at first might be skeptical about working on a Friday the 13th film, especially the tenth installment. But then I told them: ‘It's going to be fun. We are going to raise the level and make it visually amazing. And we are going to treat Jason X like the very first film of a totally new franchise.’ So when they knew that I was serious they all jumped on board.”



“When Jim asked me to do the film, I immediately said ‘yes,’” said make-up supervisor Stephan DuPuis, who won an Academy Award for his work on David Cronenberg’s
The Fly. What particularly excited Dupuis was the opportunity to help create a new “android” look for Jason late in the film, one that became known as “Uber-Jason.” “I knew it was going to be fun to make evil look this cool,” remembers Dupuis. “I wanted the creature to be very art deco-ish with a dynamic anatomy, which also has these really cool, very beautiful and powerful bodylines.” Dupuis also tweaked the “classic” look of Jason, giving him a slightly more gothic appearance.

Another key member of the behind-the-scenes team to quickly come aboard was visual effects supervisor Kelly Lepkowsky. “Jim Isaac and I have worked together enough times so that there’s a visual shorthand between us,” says Lepkowsky. “This is also a fantastic chance for us to be able to create dramatic ways for Jason to dispose of some of his many victims. We now have a chance to see somebody that has been sliced in half pulling himself across the screen with only his arms, the bottom half of his body completely missing. We also have a chance to generate lots of astonishing, really eye-popping visuals for the fans, be it model building or straight makeup or creature makeup or some sort of new CG effect that has never been seen or done before.”



Jason X was shot on 35mm film and then transferred to HD (High Definition format), a process which director Isaac found exciting. “What that HD format does is give me a lot of creative options in post-production with different tones and textures and looks, whatever I want. It takes timing a picture to a totally different level, but we will be able to play with it in extraordinary new ways. There are some sequences at the end of the movie, where I want it to be very surreal. With this system, I can do that. We don’t need to cut the negative, we don’t touch it. The film just goes to HD digital, then we work with it until we’re finished. At that point, we scan it back out from HD right back to film stock, and that’s it.”

For this digital process, the filmmakers worked closely with Dennis Berardi of the Toronto-based visual effects company, Toybox. “We have a whole digital archive of the movie,” says Berardi. “What that gives us is a unique opportunity to effect more of the film than ever before; literally, every frame can be tweaked, color-corrected, enhanced with computer-generated images, layered, composited together with other images where need be, and we can really design the whole look and feel of the movie on a frame by frame basis. We have probably around two hundred visual effects shots that involve computer-generated images, everything from creatures to virtual reality gaming environments to spaceships. All these shots are gonna come together in a digital environment and we’re gonna have an opportunity to basically give it a continuity of look.”



“And then we film-record the whole movie out on an ARRILASER recorder, a brand new film recording system,” Berardi continues. “Simply put, it’s a digital camera for motion picture film and we’re gonna be outputing the whole movie back out to motion picture film for projection in theaters. Very cool stuff.”



Ultimately, the filmmaking team set out to make Jason X a movie that would please the die-hard fans but would also offer something new and exciting for those who have never seen a Friday the 13th film before. “We have a fun movie with an amazing, big budget look,” says Isaac. “And it’s a little bit of an experiment; this way of filmmaking has never really been done before, which is exciting. Plus I think we’ve done a good job of weaving in some interesting and unique characters, as well as some really cool effects. Yet when all is said and done, Jason X is about scaring people and doing all those fun things that make moviegoers throw popcorn at the ceiling. I’m very happy with the way the film turned out, and I think the fans will dig it, too.”