The Ruins, directed by Carter Smith (Bugcrush), wants to both make and ruin your theater-going experience. Simply put, the film wants to break you – it wants you to spill your popcorn on the floor, scream so loud that theater staff eject you from the theater and then force you to go home and have unyielding nightmares.
Well, maybe all of that won’t happen, but the cast of The Ruins believes their film is an experience you’ll never forget. Written by Scott B. Smith, the author who also penned the original novel, The Ruins is about two couples on vacation in Mexico, when, as Murphy’s Law predicts, everything that can go wrong, does.
In a conference call with The Diamondback, the cast from The Ruins – Shawn Ashmore (X-Men: The Last Stand), Jena Malone (Into The Wild), and Laura Ramsey (Whatever Lola Wants) – explained how this movie sets itself apart from other horror films.
“I think, personally, the reason why it’s more scary than other movies is because this has a realistic factor to it,” Ramsey said. “You can actually picture yourself being stranded somewhere and having to deal with a life or death situation. It’s about survival.”
And while other book-to-film adaptations tend to take more liberties, fans of the original Ruins can rest assured.
“I have read the book, and I think the movie stays very true to the book because Scott Smith, the author of the book, wrote the screenplay as well,” Ashmore said. “I think at the end of the day it has the exact same tone, and all the major events and character points and stuff that happened in the book are translated really well into the film.”
The movie was filmed almost entirely off the Gold Coast of Australia, and the cast members were put through a grueling process to understand the same agony that their characters experience.
“We were dealing with deprivation. All the cast went on this sort of diet where we weren’t eating a lot and we were trying to deprive ourselves of one singular thing to sort of understand the deprivation that the characters were going through,” Malone said. “To be perfectly honest, I think I had a breakdown almost on every level: spiritually, emotionally and creatively. It was a lot of physical work and it was completely demanding.”
Getting to work in Australia was one of many motivations to do the movie, but overall, the cast said their director’s reputation was a huge pull.
“My agents sent me along Carter Smith’s short film called Bugcrush, and that’s what really made me interested in even really taking a real self-look at the script,” Ashmore said. “I loved the short film; it was creepy, it was not too stylized, but it had a real sense of direction throughout the whole short, so that’s what really drew me in.”
But when it came down to it, all of the actors agreed it was The Ruins’ stark visualizations of humanity and realism that attracted them to the movie.
“There’s a lot of CG, there’s a lot of the sex in the film, maybe it’s a little bit more of a fantasy tale,” Malone said. “But what’s going to surprise audiences is how realistic it truly is and how humanistic it is, and how it isn’t. Who you are when you’re stripped down of all of those things that you, that make up your persona, what makes up you as a human, you know, that’s what you find when you’re sort of fighting for your life.”
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