JOHN OTTMAN (2000) – “The 3 Faces of John Ottman”

October 20, 2010 | By

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Urban Legends: Final Cut marks the feature directorial debut of editor/composer John Ottman, the British Academy Award (BAFTA) winning editor, and accomplished composer of The Usual Suspects (1997). A graduate of the USC film school program, Ottman has spent the last few years building up a substantial resume of film and television scores in various genres, and edited director Bryan Singer’s 1998 film, Apt Pupil.

Though Ottman was Singer’s first choice as composer for the recent and highly successful X-Men film, Ottman’s busy schedule and contractual obligations with his debut feature prevented him from taking the high-profile assignment, and though he regrets missing the plumb opportunity, Urban Legends: Final Cut offered the fledgling director new professional challenges, frustrations and creative highs – an intense learning experience that will no doubt serve him well in his next directorial venture.

A sense of humour is mandatory when you’re asked to direct a slasher film – a genre that has a tradition of pushing the limits of bad taste, violence, and the patience of various censor boards. After the success of Scream in 1996, the last 4 years have shown it is possible to make a smart, funny and satirical movie with plenty of scares (in bouncy digital surround) that play on an audience’s most primal fears.

For a while Ottman had been dropping hints of his directing aspirations, and his efforts finally paid off in a casual meeting with the people at Phoenix Pictures, the studio behind Apt Pupil (1998) and Lake Placid (1999). As Ottman, explains, “I just wanted them to know that down the road it would be fun to direct something, and then halfway through my sentence, they whipped out a script and said, ‘How about this?’

“I was sort of caught in midstream – I didn’t know how to react. I said, ‘Well what is it?’ They said, ‘Well, it’s Urban Legends 2‘, and I think I kind of reacted the way you do when you get some socks for Christmas from your grandmother or something. I wasn’t sure how to react to it.

“At first I was sort of against the prospect of making my debut with a teen horror film, and I thought, because of the association with [The Usual Suspects]… people would be sort of aghast that’s what I was doing. But then I read the script and I thought it was fun, because of the filmmaking thing, and the film school thing, and saw the value in using the genre to show that I could do different styles of filmmaking all in one film that I may not get the opportunity to do in a more independent venture.”

Ottman worked closely with screenwriters Paul Harris Boardman and Scott Derrickson, and though the script went through many revisions and rewrites, the final product basically reflects a modern satire of film school life. Film students – whether housed at multi-million dollar campuses or in the basement of an aging edifice – are a curious lot, and the screenplay reflects the egos and dreams of grandeur which still motivate many to learn, produce, and hopefully eke out a future in Film.

The first Urban Legend (1988), set on a college campus, played upon classic scare stories that have become part of urban fear culture: the boyfriend who disappeared while taking a pee, while his worrying girlfriend is terrorized by a strange rapping on the roof; or the babysitter, who discovers the threatening calls she’s been receiving are coming from inside the house.

The sequel begins as a handful of mature film students pitch their dream thesis to stuffy department professors, and follows their efforts to produce the career-making epic… for a student budget populated with bad actors and principle photography constantly halted because of a fetishistic murderer in a fencing mask.

Though Urban Legends goes through the obligatory body count, a major character in the movie is the film school. Shot on location at Trent University in Ontario, Canada, the campus resembles a small, isolated community, surrounded by dense, verdant hills and an eerily calm river.

Like many horror films, the first Urban Legend movie used more traditional Gothic locations, and Ottman clearly wanted to give the sequel a more institutional look. Trent University’s lean, angular edifices and organic layout would give the sequel a different flavour, except a major set piece was missing – the bell tower.

“We liked the university so much that I convinced the studio that we could build the tower, and my production designer said he could build the tower for a certain amount of money because he was thrilled to shoot there.”

The tower is seamlessly featured in a major sequence in which the killer chases the heroine to the top, and a few dead classmates are discovered along the way, dangling here and there.

“I tried to milk it to death, even in our short timeframe for the film. I really wanted to shoot a lot more of it, and it killed me [that] we had to cut a lot of scenes out. We had one scene with 150 extras one day, and a crane shot going down what I call the Odessa Steps – because there were these long steps that we went down – but it was just all character exposition, and the audience wants to see someone die, and you can’t stack up too much exposition in your first act because someone desperately wants to see someone bite it.”

The slasher genre in many ways is the most rigid and the most unforgiving: there has to be a body count, and there has to be grisly violence once in a while. Unfortunately, story and character are often sacrificed in favor of thrills, and the result can be a great rollercoaster ride, but one that fades into memory pretty fast.

The first murder in the film – involving a girl who wakes up in a bathtub of ice, missing a kidney – starts the film with some gruesome shocks, and contains the most disturbing imagery.

“[Originally] the first death was the suicide of Trevor, which is off-screen; you don’t even see it, and that’s what I liked about the script because it wasn’t the typical thing – it’s like you hear about this death and you’re not sure it happened – but the audience needs something more tangible, so we added our new character in the beginning of the show.”

Though somewhat at odds with the overall tone of the film, the sequence does kick-start the movie with a visceral punch, and owes a great deal to the elaborate death montages of Italian director Dario Argento.

