Read Empire’s career-spanning 2009 interview with Sam Raimi – talking the impending release of Drag Me To Hell, his early days on the Evil Dead movies, his plans for fourth Spider-Man and Evil Dead films that never materialised, and much more…
Originally published in May 2009
Sam Marshall Raimi has been making audiences go “ooh", "aah" and "eek!" for three decades. So it's hard to believe he hasn't even turned 50. Then again, like Spielberg and Welles, he's the very definition of a cinematic wunderkind, bursting onto the scene in 1981 with the cult horror classic The Evil Dead, a film he'd started directing when he was 19.
Even then, he was showing an innate knack for dizzying camera moves, innovative sound effects and ghoulish humour. Whereas other horror directors liked to tell their stories in a restrained fashion, Raimi's direction was an aural and visual assault, grabbing you by the neck and screaming in your face. And it worked a treat – when Stephen King saw the movie, he was blown away by what was then dubbed "the ultimate experience in terror".
Unfortunately for Raimi, his next career move was to prove equally horrific, when Crimewave was taken away from him by the financiers. With nothing to lose, he threw himself with abandon into arguably his best movie, the astonishingly imaginative and influential Evil Dead II, sealing his reputation as the MTV generation's Goremaster General.
Since then, though, Raimi has avoided horror, per se. (Evil Dead III, better known as Army Of Darkness, was a Harryhausen-inspired adventure comedy, while 2000's The Gift was pure American Gothic.) Instead, he's thrown himself into a variety of genres, from the demented comic-book shapes of Darkman to the exercise in Spaghetti style that is his Western, The Quick And The Dead. But already a conflict was emerging in Raimi, torn between his talent for concocting indelible images and 'the desire to become a master craftsman. The two sides coalesced in 1993's A Simple Plan, a bleak, brilliant thriller; at last, he had all the skills to tackle a big old blockbuster. And they don't come any bigger than 2002's Spider-Man; which saw him bring the Marvel superhero to endearing, enduring life.
It soon evolved into a trilogy, which echoed The Evil Dead trilogy in structure (promising first film, fantastic, incredibly confident second film, muddled third) but outstripped it, unsurprisingly, in terms of success. The Spider-trilogy grossed around $2.5 billion, rapidly establishing Raimi as one of the most bankable directors around.
Spider-Man 4 is currently in development, but Raimi has seized the chance to make Drag Me To Hell, in which Alison Lohman is tormented by a vengeful spirit. The movie represents a long-awaited return for Raimi to his low-budget horror roots – albeit without a chainsaw or elongated chin in sight.
Empire’s West Coast Editor, Chris Hewitt, spoke to Raimi in the director’s Spider-Man memorabilia-dominated office on the Sony lot in Culver City. “They say you should never meet your heroes,” says Hewitt, “and God knows, I’ve had that saying validated in the past – but not with Raimi. Casually dressed, with glasses perched on his head, he was softly spoken, self-deprecating to a fault and, despite the movies packed with severed limbs, flying eyeballs and Kevin Costner, a genuinely sweet guy. Initially he seemed a little guarded, refusing to say anything even vaguely detrimental about people he'd worked with, but eventually you realise that it's just his good, old-fashioned Michigan manners coming through. He’s so unstintingly polite, in fact, that he decided to skip lunch so that the noise of the commissary wouldn't interfere with my Dictaphone – a decision I'm sure he regretted as we hit the 90-minute mark..."
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EMPIRE: How's Drag Me To Hell coming along?
RAIMI: I think it's coming together well. It's still in a very creative mode right now, because so much of the movie is sound design – and music – that the final picture is still being sculpted. So much creativity comes in the mix in a horror film. The ones I work on, anyway. I can't give you an honest picture of it just yet, but I'm excited about the ingredients that are coming into the kitchen for the final bake-off.
EMPIRE: So when you're watching a horror film and the sound's not quite there, is it hard to gauge the effectiveness of the scares?
RAIMI: Well, that's the thought that's always running through my mind, no matter what the noises are.
EMPIRE: Has it been a hard creative challenge coming back to horror and creating something new?
RAIMI: (Pauses) No... (Laughs) I'm not trying to be modest, I'm just trying to tell you the truth. There were plenty of hard things, such as getting all the material on a much quicker schedule than I'd been used to, and not having all the personnel or all the tools that I'd love to be shooting with. So the budget constraints were the biggest hurdle on this picture. Really, it was a joy to come up with fun camera shots, and try to be creative and original. Wondering what would be scary or funny... I never look at that as a challenge; just the fun part.
EMPIRE: Had you been itching to return to horror for a while?
RAIMI: Yes. I always appreciated the craft of making these horror films. And then, with this company that I'm involved with, Ghost House Pictures, I got to watch, as a producer, other directors working. So watching Takashi Shimizu work on The Grudge, I would see the dailies come in and think, "Oh, that's how he did it," or, "What an interesting way to make her move." I'd get really excited watching these directors work on their films and was thinking, "How come they're having all the fun?" I was just producing, I'm not making the creative choices. Some producers do, but I don't – I really let the directors make their own movies.
EMPIRE: Does that stem from the bad experiences you had on Crimewave, Darkman and Army Of Darkness?
RAIMI: Yes, that's unpleasant. That was bad (clearly uncomfortable). But anyways, I had written Drag Me To Hell with my brother Ivan some time ago and I was trying to get my friend; Jeff Lynch, to direct this movie. But I couldn't get all the money that I thought I wanted the director to have for the movie. Basically, I could get a certain amount of money with him directing, but I would have had to cut sequences out of the script. I thought, "That's not why I'm into this. I'm into this because I want to have fun with horror movies. I don't want to jam something into this budget just so it can be made. That defeats the whole purpose of why we started this company, it's about having fun." So we decided not to make cuts, that we wouldn't make it if we couldn't make it the way we wanted. It's funny – usually you take that point of view with artistic-type films, but for me horror films can't be deluded either, for their own reasons. They have their own cheesy integrity that needs to be stuck to.
EMPIRE: So you decided to direct it yourself.
RAIMI: Joe Drake, one of my partners at Ghost House, said, "Sam, if you direct the film, we can get all the money we need and you don't have to cut the sequences." I was thinking about making another movie at the time, but that movie needed rewriting, just as the writers' strike was happening. I didn't want to do the fixes during the strike, and Drag Me To Hell was a script that was written. I thought, "This is my chance to get back into horror." I really liked the script. It's not a particularly super-intelligent piece, it's just a goofy spookhouse ride. But I thought it would be great for me, it was just the break I needed. That's how I got back into it.
EMPIRE: You didn't break between any of the Spider-Man movies. That must have destroyed you...
RAIMI: One after another, they can be very daunting, but I love the characters so much that it wasn't bad.
EMPIRE: Why didn't you make a smaller film between Spider-Man movies before now?
RAIMI: We were always working on the pictures simultaneously. When we were finishing Spider-Man 1, we were already working on the story for Spider-Man 2 and doing storyboards for it, coming up with shots and character designs. When we were finishing Spider-Man 2, we were already working on the story for Spider-Man 3. There was no time really to leave them.
EMPIRE: You've had bad experiences with studio interference. Why, then, did you commit so willingly to the Spider-Man franchise? Presumably you weren't going to get complete creative control there...
RAIMI: Well, I had never had it. Only now do I have it with Drag Me To Hell and the new Spider-Man film. That's part of the reason I'm so excited about the possibility of making this new Spider-Man, which I'm really hoping I can make. I love the characters still, and I've got a lot more creative control than I ever had. They really gave me a tremendous amount of control on the first two films, actually. But then there were differing opinions on the third film and I didn't really have creative control, so to speak.
EMPIRE: Are you talking about the inclusion of Venom?
RAIMI: (Long pause) I don't even want to comment on Venom, because I know he's a: great character and the fans love him. I never want to say anything bad about a much beloved character, because usually it turns out that I'm the one that doesn't understand what makes it great.
EMPIRE: Avi Arad insisted you make room for Venom, didn't he?
RAIMI: I wouldn't say it was anybody in particular. It was just that a lot of people had different ideas on what the film should be, and I think – good or bad – the film simply represents exactly the working situation where a lot of people have a lot of good ideas about what the film should be.
EMPIRE: Too many cooks?
RAIMI: I don't want to necessarily say that. I don't want to say anything disparaging about my friends and partners on the film. The best way for me to move forward on films, I realise – and this was a lesson I had to learn for myself – is that I've gotta be the singular voice that makes the creative choices on the film. I love Spider-Man so much that I'd like to continue telling Spider-Man stories, but only under those circumstances, where I think I can honour him. I don't think I can honour him in any other way.
