Colin Farrell Interview For ‘Fright Night’

Senior Charlie Brewster (Anton Yelchin) finally has it all going on: he’s running with the popular crowd and dating the most coveted girl in his high school, Amy (Imogen Poots). In fact, he’s so cool he’s even dissing his best friend. But trouble arrives when Jerry (Colin Farrell) moves in next door. He seems like a great guy at first, but there’s something not quite right—but everyone, including Charlie’s mom (Toni Collette), doesn’t notice. After observing some very strange activity, Charlie comes to an unmistakable conclusion: Jerry is a vampire preying on the neighborhood. Unable to convince anyone, Charlie has to find a way to get rid of the monster himself in this Craig Gillespie-helmed revamp of the comedy-horror classic.  ‘Fright Night’ hits cinemas August 19th in the US, and September 2nd in the UK.

As a fan of the original film, were you hesitant about taking this role on?

Colin Farrell: My initial reaction to it was, ‘Oh no, Hollywood unoriginality strikes again!’ Craig Gillespie said, ‘I’m going to end my career. Why don’t you join me?’ And I said, ‘But, I’ve tried to end mine so many times.’ (Laughs) I was really worried, well not really worried, that’s an exaggeration, but I was kind of nonplussed about the notion of being involved in a remake, number one, because guess what? The ego doesn’t want to be involved in remakes because then people go, ‘Remakes? That’s unoriginal, and that’s uncool.’ I don’t want to be as easy a target, I like to make myself as unobvious a target as possible. And then a remake of something that I knew was as loved and held in such nostalgic esteem. When I saw it for the first time, when I was 10, 11 or 12, I loved it. I’ve seen it anywhere between 10 and 20 times. Then I read the script and from page 1 until the end, it was just a really fun read. I was looking to do something a little bit lighter than the dramatic films that I’d done, whether it was ‘Triage,’ ‘Ondine,’ ‘In Bruges,’ or ‘Pride and Glory.’ They were so much fun, but I wanted to go and have a bit of crack, and not be constrained by an emotional or psychological background, or any of those things. I knew I was being thought of for Jerry, so when I read it I was like, ‘God, it’s so much fun.’ And, I knew Craig Gillespie was directing it, and I’d seen ‘Lars and the Real Girl,‘ so I thought he was a really cool choice for this film. It all fell on who the director was. It was dangerous to visit this material, I loved the original. I do hope those who liked the original like this film, I really do.

Are you normally a fan of this genre?

Colin Farrell: I’ve loved vampire films, since I was young, with ‘The Lost Boys,’ Kathryn Bigelow’s ‘Near Dark’ and ‘Fright Night’ itself, along with others, like many incarnations of the Dracula myth. I was seeped in the lore already, that made the idea of playing a vampire really attractive to me as a fan – that’s how I approached it. Sometimes when you read them as an actor, you approach them just as a human being, not as an actor, but just as a man or a woman, and you see how the piece affects you. With this I really approached as a fan of film, and as a fan of this particular film. It was doubly hard to win me over because I was very dubious as to how wise it may be to revisit material that a lot of people felt was sacrosanct.

What did you come up with as Jerry’s back-story?

Colin Farrell: When you’re human, you get in a fight at night, or even in the workplace it might seem that passive competition is everywhere and people are one-upping each other, and there’s a whole load of human emotions. But as this guy’s a vampire, he seems to kind of have this disdainful opinion of human beings and their gross kind of passivity and how they move through life, and the way they fall into these very obvious structures. Jerry was just kind of bored, I think, just bored with being 400 years old. It kind of got funky because you try and write a back-story for a character like Jerry and it’s like 400 years. Okay, he was born in the Mediterranean in 1643, and then he went to France when? When did he go up to the north to Romania? Maybe he met with some bards there and he was drinking in the taverns with goblets. Which boat did he take to America? When did he go to America first and how many languages does he speak? And so on. His accent even, what was his accent? He’s 400 years old, what kind of accent does this guy have? He’s from f*cking Macedonia, do you know what I mean? You can really do a number on yourself. So there was one take where I got all of that in there. It was too much!

We messed around with the back-story, it just kind of took us to a place where he probably was, at this stage, a little bit bored and so he was pushing the envelope, which explains certain behaviours that I found it hard to rationalize, for example the motorbike, the blowing up of the house, the drawing of attention. But then his preternatural skill would allow him to get out of any jam – even if the f*cking National Guard descends. He could be up in the air and you know sitting in a cave in Venezuela in the space of a couple of hours. It’s really unbound, you’re really unbound by this modern, cotillion logic that we all live in. But it did allow us to go, ‘This guy is pretty bored with the tedium of life.’ He really sees Charlie as a challenge. He’s enjoying the game, he’s like a cat with a ball of wool, more so than the initial character.

What are the similarities and differences between the new Jerry Dandrige and the old one?

Colin Farrell: They both need blood to survive. The old Jerry Dandrige, as I remember him from when I was 11 or 12, was incredibly debonair, he had a certain dignity to him, felt like an intellectual, felt incredibly cultured and was suave. My guy was none of those things, he felt more like a social parasite. He felt like somebody who really did enjoy the threat that he posed to those around him, if he exposed himself to those around him, or allowed those around him to know who he was. My guy would be nothing without the fear that he could instil in people. He felt like he was somebody that treated humans like a cat treats a ball of wool, as not just a source of sustenance, but as playthings – he was brutal! I got the chance to play a brutal vampire, who wasn’t really concerned with anything. He wasn’t concerned with love, he had no fear and he had no human virtues that would be recognized. He was just somebody who travelled the world for 400 years and possibly got tired of his own company, but was violent and brutal, and very much had the MO of a serial killer.

How much fun was it to do the scene with Chris Sarandon?

Colin Farrell: Loads of fun! I mean it was just a cool benediction, at least that’s the way I took it, his appearance on the set. It was really nice that he had read the script and he liked the script. He thought that Marti Noxon did a really good job of taking it a new direction, because his experience, Chris, I know from talking to him on the original ‘Fright Night,’ was something that he still holds very dear to himself. He’s still in touch with the original actors from it, he still goes to ‘Fright Night’ festivals. It’s played a very big part in his life, so he had a vested interest in what we were going to do.

With the comedy in ‘Horrible Bosses,’ being menacing in this, and doing the action thing in ‘Total Recall,’ what is it that interests you now? Your career is so eclectic.

Colin Farrell: It’s that eclecticism. Genuinely it’s really fun to experience, even in an imaginary way or a pseudo-structure, other people’s lives. Whether it’s historical figures or everyday folks that we know and encounter in our workplaces, or whether it’s somebody like a vampire or someone like a Doug Quaid character (his character in ‘Total Recall‘), it’s just a lot of fun to mix it up. I really don’t want to repeat myself, not so much because I want to keep people guessing and sh*t, but because I want to keep myself guessing. It offers up, this job that I do, offers up such an opportunity to experience through the imagination and the physical body as an instrument, different realities a little bit. At the end of the day I get to go home to a hotel room, don’t get me wrong, I’m not going and experiencing the realities of hardship that sometimes my characters are living in – I’m not saying that, I’m very cautious about that. But you do get to ask questions and you do get to put yourself in certain situations that even mentally that you wouldn’t usually, and that’s loads of fun!