NOAH SEGAN (CABIN FEVER 2, BRICK, THE BROTHERS BLOOM)

Be warned: Through this interview we DO talk a few spoilers. I’m going to put CLEAR spoiler warnings in there, you’ll be able to skip over those parts and keep reading if you wish, don’t worry they’ll be clearly marked. J

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Noah: Hey Steve!

Steve: Hey Noah how you doing mate.

Noah: I’m good man how’re you doing.

Steve: I’m good man, it’s the first interview in around 18 months where I didn’t have to get up at like 3am so I’m quite good!

Noah: What time is it for you???

Steve: It’s around 10am. So for once I’m awake and happy about it.

Noah: Aaah so it’s like 10am around two Thursdays from now right! *laughs*

Steve: *laughs* So how you been? Good?

Noah: Yeah man, I’ve been good, been a little bit busy, been very happy, looking forward to seeing some movies come out and seeing what folks think about them.

Steve: Yeah Lionsgate gave me the online screener of CabinFever 2 last night and I just watched it and I really have to say I enjoyed it, had a blast watching it.

Noah: Oh good, good! Well I enjoyed it very much as well! We had a blast making it, and when you have a blast making it, you hope when you have as much fun making it as we did, you hope people have as much fun watching it.

Steve: Well, one of the things is, alot of crap goes around on the net when movies are being made, you can’t believe like, 1/100^th of the negative rumors you tend to read. I mean all the negative stuff I read about Cabin Fever 2, I pushed to the back of my head, because I learnt when I saw Wrong Turn 2, I read all this stuff saying it was going to ‘be a disaster, a bad movie’, when I saw it, I thought it was brilliant, when I saw Cabin Fever 2, I thought it was great!

Noah: Well, I think, the Cabin Fever films, specifically this film, they take a specific sensibility to get into them. These days the horror community are very, very smart. They want something different, they wanna be put on their ass by laughing, by crying, by being shocked, by asking questions, its something that was a hallmark of the first film and something we were trying to maintain with this film in addition to pop culture references and trying to create a little world within the Cabin Fever world and so I think that it’s a hard thing to discuss when you talk about irony and subversiveness and humor and horror and… you kinda have to be a young person to get into that, to really get onto that page so to speak?

Steve: I mean there were bits in the movie where, and yeah we are about to talk spoilers… where:

*SPOILER MOMENT SKIP OVER IF YOU DON’T WANT ANYTHING SPOILED*

Steve: there’s a bit where you and Alexi Wasser, you’re in the classroom and the teacher is on the ground, you’ve been through a lot of laughs, giggles and shocks, then there’s a teacher on the ground and she’s pleading with you… it might be played for laughs or giggles… then the CDC guy comes in and she pleads with him and he… he shoots her? And I’m thinking holy sh…

Noah: The moment leading up to that is one of the more pathetic moments and I specialise is pathos in movies, and that was one of the more pathetic moments I’ve been involved in, that was one of the more… it kinda tugs on your heart strings because it was one of the more… because all of a sudden it feels like it kinda got *real* you know!?

Steve: Yeah, that’s actually the feeling I got when I was watching the movie and I was like ‘Wow this just went from being a sequel where I thought we were having fun, got lots of gore to wow this just went really serious…’

*SPOILERS MOMENT ENDS*

Noah: Absolutely! And you know I think that this is a very modern tone within horror films, where I think the Cabin Fever films are laying the foundation for, which is you know, when you talk horror movies, you acknowledge its about pushing buttons. When you wanna scare somebody, you keep them on their toes, you have to switch it up, you know it’s something I’m really appreciative of with these new films, it’s a direction I see the genre going in that I’m really excited about, cause what it means is that if you’re a manic, neurotic guy like I am, *laughs* it means you’re gonna get lots of options, it means you’re gonna laugh one moment and cry the next, all of a sudden it means you’re gonna get the option to be Klaus Kinski Jr, you know what I mean?

Steve: Yeah! Exactly, there was another thing, how your character was written, you see a lot of movies where it’s like an episode of ‘Friends’, where it’s almost like Ross and Rachels ‘will they, won’t they, will they, won’t they?’, I really liked the fact they got that stuff with you and Cassie (Alexi Wasser) and your character John, out of the way, well not out of the way, but they brought it to the forefront very early on?

