FOX SEARCHLIGHT PICTURES Presents In ... - Central-Kino

ABOUT THE PRODUCTION
Stoker’s Path to the Screen
Filmmaker Park Chan-Wook has created a singular body of work during his more than 20
years as a writer, director and producer of some of Korean cinema’s most innovative and original
movies, crafting feverish scenarios that combine lyrical beauty with shattering acts of violence
and operatic emotion. STOKER is a dark and disturbing thriller about a mysterious and isolated
American family. Even the film’s title makes metaphorical allusion to evil, invoking the name of
Dracula author Bram Stoker, whose groundbreaking novel is as much about an opportunist who
preys on the innocent as it is the supernatural world of the vampire.
Fittingly, STOKER’s path to the big screen began with a mystery of its own. Scott Free
producer Michael Costigan received a phone call from a top Hollywood agent offering him a new
script. “But she wouldn’t tell me anything about the writer,” he remembers. “And she wouldn’t
email it to me. I had to pick it up at her office. I was of course very intrigued, so after dinner that
night I had to have a look. And as I read, I found I couldn’t put it down.”
Starting with the script’s opening image of a young girl playing a piano as a spider creeps
up her leg, Costigan was riveted, shocked and enthralled by the story as it unfolded to its
inexorable conclusion. The producer found himself lost in the eerie, improbable and selfcontained
world of the Stoker family. “These people are completely pure,” he explains. “If they
have an emotion, they have to follow it through, but they don’t fully understand the ramifications
of what they’re doing. They are brilliant in an overall sense. They’re highly perceptive. They see
things other people can’t see. But they also are obsessed with their own self-preservation, and if
someone gets in their way, they’re going to do whatever it takes to protect themselves and their
needs.”
The story begins as India Stoker turns 18. India, played by Mia Wasikowska, is
introspective and seemingly passive. “But she is about to come into her own,” says Costigan.
“She shows nothing on the surface, but clearly has an excess of emotion and perception on the
inside. She actually sees and hears minute details that most of us miss, and it overwhelms her.”
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