On August 20^th, 1973, police were dispatched to the remote farmhouse of Thomas Hewitt, the former head-skinner at a local slaughterhouse in Travis County, Texas. What they found within the confines of the cryptic residence was the butchered remains of 33 human victims, a chilling discovery that shocked and horrified a nation in what many still refer to as the most notorious mass murder case of all time. Wearing the grotesque flesh masks of his victims and brandishing a chainsaw, the killer, known as "Leatherface," would gain infamy when sensational headlines were splashed across newspapers throughout the state of Texas: "House of Terror Stuns Nation - Massacre in Texas."

Local authorities would eventually gun down a man wearing a leathery mask and declare they had their killer, which abruptly closed the case; however, in the years that followed, many close to the grisly murder case would come forward to level accusations that police had botched the investigation and knowingly killed the wrong man.

Now, for the first time, the only known survivor of the killing spree has broken the silence and come forward to tell the real story of what happened on a deserted rural Texas highway when a group of five young kids inadvertently found themselves besieged by a chainsaw-wielding madman, one who would leave a trail of blood and terror that would forever become known as "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre."

Marcus Nispel, the mastermind behind many of the most powerful images and story-telling themes in contemporary music videos and commercials, makes his feature film directorial debut. The film is produced by Michael Bay and Mike Fleiss.

"The idea was floated right before we started this company," explains producer Michael Bay. "I wanted to do The Texas Chainsaw Massacre because of name value alone. It has a mythical quality to it as one of the very first movies of its kind."

Executive producer and Radar CEO Ted Field also recalls, "when Michael and I decided to go into business together, we quickly realised that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was the perfect film with which to launch the Platinum Dunes label. It is an iconic story, one that immediately establishes what Platinum Dunes is all about and sets the tone for what is to come."

"We loved the idea because the core audience of this movie is males under 25, and although almost all of them have heard of the title, 90% of them have not seen the original film," adds executive producer Andrew Form.

Though several increasingly diminishing sequels to the original film have been made throughout the years, the filmmakers felt the most chilling elements of the original had been left behind. "The first misconception of the original film is that it was a gory film," explains executive producer Brad Fuller. "It had many extremely disturbing moments, but only four seconds of blood. It was more conceptually horrifying than it was visually."

To get the project off the ground and generate interest from film distributors, Bay directed a teaser comprised of a black screen with sounds of Leatherface stalking and chasing a young woman in and around an old house. A quick visual was inserted in the last 10 seconds, along with the whine of a chainsaw. The results were amazingly effective.

The teaser generated incredible buzz throughout the industry, which resulted in deals for domestic distribution through New Line Cinema and international distribution throughout the world with Focus Features.

Ted Field explains, "we were able to raise the money to produce the film with incredible alacrity. While international audiences usually respond well to thrillers, the reactions to Michael's trailer exceeded our wildest expectations."

"None of us could have expected the overwhelming positive response the trailer received," Brad Fuller remembers. "It seemed to hit a nerve with everyone and conveyed the raw emotion we wanted audiences to feel when they were watching the movie."

There was once a potential complication, though: Radar Pictures and Platinum Dunes had an extremely small window within which to assemble a working project. "We were able to secure the rights for only six months," explains Field. "We had to come up with a final script and a vision for the production within that time. It was a challenge."

"We wanted to find a screenwriter who could mix the best elements from the original and inject the basic story with some fresh ideas," says Andrew Form.

"When The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was released nearly 30 years ago, a large number of the people who saw the movie thought it was a snuff film. When audiences use their imagination rather than being shown everything, it really keeps them on the edge of their seats, which is what the original film did so well."

That mandate led the filmmakers to screenwriter Scott Kosar, who had previously written the screenplay for The Machinist. "We wanted the film to be about psychological fear, as opposed to just being visceral," Brad Fuller comments. The filmmakers wanted to ground the terrifying elements of the film in a collection of very real lead characters who find themselves in an unreal situation. "When we met with Scott Kosar, he pitched us an opening sequence with the hitchhiker which was so devastating that it completely set the tone that we wanted for the film," adds Andrew Form.

Kosar was already a fan of the original and relished the prospect of revisiting the setting in a new way. "When I first heard that they were remaking the film I was a little daunted by the idea of trying to rewrite a classic," the screenwriter comments. "After my first meeting, I realised they didn't want to delve into an exploitation of the material, but instead were hell bent on making a very frightening version of the original that would operate on the level of suspense and psychological terror as opposed to repulsion."

With Kosar hammering out the first draft of the script, the filmmakers' search for a director led them to the highly touted and successful contemporary commercial visualist Marcus Nispel. Ted Field had been a long-time Nispel admirer: he brought him aboard to direct music videos for Interscope Records artists (most notably, No Doubt) and had previously developed several projects with him.

Though there were numerous other directors interested, Michael Bay was immediately drawn to Nispel, as well. "I've always liked Marcus' work," he says. "Growing up in the business and seeing his work, I always thought of him as a really talented guy and wanted to work with him. He's got great vision and is an amazing shooter."

Nispel, who has won almost every award within the advertising and music industry while directing over a thousand commercials and music videos, was drawn to the project by the willingness of the filmmakers to go against the grain in terms of their creative choices. "I like movies that deconstruct," Nispel notes. "When I first read the script I couldn't take it out of my hands." Nispel came well prepared to his first meeting with the producers. "He brought some amazingly twisted photography and magazine photos for reference," Bay recalls. "He had a lot of good ideas." 

