by Darrell Hope
Photos ©2000 by Paramount Classics

Director Sam Raimi.

Sam Raimi first gained notice when he expanded his student film Within the Woods into the $300,000 horror/comedy The Evil Dead. The film became an instant cult hit at Cannes and launched Raimi's career as a director of genre features including the sequels, Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn and Army of Darkness and the fantasy thriller Darkman. Raimi has also executive produced the series M.A.N.T.I.S., American Gothic, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess. Although recently he has set his director's chair squarely behind such non-genre fare as A Simple Plan and For Love of the Game, The Gift, which was in theaters this past January, can be seen as a return to his roots.

The Gift stars Oscar-nominee Cate Blanchett as Annie Wilson, a recent widow who struggles to support her children by performing psychic readings for the citizens of a small Southern town. Annie finds both her livelihood and her life threatened when her "gift" draws her into a murder mystery that strikes close to home. The supernatural thriller also features Oscar-winner Hilary Swank, Oscar-nominee Greg Kinnear, Keanu Reeves, Giovanni Ribisi and Katie Holmes.

After migrating from his low-budget beginnings to films where the craft services consisted of more than someone's mother's kitchen, Raimi viewed The Gift's $9.5 million budgetary constraints as a chance to return to stripped-down filmmaking.

"I'm spoiled," said Raimi. "That's part of the reason I wanted to make this picture. I felt I wanted to get back to the basics."

Raimi and Hilary Swank.

Raimi filmed in and around Savannah, Georgia, where he found the perfect atmosphere for suspense amongst the Spanish moss-filled cypress trees.

"We had very little money to make the picture and we had to establish that: 1) we were in the Deep South and 2) this town was chosen because it had such outrageous trees, these fantastic creatures with their gnarled arms and their weird faces that looked like the apple trees in The Wizard of Oz. Because one of the premises of this movie is that the world of supernatural exists, we really wanted to make it real for the audience. We felt this is a great town to shoot in because every frame had these fantastic things, which are obviously not of this Earth, that every day we accept as normal. So it's a great way to put in the minds of the audience what they already know, that there are things beyond their ken that are unexplainable.

"So if you see these fantastic shapes that are living and have lived for hundreds of years before we ever came into this world, maybe it's a smaller step to think, 'Well, yeah, maybe this woman does have this power. Is it really so outrageous to think that?' Her ability to have the gift was obviously in the script and my job was just to make it believable. So I tried to use those trees as a tool to help make what they had written believable.

"We tried to make it as suspenseful as possible. I don't really know what makes things scary specifically, but Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson's script was very frightening and upsetting. Having Cate Blanchett play the role helped further create a reality, so a lot of effort went into saying this is a real person you're watching. Then whatever happens beyond that can become very frightening, even if there's a phone call and there's no one on the other end. That can be absolutely, mind-blowingly scary if the person is real and you care about her kids."

Cate Blanchett with Giovanni Ribisi.

Raimi credits Blanchett with making that part of his job easier. "She really just came in and it was very collaborative working with the other actors and myself, and I really felt that she just turned into this person. She interviewed with a lot of psychics and tried to understand the process that they go through. And I went to some psychics and some we went to together, and we pieced together what might be a common journey that these people go through."

But even with the considerable talents of his cast, Raimi still had a lot of challenges to conquer before this film was in the can. "The time schedule was new to me and I had to make a lot of hard choices that I didn't think were in the best interest of the picture. But I knew that when I went in. It wasn't like anybody surprised me. I knew it was a 45-day schedule, which for me is outrageous because the quickest I've ever shot a picture was A Simple Plan in 55 days, but that was really hard for me. The Gift had more facts and more locations and more characters and I had to learn to work very quickly.

"In a smaller budgeted picture you've got to make sacrifices, like in Annie's room. We really wanted to be able to open the curtains but we couldn't afford a backdrop. So we finally had to give up some other shots and some other things to be able to afford that backdrop. It was really tight. You can't afford to have the crane whenever you want. You have to choose the two days you want it. But it was great. It made you focus on the performances and telling the story."

However, there are some things that the budget couldn't afford that Raimi would have dearly loved for The Gift. "I wanted to capture more of the flavor of the town but I didn't have the days to do that. I wanted to get some shots of Cate and Greg Kinnear driving out to the pond to get the feeling like they're on a mission more, to help get away from the audience suspecting Greg - like, them looking at each other like 'we are bound to do this thing together.' But I didn't get a chance to do that. I think a thousand details, and probably for every day I probably had 20 things I would have loved to have gotten."

Cate Blanchett and Keanu Reeves.

But even the truncated shooting schedule and lack of extra funds didn't hinder Raimi's team from keeping every thing running as smoothly as possible. "I had a great AD in Eric Heffron and he had a really good team. He's a master of planning and scheduling and he found a lot of smart ways to put sequences together and to have the green screen waiting on location so we could knock off that shot and didn't have to run back to the studio. Jut a lot of interesting ways of combining pieces."

