Jaume, this was your first feature. How does it feel looking back on it now twenty years later?
Jaume Collet-Serra: Well, I haven’t seen the movie in twenty years. I regard it as this incredible time in my life. I think it’s always going to be special because it was my first movie. I had the fortune to find a group of people that taught me a lot, starting with producers Joel Silver and Susan Downey. I came from commercials. I think I was put on the movie because it was a complicated movie technically, and it needed a visual style. My job was to figure out how to build a house out of wax, come up with some cool deaths and make it fun for young people. You , at the same time we were shooting the movie, we were shooting an MTV reality show.

I didn’t know what making a movie really was, so I took my commercial experience and I had this incredible where they guided me through casting and the script, and things I had never done before. I’m very proud of what we did with the movie and how it came out, but it almost doesn’t feel like your traditional sense of directing it, if you know what I mean, because it was like I was just part of this machine. Now I direct movies from the very beginning, meaning I’m very close to developing the scripts. So that changes everything, but from a technical point I don’t think we’d change anything. I’m sure the movie visually stands up. We did it the best possible way that we could do it. From that aspect, I’m very proud, and I am happy to hear that people are finding it again.

Jaume, you’ve talked before about wanting to create really memorable moments in your films. House of Wax accomplishes that in a number of ways, one of which being that every death scene is absolutely fantastic. Did you have a personal favorite?
JCS: That was the part of the movie that I was scared of the most. That was my horror film to really deliver. I know that’s what Joel was looking for as well, was something very inventive. I think they had just done Ghost Ship right before, with that iconic scene with the cable cutting through everyone. So, he was looking for moments like that. Even though I like horror and the slasher—A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th—as you can see from my career, I don’t do a lot of gruesome deaths. So I didn’t know if I could do it. But in a way, I treated them almost like product shots in a commercial, where you give each one its own set of rules.

Probably the one that I the most, because it was the most difficult, was the one where we chopped the head off. That was all done from one point of view. It was the POV camera and then having the knives come in right in front of the camera. It was a very complicated shot because the cameras were so big at the time. I was thinking, “How do we get this and not actually cut off the head of the actor?” We had to create a false floor where the actor had to hide their head, and we could put the camera there. That one to me was the most memorable because, technically, it was the most difficult. Stephen, I think I you saying, with the death that was in the dark room, that you were so scared the dailies would not come out.

One thing I love that separates your movie from the Vincent Price picture of the ’50s is that, in yours, these guys are encasing people into wax when they’re still alive. It adds an even more sinister element to things. Was that something that was always in the script?
JCS: It was in the script, but it was in a much more simple way. I pushed very strongly for the design of that contraption so that the contraption itself looked scary. For me, I was asking, “How do you actually put a body in a position that you like? How do you hold it and then put wax on it?” That was not entirely described in the script. I wanted to really push to design something that felt plausible and that looked scary in that sense. But the payoff is when they scratch his face and he moves his eyes. So, that was always in the script, and that was a big, big moment. I we did that with two es, where we put Jared there with some makeup, and then we actually had a full-size wax figure of him that looked exactly the same.

Stephen, that moment is so chilling, and a lot of that is purely visual because you’re working with someone who isn’t able to move, but you’re still generating such a sense of terror in the audience.
SFW: I guess a lot of that comes down to the visual storytelling. It’s using lenses and lighting to help create that drama. And being able to see what you want to see and leaving a little bit to the imagination. I think that’s the secret to any film of the genre really, is that sometimes less is more, but then when you want to see something, it can be quite confronting. To see a human inside a wax sculpture is quite something. I mean, not since the original movie has that ever happened. So, that’s a scary thing from the get-go.

JCS: In that scene, we’re playing with the audience’s expectation. They already know [Dalton’s] in the room with his friend, and the question is how and when is he going to discover him. I think we do this quite well in House of Wax. If you look at the actual gore, it’s very short. I think that a lot of it happens in the audience’s mind, because once you go more, it’s almost like it’s very invasive. You don’t want to lose the viewer. But I think that’s something that they did with the cutting of [Carly’s] finger, things like that, if you that.

