About
Kiefer Sutherland stars as a troubled ex-cop whose job as a night watchman at a burned out department store leads to terrifying encounters with evil forces in Mirrors, the latest thriller from Alexandre Aja (High Tension, The Hills Have Eyes). His role in Mirrors isn’t the first time he’s played a tortured character, although Sutherland says any resemblance to past roles he’s played is purely coincidental.
“It’s never that thought out, maybe more just because I’ve never gone for a character, specifically,” said Sutherland at Mirrors’ Los Angeles press junket. “I’ve always gone towards a story, and those stories have interested me.”
So what was it that drew him into the world of Mirrors? “This is two-fold because it’s a genre that I really don’t think I’ve done, even though people have compared The Lost Boys to a horror film or Flatliners to a horror film, which they weren’t in my book. They were thrillers,” answered Sutherland. “The Lost Boys was a smidgen of a lot of stuff, from comedy to pop culture and on purpose - that’s exactly what Joel [Schumacher] wanted to do with it, with scary moments in it. And The Vanishing was a thriller to me. It was not a horror film. This was really, specifically going after [a certain audience].”
Sutherland admits he’s not a huge fan of horror films. “I can do maybe one a year. I kind of liken it to getting on a roller coaster. You haven’t done it in four years and you go to the amusement park with your daughter or your son. You’re standing there and you go, ‘This is going to be great!’ You get in line and then you get close to it and you’re going, ‘What the f–k am I doing here?,’ laughed Sutherland. “And then you start to try to walk out and there’s 300 people behind you, and your kid’s looking at you, so you’re stuck. And the slow ride up is just torture and then it’s done. You walk out going, ‘Wasn’t that great?’ And then four years later, you forget the front part and you do it again.”
“I wanted to work with Alex [Aja] because I really loved The Hills Have Eyes. I thought it harkened back to these horror films that I liked - which were the original Amityville, my father’s remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Changeling, The Exorcist, The Shining - and all of those films were character-based. I felt that this one was character-based. It was a drama, for all intents and purposes - up until one-quarter of the way through the film - where you’re seeing a guy who’s living on his sister’s couch. He’s at an all-time low, with regards to his own confidence. At any moment in the movie, instead of going to get the job at the security place, he could have gone to fight the investigation of him, as a police officer. It could have gone that way. It was a straight-up drama. And I felt that that gives you an opportunity to really become invested in this guy’s situation, this family that he’s estranged from, what he wants to do with his life and where he’s at. He’s at the bottom and you want him to go up. And then, all of a sudden this horrific circumstance arises and it moves into this genre. I was really attracted to that story and that idea, as much as I was anything.”
Getting back to the idea of being attracted to tortured characters, Sutherland thinks maybe he is actually drawn to them more than he initially believed. “Given the history and the track record, maybe those are the kinds of stories that, when I go to see something, I really respond to. I really responded to the Gene Hackman character in The French Connection. That’s a really tortured guy. He had this great scene where he wakes up and he’s handcuffed to his own bed by the ankle, and the girl is running naked through his apartment. That’s not a healthy guy,” said Sutherland, laughing. “There are so many films. Nick Nolte in 48 Hours was that guy. I have always been drawn to those characters, as a viewer and as a fan. I guess I’ve been attracted, certainly on some level, to those characters. I feel like I understand them on some level, and I think those films are interesting. And, certainly with something like Jack Bauer, they were interesting to someone else, too.”
Horror films, or movies of any genre which use a lot of special effects, can be tricky for an actor. Much of what he’s acting with or reacting to is not actually physically on the set, but Sutherland said writer/director Aja explained everything so clearly that he had no problem imagining what was taking place. “He’ll explain to the T,” said Sutherland. “For instance, in the changing room sequence, I never saw a lady screaming and I never saw anyone on fire. He would just say, specifically, ‘This is where I want you to look for this because this is going to happen and this is going to happen.’ He would just be really clear about what he wants to do. Alex Proyas, when we did Dark City, had to do a lot of that as well. There is a relief in someone who is so clear about absolutely everything that they’re going to do. Whereas I have worked with people too where CGI is not something they’re familiar with. They’re good [at] storytelling with a great style of camera, but they say, ‘It’s going to kind of be like this.’ And the second I hear ‘kind of,’ I’m like, ‘Okay, well, do you kind of want me to do this? Or do you kind of want me to do that?’ So, there’s a huge relief with someone like Alex.”
“And it’s all in his head, too. There were storyboards, but I don’t think I ever saw him pick them up. He knows clearly, in every crevice, what’s going to happen. So when I saw the film, when it was finished, he was dead right. Everything was exactly what he had said it was going to be. And even in that context, I still really enjoyed the film, even more than I thought I would, which is a good thing because I’m naturally pessimistic. Out of 60 films, I would say I was really excited about 15 of them. And not one of them started out without the best intentions. Not one film have I ever walked onto the set the first day and thought, ‘This is going to be a piece of crap!’ You always have this hope and this faith that this one unit, whatever group comes together, is going to make this thing and it’s going to work. The reality is that it’s just not like that. Life is not like that.”