EMPIRE: Where are you with Spider-Man 4 right now?
RAIMI: Actually, if you don't mind, I haven't yet talked to my producers about what they want to reveal. It's such a long way off that I'd rather not talk about it in case I say things that they didn't want me to reveal.
EMPIRE: Fair enough. But you were apparently on the shortlist to direct The Hobbit – was it a choice between that and Spidey for you?
RAIMI: I thought that The Hobbit is just a fantastic icon of fantasy literature. I love that book and I'm a giant fan of the Lord Of The Rings movies. It would have been an excellent job, but Peter Jackson is the producer, and he chose who he thinks would be the best filmmaker, which is Guillermo del Toro, who I love. I think that, sheepishly, he may have made the right decision. (Laughs). Guillermo's such a brilliant filmmaker that I'm dying to see his version. I know it's going to be great.
EMPIRE: Did you meet with Peter?
RAIMI: I talked with Peter once on the phone, but never actually met with him. It never really got to that.
EMPIRE: It's been 30 years since you started work on The Evil Dead. Did you not even have complete creative control on that?
RAIMI: That's exactly right. Actually, on Evil Dead II, I had to show the movie to Dino De Laurentiis, and while technically I did not have final cut, he really left me alone completely. He would say, "This is too long – out! Out! Out! Out! Out!" And I would have to trim things down according to his wishes. He was right, some parts were too long.
EMPIRE: Too long? It's 87 minutes!
RAIMI: That's why!
EMPIRE: How long was it before the cuts?
RAIMI: Well, I had a 95-minute version which he suggested cuts to. I took the suggestions and it helped make the movie better. Then he left me alone, and supported me. It's as close as you get to creative control.
EMPIRE: On that movie, and The Evil Dead, there's seemingly not a stylistic trick in the book that you don't pull. Was there a sense that you were deliberately pushing it, that you were breaking rules?
RAIMI: We were trying to be out there. We were trying to make something that was thrilling for the audience, and we were very aware of cool shots that we were trying to make, and trying to shock the audiences and build suspense. We weren't aware of rules, necessarily.
EMPIRE: Because you were only 19...
RAIMI: Yeah! (Laughs) Basically we were trying to make what we had seen in horror films, but trying to cut out the boring parts. That's what we'd been told not to do. Some distributor said, "You're out of your mind, you kids, with this script! You can't just put 50 minutes straight of what they had in The Exorcist without all the exposition!" But that's exactly what we want to do! I wanted it to be 85 minutes of the fun stuff!
EMPIRE: Your work was very stylish from the off. Is that something you honed in your short movies?
RAIMI: We did practice our craft in Super-8. We made hours and hours of movies and showed them to high-school kids, charging them a dime or a quarter. We had a lot of experience of things not editing well. We made boring movies and the audience didn't like them. That was a bummer. We saw jokes work and we would keep them, and do other jokes like them until they recognised that we were doing the same thing over and over. Then, at Michigan State University, we developed The Society For Creative Filmmaking'; my roommate, Rob Tapert, my brother Ivan and I would make movies and market them to the kids, taking out ads in the school newspaper. Sometimes we would lose money and think, "That was a bad ad." But we weren't as naive as you might think. We had to drop out of school to raise the money for that feature.
EMPIRE: The Evil Dead was made for financial reasons, wasn't it?
RAIMI: We were just trying to make a movie that would play in the drive-ins. It wasn't really driven by a love of horror. The movies that I'd made up until that point were comedies and dramas, but Rob Tapert said, "If we're going to do this, you've got to learn to make a horror movie." I said, "I don't like horror movies because they scare me!" I had some intense experiences as a kid watching horror movies and I didn't know how to make it fun for me. He said, "Well, let's go see if you can make a horror. I'm going to the theatre and you tell me if you can make a horror movie as good as this." So we went to the theatre and Halloween was playing! We watched it and he goes, "Well, can you make a movie as good as that? That's a low-budget horror movie!" I said, "I don't think I can!"
EMPIRE: That's like watching Apocalypse Now before making a war movie!
