AN LD ENTERTAINMENT RELEASE OF A LIDDELL ENTERTAINMENT PRESENTATION OF A FORTRESS FEATURES PRODUCTION A FILM BY MARCUS DUNSTAN THE COLLECTION JOSH STEWART EMMA FITZPATRICK LEE TERGESEN CHRISTOPHER McDONALD WRITTEN BY PATRICK MELTON & MARCUS DUNSTAN DIRECTED BY MARCUS DUNSTAN US Press Online Press Inquiries Nick Babiarz Jennifer Hewell LD Entertainment Brigade Marketing 310.275.9600 646.862.9125 [email protected] [email protected] Total Running Time: 82 Minutes SYNOPSIS From the writing-directing team Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton (Saw IV, V VI and 3D) comes The Collection, a suspense horror film with nonstop thrills at every turn. Directed by Dunstan and starring Josh Stewart (The Dark Knight Rises, The Collector), Emma Fitzpatrick (The Social Network) and Christopher McDonald (“Boardwalk Empire,” Requiem for a Dream), the film centers on a traumatized man forced to help rescue a beautiful woman who has become the latest obsession of a crazed killer who “collects” humans in a booby- trapped house of horrors. When ELENA (Fitzpatrick) is talked into attending an underground warehouse party with her friends, she finds herself caught in a nightmarish trap where the revelers are mowed, sliced and crushed to death by a macabre series of contraptions operated by a masked psychopath. When the grisly massacre is over, Elena is the only survivor. But before she can escape, she is locked in a trunk and transported to an unknown location. Fortunately for Elena, one man—ARKIN (Stewart)—knows exactly where she’s headed, having just escaped from there with his life and sanity barely intact. Going back is the last thing on Arkin’s mind, but Elena’s wealthy father (McDonald) hires a crack team of mercenaries to force Arkin to lead them to the killer’s lair. But even these hardened warriors are not prepared for what they encounter: an abandoned hotel-turned-torture-chamber, rigged with deadly traps and filled with mangled corpses. Can Arkin and the team get to Elena before she too becomes part of his gruesome “collection”? 2 ABOUT THE PRODUCTION It may come as a surprise that a movie as frightening as The Collection has its roots in a gentler time in cinematic history—specifically in the 1967 Terence Young-directed Wait Until Dark, starring Alan Arkin and Audrey Hepburn. The inspiration comes from the groundbreaking suspense-thriller, where Hepburn plays a blind woman who is terrorized by a trio of thugs searching for a heroin-stuffed doll they believe is in her apartment. Over four decades later, writer-director Marcus Dunstan and his longtime writing partner, Patrick Melton, took the basic elements of that story and re- worked them into what became the 2009 crime-horror hit The Collector, the forerunner to The Collection. In homage to Wait Until Dark, the writers even named their male lead Arkin, after Alan Arkin, and gave their female lead, Elena, a physical disability of her own: she’s hearing impaired. But they also added an all-important twist to the home-invasion sub-genre that carries through both films, explains Dunstan. “What happens when a thief interrupts the crime of a far more nefarious man? That’s the DNA of the first film. You have Mr. Bad versus Mr. Worse, and Mr. Bad all of a sudden becomes so much more relatable. When you see a street criminal go against a horror-movie villain, the street criminal becomes an anti-hero with absolute titanium for blood— I love the feeling of that. Those were the types of films I enjoyed when I was young.” The Collection follows the story of the traumatized Arkin (Josh Stewart), last seen trapped in a small red trunk, who is coerced into leading a band of trained fighters on a mission to rescue Elena (Emma Fitzpatrick) from the clutches of a crazed killer. The title alludes to the killer’s penchant for “collecting” and mutilating humans for display in an abandoned hotel he’s turned into a museum of death. The filmmakers decided to kick-start the action—and the bloodletting— almost from the first scene. “The challenge storytelling-wise was to learn about 3 the characters while the terror was unfolding,” Dunstan explains. “There wasn’t a calm environment at all to get to know these people.” Instead, the filmmakers used the long opening sequence, in which Elena joins her friends at an underground warehouse party, to do a sort of bait and switch. “We wanted to trick the viewers into thinking it was another horror movie about hot-bodied teens making stupid decisions and getting themselves into bad situations,” says Melton. “You don’t need a lot of time to set up those archetypes.” “It’s only after the warehouse party scene comes to a sudden and blood- curdling conclusion involving a combine harvester blade, various other medieval contraptions and 55 gallons of fake blood, that the movie really starts,” Melton says. “It makes the movie not necessarily self-aware, but a little bit smarter than the average horror movie,” he adds. Dunstan explains that populating the film with three-dimensional characters is a fundamental tenet in his approach to filmmaking. “There are other horror films that only celebrate the demise of the character and the ingenuity of the kill per se,” the director observes, “but the movie-going experience is much richer when you can make audiences care about the characters—when you give characters a heartbeat and flaws that audiences can latch on to. And then, when you add that unforeseen terrifying element of a stalker, of a predator, it gives the movie so much more to work with to get into audiences’ heads and follow them all the way home into their nightmares.” When it came to casting The Collection, the filmmakers already had their leading man, Josh Stewart, in place. In preparation for shooting The Collector, casting director Monika Mikkelsen had submitted an audition from Stewart (The Dark Knight Rises, “Criminal Minds”) for the role of Arkin. The filmmakers had already seen 4 numerous other actors, but Dunstan says they instantly knew they had something special in Stewart. “In a split-second he became this man,” Dunstan recalls. “He was vulnerable, capable of doing violence, but all of that would just become one note if he didn’t have the depth, the haunted nature behind his eyes, and the absolute cunning Josh can display. He can play smart, dangerous and vulnerable. It’s quite a juggling act and he does it effortlessly. If it wasn’t for him, there would be no movie. This was a movie built around one man.” So it was a no-brainer to keep Stewart on board for their next film. “Stewart recalls the last-minute casting session that landed him the role. “I got a phone call on a Wednesday morning, auditioned Wednesday afternoon, I was on a plane Friday, shooting Monday,” he recalls, adding there were several factors that attracted him to the script. “The really cool thing was the cat-and- mouse element that you don’t usually see in this genre. Also, there are about 70- plus pages with no dialogue, other than occasionally to myself. It was really pretty silent. Like acting, filmmaking does its job when you can tell a story without beating an audience over the head.” The actor describes his character as “a guy who has definitely been down the wrong road more than once. He’s made mistakes in his life and he’s paid the price for them in a lot of different ways. Now his conscience has gotten the better of him to the point where he feels like he owes something back to the world for everything he’s taken from it. So he’s trying to do the right things now.” Stewart says the physicality of the role proved particularly challenging: the actor broke his thumb and dislocated a shoulder during the shoot. “I never could have imagined it would have been that physical and that tough emotionally,” he says. “In these thriller-action-horror movies, you’re in a constant state of tension from the time you start until the time you go home. You have to carry that tension in your body; you have to look like at any moment you could die. Carrying that around for four-plus weeks really beats you up. Every 5 morning it takes a little longer to get into everything, as much as you try to carry it over.” To prepare for shooting The Collection, Stewart says he once again took up boxing—a sport he first did in college. “I went back and did a lot of that training, just to bulk up and get bigger, carry more muscle, so I would have the strength,” he says. “I also had someone beat on my bare chest with a broomstick for three minutes a day, just to toughen me up. That way, when I was getting banged on every five seconds during shooting, I was at a level where I could deal with it.” For all the punishment he took, Stewart says he’s game for another follow- up film. “If we do, we’ll have to put down the broomsticks and get some shovels!” he quips. “After the beating I’ve taken on the first two, a third isn’t going to kill me.” Stewart’s co-star, Emma Fitzpatrick, describes the actor as “a real-life tough guy.” That toughness was exemplified by how he dealt with his dislocated shoulder. “I was trying not to gag watching them pop it back in,” the actress recalls. “He pushed everyone away and was just like, ‘I need a cigarette.’ Then he disappeared for 10 minutes and came back and did the scene.” But Fitzpatrick says Stewart also had a soft, supportive, generous side, even taking her out for coffee before the production kicked into gear.