"Piranha 3D" *IT'S WAR: 'Piranha' Producer Responds to James Cameron's Comments*

[JamesG]

Gossip Girl Goes on Seafood Diet in Piranha 3-D
Source:E! Online
May 5, 2009


E! Online has discovered that Jessica Szohr from the CW series "Gossip Girl" will be joining Dimension Films' Piranha 3-D, a remake of the 1978 cult classic by Alexandre Aja (Hills Have Eyes).

Szohr joins the already announced cast of Elisabeth Shue, Ving Rhames, Adam Scott and Richard Dreyfuss, playing "Kelly, a hot young townie caught up in the excitement of co-eds who have descended upon the area for spring break."

Being that the movie is about a lakeside town overrun by man-eating razor-toothed fish, here's hoping she doesn't go in the water.

Piranha 3-D begins shooting in Arizona later this month and is scheduled to open on March 19, 2010.

http://www.shocktillyoudrop.com/news...s.php?id=10402

[Torgo]

Well it couldn't be any worse than the awful 90's remake with William Katt, or the silly James Cameron sequel.

[JamesG]

EXCL: Set Pic from Piranha 3D
Source:Roger Galloway
May 10, 2009

Starting Monday, there are some new sheriff's department vehicles patrolling Lake Havasu City, Arizona under the guise of "Lake Victoria."

There are three vehicles in all and they are the chief "camera cars" for the movie, Piranha 3D. Driven by the movie's stars, Elisabeth Shue and Ving Rhames (as sheriff and deputy,) they'll help control frantic spring breakers on land and be used to watch out for jumping flesh-eating piranha in Lake Victoria. (The actual piranha in real life Lake Havasu are known as "striped bass.")

Piranha 3D, directed by Alex Aja, opens on March 19, 2010

http://www.shocktillyoudrop.com/news...s.php?id=10452

[JamesG]

Christopher Lloyd Becomes Piranha Expert!
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
By: MrDisgusting

B-D reader Roger Galloway tipped off both Bloody-Disgusting and Dread Central to the fact that the great Christopher Lloyd has joined the quickly growing cast of Piranha 3D, which is currently lensing under the direction of Alex Aja.

Lloyd, who you might remember as Dr. Emmett Brown in the Back to the Future franchise, will star as Goodman, an expert on piranha.

A new type of terror is about to be cut loose on beautiful Lake Victoria. After a sudden underwater tremor sets free scores of the prehistoric man-eating fish, an unlikely group of strangers must band together to stop themselves from becoming fish food for the area’s new razor-toothed residents.

http://www.bloody-disgusting.com/news/16179

[JamesG]

Cody Longo (Odd Name) Joins Piranha 3D Cast
Thursday, May 14, 2009
By: MrDisgusting

Cody Longo better get himself some titanium waders as the young actor has joined the cast of Dimension's horror revamp Piranha 3-D, to be directed by Alexandre Aja (The Hills Have Eyes, Mirrors, High Tension).

Elisabeth Shue, Adam Scott, Jerry O'Connell, Ving Rhames and Richard Dreyfuss already have been cast in the story about a resort community terrorized by flesh-eating fish. Longo will play Todd Dupree, a high school jock and self-absorbed creep.

http://www.bloody-disgusting.com/news/16193

[JamesG]

Update: Porn Star Heats Up Piranha Infested Waters, Fish Tank Video!
Friday, May 15, 2009
By: MrDisgusting

Over at BDTV you can watch an exclusive video (to B-D and Dread Central) that features your first look at the Piranha "Fish Tank"!, courtesy of tipster Roger Galloway.

In other news, porn star Riley Steele (pictured inside) landed the role of Crystal in Alex Aja's now-filing remake of the 1978 cult, horror classic Piranha.

The release tells us that she is one of the leading roles with substantial scenes, and will act alongside an all-star cast featuring Oscar nominated actress Elisabeth Shue, Oscar winner Richard Dreyfuss, Jerry O'Connell, Ving Rhames, Dina Meyer, and Kelly Brook.

“It's crystal clear that Riley Steele adds yet another dimension to Piranha 3-D,” says producer Mark Canton. “Her natural beauty will light up the screen as she frolics with the hordes of spring break partygoers in our very contemporary, scary 3-D movie.”

http://www.bloody-disgusting.com/news/16221

[Big C]

I'm setting the over/under on human deaths by piranha at 20.