Noah: Oh absolutely! There’s something sorta very honest about it, you know? It was sorta, something, a rythm throughout the film that makes it very unique. We kind of acknowledge our hero and we acknowledge where he stands very early on so we can send him off on an adventure, so it’s not about the growth of that relationship as much as it is about saying ‘These are your people, this is who you’ve gotta watch, these are the circumstances and what circumstances they are man! *laughs*

Steve: I mean you had your cliché characters in there, you have to in your horror movies to some degree, but the way they handled them was great. I loved Rusty Kelly in it, he was hilarious!

Noah: Oh he was brilliant! Wasn’t he? Isn’t he brilliant man!? That role had some great jokes written for it but Rustys attitude was, that IS Rustys attitude, he really IS that guy, he really IS that attitude, it kinda is, just water off his back, he went through it, it flowed on him and it was fun to watch, where I was I was just being a square you know what I mean??? *laughs*

Steve: I really liked the bathroom scene… (Not giving away the rest of this scene, too funny to give away people… we DID talk about it but I just can’t…)

Noah: Oh yeah man, you just completely believe he’s 100% honest, you never get the hokey best friend thing from him, you just go ‘Man I know that guy, and if I DON’T know that guy I wanna hang out with him!’ You know!?

Steve: Yeah I can actually say I knew people like him, the same attitude, in highschool. For all intents and purposes I can say I knew people like the characters in Cabin Fever 2, they really did, they nailed the archetypes pretty well. You had the insecure overweight girl, the arrogant prick who went around pushing people around and had a girlfriend who was way too good for him…

Noah: Yeah! The thing I really liked about these characters was that the archetypes are there, I credit Ti for this, our director, and whilst the archetypes are there, they’re never, ever, ever falling into the cliché attitudes. The characters are archetypes, they’re stereotypes, but they’re being done in an honest way and are being done in a very authentic way and I think it’s a little bit of magic, because I dunno how you do it so you balance the two and we managed to balance the movie and I think it’s a perfect balance.

Steve: Yeah I mean I said to Robyn, one of the fine ladies who helped set this up today, that years back before I started doing interviews, back when dtdvd (dtvideo) stuff was by and large… less than fantastic, when it was generally a case of rushing stuff to vhs/dvd, it was a case of ‘is it particulary great, is it worth seeing?’ kinda thing, I think a lot of people have understood that dtdvd may be the better way to go, your target audience may be there already, just because it doesn’t go to the cinema doesn’t mean it isn’t a great movie, for instance Wrong Turn 2? But in more recent years it really seems to be changing…

Noah: Yeah Wrong Turn 2! Or in our case Cabin Fever 2! *laughs*

Steve: Yeah of course Cabin Fever 2! *laughs*

Noah: I mean I feel like, it’s very much, what’s the word, it’s very much a beacon of the new economy and the new way that we’ve taken media. When you look at how, I’m a guy who loves to go to the cinema, but I take in all my media from the net and dvd. When I see a film I respond to and its dtdvd, I feel like I’m in on a good joke, something not everyone else knows about, it’s niche marketing man,  when you release Cabin Fever 2 on dvd, you’re basically saying to the audience ‘We know you’re gonna find this movie, we know the circumstances under which you’re gonna watch it, so go and enjoy it!’ it helps on the business side to release it this way, allows it to  turn a profit, so that you can make more of them, cause when you release it theatrically, it costs so much money to promote a film theatrically, it’s a zero sum gain quite often. So I do appreciate this new school way of taking in movies, I feel like they’re being given to me personally *laughs* know what I mean?

Steve: Yeah I mean, you’re damn right, I’ve seen a lot of dtdvd movies here, like The Mutant Chronicles which I had to point my friends to, they wanted to brush it off, then they saw it and liked it.

Noah: Yeah, over here I think the stigma is quite quickly becoming imaginary. The stigma of dtdvd/video on demand, I think the stigma is going out the window, because people are realising that, something is out there, they can get it, they can get it now, they can watch it whenever the fuck they wanna watch it, however they wanna watch it, it’s empowering to the audience, it’s inclusive, it’s saying ‘hey come be a part of this movie, enjoy it how you wanna enjoy it!’

Steve: Did you watch the first one when it came out?

Noah: I didn’t watch it when it first came out, I saw it on dvd!

Steve: Did you see it like in the first few years or did you catch up with it more when you got the second movies role?

