Filmmakers Spenser Cohen & Anna Halberg Talk TAROT
Sony Pictures unleash filmmakers Spenser Cohen & Anna Halberg‘s TAROT in Australian Cinemas this Thursday and Monster Fest’s Jarret Gahan caught up with the filmmaking duo to discuss the film and the process in bringing it to the screen.
TAROT, is credited as having been adapted from Nicholas Adams’ young adult novel, HORRORSCOPE, though the two works are considerably different. How did you land upon adapting Adams’ source material and what lead to the pivot in the adaptation?
Spenser: Well there’s a twist. We never read the book. The studio had the book as a property, which we were told was a slasher movie, and initially weren’t interested in it. And they said, well, if you were to do something with Astrology, what would you do? And I think our sensibilities are much more in line with something like James Wan would do, more supernatural. So we came up with this pitch that incorporated Astrology and Tarot, and we went back to the studio and they got really excited about it. But yeah, it’s funny, the book was something that wasn’t really a part of any part of the process in the making of this film.
What is it about Tarot and Astrology that you feel makes for great subject matter for a horror film?
Anna: I think for us it’s primarily Tarot cards and Tarot readings that have something that’s inherently a bit scary to them. It’s this idea that you could predict the future, whether that’s good or bad, and that your fate is potentially out of your control. And I think that the Tarot cards in and of themselves also have this incredible iconography that really is visual and some of them are quite scary.
As co-writers and co-directors on TAROT, how does the working dynamic between you both? When writing is one more focused on scene set-ups and the other characters and likewise with production, is one more working with actors and the other on the technical aspect?
Spenser: We both do. It’s two brains operating as one, like a hive mind. But yeah, from the inception stage through the writing all the way through pre-production, production and post-production, Anna & I are attached at the hip and are making all the choices together. And every decision just goes through us as sort of one person.
Anna: I know some people divvy things up, but we both kind of do it all.
TAROT features some incredible set pieces and subsequent deaths, how did you go about conceiving such elaborate scenarios?
Spenser: That was so fun to do. I mean, Anna and I would sit around and we would just go, what would be the worst thing that could possibly in this situation? And we would go down all these paths and rework it. And then our process is, once we have it on the page, we storyboard a lot and the storyboarding feeds back into our writing. So we’re very visual and we’ll put the boards up on the wall and we’ll see the whole movie in front of us. And then if something doesn’t feel right, we’ll go back into the script and figure it out and then come back to the storyboards. But it was really, I mean, it was the most fun. It’s so fun to do, if I was this creature, how would I go after this person in the worst way?
Anna: And horror is also a genre that really lends itself to a theatrical experience. And we were lucky enough to know from the beginning that this was going to be released in theaters. And so we really wanted to think of these big set pieces and have sequences in the film that had scope and size and that felt really unique and different from other horror movies that we’d seen.
The sound design of the film really adds to the theatrical experience, particularly in the bridge sequence. On the topic of sound, the integration of music throughout the film is refreshing, feels more akin to films of the 1980s & 1990s than anything contemporary. Was it a conscious decision on your parts for the soundtrack to play as crucial role in the film as the score?
Spenser: Yes, it was. And even Joseph Bishara’s score, he’s a genius who has done some of the scariest movies in history, but when we first started talking to him, we said, we want to make a movie that feels like it has sort of Spielberg vibes, but also James Wan vibes. So we’re sort of mixing those two together. And I think when he started presenting us pieces from the score, they really had this quality that was not necessarily eighties, not necessarily nineties, and not necessarily modern, but you can’t really put your finger on it. But it was floating around those worlds and it was really what we were looking for.
And now the film too was shot in Serbia, which I didn’t realize until the end credits rolled. And I was curious as to the experience of shooting in Eastern Europe, what were the advantages and disadvantages of shooting there?
Anna: Well, I’m glad you didn’t know it was Serbia when you watched the movie. Shooting in Serbia was an incredible experience and I think we had access to a lot of locations and set pieces that we wouldn’t have necessarily had access to had we shot this in the United States, and we were lucky enough to film a lot of places that had never been or exposed before, but the crews are really hardworking and so kind. There was a little bit of a language barrier sometimes. And with Sony primarily being based in the United States, there’s a bit of a time change that was tricky when we were shooting, but overall it was a really fantastic experience.
TAROT moves at a cracking pace, as taut as it is tense. Did you have to lose anything in the edit to achieve this or was the script that tight?
Spenser: I mean, it’s mostly what we shot. I mean, you’ve probably heard stories where director’s cuts come in at seven hours or whatever, or five hours. Ours was maybe two hours, and we were already starting in a really kind of lean, tight place, and then we just kind of further shaped it. But we just kept going back again to those iconic movies that were touchstones for us like JURASSIC PARK and JAWS and those movies. There’s no wasted seconds. They move at such a great pace, and we really wanted to keep the audience just engaged the whole time.
Lastly if TAROT proves a success at the box office, could we anticipate another installment?
Anna: We have a lot of ideas about what future movies could be.