Oh, I that, Jaume. That scene also has Elisha Cuthbert peeling her superglued lips apart, which makes me lose my mind every time I watch it.
SFW: [Laughs] I was about to say that. Yeah, a lot of people I know found that hard to stomach.

I wanted to talk about Paris Hilton and how much the marketing leaned into that “See Paris Die” hook; this idea that society had this hunger for watching such a notorious reality star meet a horrific end. It’s not every day that you see the marketing for the movie fully acknowledge that you’re going to watch one of the stars perish before the film is even out.
JCS: I was really in on that from the beginning. Joel was very in on it. Paris was very in on it. We all met and we had this talk about how that was what we were going to do. There was no hesitation. I think that’s why there was a whole reality show from MTV. Joel is a very forward-thinking producer, and he was like, “We need to bring people to the movies. There’s all these other new stars being created.” This was pre-social media, pre-everything. He’s really a visionary in knowing what the audience wants to see… a classically trained actor isn’t the only one that is given the right to be an actor. The audience wants to see other things. Joel was trying to open that up. And me, coming from the advertising world where I had done advertising in commercials with film actors, I had a mind for it as well. There was no surprise at all with how that was picked up, and we all embraced it.

There’s a whole section in the MTV series where Paris goes to a thirteen-year-old girl’s birthday party, and she’s very excitedly telling them about how she’s going to get killed in the movie, and just having a ton of fun with it all.
JCS: She loved it! We had a great time. She was super excited. The cast, they were all young, cool people, you know what I’m saying? It felt like a good group. At the end of the day in the movie, you know what’s going to happen. It’s a slasher. It’s like, “How do you get them separated from the group? And then how do you kill them?” That’s basically it. So, you just have to be creative on those two things and then make you care about the characters. When you have an audience who knows so much about that person, you already have them a lot more invested. Almost half the job is already done. But she was game for all of that, obviously. We were all game for it.

Stephen, something I love about Paris’s death in particular is how you bring back the camcorder there. Earlier in the movie, we see the kids all filming each other with this camcorder, and then when she gets killed Vincent films her with it. Not to overanalyze the movie or anything, but it feels like there’s an interesting commentary there in how we see people through screens and the distancing consequences of that. Could you talk about utilizing the camcorder in the visual approach of the film?
SFW: It was great. Obviously, it immediately gives you another texture and another look. And at the time, the camcorder thing was very popular, of course.

Sure, yeah. Found footage had gotten its big burst with The Blair Witch Project.
SFW: Yeah, and then not long after that, everyone had it in their phone. But prior to that, the camcorder was a big thing. So, you already have that really unusual color space to it all. It’s low resolution, and it looks really interesting. I had my team and my camera operators who would operate those cameras. We’d actually use them to record. But quite often, Jaume and I, we’d just give them to the actors and they’d film themselves. There are quite a lot of shots I from the film where the actors recorded themselves.

That investment in the characters you mention, part of that comes from the patience of the movie, the way it’s gradually paced. It’s quite a while into the film before we see the first actual death, because you spend a lot of time grounding the relationships and developing the eerie atmosphere of this ghost town.
JCS: I think that credit goes to the Hayes brothers, who wrote the script. That was already in there. Joel and Susan, they do these huge, massive movies with great success. So they know very well how to tell a story, and they guided me into that long setup to make sure that we knew everybody. That’s the only opportunity we have to create the mood, to set the rules and understand the motivations of the bad guys and all of that stuff. We also had the luxury of being in a real town. If this had been a visual-effects world, then you’re trying to not spend money on visual effects, and you have to pull back on all of that. But because we built the entire town, the street, the church, the House of Wax, all of that, then let’s use it! So, we could see them wandering over here and there, and it wasn’t expensive. Once it’s all built, then you can follow these characters and have all these long walk-and-talks.

