CraveOnline: At one time there was talk of an actual Cliffhanger 2. Was there ever a script for that?
Renny Harlin: No, there was never a script for it. It’s really kind of weird. The movie made almost $300 million and by any logic there should have been a sequel, but there never was and there never was a script. Then a few years ago, I heard that there was talk about doing a reboot of it, which I was like, that’s so weird. I know they’ve done reboots of a lot of movies but for me personally, it was a very personal movie. I was very involved in the writing of the script and I thought how are they going to reboot this? It’s so weird, so I don’t know if that will ever happen but it is a well-known title and a good, strong title. Knowing Hollywood, it’s a surprise that it hasn’t happened.
How do you reboot something that was only one movie? I get it if there was a franchise and you have to start over, but if it was only one, isn’t that just a remake?
I know, I know. It’s weird. We’ll see.
Devil’s Pass is also a found footage movie. When you first started seeing these found footage movies, were you inspired by them? What ultimately made you want to try one?
I wanted to tell this story. I was intrigued by this mystery and the found footage genre felt like a way to bring it to today’s world and make it relatable to today’s people. I have enjoyed some of the found footage movies very much, like Cloverfield or Rec as examples. Of course, there’ve been many that weren’t so great. I think what happened here was when we started putting this together in terms of the screenplay and financing and everything, that was years ago. As it happens with many movies, it took a long time for us to put it together. In the meantime, a lot of people made a lot of found footage movies.
So I think that the genre is definitely valid and there’ve been some good movies and there will be some good movies that people will enjoy, but because it’s relatively inexpensive, I guess a lot of people felt like all you need is your home camera and you run into the forest and make a movie. That’s why there has been a little bit of an inflation with these movies because there’s been so many that just weren’t as good. For me it was an exercise in filmmaking. It was an interesting way of seeing, okay, how do you make a movie using this kind of technique? And I enjoyed that.
Is this much more of a Renny Harlin found footage movie where it’s not on the cheap, and you did some complicated things with it?
In a sense, I didn’t want to just go into an abandoned building and run around the rooms. I felt like we had a story to tell about one of the biggest unsolved mysteries of our lifetime and I also wanted the movie to have some production values, like the avalanche and some other things so that it would hopefully still feel real, but you’d feel like you’d get a little more for your money’s worth.
Yeah, you have an avalanche and some other visual effects I won’t spoil.
Yes, yes, definitely. We pondered that a lot, whether to do it with makeup effects and things like that. I wanted them to appear real but unreal. I didn’t want them to look like a person in a rubber suit so that’s why we did do some CG in the movie as well.
