I'm Vanessa and I'm not afraid of making a fool of myself.
I did it really, I mean...
Did you guys watch horror movies when you were a kid?
Yeah, I just love horror movies. They're great.
Yeah.
Familiar.
It's wonderful. It's wonderful. It's wonderful. Good luck, my baby. It's wonderful.
Maria, she's such a character. She's so special. I think you did a fantastic job with her.
Thank you.
But why, Maria? What was your inspiration to create her?
She's a cross between my mother and my aunt. And after I saw Eddie Murphy do the clumps, I thought,
who is the funniest person that I know? And I'm going to pat him, character after him,
and that will be my mother and my aunt.
Thank you so much. I appreciate it.
So, what are your top five songs for the holiday song?
Oh, my goodness.
And you have to sing it a little bit, you know?
Feliz Navidad. Feliz Navidad.
It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas.
I really love that.
Okay, two more.
Mariah Carey, what's that one?
Well, I want for Christmas it's you.
You've done great indie films.
Thank you.
So, how was joining this powerful empire of Disney?
Could you tell the difference right away when you enter into the set?
Oh, yeah, you can tell the set. Everything's much...
I mean, my trailer was bigger. I spent four times longer in makeup.
The cameras are bigger.
That was really what appealed to me as well, just to do something completely different from anything I'd done before.
For me, your character was my favorite.
Because...no, for real.
You say all the right things. Thank you.
It's true because I believe that as soon as you arrive, the fun is starting in the movie.
So, what attracted you the most to your character?
I mean, I thought, well, reading it, I thought it was the best or the most fun of the male characters.
There aren't many male characters in the movie, really.
And that I was going to be able to do all my scenes with Angelina.
And when we spoke about it, she said that she wanted to develop that relationship that sort of starts as a slave.
But then becoming, you know, spending so much time with each other that he starts to see other sides of her.
And that they start to get on each other's nerves sometimes.
Like an old married couple.
Yeah.
And how was experience, I mean, as a actor, to work with all the special effects?
Is it horror or is it fun for you?
I mean, a lot of the stuff they had built, so, you know, like the rocks and the trees and the waterfalls and things, you could really see.
And then there were some days when there'd be like a little person like wearing a completely blue sock or like a pair of tights completely covering him.
And he'd be running around with a wooden stick and he'd have to be looking at the end of it.
That was kind of weird, but when I was a little boy, me and my brother used to fight invisible armies in the garden.
Yeah, we always do that. Yeah, that's fantastic.
I mean, like, it's just a bit strange doing it in your thirties.
It's always fun.
Professionally.
Yeah.
Res been coming up all night.
You don't regret, you know?
Maybe I enjoyed watching the show.
Nineteen red.
So first of all, congratulations because I love the film.
Okay.
I think you did a marvelous job.
How did you decide to make a remake?
And how did the gambler arrive to your desk?
Well, I never set out to do a remake, really.
The first film called The Gambler, the 1974 film, was much more the study of addiction.
This is more about a guy who's trying to escape his life.
And he uses gambling as a means of escape.
Mark had read, my wolf had read the script.
And in the same way that I did, fell in love with it.
And it became a passion project for him.
So he contacted me, asked me to read it and the opportunity of working with him.
And then the script itself was really appealing.
So yeah, I saw it as a really good challenge.
Let's just deal with this gentleman who will understand each other, please.
No, I need for us to treat each other like we're not gentlemen and that we're very, very stupid.
It's very sarcastic and very fast.
He felt like he was about to rap a song, you know, kind of like the marky mark, good vibrations.
So did you rehearse with him or was it something that he had to the character?
It's really Bill's writing.
And I think why Mark, probably one of the bigger reasons why Mark really was drawn to the character,
was Mark's background as a singer, lent itself pretty well to a very articulate character.
A guy who uses words as his weapons, you know what I mean?
So it was a great way into this English professor who's not really a kind of stuffy, rarefied English teacher,
but more of a rock star, more of a guy who uses words as lyrics.
You did all these powerful sequences.
They're driven by the music in such a beautiful way.
So how do you choose the music for this film?
I go through my iTunes collection.
Great.
We wanted to create these musical interludes for the movie, like chapters in a book because our characters are novelists.
So it made sense, but also to pick artists that are really iconic in their field,
like Dinah Washington or Bob Dylan or Sixto Rodriguez.
And Jim Mark's character is a guy who sees genius in the world.
And so it was kind of great to be able to pick genius, sing a song like this and use them as our soundtrack.
I know what I have to do.
What if you could prove that the supernatural was merely a manifestation of what already exists in the mind?
So I have a confession to make because last night I couldn't sleep at all.
And when I was watching the film, sometimes I couldn't even look at it at the screen.
And I was like, look at my friend reaction like, what's happening right now?
He's reading a book.
Don't worry.
But it was screaming all the time.
So why do you think people enjoy so much being frightened?
I think it's the same feeling that you do when you go on a roller coaster ride.
It's terrifying, but you know it's going to end.
You can be terrified under controlled conditions.
And it's a bonding experience as well with your friends.
It's so fun to see them scared.
Yes, I get adrenaline rush.
I think it's an important human emotion.
And if it gets exercised in the real world, it's not a good thing.
Yeah, definitely.
What was your immediate reaction after you read this script, like the first time?
And what was the moment that you said, yes, I want to do this film?
As soon as I read it, but they wouldn't see me because I thought I was too young.
So they had someone else and then she dropped out and then they kind of just went, yeah, okay, we'll see her.
And then it worked out and so they made the character 18 because it was originally kind of like 24.
So they made the character younger for me and then it kind of all kind of worked out.
Thank God.
That's great.
What about you?
I got Simon Oakes who is the head of Hammer Films.
He called me up and he told me about the movie and he sent it to me and I read it.
And I knew right away that it worked.
The story worked for me because I like the idea of doing a movie about the supernatural that starts from the skeptical point of view.
Rather than you have to accept it as just a given from the very beginning so that you can take that doubt in the audience's mind,
which is a good doubt, is a credible doubt, and you can slowly turn it.
That to me was interesting and exciting.
This was based in a real life event.
So how much of the real case, how much information was available to you?
It was a real experiment that was done and that experiment was the spark, if you like, that inspired the writer's imagination, you know.
But it's a movie, it's not a documentary.
