BOP Interview:
Daniel Radcliffe, Juno Temple and Joe Hill
By Ryan Mazie
November 3, 2014
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Daniel Radcliffe stars as an outsider, Ig, who wakes up one morning with horns sprouting from his temples. Peculiarly, no one seems to pay much attention to the protruding spikes, yet strangely, everyone who he comes in contact with can’t help but share their deepest, nastiest secrets. Ig uses his newfound burden of discovering the darkest part in everyone to solve who murdered his childhood girlfriend (an ethereal Juno Temple).
On a press tour for the simultaneous VOD/iTunes/theatrical Halloween release date, I had the chance to sit with the stars Daniel Radcliffe and Juno Temple alongside author Joe Hill (son of Stephen King) to talk about creating their characters, the core of the story, driving with snakes, and why horns make the perfect headwear.
At the core of Horns, there’s such a wonderful story, but then you add the horns and the fantastical elements to it. How much more intriguing did that make this film to you if that had not been there? Would you still have wanted to do this story?
Daniel Radcliffe: You made a great point. Without all of the amazing symbolic, visual elements to it, it’s a great story. It’s a love story. It’s an idealized story of young lovers who grew up and got to be together, but then they fell away, which is in of itself a compelling enough story. I think when you add the elements of the horns and the powers that the horns give him, that brings an extra visual element of excitement, but to me I’ve always enjoyed magical realism and that’s how I viewed this script originally as being the whole world grounded in a very deep reality with this one extraordinary, insane thing happening in the middle of it.
Juno Temple: I agree. As my character is in the [back]story, she is never around the horns. She never meets the horns. But I think the love story to me was so important in this weird Romeo and Juliet way. They are never going to be together and you know that from the beginning of the film, but my God, you wish they ended up together even though it’s not possible. So the horns to me added this element of, “Yeah, he’s going to figure out what happened to her now,” so it’s almost like this blessing that gets added onto this story that is a fantastical love story. And if the characters didn’t meet the fate they did, this could be a love story forever and that is a really great part of the script and such a great base for this magical realism.
Joe Hill: It is one of those fairytale like stories where you get the wish you wished for and it turns out to be a curse. There is this moment when he says, “I want to know everything. I want to know every dirty secret, because it will make it easier to hate you.” And as a result he does learn every dirty secret about everyone around him and it becomes this incredibly painful thing and pitches him deep into a private hell. He eventually gets a confession and the unexpected truth.
Joe, it sounds like you really enjoyed how the film turned out. How involved were you in bringing your novel to the screen? Do you feel as if it stayed close to your initial vision?
JH: I think that it is tremendously close to the book in the most important way: that it is true to the spirit of the characters. It’s also very true to the plot mechanics. There are a lot of scenes right from the book in the film. But the most important thing for me is that I hoped that the characters would seem like the ones in the book and I think Dan and Juno and everyone brought so much heart and ability to it that they really did bring those characters to life in a special way.
There are really only two ways to screw up a film when adapting it from a book. You can totally forget the source material and run off and do a completely different story and it’s like, “Why did they even bother adapting something in the first place?” Or you can also be so faithful to the source material that you wind up with something that’s completely dead on screen. It just plods along. For a work of art to succeed it needs to dance, not plod. And I think they did a terrific adaptation. It hits all the right notes without bogging it down and has a huge overarching range with a very light touch.
Daniel, what was it like the first time you put on the horns and saw yourself in the mirror? How long did it take before they looked normal?
DR: They looked really normal, really quickly. That was what was remarkable about them. Whenever you see a line in the script that the character has horns, in my imagination it sounds fantastic, but how will they actually look? The first time I saw them on it was kind of a combination of relief, because they looked fantastic, and excitement. When you have something stuck to your head it can go either way – it has the potential to look silly, but here it really doesn’t.
The word “organic” is one of my most hated, overused words. But they do. They look like they are made from organic material and are coming from my head. They only took about 20 minutes to put on. They are very light.
JH: I tried the horns on [when visiting the set]. And they go so well with almost anything. But they accessorize nicely with formal wear (laughs).
DR: If this was a longer story and went into the mundane-ness of life, we thought they could be used as a dry-cleaning rack and coat hangers and things like that. They are a very functional piece of headwear.
JT: You can propose with them and put a ring on the end.
DR: Put a ring on it! There you go (laughs).
Is there anything that you saw in the script that scared you with, “How am I going to pull this off?” or “I don’t know how I am going to do this, but it will be fun to try?”
DR: Most of it I think (laughs).
JT: The whole thing. But I think that goes for every actor in a film. It wasn’t a walk in the park for any of the characters. Each one had their challenges and some that were really dark and made you feel uncomfortable, but I think that’s the joy of being an actor – challenging yourself. It should never be easy I don’t think. And that’s something that the director Alexandre Aja helped us come to. The blessing of having a wonderful director who is patient with you as an actor and loves actors will push you to a limit that you didn’t even know you had, but when it’s over, he is very gentle and helps you calm down.