RAIMI: (Laughs) I didn't know how famous it was going to be. I was really depressed. But I learned how to make a horror movie. We started to sit through drive-ins. People would give us weird looks: three boys – Bruce Campbell, Rob and myself – sitting in the front seat of a car at the drive-in, which was a make-out place, and we were there, trying to see all the Italian and British and American horror films. We'd see what they would do and go, "Okay, we can't hear what they're doing in the other cars, but those people look like they're afraid!" Then we wrote the script for Evil Dead, and I made a Super-8 movie (Within The Woods, starring Campbell) that had some scares in it, and I started to understand what that was about. And then we went to shoot it.
EMPIRE: Which was six months of sheer hell...
RAIMI: It was really hard. So hard.
EMPIRE: Was it like your own personal Vietnam?
RAIMI: Well, I would never say it was like those poor bastards fighting in the war. But as far as a physical endeavour goes, it was the hardest thing I've ever done. We were freezing every night. We didn't have warm coats. We had an industrial heater that would blowout these noxious fumes. It was so cold for so long. Mostly it was difficult because we couldn't afford the crew after a while, and I had to operate the camera because I lost my cameraman too. Karo Syrup (used for fake blood) would get on your hands. The one thing we did have was a coffee maker. We didn't have any hot water, but we brought water down, and I would have to wash my hands in the burning coffee to get them clean. Then I would have to load the camera and my hands would freeze. It was incredibly bad.
EMPIRE: So what made you want to become a director in the first place?
RAIMI: When I was a kid, my father made 16mm home movies and I remember he made one of a party. He filmed the kids and when he showed them back on the wall, he had spliced the reels out of order. It showed the kids at the party, eating cake and blowing out the candles. Then it showed the kids leaving the party, and then it showed them arriving at the party. When I saw that, I went, "Ohmigod, it's a masterpiece! You have altered time!" I couldn't believe what I was seeing. This was a miracle I didn't think should really have been in the hands of mortals – that you could capture time and rearrange its sequencing. I had to be involved in that. That's what drew me to the thing: not the drama of movies, just this simple idea of capturing reality in a can and juggling it.
EMPIRE: And when you did become a director, was there a moment when you felt that you truly belonged behind the camera, that you weren't just some kid winging it?
RAIMI: Well, yes. When we got the financing for Evil Dead II from Dino De Laurentiis. I had already failed with my second film (Crimewave). It was taken away from me and butchered, it was a nightmare. But once we got the financing for Evil Dead II, I felt I knew what I needed to do. At that point, on my third feature film, I was confident.
EMPIRE: What do you think of Crimewave now?
RAIMI: I can't look at it. It's so painful. The experience was just awful. Bruce Campbell was supposed to star. A month, two months before, the studio said, "No, he's not starring in it." My composer was removed – Joe LoDuca, who did the Evil Dead movies. They didn't let me do a director's cut. They fired my editor about two weeks in, after we'd done shooting, and they brought the film out of Detroit to Los Angeles. They had their own editor cut it, they had their own components. It was just a mess.
EMPIRE: That experience really laid the marker for the way Bruce's career would go. But, in Evil Dead II and Army Of Darkness, he has enormous leading-man potential.
RAIMI: I love him. Bruce Campbell is really the finest performer I’ve ever known. He puts all his energy into making something funny or work, or just to sell a gag. He has a unique kind of ability that I'm in awe of, although I shouldn't have said so, because I may want to hurt him one day. This quote could be used against me. (Laughs)
EMPIRE: His price just went up for Spidey 4.
RAIMI: (Laughs) Yeah... He's a very different type of performer, and sometimes people are afraid of that thing that's a little more unique. But I'll always use him in my pictures. He's a great physical comedian – I haven't seen anything like it in many, many years.
EMPIRE: The possessed hand sequence in Evil Dead II is a wonderful bit of acting.
RAIMI: A lot of that we came up with in the moment. It only works because of Bruce's physical comedy, and the abuse he can take, and what he's willing to do for a laugh.
EMPIRE: Which is?
RAIMI: Anything. In the Super-8 days I saw him dive head-first into rivers with concrete bottoms. I'm not kidding. He'd come up bloody and say, "When are we going to roll the next take?" I've seen him jump off fire escapes into one or two boxes, They were our stunt pads. It looked much too dangerous to me, I've seen him hang on cars and do battles on freeways – things that we should never have done!
EMPIRE: Bruce has been in almost all your films, but there is one thing that has him beat: your old car, the infamous Oldsmobile Delta 88. What's the story with that?
