STARBURST caught up with Tarsem Singh, director of The Fall, Immortals, Self/Less, Dear Jassi and numerous iconic music videos and ads, as his first feature film, The Cell gets a 4K UHD release. We also spoke about a wide range of topics, including Americans’ tolerance for horror, a possible director’s cut, art, Damien Hirst, Eiko Ishioka, Vincent D’Onofrio, Jennifer Lopez, Vince Vaughn, Mark Romanec Nico Soultanakis, Tarsem’s classmates Michael Bay and Zack Snyder, making a visual film, Rotten Tomatoes, serial killers, David Fincher, The Fall, Dear Jassi and what’s next for Tarsem…
STARBURST: It’s been 25 years since The Cell; what made you revisit it?
Tarsem Singh: I saw it again recently and I found it absolutely hilarious. I’m a bit sad, after 25 years, it’s something I don’t own. When the Blu-ray was released, there was always a version of this that was finished in HD. They didn’t care, they took the DVD and said, ‘here is the Blu-ray’. The director of photography Paul Laufer spent his own money to do an HD version, so I asked for that, and never really got an answer. They just called it a Blu-ray. It’s great that Arrow came along! Paul has an acquired taste. He followed up with them and then they came out with this.
What can we expect from it? We hear there’s a new cut?
It looks much cooler. It was always a visual piece that didn’t require dialogue. This is as close to it as you can get. It’s a visual treat. There’s a scene that was removed for the American market, but I had them put that back. Somebody told me they called it the director’s cut but that’s not true. This is the ‘German cut’. The Americans wanted to take a part out but I fought for it.
In the first act there is a scene where the guy comes out dressed – I wanted opera – like Francis Ford Coppola’s version of Dracula, but that’s what they didn’t want. When I said opera, they said that never works. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) made £30 million in an opening week, but didn’t reach 100 million. They saw that as people not wanting it. I had to do something quite shocking and disturbing in the first act, so they won’t laugh when Stargher [Vincent D’Onofrio] comes out wearing a sari and a tutu. They asked what, so I made a list: he kills girls, he masturbates on them… they were like “Woah! That’s over the top!” But if you remove that, which they tried, then in the third act people will laugh. Every culture has a different level of what that shock factor is. The Americans were traumatised by it but when I sent it to the Germans they asked, “Do you have any more of that shit?”
The thing that changed the film completely for me was when Howard Shore did the score. The temp track was a completely different style that was not what I wanted, but what he did was so amazing, I was aware my film was so disjointed, and it needed a common paintbrush and that was what Howard provided.
For ten grand, I said that I’d do a director’s cut, and they said “No, this was it”. They weren’t expecting it to be as successful as it was. I wanted to take out all the dialogue and just have a few cue cards and Howard Shore’s score and the sound effects. I wanted it to play like a silent film. No subtitles, just a few cue cards explaining the plot. That would have been my director’s cut!
Do you think that will ever happen?
No. I’ve moved on with my life. I think people like this the way it is.
You could be like George Lucas and keep revisiting and tinkering with it…
Like my friend Zack Snyder! He’s done a wonderful job and made a career out of it! For me, it was like, this is it. I did a cut for a few different countries, and you can take one that’s close to it.
You mentioned this is a visual treat. The Cell has artistic references – Odd Nerdrum, Damien Hirst, Eiko Ishioka’s beautiful costumer design, same as The Fall, there was also an Oscar nomination for Best Makeup and Hairstyling as well for Michèle Burke and Edouard F. Henriques…
That’s right! They had done Dracula together.
The costumes when Lopez, D’Onofrio ‘go under’ is very similar to Dracula as well.
I was trying not to go there, because Dracula was so iconic. I realised that costume was closer to what I needed from a film to what Dracula needed. I told Eiko… it’s like these bodies have been fileted, and I realised Dracula’s costume is literally that. Just make them skinless.
How important do you think it is to have a visual identity? You have a strong unique aesthetic in your films.