The first time feature director was also excited by the prospect of working with producer Bay. "I felt that it was a unique opportunity to work with somebody who really changed Hollywood by blending the best of both the commercial and film worlds," he says. "Commercials are sprints and movies are marathons, and like no one else in town he allowed me to utilize the best of the sprinters and the best of the marathoners in putting my crew together."

The first person Nispel brought onto the project was cinematographer Daniel Pearl, with whom he had collaborated on many of his award-winning commercials and music videos, and who had also previously worked with Michael Bay. Coincidentally, Pearl served as director of photography on Tobe Hooper's original production in 1974, presenting the cinematographer with a unique opportunity to both re-envision the chilling story and make cinematic history in becoming the first cinematographer to shoot a remake of his first film.

"Daniel had talked about the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre a lot over the years," says Nispel. "I liked what he did with the original and wanted to bring this film back to it's realistic vibe yet give Daniel room to add what we had learned through years of working together. After much thought, he responded with an incredible line when he said to me 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is everything I am and if I screw this one up now, I am nothing.' I knew I could count on him.

For Pearl, it was a serendipitous turn of events that would find him returning to Austin, Texas, the city where he attended college and started his film career. "It was a very strange coincidence that this project fell into place because over the last five or six years I've done some my best work and had the most fun collaborating with Marcus on commercials and videos," says Pearl. "The film wound up in the Museum of Modern Art, so doing a remake of it was such a monumental challenge for me. So much of who and what I am today is based upon where I started with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre."

The decision to shoot the film in and around the city where the original was shot was one that the filmmakers felt was vital in order to capture the visual authenticity of rural Texas. "The nice thing about Texas is that it has a lot of different looks," comments Michael Bay. "There is a lot of Americana there, places where time has stopped. Plus, it's an extremely photogenic place.  They've got great skies. They've also got great crews there."

Bay sent Richard Klotz, the film's location scout, to scout Texas locations and take some photographs prior to traveling to Miami to start Bay's film, Bad Boys II.  "He went out there for a week and came back with some amazing photos and creepy places that looked as if they were lifted straight from the script," says Bay.

Though Marcus Nispel was initially considering shooting the movie in Palmdale, California, to save money, Klotz's photos won him over. "Marcus was thinking of saving money by not traveling to a location," remembers Bay, who had shot on location in Texas previously. "But I said, 'Marcus, you've got to shoot in Texas.  You're going to be blown away by what you can get there.'"

Nispel ascribes the film's high production values to the Texas locations they were able to access. "In Texas, nothing gets thrown away," he says. "We needed 25 locations for the film, which was problematic considering the 39-day shooting schedule. We circumvented this by finding three main locations that had so many different facets and faces to them, we could shoot a majority of the film in those locations."

With Austin locked in as the shooting location, the filmmakers began to focus on the critical task of assembling a cast that could bring to life the legendary story of five young college students traveling in a van through rural Texas. "When we first started casting the film, we had to get the message out that we were not making a slasher film," explains executive producer Andrew Form. "In the first half hour of the original film, not much happens in the way of terror. You meet these kids in a van and you hang out with them and get to know them.  We wanted to do the same thing with this film. When people in the film community began to hear that we were tackling the material in an unconventional manner, it opened up a lot of doors in terms of the caliber of actors we were able to approach."

The first and most vital selection in the casting process was finding an actor who could play the lead character of Erin - a headstrong natural beauty who finds deep reserves of strength and determination to escape unimaginably brutal circumstances. The character is the focal point and driving force of the story.

"When the script was written, Scott Kosar gave a description for each character and Erin's was she would be Miss Texas if she wasn't such a tomboy," recalls Form, who with Brad Fuller, had taken Biel to a Lakers game in order to get to know her. "We were both smitten from the moment we met her," he remembers.

"This is a tough role to play - a female hero," Michael Bay says. "You have to empathise with her and believe her when she shows her tougher side. She's a female hero, and Jessica brought both toughness and sexiness to Erin. She also brought an honesty to her performance that people will respond to and empathise with." 

"I have always loved scary films," exclaims Jessica Biel. "I've been interested in the genre ever since I was a kid because I love being scared and freaked out. I loved the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the script for this film was so realistic. I had no doubt in my mind that I really wanted to play Erin. She is one of the stronger characters in the film because when things really start to go bad for her and her friends, she doesn't lose her mind. She desperately tries to hold everyone together."

In the film, Erin is the social conscience of her close-knit group of friends. When her boyfriend Kemper (played by Eric Balfour) barely misses hitting a listless young teenager aimlessly walking in the middle of a deserted road, she tries to convince him to turn around and help her out. Kemper must decide between Erin's Good Samaritan ways and the rest of the group's selfish desire to keep on trucking to a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert in Dallas. It's a decision that unknowingly leads the group into life-threatening jeopardy.

Kemper is the group's natural leader, but defers to Erin's conscience as they struggle to come to grips with the circumstances they have found themselves in.  "Kemper wants to do right by both his girlfriend and friends," explains Eric Balfour, best known for his recurring role of Gabe on the acclaimed HBO series "Six Feet Under." "He's strong in an old school kind of way and I think it's a beautiful thing when you have characters who do things out of desperation because they have no other option."

As the situation grows increasingly dark, Kemper keeps his head. "He makes the final decision on whether to report the sudden grisly turn of events in their van to the local sheriff," says director Marcus Nispel. "He loves Erin and knows she expects him to do the right thing and go for help."

Marcus Nispel specifically asked to see Balfour for the role after first noticing his work on "Six Feet Under," and then seeing him again playing the devil in a car commercial. "I knew Eric had to be the type of guy who is at his best when he is playing a character who is slightly mischievous," comments Nispel. Read more

Filming Texas Chainsaw Massacre

The Filmmakers