Ad Icon: Matthijs Van Heijningen

22nd February 2012

Ad Icon: Matthijs Van Heijningen

With some creative help from fellow directors Spike Jonze and Zack Snyder, Matthijs van Heijningen found himself helming his first feature, The Thing, with Universal Pictures. Here, Simon Wakelin probes the director about living the dream, why character is always king and how he's increasingly drawn to the darkly comic side of life…

The Thing is commercials director Matthijs van Heijningen’s first film, a frozen terrestrial nightmare that works as an effective prequel to the much-beloved John Carpenter flick of 1982. However, the project was only a distant possibility for the Dutch filmmaker when he first landed in LA five years ago. “I came to LA and I didn’t know anybody,” he admits. “I worked with MJZ, but mostly on European jobs. It was Spike Jonze who suggested I talk to his entertainment lawyer. Then my showreel was sent out to various agents until CAA picked me up.”

Van Heijningen began the process of reading endless scripts forwarded by his agent at CAA. “You read hundreds of scripts that suck because the best ones are taken,” he jokes on the process of finding one worthy enough to direct. In fact, it wasn’t until Zack Snyder came across his reel that things really began to happen for the Dutchman on American soil. “Zack liked my work and handed me this crazy zombie script called Army of the Dead,” explains van Heijningen. “It was a huge project, an insane story set in Las Vegas where everything is overrun by zombies.”

The project was so good that Warner Bros. gave van Heijningen the green light to direct the estimated $75m feature. Suddenly he was living the dream. “I was pinching my arm every day,” he says on dealing with the reality of the situation. “All the clichés came true.”

Van Heijningen had an office tucked away on the back lot of Warner Bros. and met with film idol Tom Cruise on the project. “I remember Katie Holmes showing me their baby while I had all these horrible zombie photos under my arm,” he laughs. “The whole experience was like being in a Coen Brothers movie.”

Then the economic crisis in 2008 brought van Heijningen plummeting back down to earth. Warner Bros. had to kill the project, meaning van Heijningen was back to square one. “It’s fascinating how Warner Bros. cleared my office out within an hour of the news, as if nothing had ever happened. I gave in my Warner Bros. pass, my parking pass and shuffled out of the gate alone.”

It was when van Heijningen began contemplating which of his favourite films could be ripe for a remake that he discovered a golden nugget at Universal Pictures. “I thought about all these movies I loved and I discovered that Universal were in the early stages of prepping a prequel to The Thing,” he explains. “It was one of my favourites, so I met with the producers and thankfully I became attached to the project.”

Universal gave The Thing a green light in 2009 meaning that van Heijningen was once again at the helm of a big Hollywood project. “I was excited, but terrified,” he admits.

“The script wasn’t finished, we needed to get the right actors from Norway, plus we had to figure out the look of the creature. You can spend a month on prep for a commercial, but a film is 90 times longer. It was this huge mountain looming before me. It was ‘don’t look up, just go, go, go'!”

Subscribers to shots can read the full interview here and in the new issue of shots magazine.

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