I do now, but that was my first film. Originally, I was thinking I should have done something else, but it was too late. I thought why don’t we go ‘Vegas’, which would have been cool and crazy, but I went with the arthouse references. Everyone has a different plate they were breaking. Don’t do that one, don’t do this one… The cameraman hated the end scene with the flames, he said it looked kitsch, but I loved it. He said it looked like a Moroccan serial killer. Now I love it more! I said people won’t laugh because of what we’ve done to them in the first act. The writer [Mark Protosevich] said do anything but don’t use a horse. I went to see him to take some notes, and I realised he lived on a farm – he was close to horses. I’m doing this to a child! People have children. Those are their trigger points. So I left it. The lawyer came and said ‘Damien Hirst’. He has an army of lawyers whose job is to make money by suing people. I said “Ok, what if I show you where Damien Hirst got it from?” They said “What do you mean?” I sent them a 1920s dissection of a human body exactly in that style. They said they’d love for Damien Hirst to sue us! I wish I could’ve honoured Odd Nerdrum a bit more, because I love his stuff, but I never heard back from anyone on his side. I can’t afford his art but I love his stuff!
Did you get anything from Damien Hirst when it came out?
No, I actually met Damien Hirst with Dave Stewart from the Eurythmics. I didn’t realise the restaurant we were in was his. I thought he was going to throw us out!
Has he seen the movie?
I didn’t ask. This would’ve been five or six years later. I knew Dave Stewart had as we were talking about a project long ago. I don’t know if Hirst was aware of who I was or what I’d done.
Hopefully he’ll see it one day. Maybe the new version?
I say bring the lawyers! [Laughs]
This was your first feature film. How did you approach it after doing commercials and music videos?
If you can put yourself, and your DNA, into the film, and it’s successful, then you’re ok. You just carry on. I always say Michael Bay, my former classmate, is an auteur. As are David Fincher and Spike Jonze. You can see any frame of Michael Bay’s and say “That’s a Michael Bay film”. It might not be the artistic or critics’ point of view. But a billion other people beg to differ. Can you find your stamp and go forward with it? I’ve done music videos, and it came with a visual background. A guy like me wants to put that on the screen. Mark Romanek [One Hour Photo, Never Let Me Go], who I find incredible, was the most visual out of all of us. He never did a visual film, and never got a chance. He burnt a few bridges at the wrong time and when he was ready, the studios wouldn’t let him. I hope one day he does. No one gave him the carte blanche he wanted earlier and he got shat on. It’s not like writing, it takes an army of people to do it.
Over the last 25 years, you’ve had a good working relationship with Nico Soultanakis, who’s produced all of your films. How have you maintained that?
Nico’s a classmate. For me, he’s also a director. He’s a renaissance man, he knows everything. The reason he couldn’t work as a director is because he doesn’t have an asshole bone in his body. He’s a complete gentleman. When it comes down to having to bypass everyone to make a decision, he was not that guy. I can recognise talented people. I say come on in, all I want is money and credit! I love Nico. When we were at school, we were obsessed with Eiko Ishioka, her commercials and what she was doing in Japan. When she did Dracula, we were obsessed. When The Cell came along, I said “We want Eiko Ishioka”. They said, “She’s difficult to get”. I said “I want Eiko Ishioka!” Once they introduced us, I fell in love with her. When we were doing the movie, my girlfriend said, “I think Nico and Eiko are going out”. I said, “Don’t be silly, she’s older than him and it’ll never happen”. Of course, when the film was finished, they were in love.
They got married, didn’t they?
Yep. Any project that I had, at ground zero, I had Nico and Eiko. We would get our DNA in a project before we got close to it. If it didn’t happen, walk away, keep the research and put it into the next one. And it exploded like that. Nico I’m still very much in touch with. I love him. I only have two phenomenal friends from school and he’s one of them. He married Eiko. The thing with Eiko that people get wrong is when you want people to exceed, you say, “Think about the box”. With Eiko, she had no idea what a fucking box was. She went so into a different world that you had to reign her in. That’s always easier than getting someone sane and say, “Go be edgy”. Eiko would create something, and I’d be like, “I can’t relate with that at all”. I’d pull it in such a way that it’d work in a film. For me, Nico and Eiko were brilliant. I never cared about the references; I always trusted her. She’d come up to me and say “Look, I found this bug from the Natural History Museum. Look at its skin. If we take that skin, and put it on this monster, does that work for you?”, and I’d say yes. Photographs from another movie or play – Eiko never had a reference like that! It was always plants or things like that. I was so lucky to have that relationship with Nico, and that Eiko fell in love with him, and they were together for the last decade. That’s why we worked back-to-back. I would never have worked with anybody else. Until she passed away.
