At the Los Angeles Premiere of Universal Pictures’ “Slither,” Fillion spent some time talking about working with gooey effects in “Slither,” the appeal of horror movies, “Serenity,” and how “White Noise 2″ differs in tone from “White Noise.”
Click here to view video interview
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Theres a lot of brooding, a lot of moping. Theres a lot of confusion, frustration, dawning. Lots of dawning. This is something I learned in soap operas. We use to do this all the time. In a soap opera youll have a scene going on between two characters and at the end of the scene is a slow close-up on one of the characters, right? What are they going to say next? Its almost like a long drawn out close and the scene never seems to end, and youre left there kind of acting. So what we use to do was we called it three phases of a soap take and it works in any scene, any show, whatever youre doing. These are the three phases: the first phase is did I leave the stove on? Next phase - I did leave the stove on. Third phase no, I turned the stove off.
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“Jaws changed my life. I will not go near the ocean, I have to be between the shore, me, whoever else is swimming with me has to be on the outside. I’m always on the inside. My diving instructor said, Nathan, if you ever are with somebody and you see a shark, all you do is you take your dive knife out, and you stab your dive buddy.I’ve always kept that with me.”
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Fillion Cheats Death In Noise 2
Nathan Fillion, who stars in the upcoming paranormal sequel White Noise 2: The Light, told SCI FI Wire that he will base his performance in part on a real-life near-death experience. Fillion is only three days into shooting the sequel to the 2005 movie that starred Michael Keaton, and he took a break in Los Angeles to promote his upcoming SF horror comedy, Slither.
“I did have my own real near-death experience,” Fillion said in an interview. “I was swimming in Costa Rica with a bunch of friends of mine, splashing around in the waves. I was tired, I was exhausted, and I started getting knocked around by the waves, and all my friends started leaving the water, and I started getting sucked down into the water. I got caught in the undertow.”
Fillion (Serenity) admitted that he felt less than heroic at the time. “I was pulled along the side, and it was two feet [down below my feet] to touch bottom,” he said. “It was too frothy to tread water. I managed to get both hands above the water over my head and wave full out crossing my arms in the ‘help me’ wave and my friends turned and looked at me and gave me a ‘hi’ and waved back and turned their backs on me.”
Fillion said that he got mad. “I thought, ‘If I die before any of these other sons of a bitches, I will live to kill them.’ They gave me the will to live, and I thought, ‘Those bastards are going to go home to Canada [to] say [to his mom], “I’m sorry, Mrs. Fillion, the last thing he did was this [he waves], and we ignored him.”‘ So, yes, I had a near-death experience. I almost drowned. I almost drowned.”
Fillion is co-starring in the sequel with Katee Sackhoff (Battlestar Galactica) and will be directed by Patrick Lussier (Dracula 2000). After a near-death experience, Fillion’s character discovers he has the psychic ability to see who’s going to die next. “He can see things, but people think he’s crazy, and he just falls apart,” Fillion said. “And, yes, there is some of the recordings of the dead on machines and all that.”
The original movie centered on so-called electronic voice phenomenon, or EVP, in which believers say they can hear the voices of the dead in the white noise and static of electronic devices. So far, nothing unusual has happened on the sequel’s set, but, Fillion said, “we’re only a few days into it so far, and Vancouver, well, that’s not a real creepy haunted city.” Slither opens March 31, and White Noise 2 is scheduled for early 2007. Mike Szymanski
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Noise 2’s Fillion Believes
Nathan Fillion, who stars in the upcoming paranormal sequel White Noise 2: The Light, told SCI FI Wire that he researched the supernatural and is starting to believe there is something beyond death that people can contact. “I did the Ouija board when I was a kid, and I’ve been hearing ghost stories and ghost experiences from people I love and respect,” said Fillion, whose character acquires the power to foresee who will die. “He’s a more vulnerable character than I’ve ever played before. He’s just a man; he’s not a soldier. He’s a Web designer, not a hero.”
Lately, Fillion said that he’s been watching shows such as The Most Haunted Places in the World, and it scares him. “It’s on when I get home really late, and they’re watching monitors and putting up all these devices and then say, ‘Did you see that? Did you hear that?’ And some flash of light goes by them,” Fillion said. “The hair on the back of my neck is standing up, and it’s like 12:30 at night, and I’m like, ‘OK, great, I’m up for the night now, I do believe.’”
White Noise 2 is currently in production, but Fillion said that nothing odd has happened. Yet. But he got spooked when re-watching the original film, which starred Michael Keaton and Chandra West (she worked with Fillion in Water’s Edge). “I know Chandra,” he said. “I worked with her. I know she’s alive and well, and yet when I’m watching the film, I was terrified, terrified. I have a special way to watch scary movies. I have a blanket for protection, … and I had to switch the station to Jay Leno or something else for about five times that night, just to calm down and get my breath, and then flip back to the movie.”
Fillion added: “Do I believe? Yes, I believe something is going on. Even if it’s not true, I love believing it.” Mike Szymanski
