Hitch with Red #2

Last Updated on July 27, 2021

Arrow intro:
Last week,

we asked YOU the readers
to send in your questions for writer/director and AITH alumni
ERIC RED. Of
course Eric is the lad who gave birth to John Ryder in 1986 via his original
THE HITCHER screenplay to now
see him born again in 2007 via a remake which he also holds top
screenwriting credit on. So put your thumbs way up and hitch a bumpy & dangerous
ride with Mr. Red as he extensively answers your questions having to do with
John Ryder’s mystique, the two Hitcher films, Rutger Hauer/Sean Bean, his new movie 100 Feet,
the Near Dark sequel
and beyond!

“Last round! Then I can smoke this stogie!”

Chris asks: How did the idea for The Hitcher come about and how do you feel about today’s remake trend.

I’d always dug the Doors’ song “RIDERS ON THE STORM” and thought it would make a kick ass opening for a movie. It was the song’s image of the killer on the road with his thumb out, the music’s hypnotic pulse and the sound effects they used of the rain and thunder.

I mean, those guys The Doors were all USC film students so no wonder the song was cinematic! I moved to from New York City to Austin, Texas back in the early ’80’s and during the long drive through all those wide-open spaces with too much time on my hands, the script kind of wrote itself.

I did drive a cab down in Texas to support myself while writing the script and picked up a really creepy redneck on the highway who wouldn’t say a word and just stared at me, which gave me some good material for the opening before I kicked his ass out of the car without incident.

Interestingly, most of the real life hitchhiker killings I later researched were the reverse, with the driver killing the hitchhiker.

There’s nothing wrong with remaking a film if you reinvent it, like the remakes of “THE THING” and “THE FLY,” which are amazing full reimaginings, arguably better than the originals.

The filmmakers had strong unique visions for those remakes and totally changed it up for audiences at the time. As far as most current horror remakes, the filmmakers aren’t making any real attempt to reimagine the originals or put their own creative stamp on those films. The director John Huston said you should only remake bad films they didn’t get right the first time. I agree.

Jason Artiga asks: Is the grittiness of your writing an internal thing, because I feel you bring a certain degree of realism into your characters?

I always try to keep the characters realistic and have them behave in a truthful and believable manner in the horror situations. I never spoof or make fun of the genre because it takes the audience out of the movie. You need to commit to the reality of the story.

It all comes down to suspension of disbelief for the audience and making the audience believe what is happening up on the screen. In writing genre characters, like vampires, werewolves or ghosts, I try to imagine what would they be like if they really existed. Obviously, as icons they are rooted in our psychological and mythological subconscious. I always try to go for a truthful character logic.

The vampires in “NEAR DARK” I approached as if vampires really existed. Taking liberties with the myth and discarding all that garlic and wooden stake stuff, I used daylight as the one thing that could really kill them. I figured real vampires would have to stay on the move because in the real world they’d be vulnerable. They’d keep a low profile, moving around the country, taking the highways, holing up in roadside motels.

Following that logic, the vampires naturally took on a Jesse James/Bonnie and Clyde quality and the American Outlaw stuff just came organically out of that. Because they were different, the vampires had to stick together because despite their personal conflicts, all they had was each other. They became a gang of outlaws, and the dramatic dynamic explored the camaraderie of a clan of a makeshift family outside of society. I didn’t go out of my way to make them conventionally redeemable.

They are like drug addicts, who get the rush they live for from drinking blood. Groups of drug addicts have that co-dependent camaraderie based around the addiction and I used that. Real drug addicts will do anything to get their fix but they’re always on run, and a lot of time they avoid daylight.

And I figured real vampires, if they existed, must embrace and enjoy killing because it is what they do. If what you have to do to survive is drink blood every night, and you’ve been doing it for several hundred years, you’ll get to like it. That’s what the bar scene was about. Severn Van Sickle, the character that Bill Paxton plays, was my favorite because he the most macho skewed sexual vitality of the vampires and I didn’t censor myself writing him. These really were an outrageous crew, and that’s why the audience liked them.

On “BODY PARTS,” I was fascinated with the psychological thriller potential of limb transplants.

If you lose a limb in a traumatic accident and get a new limb transplanted from a killer, then suffer adverse personality changes, is it the personality of the killer taking you over or just your reaction to the trauma of losing your arm? That was fun to play with. In my film, the man who gets the transplanted arm of the killer goes back to the doctor to have it taken off because he feels the killer’s personality was taking him over. That was just dramatic conjecture in the script. Ten years later, when they actually did a hand transplant in France, the donor went back to the doctor to take it off.

He said he felt the hand belonged to somebody else. Life imitated art.

Uncle Ted, the werewolf in “BAD MOON” I wrote as if he were schizophrenic. A guy on one hand who was a loving brother and family man but is losing a battle with nihilistic violence within that makes him turn savagely on the people he loves. In shooting the film, Michael Pare, who is just a terrific actor, and I approached Uncle Ted from the standpoint of a schizophrenic or alcoholic who is becoming a split personality. The human werewolf was more interesting and scary than the Special Makeup Effects werewolf.

You get the idea.

Michael Voyer asks: Eric — Big fan here — The Hitcher and Near Dark are some of the best genre films I’ve seen — and “Dumb suck” has to be one of the coolest lines to open a movie ever. Question: What’s your writing process like? Do you plot things out ahead of time? Caleb in Near Dark has this great character arc, a twisted kind of rite of passage to adulthood. Concerning story, do you always think in terms of character first or do the horror elements provide a jumping off point?

I always start with an idea… a one or two sentence idea fraught with possibilities. If I can’t sum up a film in a few words, there’s something wrong with the idea. For example, “NEAR DARK” started with wanting to do a “vampire western.” Simple as that.

A good example of my process is my new script “STOPPING POWER” that Jan De Bont is about to direct in Berlin. I started first with the concept of a bank robber on the run who switches cars at a gas station with a regular guy to decoy the cops. The bad guy kidnaps a family member in the guy’s car and blackmails the good guy into driving the bank robber’s car while the bad guy escapes from the police with his loot.

Basically, the bad guy tells the good guy on a cell phone to get on the freeway and drive at a 180 MPH for one hour and if he stops or gets caught his daughter will die. The situation was something that could, in movie terms, happen to anyone so the idea suggested an ordinary everyday guy that the audience could identify with. I made the daughter the captive , so a father/daughter relationship could come out of that and good drama determined that the relationship should be strained until it is reaffirmed in the ordeal.

Then a terrific problem the hero faces revealed itself where not only does the good guy have to elude all the cops in the city who think he is the bank robber, he also has to catch up with the bank robber and rescue his daughter. And he only has one hour. In essence, the hunted is also the hunter, which makes for a great spin on the cat and mouse conflict.

Another example of how I develop a story is a western I wrote and produced with John Davis that Geoff Murphy (“YOUNG GUNS II”) directed called “THE LAST OUTLAW.” The script came from wanting to do a western. I thought about the elements I thought were intrinsic in westerns and settled on the pure physical action elements of riders and horses against landscape. For me, a western had to have a clean line of physical action. I thought of a posse chasing a group of outlaws. It needed a twist.

Then I came up with the story of the leader of a group of outlaws leading a posse after his gang who shot and left him for dead. That was enough of a hook for me to write a script. And out of that idea, or logline, came the character of Graff that Mickey Rourke played in the film.

The story idea suggested a strong central betrayal and confrontation. A tough outlaw leader who has sacrificed everything to protect his gang has his men turn on him in the worst way when they shoot and leave him, because they think his leadership tactics are too harsh. When captured by the posse Graff takes over exactly because he is a natural leader, then leads the posse after his gang and kills off his men one by one.

He kills them in twisted psychological ways based on their character weaknesses that force them all to learn hard lessons about leadership. Character arc here came out of story line, or logline.

So for me character and story are very tied together and develop organically side by side out of the central idea.

The film of “THE LAST OUTLAW” turned out pretty well by the way and I urge you to see it if you haven’t. Mickey Rourke was in his eccentric period and had some very questionable makeup choices, but the cast of the gang was terrific. Ted Levine, Steve Buscemi, John McGinley, even Dermot Mulroney was good. It must be the bloodiest film ever made for cable, with every single cowboy, about 40, getting killed but one.

It’s one of my fav scripts.

Also, unique horrific action sequences are a signature part of my work and a screenplay isn’t complete for me until I have a few of ‘em. Horror films have to have those “scenes.” The truck scene where the girl is torn apart in “THE HITCHER” is one example. The handcuff car chase in “BODY PARTS” is another. In “NEAR DARK,” my trademark action sequence is the Motel shoot-out, where bullets don’t hurt the vampires but the shafts of light from the bullet holes burn them. I’d never seen that before and knew the script would work when I wrote it.

These cinematic elements were lynchpins to the script. Horror is a visual form and it’s those horrific visceral moments that audiences remember, so I’m very conscious of creating those “rippers.” Character is important too in a horror film, of course, but without those powerful fearful visuals, like a hitchhiker with his thumb out in the lightning and rain, you got nothing. This is what makes horror screenwriting, and to some degree action screenwriting, different from any other kind of screenwriting…the necessity of having of pure visceral, visual sequences.

Julia G asks: I was wondering how you came up with your story for the Alien3 script that I read by you?

I want to take this opportunity to remove my name from that total piece of shit circulating with my name on it called “ALIEN 3.” Of all the really good scripts I’ve written, it’s this piece of crap that circulates on the internet. The script is NOT MY SCRIPT. I take no responsibility for it. It’s THE PRODUCER’S SCRIPT. The screenplay was goo, the incoherent result of 5 weeks of hysterical story conferences with producers where they were desperate to get a script in 5 weeks leaving me no time to write. That is just not the way you get a major sequel to two classic films, and it was impossible for me. By now everyone knows “ALIEN 3” was a legendary clusterfuck that dragged everyone involved with it down.

I was lucky. I got out early.

As I recall, the idea I started with was in the first film you had one alien who kept changing every time you saw it, which made it interesting. In the second one, you had armies of them, which kicked it up a notch. In the third one I felt the alien needed to be changed to take it the next step, or it would be the same as the first two. I thought the idea that the military was developing the alien DNA as a weapon had potential. I had them using farm animals and later humans and hosts, so you had a cow alien, a pig alien, etc.

Had there been the time or integrity with the people involved, I think a proper third film could have been done. I will say they never made a decent Alien film after the first two or one that remotely compared to the first two.

The funniest thing was the studio told me going in I couldn’t put Ripley in “ALIEN 3” because Sigourney Weaver was demanding too much money at the time. Later, someone slipped Sigourney the script, and she was quoted as saying my script was “dreadful.” Yeah, well, no shit she thought it was dreadful. Her character wasn’t in it!

Sean asks: How often were you on the set of the original Hitcher film?
I’m curious because nothing Robert Harmon did before on since is anything like that movie, which is also head and shoulders his best.

I was on the set two weeks. Actually did a cameo in the original film, as one of the Texas Rangers who escort and load Rutger into the prison bus. I’m the good-lookin’ Ranger on the prison TV screens and outside the prison bus

By the way, there is NOTHING more exciting as a screenwriter than being on the set the first day and seeing the actors in the roles, the cameras in place, and everything you wrote in your head real in front of you. It never ever gets old, that simple sense of wonder.

I agreed Bob Harmon never did a film close to being as good, but he was working with one of my scripts. What can I tell ya?

; )

Steven Kostanski asks: Some say that horror and action are inherently incompatible genres, but “The Hitcher” manages to be a completely successful marriage of both. What do you feel is the key element that allows for the film to borrow from these genres so successfully, while others try and fail miserably?

I don’t know man, it’s just my style. I call it the Vehicular Horror genre.

John Painz asks: Hey Eric! First off, I really am a big fan of your writing. The Hitcher is one of my all time favorite movies. I enjoyed the others, too, but I have a soft spot for Body Parts. Awesome!

Anyway, I wanted to ask what you were doing between Bad Moon and the Hitcher remake. Besides the Hitcher II film that went straight to video (and was only based on your characters), we haven’t heard from you!

Anyway, I hope all is well and thanks for the opportunity to ask a few
questions. I wish you the best of luck on the remake, 100 Feet and Stopping
Power!

Daniel Syvertsen asks: Why the eleven year wait before you directed another film? A writer of your caliber must have tons of ideas that he want’s to bring to the screen. You’ve got a good track record, is it really that hard to get a movie financed? Love the Hitcher and Near Dark, great fucking scripts!

I’ll answer both questions in one. In the mid 90’s I had a film, “BAD MOON” where it was released in 900 theatres with no marketing and zero support from the studio, and guess what? It tanked. When I say no marketing I mean Morgan Creek spent literally 100 thousand dollars where there were no television ads or even newspaper ads.

The film never had a shot. Six months later I had set up a period vampire western project called “DEAD BEFORE DAWN” with October Films, and a month later there was an executive changeover and the company divided in to another company called USA Films and my project fell through the cracks. I turned down the project that became “PITCH BLACK,” which was a mistake. Then before you know it you’re a year or two between pictures and starting from scratch. All these experiences are common experiences to writers, directors and producers and happen all the time in Hollywood. The 90’s were kind of a perfect storm of bad luck and worse timing where I was a horror guy and horror was a poorly regarded genre and the script market was dead due to backlash to all the big spec script sales.

Of course, the same scripts I wrote during this period the executives and producers hated then, they love now, because horror is in. It just was not my time. Plus, I was a single father raising a daughter and it took all my focus to develop film projects and try to be a present parent, which pretty much precluded a regular personal life.

Listen, when you’re in your twenties, it’s easy to be productive being the hard working single bachelor screenwriter working until dawn banging out pages with a bottle of Jack Daniels and a carton of Marlboro lights beside you.

And it’s part of being that age as a writer. But there’s a sea change in your thirties where you start to see many your friends become couples, joining the square world and drifting away, and I was lost at sea at that time of my life.

So I went back to basics. I wrote. And persevered.

Now, I’m successfully remarried to a wonderful 2o something woman, and my life is very full. When you’re happy in your personal life, everything else seems to go better. My wife Meredith is
also a screenwriter and an accomplished short filmmaker.

She loves horror movies and is probably the only person I could have married. We met in Austin, Texas 6 years ago while I was a panelist and she had a film in competition. Writers tend to be loners, so the communication and emotional security with my wife really is priceless and I doubt I’d be accomplishing much of anything without her.

I’ve got numerous projects in development right now and I promise that there will not be another 10-year period without an Eric Red film!

Thanks everyone. This was fun. I hope I answered your questions to your satisfaction. Now go watch the original “THE HITCHER” on DVD!

READ PART 1 OF THIS QNA HERE

BUY THE HITCHER DVD HERE