Raimi freely admits it was a far cry from the guerilla-like shoots on his earlier works like Evil Dead. "That crew got so cheap because after the first few months everybody left except the star Bruce Campbell, the producer Robert Tapert, myself, Josh Becker, and one other guy, David Goodman. So David was cooking at home, Josh was doing the lighting, and I was loading the camera and shooting it and Rob was hauling cable. The costs were very low because none of us were being paid. It really went on forever. It never stopped, honestly, until we didn't have money to buy more film."

In view of his recent filmography, it could be argued that for Raimi, The Gift is a return to form. But the director doesn't see it so cut and dried as that.

"It's hard for me to talk in terms of me as that. I really loved A Simple Plan. I just thought it was so riveting and awful and dark and doomed and intense that I just wanted to make that into a picture. But I learned a lot from being around actors the caliber of Billy Bob Thornton, Bill Paxton and the others. Watching them work together was enlightening. In that way I was maturing. I realized the power of the performance when the camera isn't moving. It was a challenge to leave the camera alone and make it work with the actors within the scene.

Reeves and Raimi.

"For Love of the Game was more about, God, I love baseball so much. That's really one of my passions and, not that I can play at all, but I love watching it and as bad of a player as I am, I love playing. The script really got into what it must have been like on the field. I always wondered, 'What are those guys thinking? What are they saying when the catcher comes up and whispers?' That script answered a lot of questions for me, so that's why I thought, maybe there's a way to present baseball that would be interesting for the movie-going audience."

Not one to make things easy on himself, Raimi's next film venture is bringing a comic-book hero to life with the much anticipated Spiderman. But Raimi says having directed The Gift actually taught him lessons that he will apply to Spiderman.

"Spiderman won't be anything like this film. But after watching Cate Blanchett perform so well for so long, I learned it's all about a great actor or actress. That's what I need. That's why I went after Toby Maguire to play Peter Parker so hard and fortunately the studio got behind me. I wanted that same experience again and I knew I needed somebody - especially with Peter Parker, who I love - that I could talk to and in a really intimate way, make sure that he understood everything that I did and that we had asked the right questions. I never wanted to watch Peter Parker say something to Aunt May in a way I thought was not really Peter Parker and yet be afraid to approach the actor or have any of that nonsense of lack of communication. I wanted somebody who really would work hard on being real because that's the thing about Spiderman. Batman and Superman are great movies but they're more fantastic world movies with these superheroes in them and outrageously funny villains. I want to make this movie more like the real world, with a real kid ... a real Peter Parker and something fantastic happens to him."

Raimi is fully aware that the iconography of the Spiderman character is already firmly rooted in the public mind. "The audience has a great expectation that we all have an obligation to meet on this film. That's brand new for me. They already have in their minds who Peter Parker is, who Aunt May is, who Uncle Ben is. You can get it wrong. With The Gift, nobody knows who Donnie Barksdale is or Buddy, so I had a great deal of freedom. But with Spiderman, I've got to not only meet audience expectations, I have to actually go beyond them. I've got to choose so right that he's the soul of the character. Sometimes I think what I'm going to encounter is people who will say, 'That's not Uncle Ben. Are you crazy?' But what I'm going to be looking for is the soul of the character, whether or not he looks like him or not. So he's truly the guy that we've come to know in these comics as the heart and the soul."

Katie Holmes.

Some would probably find the thought of going into a film with that much forward baggage attached daunting, but Raimi seems to reserve his nervousness for getting specific shots on the set. He still recalls the difficulties he went through in order to capture the amazing images of Blanchett's eerie vision of Katie Holme's dead body floating in a tree.

"That was an image that really troubled me," Raimi confesses. "When I read it in the script I thought, 'This is really a frightening and strange image,' but I was concerned about the mixed metaphor of her floating in the tree because I thought, 'God, it's a little silly if I put her up there on a wire' and if I put her in optically as a green screen effect I was worried that it would look still stuck in. But then we thought, we'll make the world an undersea world so that it won't vomit the image of Katie out and will embrace her. And we blew wind fans on those trees and draped all that Spanish moss on them and slowed down the photography so that it had kind of an under-sea look as the background played. And then we photographed Cate as a separate element and put her into it and the background concept of being underwater held up. So that was a tough one. To come up with a way to make her work within that tree. It sounds simple now but Peter Donnen, the effects supervisor, said, 'Don't put her in the blue screen.' I said, 'Can we just blow her hair and shoot at like 120 frames a second to make it seem like she's underwater?' but he said it wouldn't seem like it's underwater. He finally told me, 'We've got to actually photograph her in a pool to get that weightless body motion.' So that's what we did. Katie was a real sport. She went in with the oxygen tank and said, 'Are you sure this is what you want me to do?' I thought, 'Good Lord, I'd never do that,' but she was a real trooper. We had highly trained Navy divers alongside her with oxygen masks and everything, but still the whole concept for me was very frightening. It's just a swimming pool, but it was scary anyways for some reason."

But for all the terror Raimi loves to provoke in his audiences, truth be told, when it comes to watching films, he's not particularly a fan of the genre. "It's not like I run out shrieking," said Raimi. "It's just that they make me uncomfortable. I do appreciate the craft in a good horror film and the artistry that goes into it but I'd never go to one to have fun. I'd have to be dared into it. I don't enjoy the experience, because they're very effective on me."

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