The Ring (2002)
A Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter played by Naomi Watts investigates a cursed videotape that kills anyone who views it. One more thing: It’s always raining.
Director Gore Verbinski thought he’d film his remake of the Japanese fright flick Ringu along the Northern California and Oregon coasts until he discovered the Emerald City’s hazy gloom. “The film was very much about what you can’t see and what you don’t know,” he says. “And that atmosphere in Seattle—with the rain, with the kind of obscured frame where things are haunting because there’s a sort of vagueness to everything—it’s like a dream.”
Not only did Verbinski have an eye for milieu but he kept his ears open while scouting locations on ferries. “I remember one day hearing this strange sort of g-g-g-g-g-guh—that sound they make when the waves come in underneath and the whole thing starts to shake,” he says. He had the sound guy mike the entire Quinault ferry, and the recorded noise permeates the movie’s soundtrack: “It’s just this deep, sort of subwoofer, never-ending pulse.”
Talk about seasonal affective disorder: A numb Watts gazes out the drizzly window of her gray downtown apartment complex to see several denizens in the next building staring dully at the boob tube. Our city a cold, muted, wet place where people stay inside watching movies until they die? Why didn’t somebody think of this sooner?
How It Defined Us: Hollywood caught on to Seattle’s ability to give you the creeps.
Humpday (2009)
Local filmmaker Lynn Shelton’s third feature landed a national distribution deal the Monday after it screened at the Sundance Film Festival. This was not a given considering the plot. Mark Duplass and Joshua Leonard play straight buddies who, in a complicated bit of drunken brio, vow to have sex with each other for Hump!, The Stranger’s amateur porn festival. “None of us wanted to make this movie if it was going to be a broad farce,” says Shelton. “I only wanted to make it if we could take up the challenge of making it feel believable.”
Shelton met Duplass in 2007. They hit it off and she decided to “custom-design” a character with him for her next film. They discussed how a good starting point for a story is sometimes just to take a well-drawn character out of his comfort zone. “Then another friend of mine went to Hump! and he had a really interesting reaction to it, because as a straight guy he’d never seen gay porn,” she says. “And it just got my head turning about the relationship between straight guys and gayness.”
Humpday feels very Seattle in its spot-on depiction of fairly provincial people whose comfort zones are not as limitless as they’d like to pretend. There’s something wincingly familiar about the way a nervous Duplass tells his wife that working on the sex flick is merely “reclaiming pornography back to an art place.”
Every line of dialogue was improvised. Shelton worked out “an emotional map” of where each scene had to go, and the actors worked out their characters. “It’s sort of like passing a soccer ball down a field,” she explains. “They’re constantly assisting each other so they can get to that end goal.”
Duplass and Leonard’s date with destiny worked differently. “I knew what was going to happen in every scene up until the hotel room,” Shelton says. “We realized that in order for the movie to ring true we needed to let honesty be our guide. We left all our preconceptions at the door and were ready for anything to happen.”
No—we’re not going to tell you.
How It Defined Us: A thoughtful Seattle indie put all those sniggering Tinseltown “bromances” to shame.
Published: December 2009
I’ll add Fear and Mad Love.
Some nice Seattle scenes in those.
Nice article, I have worked in the movie industry in the northwest since 1983 and long for the good old days of 1-2 Hollywood produced movie a year coming to Seattle. Unfortunately those days are long gone, most of the “Seattle” movies are made in Vancouver and at best come “down” here for only a few days just to rip off enough shots to make the movie seem like it is Seattle. After falling way behind other states with tax breaks for productions in Washington the tide may be turning, however when combined with a declining crew base, and lack of infrastructure, not to mention the traffic gridlock it may never come back. It is a shame most of my work has been out of state where quite frankly movie making is embraced as the job creating, clean industry that it is. But thank you for not mentioning those Seattle rip off movies so many others do.
Ten Things I Hate About You?
Although not a big screen movie, The Night Strangler (1973) not only used Seattle really well, it actually got me to spend the money to go on the Underground Seattle tour.
Cool! You know, the independent Cap Hill video store On 15th Video has a whole Seattle section…bet if you browsed that you’d come up with even more…
I really do think that we can take Seattle to a new level in film making. I would personally like to be involved in promoting such. Jobert1234@aol.com. We recently made a movie “Poppies, Odyssey of an Opium Eater” based on a true story (and book of the same name) of Eric Detzer’s life as a opium addict. Eric lives in Seattle and wrote the book about his addiction to wild opium poppies, which truly do grow wild in the Pacific Northwest. Eric was a well respected (master’s degree) social worker who fought child abuse, while scouring the country-side for the poppies. It is a story of his “spiral down hill” !!! If you are interested, we have a web site with a trailer….. www.poppiesthemovie.com ….. We would love some feedback about how to promote and distribute the movie in the Northwest. Happy New Year to you all. Josephine
Thanks for the article. I would like to add Assassins and Disclosure since I was an extra in both movies. I was next to Sly in one of my scenes. Fond memories!