Inside the Movie Elijah Wood Calls Even More Complicated than 'The Lord of the Rings'

Elijah Wood in Open Windows

Believe it or not, the most interesting work of Elijah Wood’s career has come after starring in three of the biggest, most groundbreaking, and universally beloved fantasy films of all time.

The 33-year-old actor and former hobbit has spent his decade out of Middle-earth exploring the dark corners of humanity, concentrating especially on horror movies and dark thrillers. Wood has starred in the underrated remake of Maniac in 2012 and in this year’s wacko classical music assassin thriller Grand Piano. Next week, he’ll be seen in the ambitious cyber horror-thriller Open Windows, a film from director Nacho Vigalondo that takes place entirely on a computer screen, out on Nov. 7.

“I’m certainly used to working with elements that aren’t physically there,” he told Yahoo Movies last week, referring to mountains of green screen and motion captured creatures in the Lord of the Rings movies. “On a technical level it probably was harder than Lord of the Rings.”

Wood plays Nick, a super-fan that operates an obsessive (and slightly creepy) website dedicated to fictional actress Jill Goddard, played by Sasha Grey. Nick travels to Austin’s Fantastic Fest under the impression that he’s won an intimate dinner with his idol, unaware that he was the only entrant in the fake sweepstakes. He soon learns the truth: A hacker even more obsessed with Goddard has tricked him, using Nick as an unwitting pawn in a plan to hack into every element of the actress’s life — and then, hack her apart.

The audience views everything from Nick’s laptop screen, with windows corresponding to his webcam, live streams of Fantastic Fest events, and Goddard’s compromised cell phone. “Each of the cast members were sequestered in their own spaces, because very rarely do any of the characters physically interact until the end,” Wood explained. “When we video chat with people, it can be awkward, because you often look at the screen and not the camera. This was three or four more times awkward because there was nothing to see, just a camera lens that I saw all the time.”

In making much of the first half of the movie, Wood spent most of his time trading lines with an assistant director as he fiddled with a prop laptop. This was complicated further by the panic he had to conjure from nothing, turning his head in horror to react to various events that were not occurring, hitting precise marks to correspond with the technical plot points that help drive the fast-paced thriller.

At one point in the film, the audience watches through a still-active webcam that Nick carries as he leaves his hotel room and races toward Goddard’s apartment. To shoot the sequence, first Wood carried an actual camera rig to film himself as he dodged hotel security. Then, he spent three days in a non-moving car in front of a green screen, trying to simulate wild driving, all while reciting a fair amount of dialogue and playing with that prop computer.

“It all had to adhere to a time code to a certain degree, because there are a variety of windows and cameras speaking to me, and various actions occurring on the computer screen itself,” Wood said, adding that he was required to manage all of these complicated maneuvers during long, uninterrupted takes. “There’s no cutting points really — the cutting is when the camera moves away from one screen to another.”

The end result is a genre film that carves out its own unique place in a horror-thriller market that Wood, along with directors like Ti West (The Sacrament) and Adam Wingard (The Guest), have helped to revive after a creatively moribund (though lucrative) mid-aughts run.

“There are the found footage films — Paramount has constantly been drilling that particular genre until it’s worthless,” Wood explained, referring to movies like the Paranormal Activity franchise. “I actually don’t have anything specifically against found footage in theory, I just think unfortunately sometimes, if something works, the theory is to make more films like it.”

In addition to starring in Open Window and other thriller, Wood has begun to make his mark as a producer. In 2010, he co-founded the Woodshed, a genre label that was re-branded SpectreVision last year.

The company debuted child-zombie horror-comedy Cooties, which was bought by Lionsgate, at a midnight screening at the Sundance Film Festival. Wood starred and produced in that one, but is even more excited about his other Sundance film, the Iranian vampire western A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, by up-and-coming director Ana Lily Amirpour.

SpectreVision’s ambitions are obviously growing, with the company having just wrapped on The Boy, a film that is the first in a planned trilogy. Think of it as a twisted take on the Antoine Doinel series, focusing on a young boy living with his father at a roadside motel who grows up to become a serial killer by the third movie.

“I’ve always been fascinated psychologically with what happens to those people who became mass murderers,” Wood said. “There are so many links that are common amongst serial killers: killing of animals, lack of remorse. It’s a real slow burn about a young boy and sort of the psychopathic proclivities that the boy has.”

If that isn’t unsettling enough, the company is also set to begin production on Curse the Darkness, a film directed by Jorge Michel Grau that promises very authentic horrors. “It deals with zombies in the Haitian tradition, which is where zombies came from,” Wood said. “There was basically a concoction that would leave people paralyzed, presumed to be dead, buried alive, and then to be ultimately exhumed and effectively brain-dead. Our movie deals with that type of zombie-ism, set against migrant workers in Louisiana.”

Wood noted that the budget gap between indie horror films and their studio brethren has closed in the last few years, which allows for even more ambitious ideas. It comes in part thanks to the video on demand and streaming market, which has helped bring the movies to parts of the country that don’t have indie theaters or big genre film festivals.

“It’s a great time for genre, a great time for horror,” Wood said, “and I feel like there are more interesting voices in that space in America than there have been in quite some time.”

Watch the trailer for Open Windows below: