The Big Picture · Interview
February 17, 2017/ 30 min/ Sean Fennessey
Sean Fennessey talks to Gore Verbinski the week 'A Cure for Wellness' opens: building the spa's horror out of old castles and a Berlin hospital, why the mid-budget movie is disappearing, and how 'Rango' and the 'Pirates' trilogy got made.
9 films across 1 segment.
AI-generated This episode was transcribed and analyzed with AI models. The matches aren't perfect — expect the occasional misheard title or a link to the wrong film.
In conversation
Verbinski on a health-spa horror he calls 'not immediately reducible': Dane DeHaan's Lockhart summoned to a wellness castle in the Alps that treats diagnosis as absolution. Shot across castles in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Czech Republic and Romania, with interiors in a Berlin-area hospital where Hitler was treated for mustard gas after WWI. A stage fire burned the set down and cost six weeks.
His first feature; he says he overly storyboarded it and left 40 minutes on the editing-room floor.
The follow-up, where he swung the other way and kept it loose. He now thinks he stopped working on the script too early.
Cited as the scale he finds cathartic to return to after big-IP tentpoles; a 'Rings' sequel opens the same year as this interview.
The first Pirates, greenlit on the premise that a pirate movie 'will never work,' which is exactly what excited him.
The 'second pirate movie'; what scared him was that the studio wasn't nervous anymore, telling him to 'just keep doing that thing you're doing.'
Closing out his trilogy; three Pirates felt like the right journey before there was no more personal growth left in it.
The Oscar-winning animated film he made 'startup'-style: six artists in his ranch house, 18 months on a story reel recorded on a Mac, final animation at ILM, none of whom had made an animated movie. Sean calls it a top-10 film of all time.
Referenced as another massive production; he describes managing a set the size of Pirates or this without going brusque or loud.
Also mentioned raised along the way
Cited as influences The ServantThe TenantDon't Look NowThe InnocentsThe Shining
In passing E.T. the Extra-TerrestrialRingsPirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales
Not films filtered out: TV, games, ads
Books The Magic Mountain
Podcasts The Watch