Noah: I had seen bits and pieces of it, I was aware of it, but I didn’t really sit down and study it until I became involved in the sequel and I’m glad I did, because as much as the heart of this film is the Cabin Fever heart, I think there’s a lot of pressure in being involved in something like that, you know ‘its a franchise now, we wanna make a second one, a third one, we want you to be involved!’ and all of a sudden you start thinking ‘Im lucky I didn’t put the first film on a pedestal til later’ cause you see it, and you realise, especially with my tase, I’m into real multi-hyphenate kind of shit man, I’m into stuff that’s hard to describe, stuff that’s got comedy, horror, subversiveness, exploitation, all these bits and pieces thrown together, kinda what the first one ushered in, it’s a big responsibility. I’m kinda glad I didn’t have the first one on a high pedestal when I was approached to do the second one or I woulda freaked out! *laughs*

Steve: Well you’ve done a lot of really great movies, I mean you were in Fanboys for instance? You had a part in that?

Noah: A very *small* part in Fanboys…

Steve: Well yeah but it’s still a part, you were ‘Boba Fett #2’… *laughs*

Noah: I was, I tell you, the funny quick story in that, I had worked for two producers previously on a movie called ‘What we do in secret’ about ‘The Germs’ a punk rock band in LA in the 70s, so we made this movie about them, I was one of the band members, Kevin and Matt produced it, when they went on to produce Fanboys, there was a scheduling something, I’m not sure, but it kept me from being one of the main four or five guys in the movie? These things happen, it’s part of being lucky enough to work and having a schedule to maintain to begin with right?

Steve: Ahhh ok right.

Noah: So you know it kinda went, there was a similar situation with one of their other friends they’d worked with, this guy Lou, who was Boba Fett #1, so I guess that as a laugh, they said ‘lets call up our buddies, fly them down to mexico and do some schtick for a day!’ they dressed us up as Boba Fetts, that’s exactly what happened! Something similar happened on Brothers Bloom for Ryan Johnson who I worked for on Brick, its just a nice feeling, when filmmakers who you’ve worked for, just want you around. That’s what I want man *laughs* I just want people to say ‘I want you around!’

(SPOILER WARNING AGAIN – End of the interview as well people… feel free to stop reading here… you won’t miss anything else if you do stop reading here asides a potential spoiler…)

Steve: If they were to do a Cabin Fever 3, because your characters fate was rather ambiguous to be honest… we saw the thing on his arm, but he cut his arm off, and we don’t know if say, it got into his blood for instance? Did it go through his blood system, is he actually dead… we heard the ending was reshot, rumors and such, I don’t know what the original ending was or whatever, no idea, but if in theory they did a part 3, would you be prepared to come back and do a part 3?

Noah: You know, I’m from New York and I know what it means to say it… so I’ll say it, I would be there in a heartbeat, I had so much fun, that in this world, the Cabin Fever world, that no matter what the circumstances…

*NOTE: At this point we got cut off around two or three times. Much ringing back to the mobile number frantically ensued with me trying to reconnect, finally I got back in touch, we continued talking for thirty seconds only to get cut off again… frustrating for me and no doubt Noah too! Finally we got a ‘fairly’ solid connection going… thank you Mr Telecommunications guy outside my house screwing around with the connections who screwed up the whole streets net that day… much appreciated!

Noah: Wow I never realised I had so much power! Never realised I was espousing so much awesomeness I was fucking up cellular connections intercontinentally so to speak!

Steve: The only one who’s done this before was Zack Ward from memory… *laughs*

Noah: Ahhh well it’s very good company to be in then! *laughs*

Steve: Well thank you very much for today it’s been fantastic! Thank you very much for speaking to us today.

Noah: No problems man!

*At this point the damn interview dropped out… but Noah was so fantastic he emailed me himself personally. Noah was fantastic. Easy to talk to, brilliant personality, one of the best examples of when everything just clicks and fits together in an interview and I’m really looking forward to checking out more of his work and praying that he comes back for the (hopefully) inevitable Cabin Fever 3!

Let me finish up with a little passage from the email Noah sent me, it’s only one line from a longer email, but getting something like this, when he really had no reason to send it, just shows how genuinely awesome Noah Segan damn well is:

“I was forwarded a message from you and wanted to reach out myself to 
let you know it was a pleasure to talk to you.”

Now, remember, Cabin Fever 2, if you’re into fun movies, if you’re into gore, surprisingly well developed characters, into something that little bit different? This is definitely that movie. It’s not the disaster quite a few sites are rumouring it to be. Do yourself a favour, see the movie, grab a pizza, grab some beers or coke, whatever, get some mates around and have a kickass time watching it. That’s how we watched it, that’s how we enjoyed it and that’s how you should too.