Interview FREDDY VS. JASON As Told To Terry DuFoe Photos by Tiffany M. DuFoe I heard rumors of "Freddy vs. Jason," one of the longest-gestating projects in film history,  back in 1994 when I asked Robert (Freddy) Englund about a possibility of the meeting of the horror titans. Forward to present day: After several script changes, "FvJ" is finally preparing to pounce on an eager fright-movie public in August 2003. To fill in VideoScope readers with all the gory details of the secrecy-shrouded pic, we spoke with actor Jesse Hutch-currently co-starring as Jimmy Riley on the NBC TV series "American Dreams"--who portrays Trey, a cocky teen who becomes possessed by Freddy Krueger. Thanks go to actress Vanessa Lengies, who plays Roxanne on "American Dreams," and series regular Tiffany M. Dufoe for helping to set up the following interview. TERRY DUFOE What was your first job as an actor? JESSE HUTCH My first job as an actor was on "Dark Angel," an episode called "Gill Girl." I played a gill guy, or gill man, or a merman, or gill boy, whatever. They had so many nicknames for me it wasn't funny. The guys who did my prosthetics, WCT, based in Vancouver, they did all the special effects makeup and all the special effects and prosthetics and they also did my prosthetics for "Freddy vs. Jason," so there's one of the main connections between the two--my first job and once again this job. I didn't actually say any words. My character spoke in a like dolphin kind of language, so that was weird because it was all put it by a computer afterwards.   TD How did you feel about the prosthetics being glued onto your face You weren't claustrophobic, were you? JH No. Let me say, though, if you are claustrophobic, you'd probably go mental.  Especially if you have to do head casts. TD Would you rather be known for yourself or somebody behind a mask all the time? JH Well, for "Dark Angel," I was fortunate enough that I didn't have to be behind a mask, so you saw my face. You saw me for who I was, but I got to do all the prosthetics. In "Freddy vs. Jason," all the prosthetics were done because they made a full-scale replica of my entire body, so you're still going to recognize me because I never had to wear anything on my face. I love doing the prosthetics. It's a totally different world and I can understand how you can totally hate it. I mean, I myself get edgy after awhile because you're freezing cold and you're like barely wearing any clothes. You've got to stand like this. "Lay down here. Sit like this. Don't move. Hold this facial _expression." And the stuff is freezing. It's so cold, then it's like warm, and then it's cold. TD How do you feel about horror films? JH Well, I can't say that I ever expected to be doing "Freddy vs. Jason." It was just like it came out of nowhere. And they're trying to keep it, obviously, as secretive as possible, and you know, we were like sworn to secrecy. TD Did you sign a secrecy agreement? JH I can't say! I love movies, so I don't want to wreck it for people. So, I'm not going to tell anyone the end of it. But anyway, just one day they're like, "Hey, you're going to audition for it." So I read for it in Vancouver and they brought me back in for the callback and they wanted to see me, but I was just leaving to come down here to work on another two episodes of American Dreams. So, I was like, "Can they meet me in the U.S. because I have to go there!" So I met the director down here and I went in and read for him. He was just being himself, Ronny Yu. I walked in and he's like, "You're Canadian, right?" I'm like, "Yep." He's like, "Are we gonna hear it?" I'm like, "Nope." He's like, "Okay, go ahead." I did the audition and he gave me a few directions. I changed it the best I could to match what he wanted--my character in this is like extremely rude!  Well, rude's an understatement. He's just so mean. TD You've seen other Freddy and Jason films?   JH Oh yeah--I watched them all to try figure it all out. TD But you weren't sleeping during them, right? JH Freddy gets his power from that. I better be careful! TD You obviously were young when they started coming out. Did any of them ever give you nightmares? JH No. I'll be honest, no. TD So did you think they were kind of funny then? JH Yeah, there were some parts that were pretty funny. Some of it is just really absurd. I think in a way, though, this one will be a little bit different, because I think we have a little bit more budget then any movies in the past. I watched the dailies and some of the stunt work that was done. It's just amazing. I can't wait to see some of the special effects. TD So what of the story can you tell us, without having people come after you? JH Uh...that's touchy. Basically there's a group of kids and Freddy kind of intervenes and Jason somehow is brought back into the picture through Freddy. So you need to figure out how can Freddy get out of hell and how is Jason brought out of hell as well. So, Freddy somehow manages to do it, and he pulls Jason out. Jason starts to go around getting revenge on people because he's still trying to get revenge for what happened to him when he was a younger kid, right? So he's going around and he's getting all of this revenge, and people think that it's Freddy, so there's a little misunderstanding going on there. TD I heard Freddy manipulates Jason by impersonating Jason's mother? Is that in the script? JH