[HuntingtonM15]

I was unaware of a Piranha remake. I enjoyed the original, so I'll most likely check this one out.

[JamesG]

The following interview gives away spoilers so be warned...

EXCL: Riley Steele Talks Piranha 3D
Source:Ryan Rotten, Managing Editor
May 22, 2009

At the outset of production, director Alexandre Aja was on the lookout for hot bodies to populate Piranha 3D, his remake of Joe Dante's camp classic. He certainly found one in porn starlet, and Digital Playground contract girl, Riley Steele. The actress called in to ShockTillYouDrop.com from the film's Arizona location to give this writer the lowdown on her character Crystal.

"She's a girl who's out to have fun," Steele says. And she means that quite literally, Crystal is one of the stars of the film's Wild, Wild Girls, a spin on Girls Gone Wild. "Me and Danni [Kelly Brook] go out and basically trying to get innocent Kelly [Jessica Szohr] to become a Wild, Wild Girl with me. So, I'm basically playing myself."

Steele's untamed lifestyle ultimately leads to her demise, a scene she tells us she is in the midst of shooting this week with co-star Jerry O'Connell. "I haven't seen any blood yet but I heard there's going to be some today. Yesterday we filmed a scene where we all die. Jerry O'Connell is playing the director, or the owner, of the Wild, Wild Girls and we fall off of this boat and he kills me trying to save himself," she laughs. "A huge piranha eats through my head and comes out of my mouth. A death scene in 3-D, eating through our faces, everything!"

Because the piranha will mostly be created in CG, Steele says she hasn't come face-to-face with any on set, however, she has seen a few mock-ups. "They're pretty cool. They really look like fish, when I saw them they didn't have any paint on them but they're really intense. Very impressive. " After our chat, it's off to do more water training. "It's all about trying to hold our breath because there's this glass bottom boat me and Kelly [Brook] have to swim under for this sexy thing. So our training is all about working under water, being comfortable. It's a lot harder than it looks!"

Piranha 3D - starring Elisabeth Shue, Adam Scott, Ving Rhames, Richard Dreyfuss and Dina Meyer - opens in theaters on March 19, 2010.

http://www.shocktillyoudrop.com/news...s.php?id=10605

[JamesG]

Official Plot Synopsis for Piranha 3D
Source: Dimension Films
June 1, 2009

Dimension Films has sent us the official plot crunch for Alexandre Aja's Piranha 3D, 2010's first big 3-D horror film.

Jaws...lots and lots of jaws. From acclaimed director Alexandre Aja (The Hills Have Eyes) comes the new action thriller PIRANHA 3D, in the latest eye-popping 3D technology. A new type of terror is about to be cut loose on beautiful Lake Victoria. After a sudden underwater tremor sets free scores of the prehistoric man-eating fish, an unlikely group of strangers must band together to stop themselves from becoming fish food for the area’s new razor-toothed residents. But our heroine (Elisabeth Shue) is seriously outnumbered, and with only one chance to save the lake and her family from totally being devoured, she must risk everything to destroy the aquatic carnivores herself.

The film also stars Adam Scott, Ving Rhames, Richard Dreyfuss, Dina Meyer and Jerry O'Connell. Look for it in theaters on March 10, 2010.

http://www.shocktillyoudrop.com/news...s.php?id=10706

[JamesG]

Eli Roth Cameos in Piranha 3D
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
By: MrDisgusting

Looking at Alex Aja's history, I'm starting to think that Piranha 3D has the potential to be EPIC. It's becoming increasingly obvious that the film isn't to be taken too serious and that it's going to be a fun bloodbath.

In addition to the odd cameos of porn star Riley Steele and comedian Paul Scheer (awesome), Bloody-Disgusting learned that writer-director Eli Roth cameos as the host of the wet t-shirt contest. 16 hotties and 32 pairs of soaking wet tits, what more can you want from a Piranha movie in 3-D? Oh yeahhhhh, BLOOD! Read on for a bit on that.

A B-D reader sent me the following excerpt from one of the KNB FX guru's blog:

"Between us and the physical FX crew this movie has the potential to out blood the 400 gallons we went through on "Kill Bill". Remember Lake Havasu, the jewel in the Arizona desert, well Its red now. LOL. We are currently shooting the Lake massacre scene 100 boats, 500 extras, 400 gallons of blood, lots of screaming, lots of bikins, lots of torn flesh and its all in 3D. Come on!!! Tell me you're not interested in seeing this movie and I'll call you a liar."

