*Spoilers below for a fun surprise in Renfield, you have been warned*
The new horror-comedy film Renfield’s director Chris McKay has revealed everything about the meticulous work that went into creating one of the most spectacular allusions to Universal’s original 1931 Dracula picture.
We already have visual allusions to actor Bela Lugosi’s slicked-back hair and formal evening wear in Tod Browning’s version of the film through Nicolas Cage’s costume as the narcissistic vampire in this adaptation of the Dracula story, where we focus on his manservant and familiar Renfield (Nicholas Hoult), who is desperate to break free from their toxic and codependent relationship.
Sir Christopher Lee, who served as Cage’s particular role model, continued it with his Dracula pictures for Hammer from the 1950s through the 1970s.
Additionally, there are allusions to the 1931 Dracula through Hoult’s Renfield’s potato bug diet and the brief use of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake theme in the movie, which played over the beginning of the original.
The most impressive aspect of Renfield, however, is how the prologue, which introduces the character’s history with Dracula, sets up the movie as a sort of sequel to the 1931 film, thanks to some amazing technical wizardry that has Cage and Hoult substitute for Bela Lugosi and Dwight Frye in movie scenes.
Speaking to Metro.co.uk, director McKay explained: ‘I really wanted to be able to show Dracula and Renfield in the past and I wanted to connect them to the old movies and connect the audience to the Dracula and Renfield that have this long, shared history that the audience could [then] sort of feel by compositing them in the old movies, whether the audience knew anything about the Tod Browning movie or not.
‘In general, I think people have had some passing familiarity with these images – they’ve seen them on a poster, they’ve seen them in a clip show about horror movies, they’ve seen them in a parody like Family Guy or The Simpsons.
‘These images are part of our pop culture somewhere, and so for me that was a [priority] – create a great connection to the past and my love for those movies, and also a connection to our characters that they had a deep past that the audience can feel just by the texture and nature of these images.’
Although it was a tribute to their own invention and position in history as the creator of many iconic cinematic monsters, Universal reputedly wasn’t entirely satisfied that it was worth the work to superimpose Cage and Hoult over the footage from the original movie.
‘The studio didn’t necessarily see the value in this stuff, but everybody else on set did – the costume department; the visual effects department, obviously, with the compositing; the camera department; lighting – and Cage and Hoult, they really wanted to do this,’ McKay revealed.
‘So, everybody worked to try to find a way for us to be able to do this thing.’
The performers’ commitment was essential since it was a highly precise procedure that required participation from many areas.
McKay recalled: ‘We set up a green screen stage, that was off one of the sets, and while we were shooting other things on the set, the actors could go over there between and get into costume, get into makeup and go and shoot these [scenes].
‘Because we were aping the exact angles from the movie and using the movie as the plate, we’re erasing the characters from the film and just putting our characters into it, so we were trying to line up a height-wise and lens-wise the exact same relationship that they had in the original Tod Browning movie.’
This also required Hoult and Cage to maintain a balance in their performances, continue to interpret the parts, and pay homage to Frye and Lugosi through their acting.
‘We were looking at the footage on set and trying to mimic some of the behaviour, so the way that Dwight Frye doffs his hat in the Tod Browning movie, Nick Hoult was like, “I want to do it kind of like that”.
‘I mean, Hoult looks… they both fit into this old movie really well in a really great way, and there’s more footage we’ve shot than ended up in the movie and I’m going to put it on the Blu-ray because there are a few other classic images from the movie that we didn’t get to cut into [Renfield].
‘I didn’t want Cage or Hoult to do an imitation of Dwight Frye or Bela Lugosi, except I wanted Hoult to do the laugh and some of the faces a little bit, but in his way, and then I wanted Cage to do some of the lines but still do his kind of mid-Atlantic, voice of his father thing that he was doing for the rest of the role – with just a touch of Bela Lugosi maybe in there!’
The setting of Renfield is contemporary New Orleans, where the two characters are recovering after a near encounter with several vampire hunters. In an effort to escape Dracula’s hold, Renfield attends a 12-step self-help group for codependent individuals in this scene.
The local criminal family the Lobos and their annoying and stupid kid Teddy (Ben Schwartz) complicate matters. He also meets and befriends police woman Rebecca Quincy (Awkwafina).
Renfield is in cinemas now.
Source My Celebrity Life.