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Todd Farmer Answers Some Jason X Questions

Admin | Published on the may 25th 2022, 8:29 pm | 411 Views

Original Interview is linked here: AV Club: Jason X at 20: Remembering that time when Friday The 13th's slasher went to deep space <- Click here!

About Jason's Healing Factor in Jason X:

Todd Farmer

But I did want Jason to have a reason why he heals, and that is for whatever reason, he regenerates. He’s like Wolverine. And at the same time, when he wants to get out of chains, for the most part, he can. He can’t unfreeze himself. But fate does that for him.

Tamed Nudity in Jason X:

Todd Farmer

That’s my fault, because I always hated gratuitous nudity. I hated the idea that we were making women take their clothes off for the for the pure reason of making women take their clothes off. And I hated it in horror movies. But in the 11th hour, Sean came to me and said, “We have to have nudity.” And so I wrote the sequence with the campers and the VR where they take their tops off—and they purely make fun of it, which is what I wanted to do. And then Noel came up with lines. And so all of that worked out perfectly. And then if you look later into my silly, floundering career, I do nudity in the movies because if I’m going to ask Betsy [Rue] to take her clothes off [in My Bloody Valentine 3D], if I’m going to ask Christa [Campbell] to take her clothes off [in Drive Angry], then I’m gonna take my clothes off, too. Because it’s only fair. If men are going to make women take their clothes off, then men have to take their clothes off too. That’s how it goes.

Unspoken Rules of Friday the 13th Mythos:

Todd Farmer

Yes, there are definitely rules. The first one was in the original VR sequence, when the kids are trying to figure out how to be rescued. The guy doing it discovers Jason’s mother so he recreates Jason’s mother and has her drowning out in the water. And so Jason goes out to his mother. And in the first draft, he goes out to his mother and he dunks her and he drowns her. And Sean and Jimmy both lost their shit. They were like, “You cannot do that! There is only one consistent in Jason, and that is he loves his mother.” So Jimmy suggested that I rewrite it so that he saves his mom, but when he pulls her out of the water she’s not fully rendered from the waist down, and so it’s like this wire mesh of rendering and that breaks the spell. And that’s what we put in there, and then they couldn’t make a financial agreement with Betsy Palmer, so it didn’t happen. But yes, that is definitely a rule.

And then Kane let us know that there is one more rule that we didn’t even know existed—and that is, you never see Jason get up. You can knock him down three or four times, but you never see him get up. He was like, “Don’t do that. Because it’s awkward, and you never want to see Jason be that human.” And I was like, that’s fucking brilliant! So I didn’t have a problem with that. Kane had been protecting that character for freaking ages. It had been like nine or ten years since there had been a Jason movie, and Kane had kept the franchise alive, going to convention after convention. So he had a right to make that call, I think.

About Jason X/Todd Farmers Legacy:

Todd Farmer

Well, it’s your baby, it’s your first movie. I wish I could go back and appreciate it more than I did at the time. But certainly everything that I know today was spawned out of that experience. Sean and I butted heads all the time, especially creatively, but he did pull me under his wing. He paid me for three years. I didn’t get rich off of it. I made a thousand bucks a week and I got a little bit of a raise every year. And then I think when Jason came out, I got a $15,000 bonus or something. But I got paid to learn how to be a screenwriter. So I don’t know that I have a legacy, but I certainly have an appreciation for being allowed into this special little playground.


Note: These are just summarizations of his [Todd Farmer] answers! to see the FULL make sure to click the link in the beginning of the article!

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