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 Filmmakers won't be creating a monster Sunday, January 21, 2001 By Ron Weiskind, Post-Gazette Movie Editor
The words "creature" and "monster" are pretty much verboten in the production office for "The Mothman Prophecies," even though the movie is based on a book about a large winged man with burning red eyes sighted repeatedly by the residents of a small West Virginia town.
"We're looking at [Mothman] as a presence. We're not going for the full latex 'Creature from the Black Lagoon' version. Ours is much less obvious and more creepy," producer Richard S. Wright says. The movie, which stars Richard Gere and Laura Linney, begins shooting in the Pittsburgh region this week.
"It's a classic problem. Once you see the monster, it's almost always a letdown. It's never as frightening as when you don't see it. We're playing with that particular quirk."
Wright says the goal of the filmmakers is to make the movie as realistic as possible.
"We'll stretch the bounds of normal reality a bit. But we won't go so far that it's clearly a fantasy.
"We've taken a story that was basically -- depending on whom you believe -- nonfiction and turned it into something with a stronger dramatic structure. The protagonist comes in and has to put together the pieces of a puzzle. Like any good mystery, there are red herrings, surprises and plot twists."
The movie will retain the basic overall details of John A. Keel's 1975 book, which tells of strange occurrences in and around Point Pleasant, W.Va. in 1967, culminating in the collapse of the Silver Bridge over the Ohio River, which killed 46 people in December of that year.
Wright says the movie is staying away from UFOs but keeping events that "we find more interesting," such as people seeing strange lights in the sky and getting phone calls featuring strange voices.
But "The Mothman Prophecies" will not be a special-effects movie per se, and even the visual effects will be used "as an adjunct to the art of storytelling," and not as the point of the movie itself.
"That's cheesy, cheap filmmaking. We are more interested in people's reactions to their surroundings than in the surroundings themselves and the characters being secondary. How do people react to weird things happening, or to their fear of these things?"
People have been trying to make a movie of "Mothman" almost since Keel's book was published, Wright says.
"There are a number of writers who took various cracks at it. But it's a difficult subject to get right. Mark Pellington [who is directing the current project] was the guy who figured out how to do it. Once he and his writers worked on it, the script filled itself out. Then Richard Gere saw it and said, 'I'm in.' And then everyone else signed on."
The movie came to Pittsburgh largely for three reasons. It had the terrain to pass for West Virginia. It was near a small town with a bridge that could be shut down for filming (Kittanning in Armstrong County will double for Point Pleasant). And it had a good crew base and the necessary services that a film shoot requires.
The producers thought about shooting in Toronto, to take advantage of the favorable Canadian currency exchange.
"It would have been cheaper, but Toronto just doesn't have the same look as Pittsburgh. We cut 10 shooting days and we scaled down. But instead of having to buy our production values, we'll get them for free. In Toronto, we would have had to spend tons of money on visual effects and on building things. There was no ravine, no bridge over a wide river that we could shut down for 20 days."
Still, Wright knows things can and probably will go wrong over the course of the shoot. He can only hope that none of them are overly strange or illogical.
When it does happen, he says, "We call that a Mothman moment."
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