Sarah Michelle Gellar

It’s An Article Version Of Romanticmovies.about.com Interview :

I’ve chased Sarah Michelle Gellar all around the world. Interviewed her in Japan, Australia, Canada, Los Angeles and now San Diego. Where next? I’m hoping Europe, actually. Humorously, I’ve never really asked her a single question about Buffy, the Vampire Slayer.

Despite a full passport, Gellar made her first ever appearance at San Diego’s Comic-Con (though I believe her husband, a huge comic book nut, has been there in the past) last week to promote The Grudge, the upcoming horror flick from producer Sam Raimi and writer/director Takashi Shimizu (the script was adapted from Shimizu’s earlier four Ju-On films by American scribe Stephen Susco). The trailer, a truly scary ass piece of work that makes viewers realize just how close they’re staying to the original Ju-On: The Grudge in particular, had the fans going bananas at Comic-Con in a way that the trailer for, say, the ghost horror show The Forgotten missed out on.

Reported in the press not long ago was the fact that the cast of Grudge headed back to Japan for re-shoots, new footage that Gellar admits she was more than happy to add.

"I saw a very rough cut about three weeks ago just to get us back in the idea because it wasn’t really re-shoots, it was more added scenes," Gellar admits. "It was adding a new element to it. It was an actor’s dream in that as an actor you’re like, ’Why am I here? What’s my backstory?’ - and no one cares about that. That’s an actor’s question. It’s like the old ’what’s my motivation?’ question. But what they actually did was give us a more extensive backstory, which I think always makes you root for people more. We also got to show a lot more of Tokyo, which was great - except that when we shot the film it was winter. Anyone been to Tokyo in the summer? It was minimum 100 degrees every day and 100% humidity in winter clothing. It was great to show more of the city, it didn’t feel very good to show more of the city."

Coming off years of a long-running television series, Gellar figured a movie schedule would be pretty a good way of coming down, but found out that shooting in Japan (where there’s no overtime, crews run until the show is done and actors aren’t treated with the same celebrity status they are here) wasn’t much easier than a full season of vampire ass-kicking.

Gellar’s got a Grudge

"It was very strenuous in a different way," Gellar recalls. "I kept thinking, ’Oh, it’s going to be a breeze. I’m going to walk through it,’ but the end sequence was so complicated and incredibly physical in a way I wasn’t used to without giving away too much. Also, it was also difficult - and I know this will sound lame - but to not look like Buffy. I had this running scene and they made me do it over and over and over again and I kept thinking I was messing up, but it was because I was running with my hands [up] and in a professional stance. They were like, ’Flap your arms more!’ They were trying to get me really tired hoping that as each take was going on. It took me awhile to catch on to what they were doing. So, in some ways it was much harder."

In Grudge, as opposed to being the one that can handle the ghost problem, Gellar plays a character who finds herself targeted by a relentless and furious spirit that offers no rational explanation of why it kills everything it comes in contact with. Instead of quickly consulting a book of magic or mail-ordering the right charm, Gellar finds herself up a spooky creek without a paddle.

"Definitely more the victim [in this one]," Gellar admits. "For me, one of the reasons I signed on was because I wouldn’t categorize it as your typical horror film. With American horror films, you do automatically think of large-breasted girls running in the woods in the wrong direction - me in I Know What You Did Last Summer is a perfect example. But Japanese films in that genre are based in such a reality. They’re more psychologically scary to me and so because of that, you face things so differently. Shimizu is so against your basic...not ’ploys,’ but your basic scare tactics. So, it’s not so much screaming as being frozen in absolute fear not being able to find your voice and that made it that much more interesting. The easy thing is, ’Oh my God - that’s something scary!’ - and scream. I think it was harder to think about what actually would happen if you saw a dead woman coming at you."

Returning to the Ju-On series is the little boy from the poster, Ryota Koyama, who returns to play Toshio in Grudge. Though Gellar was pumped for the picture, she believes Koyama may be ready to take a breather. "He’s a little kid who has been doing this movie since he was 5 and I’m not sure he still wants to be making this film," Gellar surmises. "Again, he didn’t speak any English, so I think it was harder for him than some of the adults because he’s still learning how to communicate. I didn’t work with him that much." As for what Gellar thought of Takako Fuji, the famed "Freddy Krueger" of the Ju-On movies who appears in The Grudge as well, she says, "I thought, ’Damn, that girl’s flexible!’"

