The Cabin in the Woods
The less you know going into Drew Goddard’s The Cabin in the Woods the better. From the trailer, we can glean that the movie, which premiered at this year’s SXSW film festival, starts as your typical horror film: Five college kids take a weekend getaway to a remote cabin, meeting all the stereotypical characters from horror films along the way. But then we cut to a facility where men in suits watch surveillance monitors from cameras hidden around the cabin. Just why these men are watching is unclear—but soon, Cabin becomes everything fans could ever want in a horror film but never knew they could have. “I can’t say there was a lot of thought that went into, oh, is this a horror movie, is it a sci-fi movie, is it a comedy,” says Goddard, who co-wrote the film with Joss Whedon. “We just started with something that sounded fun to us and went from there.”
There are two sides to The Cabin in the Woods: The cabin, and what Goddard calls the B-side, or the high-tech facility, houses the mysterious operation keeping tabs on the cabin’s inhabitants. The look of the facility was based on an unlikely source. “I grew up in Los Alamos, N.M., which is where they built the atomic bomb,” Goddard says. “So much of the design and the technology on that side came from my childhood. I took pictures of the Manhattan Project and what they were wearing and gave it to the designer and said here, make my hometown.”
Wherever possible, Goddard tried to use practical effects in Cabin, which often led to amusing moments on set. “We have a part of the movie where a body part hits the camera,” Goddard says. “It’s amazing how hard it is to get a bloody body part to hit a camera. We had three different people—one on either side of the camera, and one above—batting the body part around and splashing blood on the camera just out of frame so it looked like the body part was hitting the camera directly. And the amount of math and science that went into something that was so silly just delighted me to no end. It was so much fun.”
Initially announced in 2008, Cabin foundered for years as part of MGM’s bankruptcy. During that time, it was announced that the film would be converted to 3D—which never happened, much to Goddard’s delight. “I love 3D when it’s done right, and we never planned on this being a 3D film,” he says. The Cabin in the Woods will finally hit theaters April 13.
Read more: The SXSW 2012 Movies You Need to See – Popular Mechanics
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21 Jump Street
In 21 Jump Street, based on the popular ‘80s TV show, cops Schmidt and Jenko go undercover at a local high school to bust a designer-drug ring. But when their secret identities get mixed up, Schmidt (the smart nerd) has to participate in a play with the popular kids, and Jenko (the jock) has to go to science class—AP (Advanced Placement) chemistry, to be exact. “I included science in the story because even though I always found math and chemistry difficult, I had really good friendships with the kids who were great at that stuff,” screenwriter Michael Bacall says. “I see in our popular culture there’s been this tendency to marginalize the people who really affect our lives and our chances for survival everyday, and these are the people who are the scientists and the doctors and the math kids in high school, and that’s always driven me kind of nuts.”
Throughout the course of 21 Jump Street, Jenko (Channing Tatum) actually begins to see that science is cool—and even uses what he’s learned in class in a pivotal moment in the film. “It was so fun for me to try to figure out what they could learn that we could apply in an action context, and chemistry was it. One of the directors, Chris Miller, is much better at chemistry than I am, so I had this concept that we could use learning chemistry to create a great action beat at the end, and he very much helped me out with what actually would be involved in that.”
What’s involved, Miller and his co-director Phil Lord told Popular Mechanics in an email, is Jenko creating a homemade bomb out of lithium batteries, gunpowder, and schnapps. “He scores lithium batteries from a camera with a knife to get past the safety layer,” Miller says. “He drops the scored lithium batteries and gunpowder from shotgun shells into a half-empty bottle of Schnapps, which contains water and sugar, and he seals the top and shakes it. Both KNO3 (potassium nitrate) and lithium are oxidizers, and lithium when it touches water will react violently and cause a reaction, creating hydrogen gas. Alcohol is highly flammable, and if it gets hot enough, the H2 will combust in a big way. The KNO3 in gunpowder accelerates the combustion. Being sealed creates pressure to add to the combustion.”
Miller acknowledges that “It probably would have been good to talk to an actual chemist about it instead of relying on my fading AP chemistry memories, but hey, it’s the magic of the movies.”
