An Interview
with Erica Leerhsen and Jonathan Tucker
Erica
Leerhsen made her feature film debut as the sexy siren in the
highly anticipated sequel Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2. She
recently appeared in the role of "Connie" in Woody Allen's
film Anything Else opposite Allen, Christina Ricci, Jason Biggs
and Danny DeVito. Erica now plays the beautiful, free-spirited
hitchhiker –Pepper in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Jonathan
Tucker, first plunged into Fox Searchlight's The Deep End opposite
Tilda Swinton. Tucker portrayed Swinton's sensitive teenage son
in the thriller about a devout mother who instinctively reacts
to cover-up a death in an attempt to avoid her son's implications.
In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Tucker plays Morgan, an acerbic,
cerebral college student and self-professed expert on all knowledge
that is trivial and meaningless. I recently caught up with both
actors while in NYC promoting their film and here is what they
had to say about doing a classic remake.
How
was it working with R. Lee Ermey?
 Erica
Leerhsen: He just kind of came on set and I hated him
at first. He was such an obnoxious character, so sadistic. He
was improvising all this stuff and it was so offensive and inappropriate.
We were sort of laughing, but then we felt so dirty for laughing
at him and that’s the part he plays in the movie. Then I
got to know him as a person and he was the most wonderful, sweetest
guy in the world, but I was glad he did that to me and I learned
a lesson as an actor. I mean, we all do that, we lend ourselves
to our characters when we first meet each other. It was very easy
to act with him.
Jonathan Tucker: I
think Ermey taught us that you come up to a set for like two weeks
and steal the show. The guy did such an amazing job. He just carved
out his character so vigorously and I was like “Wow, this
guy is great!”
So did he improvise
the “cop a feel” line?
Jonathan Tucker:
Yeah, almost everything he’s done in there is improvised.
Erica Leerhsen:
I thought that was just his personality until I got to know him.
I think that’s what you should do when you come on set,
it’s not your job to be friends with everybody, and it’s
your job to get your character out there.
How was your relationship
with the guy who played Leatherface on set?
Jonathan Tucker:
The guy was super “method” to the point of “Yo,
you can't drop me to the ground with my handcuffs on, my wrists
are going to break”. You know, we got 9 more takes of this
pal! We’d be at lunch and he’d sit and squeal because
he was so much in character. And it looks great, he does a great
job, I had no idea how important it was.
Erica Leerhsen:
Yeah and he’s such a huge guy and he was asked to do all
of his own stunts, jumping off things with all that stuff on him.
It’s not exactly the safest thing for anyone to be doing.
It took a toll and we were dealing with someone who was exhausted,
who didn’t have the energy to make it safe for you all the
time. I felt like I had to defend my own life when I was in a
scene with him. Like if I didn’t get that barrel down in
one scene, he was not stopping.
Jonathan Tucker:
She‘s not kidding.
Erica Leerhsen:
And that barrel weighted 80 pounds and it was thrown at him at
the last minute. I’m not that strong and I had to constantly
pick it up and throw it back. Before every take I’d hear
the chainsaw roar and I was like, “Ok I’m going to
die.”
So I guess the movie
was more taxing for you than Blair Witch 2?
Erica Leerhsen:
Yes, much more taxing because the character in that movie was
completely in denial about what was going on. That’s why
we have denial, so we don’t have to feel beat up by life
so much in a way. In this movie, I think the hardest thing for
all of us is that the first thing that happens in front of our
face, that terrible thing, was having to face the worst trauma
and that’s just the beginning of what we have to face.
 How
coarse did you get screaming all the time?
Erica Leerhsen:
So coarse. There’s one shot where there was such a highly
technical move in the van, one of my favorite scenes in the movie,
and we had to react to that for like 40 or 50 times and by that
point you can’t even scream anymore. It was the third day
of shooting and Jessica and I both lost our voices because we
had to scream over and over and over and at any moment they can
get the camera right and it would be in the movie, that’s
your reaction. So it had to be as intense every single time. It
was really hard.
Did you find yourself
judging your characters’ behavior based on the people that
you are?
Erica Leerhsen:
I kept trying to be stronger and Marcus kept reminding me that
my role wouldn’t stand up to Jessica, wouldn’t question
her and would be very kind of insecure and very sweet. I wanted
her to be a tough ass; she definitely was the opposite of that.
Jonathan Tucker:
I feel the first thing you do when you come to a character is
to ask yourself how his life is, how is it not me and how do I
shift accordingly?
Was it really that
hot and sweaty in Texas?
Jonathan Tucker:
I was miserable.
Erica Leerhsen:
It was about 130 degrees inside the van.
Jonathan Tucker:
The rest of the movie we were kind of matching how sweaty we were
in the van because we set this level of sweat that was very high.
So you guys got sprayed
a lot I assume?
Erica Leerhsen:
Yeah, a lot of oil and a lot of spray.
 Anybody
got sick? I mean, it’s raining, you’re sprayed, and
it’s hot…
Erica Leerhsen:
I got sick by the end. I was so nauseous constantly, I couldn’t
eat. I don’t know if I ate something weird, but I was so
sick and it took me like a month to recover from it.
Jonathan Tucker:
We could be doing a lot of other jobs though like laying bricks
or scraping concrete, so we’re very fortunate. It was hot
in the van, but we were happy to be in this movie. Really, it
was such a great experience with a fantastic team behind it. I
feel that we really took the horror genre and the confines of
it and elevated it a little bit by tackling the story like we
would any other drama or any independent film or any other movie.
Did both of you see
the original film?
Erica Leerhsen:
I saw it right before my first audition.
Jonathan Tucker:
I saw it afterwards…I saw it like two months ago.
Did it play into you
wanting to do the remake?
Erica Leerhsen:
Yes, when I thought Texas Chainsaw, I thought more of the sequels,
I thought it was going to be more of a slasher, gore movie, but
when I watched it, it was such an intelligent psychological thriller.
I loved the way it used real dead bodies and that’s so much
scarier than showing some fake prosthetic thing. I loved it and
saw why it had such a place in film history.
Jonathan Tucker:
I wasn’t into it. When I got the script, I read the title
“The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and I said to myself,
you’ve got to be kidding me. And then they said just look
at the sides, I read them and said, “Wow, this is really
interesting, this is high stakes, this is real, this is good.”
Then they said Michael Bay was doing it and this guy Marcus Nispel
is an amazing director and we’re going to put a great cast
together as if it wasn’t a horror movie. I said, “Well,
all right.”
Erica Leerhsen:
It’s amazing when we all saw Marcus’ reel we were
like, “I want to be in that.” We didn’t even
see an acting scene, we saw images from videos and commercials.
We saw place and we just wanted to go there.
Jonathan Tucker:
Marcus sees the world differently. It’s fortunate that we
have cameras to be able to capture that. Some people express in
poems, writing, acting, but he sees the world differently, puts
a camera behind his cornea and says this is the world and it’s
awesome to be included in that.
 Erica,
how did you feel about the reaction to “Blair Witch 2”?
Erica Leerhsen:
At the time, it was such a rollercoaster. I had gone from waiting
tables to being a lead in a movie and then I did all the press.
It was a great experience for me actually. I keep saying that
there’s no question that could ever upset me, because it
was the ultimate hazing process. I didn’t enjoy it at the
time, but now I really value it and it made me into a stronger
person. The people say something, but it’s not you, it’s
a movie you were in, but it’s not personal. It was really
a great learning experience.
Would people criticize
the movie at the junkets?
Erica Leerhsen:
Oh yeah, people would say, “I really don’t understand
how it relates to the original” and things like that. And
I was like, “I didn’t write it ok! I’m just
in it!” I did my character.
Jonathan Tucker:
She’ll make up for that with the box office returns of “Texas
Chainsaw Massacre”.
Erica Leerhsen:
But it was great, Joe Berlinger is such a fascinating filmmaker
and I loved working with him. I also really liked my character;
I thought she was really cool. And I impressed myself because
I had never been in a movie before, I had only been in student
films and it was cool for me to see that I could do a whole full
arc of a character. But the negative reactions were tough. It
was a rough time.
Have you seen any
of the other horror films that came out this year? Do you feel
that the genre is back?
Jonathan Tucker:
I’m not a horror guy, it’s not my thing, but I respect
it a lot. I know how hard it is to make, especially to make good.
I haven’t seen any of them but I’ve seen that they’ve
done very well financially and that’s great. I think from
the reactions we got so far, we made a successful one, maybe even
more successful than the ones that came out in the past few years.
 What
were the hardest scenes for you guys to film?
Jonathan Tucker:
I think all scenes in a horror movie are hard places to go where
you have to bring out real fear. But with the running with the
handcuffs, I was like, “How am I going to do that truthfully?”
Let’s see how far my character has been beaten up, let’s
see, he has this gash in the back. So how is your body going to
fall and how much should he be able to do? And then I have Marcus
telling me “Push the couch” and I’m like “I
can’t, I’ve been lying for like 10 minutes, she’s
holding me up, I can’t now get up and push the couch on
him”. So how are you going to make that as truthful as you
can within that realm? That was hard for me.
Erica Leerhsen:
You had to make your own safety calls a lot of the time. It’s
not every day that you have to deal with a chainsaw that has sparks
coming out of it that is getting this close to your face. Of course,
it always gets closer than you planned. You have to make that
call. That was the hardest thing for me; you have to be emotionally
in the scene, the state the character is in, but at the same time,
make sure that you wouldn’t get hurt. And that wasn’t
what the character was thinking, she’s thinking, “I
have to save my life”. So it was like bouncing those two
things and keeping it adreanalized. To have all that fear and
that adrenaline can be dangerous when you’re dealing with
that sort of stuff.
Do you do any quirky
on-set rituals to get into a scene or into character?
Erica Leerhsen:
I remember the day of the suicide, I was just like crying all
day, I was listening to Jeff Buckley, getting into my zone, staring
at the scenery and getting into the feeling of the whole of where
we were. What I loved about the set is that nobody gave me a hard
time. The producer walked right by me, I’m sobbing and he
didn’t even say, “Are you ok?” because he knew
that it was an intense scene. It was as if someone had died that
day.
Jonathan Tucker:
I’m like MR. Crew. I like buying gifts for everybody, and
I like buying beer at the end of the day. But in the same hand,
you can’t really care what they think about what’s
going on. If you gotta run around and spit on yourself or jump
through hoops, it doesn’t really matter, what matters is
what you see onscreen. Even though you become friends with people,
you can’t care about what they think. If you gotta do some
really awful stuff you just have to do it and get to that place
emotionally.
THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE
OPENS OCT 17
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