When Japanese horror films have been remade in the past over here, western directors (Gore Verbinski on The Ring, Walter Salles on Dark Water, etc.) usually find themselves at the helm of the remakes. With Grudge however, Raimi and his Ghost House Pictures decided to let the man who had already taken his Ju-On franchise into four incarnations into a fifth and more westernized entry (there were the first two straight-to-video Ju-On movies followed by the first theatrical one - Ju-On: The Grudge and now Ju-On 2: The Grudge). A relatively young filmmaker, Takashi Shimizu speaks relatively little English, making it a little difficult - at first - for the American actors to work with him.

"Very difficult to make a lunch order," Gellar deadpans. "It’s funny. It’s not as challenging as you would think it might be. You’d think it would be difficult when you don’t have the words to rely on, but you wind up connecting on this different level. You look so intently. Sometimes you have a tendency when you’re talking to drift, but you have to [listen closely] because you really need to get the essence of what someone’s saying. You look at body language or the voices and because of that, it’s like a deeper connection. Raja Gosnell, who directed the two Scooby movies used to have this joke with me that my humor was so sardonic that he never knew if I was kidding or serious. Sometimes I would not tell him just to see if he could figure it out. After two weeks, I would say something totally dead-pan and Shimizu would start laughing. Not necessarily knowing what I was saying, but understanding that it was my way of making a joke. So, it was as complicated. I think what was more complicated than the English language versus Japanese was cultural differences. Americans are very gregarious. We touch people when we talk even if we don’t know them. We speak much more intimately. Japanese don’t do that. In the beginning, I remember it was constantly a struggle because he would want to know why Karen and Doug - Jason [Behr] and my character would always talk close together and touch more than the married couple. We tried to explain to him, ’That’s like America!’ But, he didn’t understand that and we’d have to constantly explain that - ’this is the American way.’ It was sort of like meeting halfway, so I think that was the bigger barrier." So, what else is different from one film to the next? "Everything is going to be heightened a little bit," Gellar continues. "Even just in general because obviously we use different lenses and different film stock, so it was also for very technical reasons. Also, just to change it from what people have seen."

SMG in The Grudge

One thing that remains unchanged, however, is one of the most notoriously fear-inducing sequences in the original. "The shower scene!" Gellar exclaims. "I’ll tell you - doing it, I was petrified. That was one of the things we re-shot. We re-shot it to make it a little scarier, because in American films, you can push a scene like that a little bit further. I kept asking to put Toshio in the tub and no one thought that was a good example."

While in Japan, Gellar was able to do some exploring here and there and, in fact, picked up some Japanese. Because of this, she was able to understand what was going on on the set when most of the other Americans didn’t as the Japanese crew and producers would talk freely in Japanese. It didn’t take long, however, for them to figure out that one of their stars was starting to learn a little of the language.

"They stopped talking around me real quick," Gellar admits with a coy smiles. "Actually, it was really funny because in the beginning they would say things and I would pick it up. There was this one very infamous day which hopefully will make the DVD because I did videotape the whole thing where we couldn’t find Shimizu. I shot a video called, Where in the World is Shimizu-san? I would go up to everyone and when I finally got to the producers, they were freaking out because I wasn’t supposed to know that they couldn’t find the director. First of all, it was kind of obvious. We’re all standing around twiddling our thumbs. I’m blonde, but not that blonde. But I understood that they really didn’t know where he was and nobody could find him. After that day, they started to move farther away so I couldn’t eavesdrop and find out when we were going to wrap or what time they were thinking of breaking for lunch or those things you never want actors to know. This trip when we went back, I was so jetlagged that I barely understood English when I got out there this trip. I was like, ’You guys! You don’t have to be secretive. I don’t know my own name right now.’ Last time we had two weeks to get acclimated, this time we had about a day." So, did she find him? "You have to wait for the DVD!" Gellar laughs.

Finally, as this is Comic-Con, the question of whether Sam Raimi himself ever showed up on set is one many a fan would be interested in hearing about. "No, he was so busy with this very small movie about a guy in a suit," Gellar - again - deadpans. "I heard they had a little booth around here. He was a little behind, but he’s taking a very active hand in the editing. He was the real reason we got to go back and he really helped fight for it. When I saw the movie and I’m telling you, I’m my worst critic in the world, I thought it was a really cool movie. I would’ve been happy if it came out the way it did, yes. I would’ve said, ’Wow!’ I was genuinely happy. But getting to do these added scenes was really just icing."