Thomas Jane (The Punisher, HBO's Hung) makes his feature film directorial debut with the horror thriller Dark Country based on a short story by Tab Murphy. Jane not only directed the film but also stars as a newly married man who hits the road with his young bride (played by Hostel II's Lauren German). The couple runs into trouble when they come upon a disfigured car crash survivor only a lonely stretch of road in the middle of nowhere.
Thomas Jane Interview

I was totally convinced that this movie was set a couple of decade ago until they used a cell phone. Is that what you meant to lure people into believing?

Thomas Jane: "Yes, absolutely. I meant to try to set it outside of time, and we would be lost in time. And I think when she pulls out the cell phone it’s also confusing because it’s not like a cell phone that we are using to seeing today, don't you think? It's an Art Deco cell phone. The idea that the whole story takes place outside of our day-to-day concept of time was appealing to me."

Was that something that you originally saw in the script or is that something you came up with?

Thomas Jane: "That’s something that I kind of brought to the project. And the style of the piece, the car that we chose, that 1961 Dodge Phoenix, had never been filmed before. No one had ever put that car on film before and I thought it was a very unusual, beautiful car. When I grew up, the movies that really affected me were by David Lynch and the Coen Brothers, Stanley Kubrick, The Twilight Zone and Danger, and movies that would come on late Saturday night on UHF, way back when TVs only had HF.

And those movies really had an affect on me. They were off the beaten track and they were different. So that's what I strove to bring to this film, my first film."

"And I also love film noir and I love the sort of darker psychological aspects of the horror story. And so I wanted to make a movie, you know, especially in today's world when it seems like every movie is either a hundred million dollar, you know a real just rammed down your throat blockbuster film, or it’s something on television. The stuff that's sort of in-between is really few and far between, have you noticed? The stuff that there used to be for an eclectic...there was always something for the eclectician. There was always something for the people who were different. And there's a lot of people out there like that. There's a lot of people who don't respond. It’s a niche group of people who respond to the odd, you know? There's people who liked Sid and Marty Krofft when they grew up. Everybody was watching Sesame Street and Mr Roger’s Neighborhood, but then there were those few kids who watched Sid and Marty Krofft. I tried to make a movie for those guys."

And you had a really low budget to work with.

Thomas Jane: "I'm not a money guy, but I knew that we were going to do it very cheaply. My goal was to make an incredibly cheap 3-D film. The other sort of theorem that I had in making the film was 3-D is being brought back to Hollywood but they're all in giant blockbuster movies. Could we take a 3-D film and make a tiny, independent, strange film in 3-D? And Paradise F.X. stepped up and were able to hand-build the cameras that were used, the rigs that were used to put the cameras in to create the 3-D. And we did it in 25 days. We shot the movie in 25 days and I shot it the old school way with the car against the green screen and we laid in the backgrounds later. I wanted to use the low budget aspect of the film. Instead of trying to hide the seams in the film, I wanted to highlight some of the variances and the mistakes in the movie to try to give it more of a sense of unreality. Almost a lot like when Oliver Stone did with his film, which we’re going to think of the title of now. What was it called, that he did with Woody Harrelson? ...Natural Born Killers. So almost like what Oliver Stone did with Natural Born Killers."

Did you ever at any point feel like you were trying to do too much? You're directing, you're in every scene in the movie, and you're going for this very specific tone. You were doing all this, was it ever too much?

Thomas Jane: "Yes, yes, every day was too much."

How did you handle it?

Thomas Jane: "Well, as best as I could. You could bite off little chunks, you know? You just take as much as you can do in any given moment and you do that, and then you move on. So it really is just a building together of as many different pieces as you can. And yes, it was challenging. It was very challenging."

In the DVD commentary you said you had to make sure you didn’t sell yourself short when you were filming specific scenes where it was basically focusing on you, and that you gave yourself enough takes to get what you wanted. How did you accomplish that?

Thomas Jane: "I don't know if I said this on the commentary...I was really nervous when I got the go ahead to star and direct this film written by Tab Murphy that I’d been developing with him for a long time. But when we finally got the go ahead, I actually called up Mel Gibson. We had the same agent at the time and I called up Mel because he's done it a few times, directed and starred in films that he's directed. So he got on the phone, he called me back and he talked to me for an hour on the phone. What he said was that when he did his first film, he was really nervous and he called Clint Eastwood, because Clint at that time had starred and directed in a bunch of his own movies. And Clint told Mel that when Clint did his first film he was really nervous and he called Don Siegel who had directed Clint in a bunch of movies, and he respected him. And Don told Clint, 'Don't sell yourself short. Take care of everybody else as you would, but then when you come to yourself, your tendency will be to just kind of blow through it. It’s you, you can always pick it up later. You know what you can do. You'll do one or two takes and then you'll move on. Don't do that. Spend as much time on yourself as you do on every other aspect of the production and you'll find that it pays off in the end.' And so Clint did that. He told Mel and Mel told me, and now I'm telling you."

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