CraveOnline: You could have done this as dark, creepy, psychological horror, and instead it’s funny and there are moments where you’re really embracing the familiar elements of the genre so you can laugh at them to alleviate the tension.
Rob Cohen: Yeah.
Tell me about that process. Because it seems like we’re starting to see a little bit more of that emerge in the medium.
You have to be self-aware. You can’t pretend, “Oh, Fatal Attraction? I’ve never heard of it before!” You know you’re going to a genre that has been trodden in one form or another, either the woman with the crazy guy or the guy with the crazy woman, and we’ve seen those movies. But the question is, how do you do it so that it’s different? How do you do it so that it’s 2015, not 1990 or whenever Sherry Lansing was making all those kinds of movies, including Fatal Attraction.
Adrian Lyne did it by making a lot of pretty images. What I wanted to do was have a self-awareness about the horror genre, the dark house genre, the psycho genre, but also really get you into these characters and really keep you connected to them emotionally so that it rang true.
“You can’t pretend, ‘Oh, Fatal Attraction? I’ve never heard of it before!'”
I think that’s what I’m getting at. There’s a sense that the filmmaker has a certain amount of wit and self-awareness, but the characters aren’t necessarily in on the joke.
No. You don’t want them in on the joke.
I think that’s great. I think we need a new genre identification for that because I think it’s confusing people. I think there are people who pick up on the humorousness of the filmmaking and they assume that means it’s bad. It’s like, you were having so much fun watching White House Down or whatever…
Right!
And now you’re saying it’s bad? It achieved its goals. How could it not be good?
Because those kind of judgments are so erroneous. They’re so spurious in their basis of judgment. I want you to have a good time. I want you go into my movie, whether it’s Fast and Furious or xXx or The Boy Next Door, and it’s tight, it’s fast, it carries you away, it keeps you involved, and you don’t know exactly where it’s going – you may be following certain of the genre steps, you know it’s going to build to a violent climax because he’s crazy – but while you’re on the journey to the violence there’s these twists and turns.
Like the classroom decorated with these flagrant delecti photos, right? It’s a different twist. Glenn Close didn’t do anything like that. And we didn’t boil any bunnies! So it’s trying to reinvent the genre in an entertaining way, but for Claire, if that principal or those students see that picture of her naked with a student, she’s cooked. Now, he is not statutory rape, he’s older…
Was that a…?
That was a conscious decision.
“I want [audiences] to have a good time.”
Was he younger in an earlier draft?
I think probably in the Barbara Curry draft there was this idea that he was younger. But I just felt like that’s not healthy…
We lost sympathy for the protagonist?
Yeah, and besides, no matter how mature a 17-year-old boy is, you’ve got to be a certain kind of woman to want that.
Especially to act on it.
Yeah, you can fantasize, but…
To act on it, that’s legally crossing a line.
He appears to be centered, and have an intellect. They appear to have things in common that transcend just his biceps. It seems, in the beginning. Like this kid is really into classic literature…
