When you have actors as talented as John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson on your side, does it make the whole process more enjoyable?

MH: Absolutely, if you have talented actors it makes life massively easier. As John Huston once said, as soon as I have to direct I know I've done my casting wrong, and there's some truth in that. But of course, when you're directing strong personalities such as John and Sam you also have to go in there and be strong and have your roadmap and stick to it, because your responsibility is the whole goddamn thing and actors are in the moment much more than a director can afford to be.

Sam and John have never worked together before so putting those guys in a room together was obviously fun. You have to cast right, you can see great actors being cast wrong and they're helplessly lost in that situation. I think, when it comes to the hotel manager played by Sam, we really needed a strong character who could stand up to John in this nine-minute long scene. It's an interesting power struggle within that scene and that was a great joy for me to do. We rehearsed it as almost a theatre play; we spent a day rehearsing and shot it the next day. That was interesting.

You mentioned John as an in-the-moment actor; when you're working with material this dark is it easy to snap out and the end of the day and stay sane?

MH: John has his process and we tried to start every day just me, John and Benoit and we would just go through what we were going to do that day. John woke up in the middle of the night and had some new idea, and I would have some of my own, and Benoit would add something, so we worked in that manner and then when we felt that we had a good situation going we started to shoot.

Many of these scenes took a lot of energy out of John for starters - and also me as a director sometimes! I had to play all the things that were not there yet, the screaming walls, Mary McCormack on the computer, and all of these things. It was a very physical film to direct in that way because I was doing all these things for John to react to.

But, yeah, he's very committed and it drained him every day, but he was also a trooper and he's a strong guy. He's a professional actor so he knew how to divide his energy in the right way.



I imagine you're a definite John Cusack fan...

MH: Yeah, absolutely, who isn't! John's been working for something like twenty years now, and he's even in Stand By Me, which is another Stephen King adaptation, when he was much younger. When you think about John Cusack you think about quite an amazing variety of films and parts; he always makes something new out of it even if he's playing in conventional things like romantic comedies. Even if you don't love the films, maybe, you can always watch him because he always gives something.

What are you favourite Cusack films, not including 1408?

MH: Not including 1408? The Grifters is a great film. I think he was very good in that thriller in the motel that came out a couple of years ago, Identity. That was quite an underrated film and I think it was a very interesting piece. It didn't get the attention it deserved. Being John Malkovich was another film I liked a lot. Whatever genre he works in he always brings something to his characters. I think, when it comes to 1408 you may like the film, but you'll like Cusack even if, for some reason, you don't like the film. It's a great performance.

Evil is a great film; have you moved to Hollywood now or are you thinking of going back to Sweden to make perhaps a smaller film?

MH: Hollywood doesn't really exist. It exists as a place but the concept is disappearing. 1408 is a Swedish director, a French DP and composer, an English crew. And that's important to me, it's an international environment. I shot here in London and I now have a group of people I really like to work with.

I've stopped planning things that way, things will happen. Of course I can see myself doing a film in Sweden at some point. Sweden is a very small country with a very small film business and being able to work in this international environment gives me more opportunity to do what I chose as a profession; that's great news. As a director I really want to try different films and different genres, and I want to surprise myself, too, I want to find projects I really wasn't thinking about doing. So we'll see what happens in the future but, you know, with 1408 doing very well in the US it obviously gives me more freedom and trust from the money people to do what I want, which is good news for me, obviously.



Have you found, making 1408 and Derailed, that the offers coming through are for similar thrillers?

MH: No. It's quite a variety, the next film I'm starting on now is called Shanghai and it takes place there during the war, just before the Japanese invasion of China. It's sort-of an epic drama, a love story set with the war as a backdrop. It's a great piece of material that I've been flirting with for quite some time and I hope it's going to happen at the beginning of next year. So that's something very, very different from these two films.

You mentioned Evil, you know, that's a period piece in a Swedish boarding school in the fifties. I can see similarities with Evil and 1408 when it comes to my interest for this specific character, even if they're very different films. But you're drawn to certain material and certain characters for a reason. You don't want to know exactly why because then it becomes too intellectual, but you try to go with your gut feeling.

Also, I'm not really worried anymore about critics and so on. Obviously you want people to like what you do but if you want to really be loved by critics you should stay away from the horror genre. I really try to be honest with myself and do things that I can have fun with.

Is the challenge part of the interest?

MH: Yeah, if you for one reason or another end up in this weird job that I have you have to be prepared to work very hard and I think that's for every film. Shanghai is proving to be the most technically complicated film I've done, but I welcome that and sometimes you wonder, "Why the hell am I do this? Why do I get up at six o'clock every morning?" But that's who you are and that's what you love in a way. The alternative is working in an office, and sometimes you wish you were, but at the end of the day you're not.