Fede Alvarez Talks Don’t Breathe And Updates On Evil Dead

 

It’s been three long years since Fede Alvarez rebooted Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead franchise, which Raimi himself then parlayed into a successful Starz TV show. There was talk of a Raimi/Alvarez meet-up somewhere down the line, where Jane Levy’s character might team-up with or fight against Bruce Campbell’s Ash, but then those rumours stopped, and Alvarez started developing his own project. It’s had a few titles, between A Man In The Dark and Untitled Fede Alvarez Project, but, finally, at this year’s SXSW festival, Alvarez premiered the officially titled Don’t Breathe.

The film stars Stephen Lang as a blind veteran, who encounters three young criminals attempting to steal a large sum of money he’s currently hoarding. Things go south, a chase begins, and tension makes this film one hell of a thrilling escape. It will officially release this summer, but for an early taste, you can head over to my SXSW review!

Alvarez attended SXSW so he could personally introduce the film, which most people were seeing for the first time. He talked about his creative process, why he likes taking his time as an artist, and offered a brief update on his Evil Dead baby, which doesn’t look like much as of now. He said “It’s personal because it’s hard to say Evil Dead was my film. It’s definitely something I wrote and directed, but I’m borrowing from a legacy of so many films, while standing on the shoulders of giants. This was going to a place I’d never been, to do my movie. There was a blank page in front of me. I could come up with a story, and get it done. This is truly MY movie. The fact that it’s personal comes from the themes and ideas in the film. It’s not the facts of the movie, I don’t like to harm people. It’s just the themes that surround these characters. The burdens of the past that you cannot escape. Like I said at the Q&A, it’s always about nostalgia, and the best times being behind us. The best times were the 50s and 60s, and we’ve just been drifting towards this darker and darker place which is not true. That’s just what previous generations try to tell you. The characters in this movie, they live in Detroit with a life they feel doesn’t belong to them. They feel that their fate has been written before they had a choice. That’s why I sympathized with them, and that’s why I wanted to create a story with themes from everyday life, even though we don’t see them as heroes in movies because we judge them right away. Evil Dead had that to degree I just love going towards those characters.