RAIMI: (Laughs) I don't know! It was simply in the movies I made as a kid because it was the only car available. It was my mom's car. It was the car that my brother and I had at university. It was an old car then, so she let us drive it up there. When it came time to make Evil Dead, it was the only car that someone would let me put through the bridge, because it may have fallen in the river. Then I realised after that that it's really been in every movie I ever made, so I just kept putting it in there.
EMPIRE: And it's even in your Western, The Quick And The Dead?
RAIMI: Somewhere... Somewhere... hidden. Only I know. I'll never tell.
EMPIRE: That movie is something of a watershed for you in terms of how you dealt with actors…
RAIMI: I had to treat 'em with a little more respect, you're right. (Laughs)
EMPIRE: There was a rumour at the time that Gene Hackman had been unhappy with you after you wanted to strap a camera to his chest.
RAIMI: (Laughs) I don't remember that, but any dream I had of fixing a camera to Gene Hackman's chest probably went out of the window about ten seconds after meeting him! I'd worked with two very fine actors in Fran McDormand and Liam Neeson, on Darkman. But I'd never worked with so many great actors – it was an eye-opening experience for me.
EMPIRE: Was it fair to say that before that movie, you had treated actors like props?
RAIMI: Not so much with Liam, because he contributed so much emotion to everything. But still, in the action sequences, more or less as props to move about... I will say I think you're right. But I did learn so much from the actors on The Quick And The Dead. I learned that I had a tremendous amount to learn about directing actors. And that style is only so satisfying.
EMPIRE: But that's a movie that's defined entirely by its style, where each duel is different from the last.
RAIMI: That was one of the goals, to make every gunfight unique, so they were experiencing something new visually, sonically, maybe dramatically. But I reached a dead-end after that movie. I felt my style didn't help make it into a great picture. So I kind of stopped making movies for a while and tried to rethink my situation.
EMPIRE: And when you came back, you made A Simple Plan, For Love Of The Game and The Gift – your respectable phase.
RAIMI: My respectable phase! (Laughs)
EMPIRE: Well, there's no gore, no bells, no whistles in those films...
RAIMI: Yes, that was a conscious choice. Style was a dead-end for me, without the substance. So I was confused for a time and laid low in television. I wasn't directing, I was just working with writers and trying to understand how to be a better writer and make stories work better. Then came along this book, Scott Smith's A Simple Plan, and I thought, "I want to make this. It's all about these characters and their interactions, and nothing else. It doesn't want a visual style. In fact, I'm going to see if I can just tell the story, not with the audience standing back saying, 'What a cool shot,' but being pulled into the screen, saying, 'Yes, I understand you, I believe you, I want what you want." I put the camera in what I felt was not the most dramatic place, but the proper place to tell that story.
EMPIRE: You've been friends for years with the Coen brothers, and A Simple Plan has often been compared to Fargo.
RAIMI: Actually, Joel and Ethan gave me a lot of tips on shooting in the snow. They also taught me that you have to have Dieter Strom, the finest snow guy in Minnesota, do the snow for you.
EMPIRE: That's a real person? They have a habit of making people up...
RAIMI: No, he's real! He's a real guy and he did a great job for us.
EMPIRE: Do you think that Fargo overshadowed A Simple Plan?
RAIMI: No, I don't think it was overshadowed by their great movie. It just didn't get a big release. Maybe people didn't like it as much as they could have. I don't know. A lot of people have seen the Spider-Man movies. If Sony Pictures haven't shown it to you in the theatres or sold you the DVD, they've put it on your wristwatch or telephone. You're going to see it, one way or another. They'll make sure of it!
EMPIRE: How did Spider-Man come about for you?
RAIMI: My agent said to me, "Columbia Pictures is thinking of making Spider-Man. Is that something you want me to put your name in the hat for?" I said, "Yes, I love Spider-Man. If they're really going to make it, that would be awesome." Then he called me back, a month later and said, "Sony said there are 17 other directors they'd rather make the picture with than you." I said, "You don't have to give me all the details! "
EMPIRE: Did you get the names and start picking them off one by one?
RAIMI: (Laughs) He called me two months later and said there are only nine people in front of you now.
EMPIRE: You're on hold. You're ninth in the queue.
RAIMI: (Laughs) A couple of months later, he said they were down to one or two people and wanted to meet in case they don't hire one of them. So I went in and presented to Avi Arad, Amy Pascal and John Calley, who was chairman of Columbia Pictures at the time. I told them about my love for Peter Parker and all the great Stan Lee comic books, and how I loved the characters he'd created, and that if I got the job, I would not make the movie about Spider-Man, but about Peter Parker. I thought it went pretty well. But the next day, I read in Variety that they were hiring somebody else (David Fincher).
EMPIRE: How did you feel?
RAIMI: I told myself that whole day that it was just as well because I really wouldn’t know how to make that movie anyways! I had talked to them about a camera device that would move through Manhattan at speeds of up to 40 miles per hour – I would have killed people! So I'd convinced myself that it was all for the best, when I got the phone call saying, "You're hired." (Laughs)
EMPIRE: Had you pitched for big things before?
RAIMI: No. People hadn't usually considered me for bigger pictures.
EMPIRE: Did that frustrate you?
RAIMI: No. I was glad to be making movies and I just assumed that's who I was, that they'd figured out that I could never make those movies. They never approached me. I just assumed that after 20 years that that was not my thing, you know? You would assume that Sports Illustrated doesn't want you to write about baseball teams. You'd think, "Maybe cricket, but baseball?" Have they ever contacted you about writing a baseball article?
EMPIRE: No. Fair point.
RAIMI: I thought it was an elite club. And they never had a property that I really loved. When they'd say, "Oh, we're making a big outer-space picture," I never went after them. Spider-Man happened to be a character close to my heart that was also a big studio property. The two had never crossed before.
EMPIRE: You'd never had a movie gross more than $40 million. Spider-Man made $114 million in its first weekend, a record at the time. What was that like for you?
RAIMI: I was in a restaurant with Amy Pascal and some of the other executives at Sony. They were trying to explain to me how important these numbers were, but I didn't quite understand it. These guys had been in the big games a long time – I had never been in the big game – but I could see how pleased they were. I felt strangely distanced from the whole thing. It was not something I could taste, or laugh at.
EMPIRE: It was abstract.
RAIMI: Right. I didn't know how to relate to it. I had spent 20 years making movies that didn't get the good reviews or the big box office. To survive those 20 years, I had to tell myself, "It doesn't matter that it doesn't make a lot of money. It's not important if it doesn't get good reviews..." (Laughs) I would just ask people how they liked the movie and that's important. On those grounds, I could win sometimes, because these movies had fans, no matter how few or how demented they may have been. So when Spider-Man made all that money, I was kinda screwed. I was in a different place where I couldn't appreciate it very much. It's weird.
EMPIRE: But you must have known it was going to be big.
RAIMI: I knew that whoever made Spider-Man, it had so many fans that it was probably going to be a really big hit. A reason I didn't relate to the numbers so much was that, had one of these other big guys directed it, it probably would have made as much money.
EMPIRE: I'm not so sure. I think you bring a sincerity to it that not many directors have. I get the feeling that, "With great power comes great responsibility" would have been a throwaway line for most directors, but you really committed to it.
RAIMI: I believe that's true. But mostly I believe in the character of Peter Parker as a living human being. I believe in Stan Lee's vision.
EMPIRE: You're turning 50 this year. Do you see that as the start of a new phase in your career? Would you like to win an Oscar, for example?
RAIMI: I never really thought about the Oscars, the way I never thought about big-budget pictures. I like watching them, but that was never really my goal. Although, I'm sure that those people are honoured to have the respect of their peers. That must be great. It's more about the paying audience. I'm not making works of art, I'm making entertainments that live or die on an audience's approval. That's my goal.
EMPIRE: Okay, then. I have to ask... Evil Dead IV?
RAIMI: Everyone keeps getting mad at me because I kept talking about it! But I'd like to write Evil Dead IV with my brother. Every time we're together, we write another page. We've got nine pages now.
EMPIRE: Hang on – there are nine pages of Evil Dead IV... here?
RAIMI: No, it's in Detroit and in my garage!
EMPIRE: Oh. What's in the pages?
RAIMI: There's some dialogue. Ash being an idiot. Ash taking some abuse. Some character stuff, and then some structure of Act Two. It's ideas, jokes, things we'd like to see.
EMPIRE: Bruce is now 50. Would he still be playing Ash?
RAIMI: That's the plan. Unless you think I should play the role...