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Joshua Jackson on Shutter
By Fred Topel | Images property of 20th Century Fox
Joshua Jackson has done a few horror movies before. He was in Scream 2, Urban Legend and Cursed. His latest is Shutter, an Asian inspired thriller about spiritual photography.
Joshua Jackson Talks Shutter
"What attracted me to Shutter, beyond the broader part of it, personally what attracted me to the character was that if you're playing a straight ahead drama, generally the transition that a character goes through, while it might be internally severe, is from sort of A to hopefully Z, but usually is from A to H or I," Jackson explained. "When you're doing a horror film you have the potential of doing something much broader and much more shocking of a shift. So for me to be able to start here and then end up as somebody totally different is fun for me. You get to lay in all those red herring things in the story and lead people down this path and then hopefully show them something on the other side. So that was the gist."
The concept is that a ghost follows a newlywed couple within the photographs they take. One intense scene has Jackson trapped in a darkroom, flashing his flash to provide glimpses of light.
"We did it both ways. For me we did it with light and dark. We had a couple of passes through it on the master shots and on the wider shots, just to get me into the habit of not being able to see and sort of creating the panic, and then we did a couple of takes all the way through in light so that the director could choose which moments he wanted. So we actually did both."
Shutter
Shutter
The American Shutter differs from the original in that it focuses more on the new bride's point of view. "Beyond the male/female perspective being different, which is different, the major difference is Thai movie with Thai actors and so they were already acclimated to the culture that they were in. So the introduction of the spirit photography was more digestible, I guess, for those characters because they would've already had a cultural reference point. If someone came up to you and said, 'Look, we're being hunted by a ghost. Look, it's in the spirit photo.' You'd be like, 'Okay. All right.' So by introducing westerners into that mythology, the whole beginning of our story changes. You're not only changing the gender perspective, but you have to bring the character into that mythology. The benefit of doing that is that you then also get to bring, hopefully, the audience into that mythology as well."
As an American in Japan, Jackson did learn to speak a few lines of Japanese. "I had a personal guy that came with me that did it, not everyday, but almost everyday. I'd learn it in sections. There'd be a speech and I'd learn the speech and I'd try to get that down as quickly as possible and get the next speech down. I learned as much as I could. There's much more Japanese in the Japanese version of this. They cut out a lot of the Japanese language that I speak for the American version because they were worried that there'd be a disconnect if there was too much of a difference language. When the Japanese version comes out though in Japan there's a whole section of the movie that's in Japanese."
Shutter opens to theaters March 21st.
For the trailer, poster and more movie info, go to the Shutter Movie Page.
Fred Topel
Sources: Images property of 20th Century Fox
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