When the copyright expired on Disney’s Winnie the Pooh it seemed to be open season and director and co-writer Rhys Waterfield took the opportunity to make a horror version of the children’s classic. The film made just under $5m worldwide off a tiny budget and a sequel was inevitable and has now been shot. Waterfield was recently interviewed by trade paper Variety about Winnie the Pooh 2….Here’s what he said
How much more blood are we going to see in the sequel?
In comparison to the first film everything’s stepped up massively. It’s a horror film. A lot of the times people are going there for the death scenes and for those elements and we’ve really upped the ante. I think the last time I did a count there was over 30 deaths in the movie, which is quite substantial compared to most movies. I think that’s at least over three times what the first film had and there’s various massacres and stuff. So there’s a lot of blood and a lot of gore.
About the sequel’s budget….
It’s magnitudes higher compared to what it was on the first film. It’s over 10 times what it was.
How they came up with imaginative kills for the sequel…..
It was actually a bit easier this time because the budget is higher so it expands out your options. And I want them to be really, really crazy. I’ve given Winnie a signature weapon this time. In the other film it was just anything he could pick up really, so it was like a sledge hammer or a bat. But one of his key weapons in this is a bear trap, which is very fitting to his to his character. So we got a really gruesome, scary one made. It looks awesome and he kills people in a variety of ways with it. And there’s some very, very cool set pieces. They were challenging to shoot but they’ll make for some crazy kills. There’s one sequence in the movie which is absolutely wild and I’m really excited for people to see it.
What Winnie the Pooh 2 is about….
There’s a group of girls in a motor home, they’re having a good time and then Winnie the Pooh and Owl turn up and then… they don’t have a good time.
How Tigger appears in the sequel …..
You couldn’t use Tigger before because he wasn’t in the public domain then. But Tigger is in the public domain on Jan. 1, 2024 and the film is coming out a month later…… We’ve finished principal photography and the film is currently in the post production stages. I’m tidying up the edit and we’ve got various departments working on it in terms of the music, sound, grade and animation, VFX, all of that stuff.
Fur instead of latex with blood ……
It was very hard. Because we’ve really pushed the boat as much as we can and it was a very difficult shoot. And elements like that, like having fur on the creatures, it does add an extra level of complexity. For continuity, if you’re going in between when they’re soaked in blood and they’re not soaked in blood, it is harder for those guys to clean them off. But it actually adds a lot, especially on close ups, when you see all of fur and the dimensions to it. It doesn’t just look like latex and rubber, it makes it feel more real.
source : variety
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