21 Jump Street will be in theaters March 19.
Read more: The SXSW 2012 Movies You Need to See – Popular Mechanics
The Central Park Effect
Many New Yorkers would tell you that the only wildlife in Central Park consists of pigeons, squirrels, and the occasional coyote—but Jeffrey Kimball knows differently. “You’ve probably never seen a raccoon,” Kimball says. “There are hundreds of raccoons.” In fact, 200 species of birds, both native and migratory, stop in the 843-acre park every year. And those feathered friends are the subject of Kimball’s first feature-length film, The Central Park Effect, which had its premiere at SXSW.
“I was never a birder before I moved to New York,” Kimball says. “I’d take vacations to California and I’d bring my binoculars to look for wildlife, but I’d hang them back up when I got back to New York. Then I started hearing about Central Park, and I didn’t quite believe it—I thought I’d go in there and get mugged. But eventually I checked it out, and it was amazing.”
Kimball interviewed well-known Central Park birders, including author Jonathan Franzen. But to capture the bird footage—which he did himself—he used two prosumer Sony cameras. “The first I bought was just a little thing, but I bet there’s 10 minutes of footage from that camera,” he says. “The second camera was a PMW-EX3 with a removable lens, so I rented a lens that was three times the cost of the camera.” But actually getting shots of the birds turned out to be more difficult than he anticipated. “Birds are hard to shoot. The lower the light, you can’t change your shutter speed. They move fast, they’re in dark places, and they’re small. You have to shoot them with long lenses, which need a lot of light. And it’s hard to keep the birds in focus. It took awhile to get footage.” In fact, footage of the rare cerulean warbler, which visits Central Park only once every two years, was deemed too poor to include in the film.
“I think it’s important for people to realize that nature is changing,” Kimball says. “It used to be there were pockets of cities and then vast tacks of wildernerss, but now we’ve spread out everywhere. So the nature that’s going to survive—and some of it won’t survive; it just won’t—has to learn to live with us, and there’s no harm with us helping it out.
Read more: The SXSW 2012 Movies You Need to See – Popular Mechanics
The Hunter
Though the last Tasmanian tiger died in 1933 in the Hobart Zoo in Tasmania, rumors persist that the animals are still alive, hiding out in the Tasmanian bush. It’s fitting, then, that during filming of The Hunter—in which Willem Dafoe plays a mercenary sent by a biotech company to get DNA from a Tasmanian tiger that people say they’ve seen in the wilderness—that a sighting of the extinct animal was reported. “I came to the set one day and someone said, hey there’s new footage on YouTube, someone said they saw the tiger!” Dafoe says.
Director Daniel Nettheim spent a lot of time looking into the tiger, and even used several minutes of archival footage of the last tiger, shot by zoologist and naturalist David Fleay in 1932, during the film’s opening credits. “These images of it walking around in its cage are so poignant, because it was a strikingly beautiful animal, really unique,” Nettheim says. “It was a carnivorous marsupial, more closely related to the kangaroo than to anything else. It was tragic what happened to it.”
The crew shot in remote locations in the Tasmanian bush, where the terrain was rough, the weather was erratic, and leeches routinely latched on (Dafoe once pulled 40 from his body at the end of the day). “Everything was harder for Willem than it was for the rest of us,” Nettheim says. “On the cold days, pretty much my nose was the only thing exposed, and Willem, due to his devotion to the character, insisted on carrying a weighted backpack rather than an empty one.”
Dafoe and Nettheim also met with hunters to look at various ways someone could actually capture a Tassie tiger. “Those guys, they showed us a certain type of trap, some of those antiquated illegal metal traps, and a certain kind of mindset,” Dafoe says. Netthheim also found a survivalist who taught Dafoe how to build snares from tree limbs, sticks, and rope. “Because there’s a fair amount of that stuff in the film, we had to have it up our sleeves, and we had to be able to do it gracefully and efficiently,” Dafoe says. “I love when you learn things from movies, because the life adventure feeds the fiction that you’re making.”
The survivalist also was on set for the scenes in which Dafoe had to build the traps. “There was a lot of precision involved because these are tightly wound devices with lots of latent energy,” Nettheim says. “They can very easily be set off and you can end up with a stick in the eye. So making them, we had to be very precise.” Still, Dafoe says, he’s far from a master. “It’s film, after all—you can cheat sometimes.”
Read more: The SXSW 2012 Movies You Need to See – Popular Mechanics