You talk about talented people, you had Vincent D’Onofrio, an established actor still going strong today. As well as Jennifer Lopez and Vince Vaughn, famous but relatively new to feature films. Jennifer was in Anaconda and Out of Sight…
Out of Sight was the film! I saw that film and I saw the girl can act. She might not be your thing. Any differences that we had was water under the bridge. But she did exactly what I wanted in the end. It’s a very consistent performance. If there’s any fault, blame me. She did everything right. D’Onofrio – any project that I get, if it’s an animal, a woman, a child, I ask if D’Onofrio’s available! He is so – and I don’t use this word lightly – serious. The only person that I’ve never worked with, who I think is the greatest actor of all time, is Philip Seymour Hoffman. I look at those two and that’s just about as fearless as you can get.
Vince Vaughn as well, probably known more as a comedic actor but also started as a dramatic actor…
I thought he is so wrong that he’s right for it! A ‘50s kind of detective in a ‘90s movie.
Like film noir?
Yeah, he’s so aesthetic. And everybody’s dialogue – D’Onofrio can dial that in and dial that out – is effective dialogue. Those things, when they come out, people can be like “This is not real at all” and they can’t relate, but all I can tell you, I call those movies ‘pre-dated’. They look dated when they come out but 30 years later, things that came out then look dated, but this looks the same. Kubrick’s’ films are not naturalistic. Vince Vaughn was effective. Peter Sarsgaard, who’s big now in the arthouse world, had a really small role. He did this line, and I was like “Brilliant, but wrong film”. So I gave him a different role. D’Onofrio could do opera, and then naturalistic. That scene when he’s cutting the girl in the bathroom, he’s at one level, then *click* he comes down to another. Like ‘do you really know me?’ It’s freaky. It’s usually something people don’t accept in a film, but with him, it just works. He knew how to freak you out with it, and I loved that.
Also, I find it unheralded, usually when someone does an arthouse masterpiece, it’s also a thing that you copy. I remember 10 years later – in a film that I love, The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men, Javier Bardem looks like D’Onofrio from this film. He has the exact same clothes, he’s a little feminine, he has the same hair. I thought ‘brilliantly done’. No one gives D’Onofrio the credit that he deserves.
When the film came out, critics had mixed reviews. Roger Ebert named it one of his favourite films of the year. Others were less favourable…
I’ve never done a film recommended by Rotten Tomatoes. I do polarising things. That’s the scariest thing about Rotten Tomatoes, the standard of judging. The greatest film ever made is a ‘good’ film. Like The Shawshank Redemption. It’s not offensive. If every critic gives the movie a six (out of 10), it becomes 100%. A movie like Jonathan Glazer’s Birth, which is one of my favourite films, is at 40%. At 50%, you’ll find some incredible films. With The Fall, a lot of younger reviewers are liking it, and a lot of the older ones who gave negative reviews are dead. Hopefully after suffering a lot (laughs)! Now, it’s recommended by Rotten Tomatoes and I’m not sure if I like that. The great thing about Ebert is he wrote a note asking if he’d seen the same film as the other critics. Actually, he hadn’t! The studio sent a lot of critics a rough cut, which didn’t even have Howard Shore’s score in it. The film was a lot more disjointed. A lot of people have seen it and hate it, and that’s fine. Ebert saw the finished version and he embraced it. He put it in his top ten films of the year. It’s good that people say it’s shit and not, that’s what gets you hired again. If it’s comme ci, comme ça, you’ll never get a job because everyone had a brother or someone who has a drone and knows how to make a film on their phone. People who say its shit won’t hire you but the people who thought it was brilliant, if they get into power again, they’ll hire you. Polarising? OK by me.
