class=”alignleft size-full wp-image-53022″ title=”matt reeves” src=”https://www.heyuguys.com/images/2010/10/matt-reeves.jpg” alt=”” width=”195″ height=”275″ />It takes a brave soul to remake one of the most critically acclaimed and fiercely protected foreign language genre films of recent years and with Let Me In Matt Reeves has done something impressive and combined an emotionally engaging love story and properly grisly horror film which honours the original and stands very well on its own.
Let Me In enters UK cinemas this Friday and we had the chance to sit down at the table with Matt Reeves to talk about his relationship to the film and how he considers the love story and horror elements to be one and the same.
‘The story reminded me of my childhood,’ explains Matt Reeves, director of Cloverfield and Let Me In, ‘and it appealed to me as an adult in my remembrance of childhood.’
‘You engage with it on an emotionally complex level, you actually feel for their love story and yet they’re two twelve year old kids,’ Reeves is keen to heap praise on his young stars but also to attest to the power of the original story by John Ajvide Lindqvist, with whom Reeves spoke and impressed the author with his take on the novel.
‘I said to him that I was interested in doing the film not because it’s a great genre story but because it did remind me of my childhood, and he said that meant the most to him because it was the story of his own childhood. Without vampires. And it’s an adult story told through the eyes of children.’
Comparisons with the Tomas Alfredson version are inevitable and Reeves took from the Alfredson film as well as the Lindqvist novel, and he took from his own experience and directorial style, in his words, ‘Personalising, Americanising, all on an instinctual level, knowing one thing – that I related to the story as a coming of age story. It’s all about [Owen’s] character. I make him into a voyeur, peering into the world of adults, and to use all of that, and the subplots, to illuminate his coming of age.’
With the focus so much on the love story, I asked the director how the harder horror elements were incorporated. ‘People have said that the tone of the film is more horror based, but what I felt was brilliant about Lindqvist’s conception was he was taking the metaphor of the horror story to describe the horror of growing up and all of that dread that Owen feels every day, like the bullying at school. It’s a movie about waiting, and the horror for me was not so much those jump moments, though they are there, but it’s more about the waiting and fear of what will happen. That was very important to me, that it occupies the emotional state of the character, and that drove the horror, and it drove the love story. They both come out of the same thing, which is his isolation, his loneliness and the pain of growing up.’
Let Me In is out on Friday the 5th of November, my review is here and it’s positive. Remember, remember.
