Interview with Alexandre Aja

"A fairy tale can work as a psychological tool that helps us face our monsters"

[interview extracted from the Festival Diary of October 12th and 13th, 2024]

El cineasta francès torna a Sitges per presentar la seva nova pel·lícula, Nunca te sueltes (Never Let Go), i recollir el Premi Màquina del Temps – Per Maria Adell Carmona

The French filmmaker returns to Sitges to present his new film, Never Let Go, and to receive the Màquina del Temps Award – By María Adell Carmona

It’s been just over two decades since Alexandre Aja revolutionized the Festival with his second film, High Tension, which won multiple awards at the 2003 edition. Since then, Aja has become an essential name in contemporary horror. He has directed The Hills Have Eyes, Mirrors, Piranha 3D, Crawl, and written P2 and Maniac. The director will receive the well-deserved Màquina del Temps Award and present his new film starring Halle Berry.

You've had a career of more than twenty years in genre cinema. Where does your love for fantasy and horror come from?

The first memory I have of seeing something terrifying, which gave me nightmares as a child, is the image of the witch from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. I also remember accidentally walking into a room where older kids were watching Raiders of the Lost Ark, right in the scene where the Nazis start melting. But the first truly terrifying impact came a bit later, around six or seven years old, when I watched The Shining, probably too early. I remember being petrified in front of the television, unable to turn off the video player, hypnotized by the screen. I think I was just a very sensitive and imaginative kid, and the combination of those images with my own fantasies brought me here. It's as if, forty years later, I needed to exorcize those images and nightmares by making films.

Your debut was Furia, but High Tension gave you international recognition. What are your memories of it twenty years later?

Furia didn’t do well at the box office, so it was tough to get High Tension off the ground. Back then, genre films weren’t really being made in France, and our goal was to make a return to ‘70s cinema, very B-movie, very campy, but also scary. High Tension, which I co-wrote with my friend and collaborator Grégory Levasseur, was a love letter to Wes Craven, John Carpenter, Tobe Hooper... all those directors who influenced me so much. We made it with that spirit, without other expectations, thinking it would be a small project. Everything changed once it started screening at festivals like Toronto or Sundance, but especially here, at Sitges. High Tension is the movie that started my life as a filmmaker. I don’t quite remember the projection here; my memory is a bit hazy, but I do recall realizing right away that we had somehow connected with many people who, like us, wanted that seventies style to return to cinema. High Tension is the film that started my life as a filmmaker and allowed me to cross the ocean to work in the United States with people I have always admired, like Wes Craven and Sam Raimi.

You've been grouped with the New French Extremity. What do you think of this label two decades later?

I feel connected to all those filmmakers because they are my friends; I know them personally, and we share the same passion for the genre. Pascal Laugier, Xavier Gens, myself… we all come from the same place, from reading magazines like Mad Movies and wondering why we couldn’t tell stories like those in France. However, the release date of my first films is a bit earlier than those associated with that label. When we were preparing High Tension, we were all watching what was happening in Spain, what Filmax was doing with the Fantastic Factory, and filmmakers like Jaume Balagueró or Paco Plaza. In fact, I remember that when I was filming Furia, Jaume was filming The Nameless, and later he was the one who presented me with the award at Sitges for High Tension. Deep down, I think what happened was a kind of alignment or temporal connection among filmmakers in different countries who were all interested in making the same type of cinema. Eli Roth, James Wan, Zack Snyder, Rob Zombie… all these filmmakers, who were grouped under the name 'Splat Pack,' didn’t know each other, but we had the same idea: to bring back the hardcore American style of the seventies to the big screen. I believe that the success of High Tension opened the door for more genre films to be made in France; it became an economic model that demonstrated a horror film could be profitable, sell internationally, to TV channels, and so on.

You’ve done remakes of canonical horror films, like Mirrors and The Hills Have Eyes. How do you approach these projects?

In the case of The Hills Have Eyes, what we did was carry out a reimagining of the original film, imagining the backstory of the story. Anyway, since we made the movie together with Wes Craven, I feel as if the film is also his, and I think that, in fact, he himself preferred this version to the original. I believe that when you choose a story to remake, the first thing you need to understand is why it was so good in the first place. You have to go back to what you felt when you first saw it and protect those emotions, protect what works. Sometimes, when a remake doesn’t quite work, it’s because the person responsible tries to do something very different without understanding why, instead of simply embracing and incorporating what made the original film so good.

You’ve worked with Wes Craven and Sam Raimi produced Crawl and the newly announced sequel.

Making Crawl with Sam was an incredible experience because he was the first person I met when I arrived in Los Angeles twenty years ago. At that time, and in a very strange way, I had to choose between working with Wes or working with Sam. In the end, I ended up writing a letter to Sam telling him that I was going to do The Hills Have Eyes because it was what I truly felt I wanted to do. He responded and was incredibly kind and understanding, and it took us fourteen years to finally collaborate on this film, which has been an incredible adventure but also very challenging because shooting in water is very tough—something I already knew from filming Piranha 3D. Despite everything, Crawl is exactly the movie I wanted to make, and we had such a great time working on it, and the audience response was so positive that we immediately started thinking about a sequel. Now it seems that Paramount is interested in diving back into the water, so we’ll see what happens.

Finally, can you tell us about your new film, Never Let Go?

It's a post-apocalyptic thriller in the vein of A Quiet Place and Bird Box, although it actually takes a very different path, with greater psychological depth and a nightmarish tone. I define it as a very dark fairy tale, in the sense that a fairy tale doesn’t have to be just a fiction; it can also serve as a psychological tool to help us face our monsters.

Listen here the Press Conference of Alexandre Aja in Sitges2024