You mention younger viewers and people going back and revisiting things. Sometimes, a film becomes a cult classic. 25 years and more ago, you had The Cell, The Bone Collector, The Silence of the Lambs, Se7en…
Se7en and The Silence of the Lambs were accepted critically, and everything; the others weren’t. It’s a serial killer thing. That’s what got the film made. I have no interest in serial killers. I had all this visual stuff I wanted to get out, and I just had to find the right vehicle. Movies that were greenlit in the ‘70s were disaster movies. It’d be about a burning building. The reason I’d make it would have been because the guy on the 87th floor was having a dream. I get to improvise; studios get the burning building – done. So, in the ‘90s; ‘got a serial killer’? Fucking yes!’ The thing was in The Cell, you’re going to go into his head, and I had a blank slate.
Today, we still see horror movies, serial killer movies, why do you think it’s so attractive to an audience?
Well, you’re looking for extreme reactions. People think they’ve found something new, but this gene has been around forever. Then science caught up and recognised a select few people were doing this again and again. There were always kids disappearing and you never knew what happened to them in history. In the Crusades or whatever, you have a psycho brother, they join the Crusades, and they rape, plunder, and suddenly become king of the place. In the last 100 years, science has realised there’s a group of people who do love it and do it. It’s a discovered thing. But it’s not new, it’s been around forever.
David Fincher lived opposite me, and he was doing this stuff. He was our guru when we were at school. I remember when Jonathan Demme came out with The Silence of the Lambs. I was like, wow you’ve pre-empted all of us! And then people were asking, “Why is Fincher doing Se7en?” and I said, “I bet you he has a take that’s different to Silence of the Lambs”. When people asked me why I’m doing The Cell, it’s because I have a take. It doesn’t look like Se7en, it doesn’t look like that. It’s a genre. If you go against it, you won’t see the subtleties in it. You can say all rap is shit, but Massive Attack use rap. All classical is shit, maybe a lot of it is, but there are nuances in it. You better have your stamp to put on it.
You talked about new ways of filming, how do you think filmmaking has changed in the last 25 years, for better or worse?
I never say for worse or better, I say it’s evolved. Evolution doesn’t give a damn who survives. Circumstances change, a certain group or a certain gene got an advantage. When we were doing films, it was a magician’s art form. You show it to people, and they go “wow, that looks amazing” because nobody could see what you were doing. You have to learn how to make the film. But now anybody who has a phone is a director. Anyone who has a cousin who can fly a drone. Everybody’s got a computer so they can edit. The joke used to be everybody’s a writer, but now everybody’s a director. The problem now becomes how do you get eyeballs on this thing? How do you get people to see it? It’s become much more about the distribution. How do you separate the shit from the Shinola? Maybe it’ll become a thing that you can download yourself into, I don’t know.
There’s a big question mark over AI and automation, and what counts as creativity, and how are you an auteur anymore in a world of AI…
You will be! I’m so computer illiterate, if it wasn’t for porn or chess, I never would have discovered the internet! I wouldn’t know what I was looking at. My niece knows in two seconds if it’s an ad. It’s a tool right now, but it’s writing brilliant shit. But how do you take from it and make it yours? That’s going to be the fight. I don’t know!
What’s next on the horizon, do you have plans for another film?
I wish people would see Dear Jassi, the last film I did. The same thing happened as with The Fall and The Cell. Very polarising. But it’s the only film the critics have ever loved. The producer had a falling out, so they haven’t released it yet. It’s very hardcore. But I hope it doesn’t take 20 years like The Fall for people to see it! It’s only been screened at the Toronto Film Festival. It’s the second most personal film I’ve done after The Fall. In the meantime, there are three or four films right now.
One was supposed to go but the actor pushed the schedule to next year and I said I’m out as I don’t know what I’ll be doing next year. One might go by this summer. In the meantime, I do music videos very rarely, I love doing adverts, because they allow me to use new tools and new things to figure out, with the best budgets, so I look at ways of incorporating things. I don’t know which one will go first. If I can’t have my DNA in it, I don’t want to do it. Unfortunately, even though The Fall drove me close to bankrupt, I’d do it again in two seconds. Because that’s the only way I know how to function. I’ll see what comes along and if I get that passion.
THE CELL is out now on 4K UHD.
