By MICHAEL GINGOLD
The filmmaker is rebooting one of his all-time favorites.
While speaking with writer/director Drew Hancock about his much-praised feature debut COMPANION (you can read that interview tomorrow), RUE MORGUE got a few words with him about a couple of his next projects, including a reboot of the 1998 high-school horror film THE FACULTY. The update of the chiller about teenagers contending with teachers overtaken by aliens is being produced by COMPANION’s BoulderLight Pictures for Miramax release, with original director Robert Rodriguez on board as producer.
It was Hancock’s enthusiasm for the original FACULTY that led him to break a self-imposed rule when it came to the projects he was offered as COMPANION’s buzz was building. “THE FACULTY is a movie that I loved in the ’90s,” he tells us. “I didn’t want to do a sequel or a reboot; I was having dinner with the BoulderLight guys, and they were asking about what I was going to do next, and I said, ‘No sequels, no sequels, no sequels.’ Then they asked, ‘What about THE FACULTY?’ and I was like, ‘Oh my God, you found the one property I just love so much.’ I’ve always had an obsession with pod people, and INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS; I’ve always wanted to do one in high school, and this was my opportunity. I can do my own version of THE FACULTY, and that’s very exciting.”
High school has obviously changed quite a bit in the two and a half decades since the first FACULTY, but Hancock believes that young people themselves haven’t. “I think the emotions are exactly the same, you know? There are cosmetic differences to high school, so I’ve had to do the research and find out, oh, no one has lockers anymore. I can’t have a scene that takes place between two people at their lockers, because they just don’t exist. It’s actually kind of fun exploring what is new, but it’s all in a world where you’re dealing with teenage emotions, and those haven’t changed. I’m sure those were the same 1,000 years ago. Every decision they make is, to them, the most important decision they’ve ever made, and all the emotions are dialed to 11. It’s going to be fun to play with that in the FACULTY world of conformity and that alien invasion layer.”
Another major difference between then and now is teenagers’ dependence on social media, but Hancock is being cautious in how he approaches that subject. “We’ll see how big a part that plays. I’m always a little wary of that, because sometimes I feel like the old guy saying, ‘Oh, social media is really affecting kids these days,’–kind of that ‘Get off my porch!’ attitude. So I will weave it through, and obviously it will be a flavoring of that environment, but I don’t want it to come across like some kind of judgment, and make any assumptions about how it’s affecting the way kids interact with each other. I’d rather contain it within the school and not do too much social media commentary.”
Another project Hancock is working on comes from a very different source. “I’m doing an adaptation of a short story that was on Reddit called ‘My Wife and I Bought a Ranch’ [by Matt Query]. It’s more horror, but it still has an element of absurdity that I love. I guess the logline would be similar to COMPANION, but it’s about a couple who move to a ranch in Idaho, and it’s dirt-cheap, and they’re like, ‘Why? What’s the catch here?’ Then they find out there’s a reason why it’s so cheap; I don’t want to spoil it, but there’s something living in the woods that they have to appease.”
You can see our review of COMPANION here.
