 |
| Gore Verbinski |
MAGAZINE
Published February 16,2017
http://magazinereaders.blogspot.com/
A conversation starter for bored dinner party guests, “nominative
determinism” is the theory that someone’s name destined them for
whatever they ended up doing with their lives.
Think Bulgarian hurdler Vania Stambolova, BBC weather forecaster Sara
Blizzard, singer Bill Medley or lavatory impresario Thomas Crapper.
So there was a certain inevitability in Oscar-winning American
filmmaker Gore Verbinski becoming a horror director — although the big
mystery is why he seemed to give it up when he’d only just got started.
The 52-year-old made his name in 2002 with “The Ring,” a remake of
Japanese classic “Ringu,” scaring the wits out of a generation of fans
with his spooky tale of a cursed videotape that kills anyone who sees it
after a week.
It became one of the highest-grossing supernatural horror movies of
all time, recouping more than five times its $48 million budget and
spawning a sub-genre of American remakes of “J-Horror” classics such as
“The Grudge” and “Dark Water.”
Yet Verbinski stepped quietly away, letting other directors take over
two poorly-received sequels and turning with varying degrees of success
to straight drama, a western, an animated film and three “Pirates of
the Caribbean” installments.
“A Cure for Wellness” sees the director reaffirm his horror chops
with an elusive genre-bender that might best be described as a cross
between Martin Scorsese’s “Shutter Island” and Milos Forman’s “One Flew
Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
“I’m always developing four or five things. They all go on the back
burner and I go ‘I have to tell this story now.’ There’s no kind of
career path,” he told AFP, attempting to explain the 15-year hiatus
between horror films.
‘NIGHTMARE’
Shot over seven months mostly in Germany, “Wellness” stars Dane
DeHaan (“The Amazing Spider-Man 2″) as an ambitious stockbroker sent by
his firm to a remote Alpine medical spa where the patients are
supposedly receiving a “miracle” cure but seem to be getting sicker.
Verbinski transformed the derelict Beelitz-Heilstaetten military
hospital outside Berlin into a sterile yet Gothic spa in which you might
find oligarchs and captains of industry receiving quack cures side by
side.
He wanted it to be the kind of place where “you would, maybe deep in
the steam room, bump into Dick Cheney with a towel wrapped around him,”
the director said.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment