Exclusive Interview with 'Vanishing on 7th Street' Director Brad Anderson

Read our exclusive interview with director Brad Anderson, who helmed the upcoming post-apocalyptic horror-thriller movie ‘Vanishing on 7th Street.’ The film, which is set to have a limited February 18, 2011 theatrical release, follows a group of four strangers who discover Detroit has been hit by a black-out. The four strangers, who are played by Hayden Christensen, Thandie Newton, John Leguizamo and newcomer Jacob Latimore, try to figure out how to stay alive as people around them are simply vanishing after being engulfed by the dark. Anderson discusses with us, among other things, why he decided to use shadows to bring on the apocalypse, and why he thinks people are afraid of the dark.

Written by: Karen Benardello


Shockya (SY): ‘Vanishing on 7th Street’ takes place, and was shot, in Detroit. Why did you decide to shoot and set the post-apocalyptic thriller in one of the country’s biggest cities?

Brad Anderson (BA): One of the reasons we shot it there is because Michigan has really good tax breaks and substitutes to shoot. With Detroit, we were looking for a city that would visually work for us and would capture a dark, forbidding, abandoned city. To be honest, with Detroit, we didn’t have to do much production design. We just shot Detroit as Detroit, which I felt made sense.

SY: The film is unique in the fact that instead of using weapons or technology to bring on the apocalypse, it instead uses the shadows and dark. Why did you decide to do that?

BA: This was a script I wrote. With the script, if you see the film, there’s no explanation given. What’s happening is purposely left ambiguous. The shadows are the monster or the villain, if you will. It’s interesting to me because it’s not as if there’s a nuclear threat or a virus, or anything like that. What I did was an existential threat. People are confronted with disappearances without any real explanation. They’re left to debate what that means. The circumstances as to why this is happening were less interesting to me than the reactions and the behavior of the people, the survivors of the story. It’s not a typical apocalyptic genre film at all. I was never into that.

To read the rest of this interview, please visit:
http://www.shockya.com/news/2011/02/08/exclusive-interview-with-vanishing-on-7th-street-director-brad-anderson/