That set is one of the best I’ve ever seen in a film, and you of course had the extremely unfortunate moment with it burning down during shooting. Stephen, what was going through your head as that was happening?
SFW: It all happened so quickly, and it was genuinely such a scary moment. It was the end of a week, so everybody was ready to have the weekend off and come back on Monday. I that we all left the stage, and by that time the ceiling was on fire, and all sorts of craziness was happening. There were gas cylinders inside the stage that were the propane fuel for the set. I that all the heads of departments had to do a head count, so you’ve got your iPhone 3 out and you’re ringing everyone in your crew who left for the day, but of course no one’s answering because they’ve gone off for the weekend.

So, there was that initial scary first few hours until everybody was ed for. Thankfully, no one was hurt. Of course, that’s the most important thing. But the film shifted. We had to shut down for a few weeks. I we had a second unit who had to stop filming for a while because they had nothing they could do. Jaume and all our crew from the first unit had to become a reduced unit until things were figured out and sets were rebuilt.

JCS: Stephen was operating the camera, so he was holding the camera when it all happened.

SFW: We all left the stage with everything on fire. There was all the camera equipment, camera cranes, video and sound equipment. There were millions and millions of dollars damaged, let alone the building itself which was completely destroyed. It was the largest soundstage in the Southern Hemisphere at the time. It was relatively new as well.

Jaume, especially with this being your first feature, what was going through your head in the days following that?
JCS: In the moment, obviously the same as Stephen’s saying, you really want to make sure that everybody’s safe. I getting incredible from Joel and Herb immediately. In that moment, you learn the value of a good leader, and it teaches you a valuable lesson because they basically said, “Everybody’s safe. Don’t worry, we will rebuild, we will continue shooting. We will obviously make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

Even without the knowledge of the set fire, it’s such an impressive feat of filmmaking to watch unfold as an audience. That whole climax is magnificent. The wax melting down around them as the action is going on. I love the visual of the characters’ feet going into that wax and their legs sinking into it. What were some of the biggest challenges for you in pulling that sequence off?
JCS: That was the most difficult. The stepping into the wax was the hardest because the actors were exhausted physically. It was very, very hard. I kept saying, “Go faster,” and they’re like, “We can’t!” Especially after take two. They would come out of the wax without their shoe on. Then the same thing would happen with the camera operator because it was around the whole set. Shooting in water is very difficult, but shooting in that environment was the hardest. In of the visual aspect, I even after the accident trying to not make the movie smaller because I still wanted to always give it these great shots that tell the story. I think that’s why it ended up being so epic, because I really wanted to see that house melting. It was an incredible challenge, right Stephen?

SFW: Yeah, and I think our goal, Jaume, was to create as many in-camera techniques as possible. That’s how the actors and crew ended up being subjected to those kinds of hostile environments. They’re physically difficult, challenging environments, and that’s what makes it so good. We kept pushing the envelope.

I love the shot during that sequence of Vincent cutting through the wax door, and he cuts through the wax sculpture of the coned twins, separating them. Did you intentionally look for those kinds of moments where you could incorporate the notion of doubles into the visual language of the movie?
SFW: To be honest with you, I’m keen to have another look at the film because I’ve actually forgotten some of that stuff.

You guys should check it out—it’s a really good movie!
SFW: [Laughs] It’s so great that you those things, Mitchell. I genuinely don’t our process for that one.

JCS: I the door, because it was so hard to get that shot. I think we made three of those sculptures of those twins, and I saying, “I want to do it in two takes because I want to keep one for me.” And I did it, so I have one still that is not cut.

You guys are working together again now, reuniting for the first time in twenty years since House of Wax. How have things changed, or how are they the same, two decades later?
SFW: Well, Jaume has had a fantastic career in the past twenty years. He’s made so many more fantastic movies, and I’ve made plenty more movies. It’s so nice to re-collaborate again after knowing what we’ve all learned as filmmakers, and been through completely different experiences, and having a very grateful and wonderful journey. So, coming full circle is awesome. It means a lot to me.