Yep, that's very true. TD So you would say that Freddy is the dominant one? JH Freddy is, at the beginning, I guess; you'd almost see him as the puppeteer, and Jason doesn't really realize that at this point. So he starts going around, and he's doing his thing and people are starting to think it's Freddy. They don't even know who Jason is because obviously there's never anyone left alive to know that it's Jason Voorhees. So, everyone is blaming Freddy, and as you know, Freddy gets his powers from what? TD From fear and nightmares. JH Okay, so we got some of that building up now. So somehow, through this fear that is being built by Jason, Freddy gets more and more power, and he's able to manipulate more and more people and he starts to go after these kids, because they now live in the Elm Street home. So eventually Freddy and Jason are kind of full steam ahead, going to work.  People are getting slattered--slattered, that's a new word!--splattered and slaughtered and cut up and stabbed and you name it! There's a big rave sequence happening. And everyone's kind of dancing and partying. The girl who plays my girlfriend, she's hammered and everyone else is getting hammered, and Jason shows up and he just starts killing people, basically. There's actually one point where there's this guy that has all these glow sticks attached to him and he's trying to make out with the girl who plays my girlfriend while she's unconscious and drunk. And she's starting to be sucked into the dream world of Freddy because of me, so my character is actually possessed. I'm actually possessed by Freddy at this point and he's inside me. So I had special effects make-up, and I'm pretty much dead at this point. TD So, in a way, you almost get to be Freddy? JH In a way, I am Freddy, yeah. I think there's one point in the scene that I do where they're going to slowly change my voice to his, but I'm not sure what they're going to do with that yet. So, basically I lure her away and she passes out, and she's with me in this dream world, and then I turn into Freddy Krueger. As she's in this dream world, this guy kind of jumps on top of her, and he's sick and twisted. This guy's basically trying to make out with her while she's passed out and Jason Voorhees jams this pole through his back and picks him up! And he's still alive and he's freaking out and flailing his arms and he just whips him through the air and the way that they described it is that he's supposed to look kinda like a shooting star because he's got all these glow sticks, and he just goes flying over this corn field, and he just kind of lands into the corn! So it was really neat to see the shots for that because they had the stunt guy cabled up and jammed this fake pole in his back. Then Jason ends up on fire, of course. He just starts running around on fire, and then other people end up on fire, and he's throwing people and stabbing them. It's just crazy and he goes all psycho and that's pretty much the whole raver sequence. It was really neat because we used a real cornfield just outside of Vancouver, and I had no idea what to expect. TD Now, the part where you become possessed by Freddy, did you talk to Robert Englund? JH He was getting his prosthetics put on and I was just a chair down, and we're the only ones in the trailer. You know, we're all sitting there getting high off these paint fumes because I can't leave for two hours so everybody's like gasping. Everybody is just laughing and having a great time! I also got to talk to him and we joked around as well when I had to do a full body digital scan. For one scene, my body is going to be handled by computer because I can't physically do it. TD What happened, did you explode or something? JH No. There will be one scene where I'm walking towards my drunk girlfriend and my neck's actually broken, but I'm still kind of holding myself together. I did as much as I could with the walk; I had this whole sequence worked out with the director because it was all supposed to be computer animated. But I said, "Well give me a chance, and let me try to do as much as I can, because the more I can do, the better it's going to look, right?" So he's like, "Okay, well, your neck's broken, and your leg's busted, and every time you step on it, it's going to snap, and you're going to fall down, but you catch yourself. Come up with what you can do." So I'm in my trailer between scenes and I'm like, "Okay, my neck's broken. All right, I can imagine this. I broke my neck in my former life."  So I worked out this sequence where I actually got it to look pretty good with holding my own head up. And my body, I tried the best I could, but my spine's supposed to be snapped at this point, and I can't do that. I'm trying to pretend. "Okay, I had a bad accident. My back's broken. How do I sit? Do I just fall on the floor?" Come on, that's not going to work. So basically I have to hold my head up, do my dialogue, try and do this walk like one leg's broken, so I'm kind of falling out of frame and I can't really control my speed. So they did a computer scan, which took quite a while actually.  