More blood than in Kill Bill? Are you kidding me? Seriously, this movie sounds like it has some serious potential to entertain. What do you think?

March 19, 2010 can't come soon enough.

http://www.bloody-disgusting.com/news/16448

[JamesG]

Last Second Desperation Casting For Piranha 3D
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
By: MrDisgusting

Ricardo Chavira ("Desperate Housewives") has been cast alongside Elisabeth Shue, Adam Scott, Ving Rhames, Richard Dreyfuss, Dina Meyer, Brooklynn Proulx, Quinn Lord, Riley Steele, Jessica Szohr, Jerry O'Connell, Paul Scheer, Cody Longo, Riley Steele and Eli Roth in the Weinstein Co.'s Piranha 3D.

The film has already begun principal photography under helmer Alexandre Aja, with plans for a bow March 19, 2010.

After a sudden underwater tremor sets free scores of the prehistoric man-eating fish, an unlikely group of strangers must band together to stop themselves from becoming fish food for the area’s new razor-toothed residents.

http://www.bloody-disgusting.com/news/16516

[JamesG]

Piranha 3-D Visit: McQueen is Ready for Action
Source:Ryan Rotten, Managing Editor
June 27, 2009

"Am I going to get to use that?" questions a chilly, but palpably excited, Steven McQueen on the Arizona set of Piranhna 3-D, Dimension Films' remake of the 1978 film poised to make a splash March 19, 2010. McQueen and director Alexandre Aja (The Hills Have Eyes) are watching an FX technician demonstrate the use of an underwater flare. And to answer McQueen's question, yes, he is going to use it.

When Shock visits the set, McQueen is in the midst of filming a sequence that will kick off the film's action-packed third act. Today calls on the young actor, grandson to the Steve McQueen, to spend most of his time, with Gossip Girl's Jessica Szohr, swimming in a large tank created for the production (more on that in a future report) with two capsized boats.

"I'm regretting doing my own stunts right about now," McQueen laughs, later taking a break in a nearby warming pool. This is where Shock catches the actor before it's back to the tank for him. Of his experience on the production, he says "This whole thing has been awesome. It definitely has its funny beats and scary beats, it's got a nice romance. The whole 3-D aspect is definitely going to get people into it and make them excited to see movies again."

McQueen, seen this fall on The CW's Vampire Diaries, says Piranhna 3-D was the perfect gig to take on after shooting the Diaries pilot. "I play Jake, Elisabeth Shue's son," he explains. "I'm the main kid - and he's got great potential but he doesn't know how to let it out, use it. Out of this extraordinary situation I learn to put that to good use." That extraordinary situation entails a horde of prehistoric piranha freed from their cave when an earthquake disrupts Lake Victoria (Arizona's Lake Havasu in the real world).

"Alex [Aja] is a good guy," he continues. "And as director, he knows exactly what he wants to see. It's been an honor working with him. He's a fan of the blood." No doubt. A week prior to our visit, Aja staged a massacre in the lake which entailed hundreds of screaming extras. "I wasn't working too much of the massacre. I came and visited that day, but I needed to take that time to rest my body from the stunts and the underwater stuff. We've been doing a lot of water training. Before we started I could only hold my breath for up to 40 seconds, by the end of this I could get it up to two minutes, but that's not that long."

With that, McQueen is called back to set to brave the moderately cold temperatures of the tank. But sun, sand, babes...voracious fish? Not a bad way to spend a summer for this actor. Stay tuned for an in-depth report from the set of Piranhna 3-D in the near future!

http://www.shocktillyoudrop.com/news...s.php?id=10935

[JamesG]

Piranha 3-D Set Visit: Alex Aja Interview
Source: Ryan Rotten, Managing Editor
June 30, 2009

"My heart is beating out of my chest," enthuses French filmmaker Alexandre Aja. The reason behind the increased heart rate? He's on the 38th shooing day of Piranha 3-D - his big budget update of Joe Dante's 1978 Jaws rip-off - and things are going swimmingly well, no pun intended. Beneath unkempt, sand-colored hair, the High Tension director's eyes intensify when he rattles off the cast he has to work with this time: Elisabeth Shue, Ving Rhames, Christopher Lloyd, Jessica Szohr, Steven McQueen, Adam Scott, Jerry O'Connell and, sink your chompers into this...a cameo by Richard Dreyfuss, bearing a slight resemblance to his Matt Hooper persona in Steven Spielberg's aforementioned classic.