Best known for the landmark thriller and horror films Profondo Rosso (1975) and Suspiria (1977), Argento’s victims are generally chased through cavernous, labyrinthine locations, and are generally dispatched to Heaven with a throat slashing or hanging – but not before the victim’s head artfully crashes through a pane of glass.

Though he admits to not being familiar with Argento’s work, Ottman’s direction of the first murder is very much in tune with Argento’s fetishes (as is the subsequent bell tower sequence), and inadvertently satirizes the cat-and-mouse interplay of Suspiria, tossing in some barbed wire, decapitation by window, and a hungry dog with an appetite for fresh kidney.

The sequence fulfills the requisite opening shocker for the movie, and once dispensed with, Ottman is able to use his editorial experience to structure his film with peaks of violence and valleys of character development.

Though billed as a teen slasher, Urban Legends: Final Cut does contain more straightforward dramatic scenes, and it’s often these integral moments of character and plot information that reveal a director’s competence. Just letting a scene play out sounds so simple, and yet some directors have little patience for narrative dialogue and emotional reaction shots.

Rather than resorting to the kind of choppy editing that characterized End of Days (1999) or attention-deficit construction of Armageddon (1998), Urban Legends lets the actors think a little, react naturally, and speak their lines with more conviction than normal in a slasher film; this more traditional approach makes the eventual shocks all the more effective, and once in a while morbidly witty.

One key sequence involves a student director’s worst nightmare: saddled with the most incompetent actress on the planet. Played to the hilt by actress Jessica Cauffiel, Sandra is a buffoon of epic proportions. When asked to emote sheer terror for her student director for a scene involving a ridiculously disemboweled pooch, Sandra goes through various rubbery gesticulations with unbearable ham-fisted energy; a noble tribute to the kind of surreal acting in a Dwaine Esper movie.

When she returns to the abandoned set one night, she’s confronted by the killer, and becomes the star of her own snuff video, with a generous nod to Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960). Unlike the opening shocker, the sequence and the elaborate viewing of the footage the next day contains little gore, and offers another effective route, under the reins of a knowing director, to create terror without being graphic.

As Ottman relates, “There are sequences that I’m proud of. One of them is Sandra’s death [when her classmates are] watching the dailies, because you’re watching someone die, but you know they’re dead already, so it’s a passive experience, but you have to make it somehow feel suspenseful, but you already know that she’s dead… So editorially, I’m pretty proud of the way that I put that together with the shots of the projector shining and shooting different image sizes off an actual screen. We shot her in 16mm, so you got the little holes on the side of the screen, and the close up of [Sandra’s] eyes, and so forth.”

Unlike Halloween‘s Michael Myers or Friday the 13th‘s Jason Voorhees, the Urban Legends killer is a film geek, and quite proud of it. Sandra’s death reveals more of the killer’s arrogance, and in a later scene with the film’s heroine, he moves, from producer and director of his own slasher fantasy, to composer. Trapped under a grand piano in the campus soundstage, the killer strikes the same keys, underscoring his/her elaborate murder plot.

“It was one of those situations where we actually were in overtime, and I suddenly though of this idea where, ‘Don’t just go and finder her – Just stand there and play the piano.’ And one of the producers who was our watchdog (who was really the guy to pull the plug) said, ‘You know what? This is so great that I’m authorizing you to go into overtime.’ So we all knew it was a cool idea, and it sort of ends up being a strange homage to myself by being in a scoring stage.”

Having composed music for the return of Michael Myers (Halloween H:20), a killer crocodile (Lake Placid), the poor, waifish Snow White (Snow White: A Tale of Terror, in 1999), and a cable technician with too much time on his hands (Cable Guy, in 1996), Ottman gave his own feature film another rich, orchestral soundtrack.

Horror scores are often little gems that most people don’t notice at first – and that’s actually a good thing – because it shows the music is doing what it’s supposed to do: scare you to death. That’s the score at its most functional level, and yet a well-crafted soundtrack will also reflect the film’s moods, the characters’ fears (and unbridled lust), and add some emotional subtext to the moments when a bimbo or thick-headed jock isn’t being chased by an ax-wielding lunatic with big comfy boots.

Urban Legends‘ music is characteristically creepy during the stalkings, murders and corpse discoveries, often using a large orchestra and some avant garde writing. Ottman periodically incorporates a lilting theme to evoke the confusion of a traumatized child, something that adds more depth to a scene, and polishes the film overall.

Now that John Ottman has advanced from composer to editor to feature film director, the next hurdle will be Hollywood’s perception of who Ottman is. In an age where singers act, producers direct, writers produce, and composers edit, there should be room for another multi-talent.

“My aim is to have my cake and eat it too, and that is to keep scoring films,” clearly Ottman’s first love, “And direct films that I score.”

On February 6th, Columbia TriStar Home Video will release Ottman’s film on DVD in an anamorphic transfer. In addition to a featurette, the DVD will include deleted scenes (with a partial section of the “Odessa Steps” sequence), and a running commentary from John Ottman, in which he touches upon his role as director, editor, and composer.

Ottman’s own enjoyable website, dubbed “The Asylum,” (http://www.johnottman.com) offers some candid production recollections, a still gallery, and soundtrack highlights from Urban Legends 2: Final Cut.

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© 1998 and 2001 (revised) Mark R. Hasan

To read a 2008 interview with John Ottman regarding Valkyrie, click HERE.

Visit John Ottman’s website HERE.

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