THE WARD is hitting select cities this Friday, and actor Jared Harris shared a few thoughts about collaborating with Carpenter on the director’s first feature film in a decade.

Collider spoke with Harris, whose genre credits include TV’s FRINGE and RESIDENT EVIL: APOCALYPSE. “I got involved [with THE WARD] through someone I used to know in college,” Harris relates. “He runs the film company [ARC Entertainment] now, so we got in touch with each other and I came in and chatted with him and he said he had this thing and would I be interested. They were out to some other actors, but it didn’t look like it was gonna work and would it be something that I would be interested in and I said, ‘I can say right now hell yes, it’s John Carpenter. Send me the script.’ So that’s how I got involved. And then I read the script and it was good fun and I could see exactly how this worked and being in a John Carpenter movie. I love his films. I remember where I was when I saw ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, I remember going to see HALLOWEEN in the West End, I remember going to see THE THING in North Carolina when I was at Duke, STARMAN at Times Square in New York. You know, I love his films.”

As a fan, Harris couldn’t resist talking with Carpenter about his past works. “Well, I think it’s alright to ask questions like that,” he says. “He doesn’t like to sit there and chitchat on set, so if you were on the way to lunch or something like that he’d sit and talk about the other movies and some of the questions and famous stories that you know about these films and stuff like that. But when you’re on set, he doesn’t want to chitchat, he wants any conversation to be about solving the problem of why you’re not shooting the next shot. I probably got to talk to him a little bit more about that after we were done or the couple times we went out for dinner or we had a drink or something like that.”

We won’t spoil THE WARD for you, but there’s a big shock in the third act, and Harris explains that the story needed to be “tightened up” during production. “It’s very difficult when you do a story like this, without giving too much away, where there’s a big reveal at the end of the story,” Harris remarks. “There are necessarily holes in the story that are like thin ice and you’ve just gotta shoot over them quickly; you don’t wanna linger over where the ice is thin. And you know it’s necessary for it to be that way, because every single story of any movie that you’ve watched and where you’ve had a good experience, I could probably sit down there and pull out bits where there were, not logical inconsistencies, but like reality gaps in there. But you know, it is a story, they’re fiction, so in this particular one there was tightening up of stuff that was going on.”

ARC Entertainment will release THE WARD in Los Angeles, New York, Denver, Miami, Chicago, New Orleans, Boston, Houston, Minneapolis and Dallas this Friday. Click here to get the details concerning Carpenter’s live Twitter talk taking place tomorrow.

---

News - Latest