ShockTillYouDrop.com is sitting with Aja on the arid, overcast Arizona set which is situated on a ranch tucked behind an Amblin film-esque neighborhood. The production has successfully made its mark on Lake Havasu, a popular tourist spot just a few miles away, quite literally turning its water red with spilled fake blood. Yes, it's hot. But not oppressive. No reason to go running for the three giant stacks of bottled water yet.

Today, Aja, this writer and the crew are perched on the edge of an in-ground tank, the largest of its kind in North America. For the purposes of the film, it's meant to resemble a section of Lake Victoria (Havasu's fictional name in the film) where the crew can do some underwater work. On the far end of the tank, 75 feet or so beneath the surface, is a set all its own: A cave where the film's titular nasty nibblers originate from and wreak havoc on Victoria's spring breakers.

And apparently I've missed something big. Before me, in the tank, is a small dock and two half-submerged boats - the result of a deadly piranha attack. The vessel farthest from us is named the "Barracuda." This afternoon's action is taking place on the closer party boat with a glass floor that Jerry O'Connell's character uses for his Girls Gone Wild-style program. Aja assures me the floor is put to good use with shots of naked swimming beauties (like Kelly Brooke and porn stars Riley Steele and Ashlynn Brooke) who will look like they're "swimming over the audience" in 3-D. Yee-haw.

Presently, the floor is a means of escape for McQueen who's tethered underwater and about to swim up through a hole in the glass and into the heart of the boat. Aja fires off a take, hindered briefly by a few problems: A stand-by scuba diver is conspicuously drifting into the shot and the line holding McQueen is being stubborn. The actor hits the surface and climbs onto the top of the boat. He's immediately met with a towel to cover up, but not before I spy the giant blotches of blood stains on his shirt.

Yes, it's a rather light and quiet day action-wise on the set. Busy work is happening all around, no doubt. Two crew members in one spot have a stunt jet-ski attached to a rig. An FX technician walks by with a fake head of Ashlynn Brooke, the back of her skull hollowed out.

The weather has affected the schedule forcing Aja to push much of the juicy stuff to the following day. Elsewhere, on Lake Havasu, his writing and producing partner Grégory Levasseur is waiting for the clouds to pass so he can begin the day's work on second unit. Levasseur isn't the only one on Piranha 3-D from Aja's High Tension days. Franck Khalfoun, who played that film's hapless gas station attendant, is sitting nearby. It's his last day of acting work playing a deputy for Shue's Sheriff Forester.

As McQueen saunters off to hop in the warming pool, Aja takes some time to talk about his second remake after The Hills Have Eyes...




ShockTilYouDrop: Is this your biggest picture yet?

Alexandre Aja: It's huge, it's nothing compared to Mirrors. It's completely a different movie, but it's also a different scale. Piranha is a big disaster movie and we have so many characters, so many actors, so many extras. Everything is taking place during the most crazy, insane spring break you can imagine.




Shock: How are you handling it stress-wise?

Aja: I was very stressed before because it was the most challenging hostile element that you can imagine, from shooting above the water, special effects, visual effects, special effects makeup, the heat - 120 - kids, animals, CG fish, everything. You name it, we have it.

Finally, on set, I realized that making a movie on the water is one of the greatest things ever because you're in open space all the time. You can swim during the day, so when it's very hot, it's very great. [But] it's pretty intense. Yesterday was our last day really on the lake, it was very kind of moving. It was really hard, but we managed to get so much great stuff out of it.




Shock: How did you convince the powers that be, to do a sequence like we've been hearing about with 500 extras, a full-on massacre?

Aja: During the whole process the idea was to do a movie like "spring break under attack," so it was the whole idea. Of course any studio would have tried to "Less is more. We care about the characters, we don't care about spring break," because it was a huge scene, nine days of shooting. It was really big. I don't know how many hours, but I would guess around 25 or 30 hours of dailies, five cameras. It was, in every scale, really huge. The special effects guy told me [around] 5,000 gallons of blood. I think it's a little bit over because it's cutting the blood with the water, but it's pretty sick. Lake Havasu was completely red for a few days after.