DR: Yeah. I think actors are lucky to have a job, which becomes more fun as it becomes more challenging. We can do a day of me shooting me shutting doors and opening stuff, and it would be the easiest day of my life, but it wouldn’t be any fun (laughs). I think particularly the break-up scene, it isn’t so much, “Will I be able to do that,” but for me I go, “We can’t not do that right. It has to be perfect.” The breakup scene in the diner is replayed several times through different perspectives and is a real key element in the film. But that’s a great time when you have a director like Alexandre and a screen partner like Juno where you can work off each other.
How reliant were you on Alex for the tone of this? There are scenes that are silly and fun and other stuff that is very serious and you really nail it.
JH: One thing that I find interesting about Alexandre is that he’s made a lot of really disturbing films full of upsetting sequences, but he is a real sweetheart who gave a really lush, gentle romantic arc to this story. And with the scenes in this film, the man’s romanticism comes through – it glows. There is a real affection for the characters, even when they are admitting some really, ugly painful things. There is a feeling that these people are cared for. The storyteller has an emotional attachment to them.
DR: I really much relied on Alexandre for that, because that was his biggest challenge on this film. It’s a thing that’s very nice as an actor to go, “I’ll just follow your lead and you tell me what you want and I’m guided by you.” And also when you have such trust in a director, there was never a moment when he’d say something that I’d disagree when something should be played funny or dark.
JT: The scene with us in the tree house, we were listening to David Bowie and he played it super loud so we were actually having a great time as you should in a moment like that. And for me with the scene in the forest, it was a polar opposite situation where it is incredibly freezing, wet, and dark, and you’re in the thralls of nature, which no one can control. It was interesting, because I felt like Alexandre was more separate from me in that scene… it felt much more lonely, which really helped me.
I did feel lonely and frightened, which was perfect as opposed to the night when we were shooting in the tree house and we were told to just have a great time. It really helps you as an actor to be put into a situation that you are taken out of in everyday life. I think a director is so lucky and so inspiring when they get the opportunity to see that they inspire everyone around them. It’s a great thing.
Another supporting character in this film is the old AMC Gremlin you drive, Daniel. Is it your car of choice now?
DR: It would be. I love that car (laughs). But yeah – my main focus for all of the driving scenes was to not break the car or crash into anything. Hitting a mark in a car is a horrible thing, especially if you aren’t good at it, because you know all the other men on set drive so literally everyone is going, “Can I just do this, please?” (laughs). It’s not my favorite, but I’m taking my test at the end of the month.
And one of my favorite moments from any movie that I’ve ever done… is when I drive the car with the snake around my neck.... But I couldn’t actually drive with a snake around my neck, because the snake latches onto the gear stick and the steering wheel. So we had someone in the back of the car who would put the snake around my neck before I got out, so they had to hide down in the back of the car with a python. Brad, our main snake handler, had a wooden leg, so it was hard for him to get into the back of the car so the job got delegated to someone else and I remember him getting into the back of the car with the snake and I turned around to him and was like, “Just so you know I don’t have a license. I don’t drive.” And he was like, “It’s fine, I never handled snakes before” (laughs). It’s just one of those moments that like in any other industry probably wouldn’t happen, but it’s great. It’s moments like that that make the film industry the best industry to work in, in the world.
You both started acting at an early age. Do you remember when you first started to consciously bring craft to your work as actors and finding your way?
JT: I remember being given a piece of advice when I was doing Atonement by Joe Wright. There was a scene where I had to weep. Hysterically weep. And I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t cry. Couldn’t cry. And then I sat in the corner and all of a sudden my 16-year-old, dark teenage self found everything inside of her to get catatonically upset about and I wept and wept and couldn’t stop. After we cut, two and a half hours later, I was still weeping hysterically. Joe said to me, “You really need to learn to understand your character and get upset about what the character is upset about so you don’t have to draw from your own sadness so that you wreck your mind the rest of the day.” Definitely, those things should be present, but that was something I really learned and enjoy now… getting in the character’s head and not needing to force cry. It becomes much more fluid and that’s a craft thing.
DR: I think it was very gradual for me through different stages and it is still going on.
JT: It’s always going on.
DR: It’s constant learning. I think 14 was the age when I thought, “I really want to have a go at this and I really want to do this for the rest of my life.”
JT: Me too.
DR: I think you’re old enough to know that by then. I don’t think I got any solid, technical grounding until I was preparing for Kill Your Darlings, when I was taught how to breakdown a script and very basic stuff like, “What does your character want out of the scene? What is your character trying to do to the other characters when you say that line?” It’s all very basic, but I never learned it before, so I found that stuff really helpful going forward over the last few years.
JT: But it is a constant learning process. That’s the joy of what we do. You’ll never be the best that you can be. You’ll never get an A. You can always keep learning and being open and the best research that you can do is listen and learn. It’s like being a sponge for life, because you never know when you’re going to use it.