Interview: Director Jason Zada Talks Horror Movie The Forest (Exclusive)
Out this weekend in UK cinemas is ‘The Forest,’ a new horror movie set around Japan’s infamous ‘suicide forest’ Aokigahara, a real-life place which is among the most popular locations for suicide in the world.
The film casts ‘Game of Thrones’ and ‘The Hunger Games’ actress Natalie Dormer as Sarah, whose estranged twin sister (also played by Dormer) disappears in Aokigahara.
Undaunted, Sarah heads to Japan and ventures into the forest in search of her sister - and unsurprisingly, things don’t go too well.
‘The Forest’ marks the feature debut of director Jason Zada, who was good enough to speak to us about the film.
Congratulations on The Forest, your first feature film as a director. Could you tell us a bit about what you’ve done in the film industry up to this point?
Well mostly, for almost the last 8 years of my life I’ve done a lot of commercials and music videos, a bunch of short films, all that sort of stuff. And I did a short called Take This Lollipop, which [went] very viral and popular… then I spent the last year making The Forest.
How did you come on board the film?
David Goyer is one of the producers… it was his original idea. And the place, the location, became such a lure for me. I really wanted to be involved in the project just because the location is very scary in itself, and the more I researched it, the more I just wanted to do it.
You didn’t shoot in the actual Suicide Forest though; am I right in thinking you instead shot somewhere in Eastern Europe?
Yeah, we shot in Serbia. You’re not allowed to shoot in the actual forest; it’s also very dangerous, because the entire forest is built on lava rock, with soil that has found its way on top of the lava rock, so you can fall into a lot of caves, just as Sarah does in the movie. It’s fairly dangerous.
So we found a forest that has a very similar look, but in Eastern Europe, yeah.
Did you ever have any concerns about the subject matter, considering that it is a very real place, and that people genuinely have, and do commit suicide there? Were there ever any doubts about the sensitivity of it all?
I think we deal with suicide in the film very [realistically], very gently. Our main character; her sister does have a troubled past. It’s always something which you have to be sensitive about; I don’t think I could have made a film which would have presented it in the wrong way.
So I think that we were all very mindful about it; I know Natalie as well was very [aware] that it’s a sensitive subject. When you think about making a genre film set against that – I think we tried our best to do something that deals with it realistically, but also to try to get in the scares as well as you can against that backdrop.
At what point did Natalie Dormer join the film?
She was the very first person that I went out to; she was at the top of my list, she was at the top of the studio’s list. I’d been a big fan of her work for a long time. We had a meeting, and I just walked away from that meeting thinking, she is the main character. So it was pretty early on; I think she’d been attached to it… I want to say six months prior to us starting shooting. So, she was the first.
And how was it working with her?
She’s great. She’s so smart; she really understands, and wants to understand every aspect of filmmaking, and it’s really great to see. She has to carry every frame of the film, and play two characters, so she had a pretty heavy load on her shoulders: to not just bring Sarah to life, but to bring Jess to life, and to take us on this journey.
The film in many ways feels reminiscent of the horror films that came around in the late 90s; with the forest setting it’s reminiscent of The Blair Witch Project, and the overall tone of it isn’t too far removed from that of The Sixth Sense. Where there any particular films or filmmakers which you took inspiration from in your approach to it?
There has been a bit of a distance since The Ring and The Grudge, and that whole J-Horror scene, so I felt like we needed to create something that felt familiar yet new. And I think stylistically we wanted to create a film which could be beautiful but also scary.
For me, The Shining is one of those films that’s hard not to reference, for anything in the genre; it’s always been one of those great films that stands the test of time, watching the character psychologically unravel on screen, which has some similarities [with Sarah in The Forest]. So it was influential, but not something we tried to replicate at all.
The Forest is a PG-13 horror film (although a 15 in the UK). Opinion tends to be a bit divided about horror films at PG-13 level. Were you ever tempted to push further, or did you feel it wasn’t necessary?
It’s a good question. There’s a part of me that feels that with an R, a harder rating, we could have pushed things harder. But I don’t know if, with the exception of actually seeing people commit suicide, I don’t know if I really would [have wanted to]. It was something we definitely talked about a lot…
I know when some people talk about PG-13 horror, they think there’s no way it could be scary, or as good as if it was R. But I don’t know if there’s a lot of things we could have changed to make it harder. The subject matter itself and the place itself is pretty scary, and I’m actually kind of surprised at what we did get away with in a PG-13!
Recently we’ve had the Oscars diversity scandal, and a lot of talk about ‘whitewashing.’ Was there ever a concern about going to a Japanese setting but using western actors?
I think part of the story, and part of the journey you put the audience through is this idea of being a sort of fish out of water, a stranger in a strange land, and part of what makes it hard to find your missing loved one is that you don’t speak the language, you can’t read the signs. And I think part of that is what makes the story interesting.
I don’t know if it would have worked as well if it was someone from Japan who went missing - and quite honestly, with the exception of I think three people in the film, everyone else is Japanese.
Are there any other films you’re working on, or any other things you’d like to do, as a director?
Yeah, there are probably a few projects that I should be announcing soon, but I’m very busy with a lot of things at the moment. I love the world of fantasy, and hope to explore more of that in the future.
Picture Credit: Icon Film Distribution
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