All of that together, it was the only reason why I wanted to make this movie. I wanted to have that huge scene. [I wanted to have] a movie that starts like a spring break where you can have some fantasy on it and then turns into a big nightmare.




Shock: The original Piranha had humor in it. Is this the first Aja film we're going to see with a funny bone?

Aja: It's completely different from anything else that I've ever done before and it's very, very dark funny. It's scary as well. We are much more on the The Frighteners, Braindead, Gremlins side than like the other movies before. We are completely throwing popcorn. We are going for the rollercoaster ride. We are here to spend an hour and half in the most insane world that we can imagine. The movie was funny even while writing.

The first script I read five years ago was already that idea of "spring break under attack" and it was already something very iconoclastic with a kind of subtext about American culture. Like spring break being the incarnation of the American way of living in excess and the piranha being the unexpected dilemma, the uninvited guest that's going to just crash the party.

It's so in the vain of all those guilty pleasure movies that we had in the '80s. Just the rewriting of the script was following in that direction. I think even directing the movie and shooting everyday those scenes together is exactly what we achieve. We achieve to create that kind of movie that you would have died to have seen when you were 12, 13, 14, 15, 16... monotonous




Shock: How much screen time is Richard Dreyfuss going to have in this?

Aja: You'll see. It's very funny because it's an unofficial, indirect sequel or spin-off [of his Jaws character]. So, it's funny.




Shock: Did it take much convincing to get him on board?

Aja: When you write a character and you think about an idea... When the idea for Richard Dreyfuss to play this part came to us, we couldn't imagine anyone else. The studio really supported us in that decision to get him. From the glasses, to the outfit, to everything you'll see.




Shock: That's awesome. You've also got Christopher Lloyd!

Aja: For our generation Christopher Lloyd is that kind of...I couldn't imagine anyone better than him to play that old adventurer that came back to Lake Victoria to open a pet store, but still passionate about preserving the species and stuff. We were shooting that scene last week and the way he lights up when he starts to be passionate about something, it's dark, there is no question. It just belongs to that kind of pop culture mix that we are trying to create here.




Shock: Did you reach out to Joe Dante at all?

Aja:Yeah.




Shock: Yeah, what did he have to say?

Aja:His only advice was, "Even if you go with CG fish get some puppets."




Shock: And did you take that advice?

Aja: We have some puppets in the truck.




Shock: Can you talk about the design of the piranha as well as what they're capable of in the movie?

Aja: For a few months we didn't have time because we pushed the shooting back with Neville Page, the designer of the fish. We went through all the deep sea and prehistoric species still alive, and all the different documents we could find about it. Then, we tried to think about the way they were two million years ago and how they were able to survive. The design that we were able to create is a good mix between all the old species without losing what makes it a piranha - the size, not too big, the tooth shape, and many other features.

Then we were following some very logical elements like, they were [in this cave] for like a million years feeding on other species and killing each other. They would lose some senses like vision and give up some other ones. That's a little bit of direction. And then, when you study the piranha you have a piranha that can jump a meter out of the water, three feet out of the water. We used all the kind of different skills you can find in nature.




Shock: So no POV shots from the piranha ala Jaws?

Aja: They're mostly blind, but we'll follow them. We'll be in the middle of the school. We're working with amazing people. The guy who's doing our visual effects...I'm very confident about CG and what we're going to achieve with it.




Shock: Do you see this as having the potential for a series?

Aja: There are many stories and the movie ends in such a way that there are a few sequels possible. We'll see.




Shock: In some early photos of Elisabeth, she looked as if she had been doing a bit of training...

Aja: I wanted like a very tough sheriff for this town, someone believable and someone sexy at the same time. She had, at first, a very great physical condition. She's a big tennis player, but she really trained to be that new Linda Hamilton. She's impressed me in the situation and everything. [Steven McQueen] is the real leader of the movie because the whole story is about that guy Jake who is the older son of Elisabeth Shue. This guy, year after year is forced to do some babysitting over spring break, so he's missing all the fun every year and this year he just wants to have fun. That's the whole beginning. And he's really the guy who's carrying out through that fantasy of spring break that's going to turn into the blood bath.




Shock: What 3-D process are you using for this film?

Aja: It's very bizarre because we started the process by talking about using the new system that James Cameron used [for Avatar]. I realized along the way that those cameras were forcing me, first, to shoot in HD and then there were too many technical parameters that were not good.

So, we heard about a new technique they were developing that nobody really used before which is the conversion. The conversion is more expensive, much more work in post-production. You're basically shooting the movie in the traditional way thinking 3-D and then the whole movie would be converted by computer. The camera in 35mm is shooting all of us here and then the computer is going to modelize each of us in 3-D and inside the computer you're going to screen, you're going to project the image on the 3-D model and you create that space and that whole style. It's very complicated.

I was kind of like, "Oh, it's impossible it's not going to feel natural," and I saw 20 minutes of King Kong being converted and it's the best thing I've ever seen. When I see 20 minutes of that, I mean, I don't understand why the studio is not finishing the movie and releasing the movie again in 3-D. It's the best, best, best, best. I've also seen stuff from The Matrix and from Star Wars, the original.




Shock: Whoa. They're just converting it for 3-D?

Aja: Yeah, it's unbelievable. It's not like black and white convert in color where you see that it's stained and it's not natural. It's amazing, there is no word. It was great for us because we are shooting for real on cinemascope anamorphic on film, shooting it as a normal movie. So, it's much faster and we have a full control on the 3-D. Without being presumptuous, I think the 3-D experience on Piranha is going to be the best one that's ever made.



Piranha 3-D opens in theaters on March 19, 2010 from Dimension Films. Stay tuned for a full FX report with KNB's Greg Nicotero. It's gonna get messy!

http://www.shocktillyoudrop.com/news...s.php?id=10956

[JamesG]

Piranha 3-D Set Visit: Greg Nicotero Interview
Source: Ryan Rotten, Managing Editor
July 2, 2009

Piranha 3-D may be the bloodiest film you'll see next year. And behind the carnage is none other than KNB EFX, reuniting with director Alexandre Aja for a third time after 2006's The Hills Have Eyes and last year's Mirrors, both of which offered audiences a generous amount of punctured craniums, slit throats and hacked limbs. None of this compares to the gore-covered canvas KNB's Greg Nicotero, his team and Aja are playing with this time.

Within the on-set Piranha FX trailer utilized by Nicotero, Jake Garber, Mike McCarty and Carey Jones one finds corpses and sundry body parts in various stages of consumption - chewed up by the film's titular fish which will be created practically by KNB and CGI visual effects supervisor Derek Wentworth's crew. "In my 500 homages to Jaws in the movie, we even created Chrissie's arm for one of the body parts," Nicotero grins handing this writer a faux female arm, wounds vibrant and fresh. He's wearing a Land of the Dead shirt, an out of the norm day for him. He says he's been wearing Amity Island and Jaws t-shirts during the production.




I'm dropping in on Nicotero on a June afternoon in Arizona where Aja is nearing the end of his production schedule. Things haven't slowed down any here for KNB. Out of the estimated 40-day shoot, Nicotero tells me they've had probably ten free days. He echoes a sentiment that I've heard bandied about the set quite a bit: Piranha 3-D is an ambitious feat for the budget they have to work with. One scene alone called for 97 hours of non-stop prep work and execution.

"We had a week and a half of people being decimated," Nicotero says incredulously, describing what is sure to be Aja's piece de resistance: An estimated 500-extra massacre in which the prehistoric piranha go on a feeding frenzy. "It's a sequence we call the D-Day sequence where they're bringing all of the survivors up onto the beach and the camera is going through and finding people with their limbs chewed up. Just hunks of raw meat! We used a couple of surfers who were amputees and we put chewed up legs on them. The nice thing about Alex is he just lets us go. He knows this movie is about the gore and, when you get to that point in the script when the piranhas start attacking, it has to feel like complete insanity and mayhem."




To capture the carnage, KNB had eight weeks preparation time to test new techniques and gags for realism. Nicotero grabs a slab of flesh on a nearby table. For the life of me, I can't identify what part of the body it came from, but it looks like the piece of gristle I left on a plate at the end of a recent BBQ in the backyard. "We came up with different ways of using silicone, different textures so it dangles. It looks like a butcher shop," he punctuates this by flicking a sheer end of the pale skin then turns to a corpse we cannot identify. Literally. Half of this poor soul's face has been picked off. "These are some of the best fake bodies we've ever done. Kevin Wasner, he came up with this great technique to layer the bone and the musculature and add that fat layer in so it's not just scooped away foam. Once we established the look we liked, we had an assembly line of guys going in adding not just bone but more textures on top of it."

