Chances are pretty good that while you haven’t ever heard of Marcus Nispel, you have seen some of his work. Nispel is a member of a group of veterans who are making their break from music video to the big screen, and he recently got his chance when Producer/Director Michael Bay chose him out of hundreds to remake THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE.

Nispel got good marks for his unique and ambitious view on the classic, and whether you love or hate the idea of a remake, you still have to admit that Marcus Nispel did a good job of making it a new and unique experience.

The DVD releases on March 30 and it comes in both a regular and a special two-disc edition, which includes four separate audio commentaries, and Nispel speaks on each one. He also took a few moments from his busy schedule to speak to us and answer a few questions about the making of the film.

DVD Empire: Hello Marcus. Thanks for taking to time to speak to us.

Marcus: You are welcome.

DVD Empire: First of all, I have to say congratulations are in order. Because you achieved what some say is the impossible. You took a genre classic and gave it a new look without ruining any of the feeling of the original. That must have been an incredibly daunting task. So how much of that was on your mind while you were filming the movie?

Marcus: I have sort of a pat answer for that. I always say I wasn’t remaking TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE as much as Tobe Hooper was remaking Hansel And Gretel. Seriously though, I’m a big fan of the original movie and that’s not just saying “the original horror movie” but also the kind of unapologetic movie that sets out to do what it promises. To truly be scary and not something for everyone, is truly something remarkable. There is a select group of people over the years that have become homogenized to the horror film, and TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE is the cure for that

DVD Empire: I would have to agree with that

Marcus: And you know what, also maybe coming out of commercials and music videos where I certainly did a fair amount of polite entertainment. This was a nice area to step out in. The original film still remains a benchmark and I’ve tried to make film look like that, but never to this degree.

DVD Empire: That’s interesting because a lot of your film seems rapid paced like a music video or even a commercial. How much was that on your mind during filming?

Marcus: You always use the material as a driving force and if you really look at my music videos they certainly don’t have the general MTV style that granted, a lot of them might have. But there are those where I tried sort of like a feature look and experimented and they never smelled like MTV. So when I did music videos I tried to make them look like feature films and when I did commercials I made them look like music videos so my question was always, “What will I do when I actually do a movie?”

DVD Empire: It looked like coming home for you.

Marcus: Yes. And really the main question for Daniel who has done it before and me, you know Daniel, my cinematographer did the original “Texas Chainsaw Massacre”…

DVD Empire: That would be Daniel Pearl, right?

Marcus: Yes, Daniel Pearl. And our big question was, “How do we approach it?” and I really felt it had to be like a snuff film. Scott Kosar kept showing us around these wonderland crime walk-throughs and all that that seemed very real and maybe not the way it should’ve gone and Daniel just decided that we’ve seen that now. It worked with the “Blair Witch Project” and it worked with the original TCM, but if you do it again it just becomes a “me too”, and we really have to find something that would be unique. What really was guiding me was not the commercial style but the fact that horror and violence can have something incredibly poetic about it and I haven’t really seen that yet. It’s something that when it happens it makes people very uncomfortable. Look at Joel-Peter Witkin. He’s making art corpses and you look at it it looks like a Botticelli painting and people go “oh”. What’s really disconcerting is that first look. It looks almost hypnotically beautiful and then you look closer and you see it’s actually very very cruel. So it seems to be obvious to shoot something grimy in a grimy way. We still try to saturate lots of art directed in an authentic style but that’s sort of how we arrived with something that was not what we originally set out to do.

DVD Empire: You mentioned the writer Scott Kosar and he’s suddenly become the master of the horror film rewrite. He’s off to do the remake of THE AMITYVILLE HORROR now, am I correct?

Marcus: Yes, you are

DVD Empire: And you are now moving onto the movie “Needs”, so this looks like it’s been a good experience for you guys in Hollywood. But how much of that was the team that you assembled?

Marcus: It has everything to do with a good crew and I had one of the best to work with.

DVD Empire: Listening to the documentary, I have to agree that you folks always seemed to know what the other was thinking, so how much of that do you feel came into play as far as the film turned out?

Marcus: It had everything to do with the success of the film. You see, this is quite a different way of going about making this material. Tobe and Daniel, when they set out to make the original came fresh from film school. They were young and they made it with their credit cards. It’s a real ugly duckling story. Now in regards to the remake, we have the director and producer Michael Bay and everybody knows his story. Now me, I’ve done thousands of commercials and music videos, I’m a very commercial guy. I’ve worked a lot. I’m not a boy wonder by all means, but I have been doing this for a long time. And so it worked out that the people that we enthused for this are people that we’ve known for a long time. They are all people that you know. The special effects Supervisor worked with Michael Bay on PEARL HARBOR, and I had years of experience working with Daniel Pearl. So these were people that have done it for a while, but I carefully screened them because what I did not want to end up with were people that say, “Oh yeah, I worked with ‘Pearl Harbor’ and ‘Armageddon’ and I can do this too”. What these people said when I met them was, “We’ve done all these movies. We’ve done these big movies that are all about celebrity and special effect and we don’t feel it anymore. We want to go on and do something that we thought is what it would be like when we came from film school. You know, that gives us a feeling again to go out on a high wire without a net. Not enough time, not enough money, but the opportunity to really go in rough without some junior studio executive telling us how to do it.

