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Donna
FROM la times 2006
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/movie...
From rags to writer on the back of fear
Two years ago, 28-year-old Bryan Bertino was just a gaffer on commercials and low-budget independent films, hoping to accumulate enough hours to get into the electrician's union.
Smash cut to today, and the Texas-born handyman has been reborn as a newly minted writer-director, with a go picture, "The Strangers," at Universal, which begins shooting in three weeks in a desolate stretch of South Carolina on a $10-million budget. Liv Tyler scored the female lead after actresses as diverse as Thandie Newton and Oscar winner Charlize Theron circled the project looking for a dark suspense picture to give their careers a shot of adrenaline.
Bertino's offering ingeniously mixes highbrow and low, realistic romantic turmoil and in extremis primal terror. On their way back from a wedding (in February!), a couple in their mid-20s decides to forgo the hotel for a night in the house in which the man's family grew up. In the midst of all the relationship turmoil that milestone events such as this stir up, three extremely antagonistic strangers intrude (one of whom will look like 19-year-old Aussie supermodel Gemma Ward, in her unfashionably hostile acting debut). Who gets to keep the "Zoolander" DVD quickly becomes the least of the couple's worries.
The screenplay is deft, economical and dread-filled; it couples a detective's ominous voiceover catalog of items found at the scene with the disturbing imagery of the horrible events' aftermath. The script then quickly shifts back in time to the couple's middle of the night entrance in mid-fight, which provides a realistic, original twist on the standard introduction of the victims. With plot and thematic elements that evoke the claustrophobic thrillers "Open Water," "Straw Dogs" and "Panic Room," the intense experience that follows begs each moviegoer to wonder, "How would I behave if it were me?"
"What I wanted to do was focus in on their relationship and then take this outside force that is more of a traditional horror idea of bad people and play off of it," Bertino says. "I just tried to think about what I was most frightened of, and the moments that I'm most frightened are my girlfriend waking me up in the middle of the night and saying, 'I think there's someone in the living room.' So the whole idea came about as, 'What if you went into the living room and there was somebody there?' "
Bertino had submitted the script for a Nicholl Fellowship, a $30,000 prize awarded to unproduced writers by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. "The Strangers" got knocked out in the quarterfinals, but Bertino landed a manager and a meeting with Vertigo Entertainment, whose film "The Grudge" had just opened to $39 million. The sit-down was encouraging enough for him to take the risk and quit his job, and within a few days he sold the script to Universal for low six figures against mid-six figures if the film was made. "It was enough that I didn't have to work as a grip anymore," Bertino says.
His good fortune grew when music video auteur Mark Romanek, writer-director of the dark drama "One Hour Photo," refused to make the film for less than $40 million. (He insisted on building the neighborhood on a soundstage that he could control so he wouldn't have to resort to computer-generated cold-weather breath.) So the studio offered the novice screenwriter the gig instead. Bertino will have to fit his directorial debut into a packed schedule that includes writing the sharp, genre-blending horror scripts he owes Hollywood mega-producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Scott Rudin.
To celebrate, Bertino purchased his first suit and a TV.
This is all the info that I could find about it.
But like i said, i still wanna see it just because the movie looks great, besides what the makers tried to pull.
still pumped to see this tho!
Most movies that have the "based on a true story" caption always end up being very loosely based on a similar event.
This movie most resembles the Keddie murders.
This Movie is gonna make me crap my self.
THE STRANGERS!!!!!!!OMG OMG FREAKING IM GONNA DO SUICIDE MAN.
This Movie is gonna make me crap my self.
THE STRANGERS!!!!!!!
Im sleeping with my parents Through on out.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/01/06/early...
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/son-finds-b...
http://www.wzzm13.com/news/news_article.aspx?st...
I'm sure all the names, dates and locations have been changed to protect the innocent.
What do you think of the links?
someone was tortured, killed, terrorized, or even looked at wrong.
If I wrote a movie about aliens flying their spaceship into a skyscraper I could say it was based on true events. It's the word "based" you need to be wary of.
(that is supposedly the name of the real person who is murdered). thats what happened to the blair witch project and it will happen again.
Then today we decided to find out more about the murder case because the movie was VERY confusing. We googled everything and searched for any type of pictures, we found nothing.
Now the movie doesnt seem as good because they just made it up, and possibly loosely based on something that wasnt exactly happened.
But, we do hope another one comes out to explain the first movie better.
=]
that movie was scary as hell though!
I think she must have for this story to come out, she either survived long enough to tell the story and then died, or she lived anyway. How else would anyone know what happened?
I like movies that are based on true events, its important that people know the truth - even if they don't want to.
THERE SHOULD BE A MISSING REPORT OR SOMETHING ON HIM AND IF YOU HEAR SOMEONE SAY HELP ME AT THE END OF A RADIO YOU WOULD WANT TO FIND OUT WHERE IT WAS COMING FROM.
According to production notes,[2] the film was inspired by an event from director Bryan Bertino's childhood: a stranger came to his home asking for someone who was not there, and Bertino later found out that empty homes in the neighborhood had been broken into that night.[3] In interviews, Bertino stated he was "very impressed" with some of the theories circulating on the Internet about the "true events" the movie is allegedly based on, but said his main inspiration was Helter Skelter, a true crime book about the 1969 Manson family murders.[4][5]
In another interview, Liv Tyler revealed that in Bertino's original script, "You saw a lot more of the strangers. It was much more of a Manson-esque experience."[3]
^ Production Information. "The Strangers: Movie production notes". Retrieved on 2008-08-20.
^ a b Angela Dawson (2008-05-28). "Liv in the moment". Entertainment News Wire. AZCentral. Retrieved on 2008-07-01.
^ Ryan Rotten (2007-08-01). "EXCL: Never Talk to Strangers". ShockTillYouDrop.com. Retrieved on 2008-08-20.
^ Ryan Rotten (2008-05-26). "Interview: The Strangers' Bryan Bertino (Pt. 2)". ShockTillYouDrop.com. Retrieved on 2008-08-20.
In another interview, Liv Tyler revealed that in Bertino's original script, "You saw a lot more of the strangers. It was much more of a Manson-esque experience.
basically it was based on his childhood and the manson family