The assembly line technique also applied to the massacre's injured extras, a process that recalled Nicotero's days readying the zombies for George Romero's Land of the Dead. "You do all of the zombies, then you go on set and do all of the gags. This one, you do all of the bites and the victims, then you get on set and you do all of the gags which take a little time. We had a crew doing 60 to 70 make-ups a day plus gags and we had to paint a lot of the blood on with tattoo color so it wouldn't wash off in the water. We had bodies and body parts everywhere."




Aja and Nicotero found themselves referencing this video, amongst other research photos and YouTube discoveries, at the outset of production. The real shark attack caught on camera set the bar for what needed to be achieved in KNB's kill gags. "What happens is the blood starts pouring in the water, they grab the guy and pick him up. The second they lift him out of the water, the blood gushes like a f**kin' water fountain. Aja thought we needed to differentiate the blood in the water versus the blood out of the water. The first test we ever did was at KNB with one of my guys where we made a full silicone leg with blood tubes in it and we actually green screened out his real leg. We had a couple of guys carrying him around in the water. Alex said if we can maintain that level of detail on all of these gags in the massacre, we're going to have a great scene."

"Right when we were shooting the D-Day scene," he continues, "we have water blood and dressing blood. The water blood has that bright '70s feel to it so it reads in the water. I would run along the shoreline dumping blood in and when they yelled action, the blood would just wash up on the shore. It looked like the entire lake was covered."




So much blood was spilled in Lake Havasu - where most of the lensing took place - it crept across the lake to where families frolicked. They didn't seem to mind though ("Kids are playing in bloody water!" Nicotero laughs); they even showed amiable curiosity when the KNB team unloaded bodies and parts from their boat to the dock at the end of the day.

As for the lil' buggers inflicting all of the damage, Nicotero pulls out a maquette of one of the film's fish, conceived by Cloverfield monster designer Neville Page. "The first thing Joe Dante said when I told him we were doing this was, 'Oh, you're shooting with hand puppets? Shoot it at eight frames? Man, you get a lot of mileage out of that!' Yes, Joe, we're going to have puppets." Head-on, the piranha I'm looking at is fearsome, almost dragon-like with a bony plate situated between its eyes and just above the mouth. The tale resembles - slightly - that of a coelacanth and the scales are painted with a blue hue. On either side spring two feelers which Nicotero explains "will be a lot thinner and wispy. The majority of the fish stuff is going to be CGI. What we provided were the hand puppets and the scannable maquettes."




What gets this Jaws fan palpably revved up is not just the viscera he gets to spill but the company he has gotten to keep. Nicotero owns up to doing a little "geeking out" alongside Aja when it came time for Richard Dreyfuss to do his cameo.

"F**kin' unbelievable," he says. "They changed his name in the script to Matt. Ironically, when they started casting, they were cc'ing me on the cast wish list. When the cast list for cameos came out, they wanted Shatner, Sam Elliott, Billy Bob Thornton, everybody they wanted to play that character. At the bottom it said, 'Richard Dreyfuss unavailable due to scheduling.' That night I had dinner with a friend of mine who said, 'Guess who I represent?' Richard Dreyfuss." Aja put in his request again, and as it turned out, the actor's schedule was free during the time they needed him. "He gives me a little credit for getting Dreyfuss. The first day on set, when you hear his voice, and he's in that character, Alex and I just started freaking out."

"Eli Roth was also here because he has a part in it as the host of the wet t-shirt contest," the KNB EFX head adds. "He was great on stage with these two super-soakers soaking down all of these chicks in Wild, Wild Girls t-shirts. Eli said, 'I should never be around this much boobs and blood in my life ever.'"




Piranha 3-D may be work for the KNB fellas, but they seem to be having the time of their lives with an unbeatable equation. Says Nicotero, "If I was 20 years old, this would be the greatest movie I ever worked on because it's just gore and hot women and 3-D and monsters. How much more fun can you get?"

You'll see their work and more when Piranha 3-D opens in theaters on March 19th.

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