DVD EMPIRE: With TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE and also CABIN FEVER, which was directed by Eli Roth, Horror seems to be heading back to the grass roots. It’s becoming more bang for your buck with less budget. Is this something that the big studios are figuring out yet?

Marcus: Well, you know I met yesterday the guys that are in charge of horror films at a big studio of that genre and they came and they hugged me and kissed me and they said, “We fought an uphill battle here for the past few years and you really busted open the doors to let this type of movie happen again. When we started out we certainly didn’t really have many well-wishers and everyone was like; “How dare you?” The whole idea of doing a re-make seemed preposterous, but you know my initiative had a lot to do with that. I was deterred by that because you see in Germany, where I’m from, “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” was X-rated, well not X-rated, but not allowed. You couldn’t watch it. So it was not in my DNA. Later I learned about it, I knew about it but I was not in a country where it was as well received, as it was here where it really broke all the rules, where it became this monolithical cult. So I didn’t have that reverence to it. Then you sign on and you look at the intimacies of the year and what a sacred cow this really is and then you start to take this really damn seriously and say, “You know what? I don’t care what’s being said. When it’s done I want to make sure I don’t turn off those people that pay their hard-earned money to see this type of a movie.” And our big mantra was ‘let’s keep it in the seventies’. That’s one first step towards authenticity because that’s maybe the last time that truly authentic movies were done on a regular basis. Another interesting thing on the DVD that I thought it was very interesting is that on top of it a movie like this, a story like this with modern day kids wouldn’t even be possible because they’d all have cell phones.

DVD EMPIRE: That’s a very good point, and since you brought up the commentary issue, let’s talk about it. You did four commentaries on the DVD. What was that like?

Marcus: That’s what they do and I was actually very glad about it. It was done in two sessions and I got very good questions. In a more traditional commentary, you tend to go and ramble. Here I did just that, but they had somebody to cut it together and make sense of it later.

DVD EMPIRE: That makes sense. One of the tracks was recorded with the cast and crew, and they seemed to be as at home with the material as you. Were they comfortable during the shoot? And also, were you as comfortable with them as you seemed to be?

Marcus: Absolutely! Well, a lot of filmmakers that are happy with their cast talk about what a great contribution it was for the movie. I think it’s safe to say if it wouldn’t be for the cast I would’ve been cut and shot in Austin. I would’ve never come back alive. If you go to a town that you don’t know, where you don’t shoot a lot, these people owe you nothing; they don’t know you from shit. And you come in there and you do a little genre flick for like five million dollars for production and you actually have high aspirations and then you work with a group of people that goes, “Oh yeah we can squeeze that little thing in before we do ‘The Alamo’” or whatever really big movie that they did before and after. Then people realize what kind of aspirations we really have, that we really want to make a four or five million dollar budget look like fifty, sixty million dollars. And that rarely happens. In fact, I think the first time it happened with the horror genre was when Ripley went out to do “Aliens”. Monster movies weren’t approached in that way. Then you really have an uphill battle. It’s the hottest day, the hottest time, shot in the middle of the summer, in a little van. You have to turn off the air conditioner, you have to close the windows because cells are flapping, and you’re not popular. And then suddenly you look at the cast and they’re acting from the inside out. They’re putting their heart and soul in it. They’re really suffering. When Vogel is hanging on that hook he’s in tremendous pain and everybody knows it. When Jessica is acting it’s not Visine in her eyes, she’s really crying her eyes out and she’s keeping herself in that mode 24 hours a day and as we shot it in sequence for literally like fifteen, twenty days. Nobody complains, nobody riots. Because nothing that a crew respects more than professionalism. So these kids were everything that I had. I had nothing else, and they became the barometer of professionality so I can’t say enough good things about them.

DVD EMPIRE: The whole thing just looked like it came together and again, you guys did an incredible job on it.

Marcus: Let me tell you, the first act, and the first twenty pages of the script all took place in that little van, right? It was all shot on the first day. Now that’s a good cast.

DVD Empire: That’s a damn good day!

Marcus: And that could’ve easily taken a week and if it would’ve taken a week we wouldn’t really have had the time to work out the action of the ending where you cut to the much more rapid pace. So what a gift, you know?

DVD Empire: What’s your next project going to be?

Marcus: Good question. “Need”, I’m still waiting for a script approval so I’m thinking about moving on to something else. There’s a lot of options. One thing I know is I want to do something that’s diametrically opposed. “Need” being a very sexually charged love story is just the right thing so maybe later in the year, first thing next year, but I want make sure that also that won’t get compromised. Scary movies have to be scary, sexy movies have to be sexy.

DVD Empire: Absolutely. Back to Texas though, did you have any problems with the ratings board?

Marcus: No, if anything people helped to protect me from myself. I wouldn’t have really changed all that much, therefore there is no such thing as a director’s cut or uncensored cut because we didn’t feel that there was really any compromise done to begin with, with the exception of the Morgan scene, the guy who got handcuffed to the chandelier, I always felt I wanted to see him go and we were discreetly cutting away from it so on the DVD you get to see the full scene, and there’s a lot more to be seen. It’s just that looking at it now, I’m not sure that we needed to see everything falling out of him. As a filmmaker, I was satisfied with the final cut of the scene, and anything more might have been over the top.

DVD Empire: Well, I think that covers everything. So let me thank you for taking the time to speak to us, and also thanks for a great film and cool DVD. Be sure to let us know when you have something else coming. I’ll personally be looking forward to NEED, and I hope it goes well for you.