WGTC: What was the process like of preparing The Yankee Pedlar Inn for production? Did you change anything in the hotel to fit what you wanted it to look like?
TW: Well, we all thought that we wouldn’t have to change anything, and we’ll go back there and just start shooting. But we changed more than we thought we would. But if you went to The Yankee Pedlar right now, you would think we changed nothing, that it looks just like the movie. Little things we changed. It was a lot of work that you don’t see. Like I said, if you watch it, you wouldn’t notice it.
I think we changed a lot of things, but it still feels the same. So to me, it was just about getting things out of there.
WGTC: Ti, you have said that you would only be interested in making The Innkeepers if the owners of The Yankee Pedlar Inn allowed you to film the movie there. What was your reaction when they agreed to let you shoot there?
TW: (Gives sigh of relief) I mean really, there would have been no other place to make it. It was talked about, oh what if we change it. I said I don’t really want to change the script to be some place else. It was written about living at the Pedlar. There’s no other place that I know of like it. If we found some place else just like it, fine, but we weren’t going to. We lucked out.
WGTC: Did you experience any supernatural occurrences while shooting The Innkeepers?
TW: Yes, but I don’t know if it’s true. I don’t really believe in that stuff. But it’s the closest I’ve ever come to believing. There’s one story that I always tell, the one to me that’s the strangest, is the room in the movie that’s the haunted room, the honeymoon suite. The only reason we used that one was because it was on the third (top) floor, at the end of a hallway. It was big enough to do a dolly shot. It was purely technical reasons. But after we wrapped shooting, I found out that that is the most haunted room in the hotel.
SP: It’s a really weird room.
TW: Yeah, and I only picked it because we were able to do the shot that I had in my head. I didn’t feel that it was haunted, it was all technical. Then to find out it was the most haunted, it was weird. Then when you add that with lights turning on and off, doors opening and closing, TVs turning on, phones ringing and no one was there, if you add all that up, it’s a weird place.
SP: It was weird. Just the same stuff happened to me. My door would fly open violently when I was sitting on my bed, and I was like, it’s the wind, even though the window was closed! But I didn’t want to pull a Claire, and start freaking out. So I just told myself it was the creakiness of the whole place.
WGTC: Did you have to shut the hotel down when you were shooting?
TW: Almost, but there was a prom, a wedding. We had to schedule around a few things. But most of the time we were shooting, there was either nobody, or one or two people were staying there. Sometimes we had to schedule our day off around an event, because they had already booked that stuff. But by some miracle, it worked out. I thought for sure some of that stuff was going to back-fire.
The House of the Devil was a really terrible experience for me, meaning it was very hard. Everything was going wrong all the time. The Innkeepers just kind of worked out. We made it in 17 days, which is nearly impossible. We finished early every day.
SP: We had a 10-hour day everyday.
TW: Yeah, this one wasn’t so bad, I don’t know why. My next movie, I’m just going to get hammered, because this one went so well.
WGTC: Even with such a short shoot, you didn’t face any difficulties while making The Innkeepers?
TW: I don’t think another movie will go as smoothly as this one.
SP: Yeah, I never had an experience that went as well as this one did.
TW: We would shoot like nine pages a day, and three-quarters of it would be done before lunch. We would go, we need to figure out something else to shoot. (laughs) Or we’d have a new crew guy come in from another movie, and he would go, oh, eight pages, and we would be done before lunch. They would say, I’ve never seen anything like this. (laughs) It just sort of worked out.
WGTC: Sara, given that Ti wrote the screenplay for The Innkeepers, did that make it easier for you to work with him as a director?
SP: I really liked working with Ti because many times I have worked with directors who don’t know what they want. If they don’t know what they want, we do like 10,000 different takes, because they can’t make up their mind. It was so easy (with Ti), he knew what he wanted to do. He was so specific. That was great.
WGTC: Ti, as a director, is it easier for you to work on a film that you wrote the script for?
TW: Yeah, I like writing my own stuff. To me, writing, directing and editing are just film-making to me. It’s not really that compartmentalized. It would be bad if Sara asked me, why am I saying this line, and I said, I don’t know, ask the writer. It seems like a weird disconnect.
As the writer and director, I can say, here’s why, or just don’t say it. Having the ability to make those judgment calls like that, to me is what being a filmmaker, a director, is. Knowing what you want, and having that specific voice, is something I like.
WCTC: What do you think makes The Innkeepers unique from other horror films that are coming out now?
TW: Well, it takes place in a hotel. (laughs) For me, the goal was to make a charming horror movie, which I haven’t seen in awhile. Also, it’s not important, but I like when people who don’t watch horror movies go oh, this one we’ll be okay with, because it’s not the lowest common denominator of people being killed. That’s what I like, when people say I don’t really like horror movies, but this one I liked.
There’s not a lot of other horror movies right now that have a balance of regular movie versus horror movie. I like to think that I have respect for the audience. Yes, this movie’s a little slower, but the movie treats you like you have intellect.
That concludes our interview, but we’d like to thank Sara Paxton and Ti West for taking the time to talk to us.
Be sure to check out The Innkeepers, which was released on VOD on Friday, December 30, 2011, and will hit theaters on Friday, February 3.