They basically take photos top to bottom, then they do your face separately again. You wear the clothes that you're going to be wearing for that scene. Robert Englund also had it done, and so did Ken Kirzinger [Jason Voorhees]. So there were only three of us total in the film who had this process done. They showed me a few tests. It's really weird. I not only got to see myself in my prosthetics, but I also got to see myself digitally replicated because they had already taken previous footage of me and made a template. And he just presses "enter" on his laptop and you see me freaking out on the screen, and I'm like, "Whoa! Where'd you get that?!?" He's like, "We took it from some previous footage." Rumor is that my head may actually spin 360 degrees around, but they're not sure if they're going to do that yet. TD Oh, so you could do "The Exorcist" next. JH Possibly! It was also neat in a way just because I was one of only three to have this done and the only two other people were the lead characters! So I kind of felt special, you know, for like a second. The funny thing was for this movie they told me that total I did 16 and a half hours of prosthetics for this role, and I did more than Robert Englund did. Apparently, I did the most of anyone in the movie, according to WCT Productions in Vancouver. TD Does the make-up still look like the old Freddy, or has it changed any? I don't know how many of the movies you have seen, but he looked quite different in the last one, "Wes Craven's New Nightmare." JH Yeah, I think it kind of follows the older ones a little more, the burnt look, you know? I think they had some of the originals, like Jason Voorhees' mask was original and they replicated that. I think they're trying to go back to the original look. I saw some crazy stuff on this set! Especially at WCT, the prosthetics company--they re-did Crystal Lake, but it's part of a dream sequence and they did all the prosthetics for it, and everything looks the way that it used to except it's all made out of human body parts. I saw the storyboards, and it was just wild! The storyboards alone were colored and computerized! In the swamp they made prosthetic heads, and they float like rocks in the water. The trees are made of intertwined body parts. The water is blood. Visually it's kind of scary! TD Is there nudity in "Freddy vs. Jason"? JH Yeah, unfortunately. I didn't actually see what was shot but I heard stories about it. TD Well, you didn't have to do any nudity, right? JH I have a scene where my girlfriend and I are in the bedroom, but there's no nudity. It's a very short, short clip. Jason pans past the doorway and there's supposed to be just a clip of his POV seeing us. TD I ask because nudity has pretty much been a staple of the Jason movies. JH Yeah, I'm afraid they still kept that. I mean, it's not really something that personally in my life I really respect, but I can't do anything about it. All I can do is in my own career try and make the decision that, no, I don't want to do it. I know people were hired for nudity, and there's a few scenes that definitely follow that line. So I didn't really enjoy that part of it and I'm glad that it never had to go any farther than it did. Nudity is just not my thing. There's a lot of unnecessary nudity in movies today. I understand that that's a selling point for them, and I know that they're going to use it. Doesn't mean I have to like it, though. And it doesn't mean that I have to do it, so I'm not going to do it. But yeah, you'll see nudity in it, and at the same time, I don't know what it will be rated, but I'm sure they're going to keep it as close to that borderline as they can without losing more ticket sales, you know? TD What about accidents? Did anyone get hurt on the set? I know Robert has been stabbed several times. JH Yeah, he was telling me little stories about how he's been stabbed. I didn't hear about too many accidents on this set. Nothing serious. Probably just little things like, "Oh, I slipped and fell." Then, of course, the stunt guys are always getting bruised up. TD So is there any point where Freddy and Jason turn on each other and start fighting each other? JH Yeah, eventually somehow this group of kids manages to make Jason realize what's going on, and it's definitely not the easiest thing in the world because he just wants to kill everyone and everything, and Freddy doesn't care who gets killed as long as he gets the power.  So, eventually they managed to turn these two guys against each other and then, basically, all hell breaks loose.   TD Now, Wes Craven was credited as a writer. Has he been on the set? JH I never saw him. He's credited for writing a lot now; I mean, just his name sells a lot of things but I'm sure that he definitely had something to do with the writing because it all ties into all the old ones. There's some flashbacks to older ones. So there will be original footage from all the old ones, but I believe they're going to remaster it. TD Now, Sean Cunningham was Jason's mentor. Was he involved at all?   JH I couldn't tell you. I mean, perhaps in some roundabout way, but all I really get to see is what's on set. I have no idea as to who's writing. TD Did they film different endings? JH I'm sure. I know they filmed it, and they also asked us when we did the table read, "What do you guys think?" TD Oh, they actually asked your input? JH So, we were like, "Well, you know, this one feels kind of cool. But what if this happened, or what if that?" TD So you're still not going to tell me who wins, Freddy or Jason, huh? JH That would totally wreck the film. I don't want to tell you! Copyright 2003 PhanMedia, Inc.