David Arquette Is Bugged

By: Marc Shapiro
Date: Wednesday, July 17, 2002

David Arquette is usually pretty cavalier when it comes to going after roles. But he was literally foaming at the mouth after he read the script for the giant spider invasion movie EIGHT LEGGED FREAKS.

"I was like 'I've got to do it,'" he recalls. "I called up every connection I had at Warner Bros. I was virtually begging for it. I said, 'You didn't let me try out for SCOOBY DOO so you're gonna have to let me do this.'"

Arquette, who after starring in the wrestling flick READY TO RUMBLE is no stranger to fighting off eight legged freaks, plays fiery and troubled chemist Chris McCormick who has returned to his home town to find himself. Arquette offers that the last thing he expected to find was a group of chemically mutated attack spiders... and himself turning into a full blown action hero.



"I'm really at a loss as to how I played this guy. I don't know if I'm playing a typical action hero. I know I kind of acted cooler and nothing really shakes me. I had to put on a calm exterior. This character obviously had different quirks so he wasn't the most action packed guy."

Arquette explains that a lot of the over the top theatricality and humor running through EIGHT LEGGED FREAKS and, in particular, his character came from his experience being around wrestlers in READY TO RUMBLE. And these skills were often tested on the days when the actor would have to be playing the emotions of fear, anger and everything in between to spiders that would be CGI'd into the scene later.

"Most of the time, there was not even a tennis ball or anything to look at," he says. "The process that they used on our film didn't even need a blue screen. You were just reacting to nothing. The director would just say, 'It's right in front of your face.'"

Arquette concedes that while the script was rock solid, there was an awful lot of adlibbing required of the actors when they were dealing with those CGI-heavy sequences.

"There would be a scene where you had to run out and look to the right and the director [Ellory Elkayem] would say, 'There's spiders everywhere.' That was our direction. So I would run out and look around and these great artists would incorporate where you look and put in the spiders. Part of what really sells it is when you combine things that are in a scene with a computer generated image. In the scene where the spider walks into [co-star] Scarlett [Johansson]'s room, a fishing line with a bunch of stuffed animals was attached to the window. What they would do is slowly pull open the window and slowly pull the stuffed animals down. When the CGI guys got a hold of the scene, they would put in a spider's leg and have it kicking those stuffed animals to just make things appear that much more realistic."




The actor also acknowledges that his approach to acting opposite spiders that were not there was aided by the occasional odd prop that the director would put on the set during particular scenes.

"They had this big sort of hard shelled spider," he says. "If a spider got killed or they just needed it to sit in a corner, they'd put the real spider in there just to tie in reality with the computer generated images. That was cool because we could see the actual size of them. It would sort of give you the sense that there was a real spider there. Other times you would just sort of have to imagine it and fool yourself into thinking, if you were in that situation how would you feel? I did things like get in touch with how my heart rate would be and what your breathing and level of adrenaline would be like."

Equally challenging for the actors in EIGHT LEGGED FREAKS was the notion of "selling the characters to the audience" so the moviegoers would come to believe the jeopardy and suspense in their lives as the giant spiders moved in for the kill. For Arquette that meant giving over a lot of attention to his budding romance with the town sheriff Sam Parker (Kari Wuhrer).

"And no, I didn't prepare for those scenes by watching Kari's erotic thrillers," laughs the actor. "But I did actually adlib some of the dialogue in those scenes. For example, there was that cheesy line about the flowers, 'I picked them myself,' that I just threw in there for a cheap joke. Actually one of the final decisions that was made on this film was what their relationship was and how to approach it. I think it was pretty much [producer] Dean [Devlin]'s idea to make it as though he couldn't verbalize his feelings for her and I thought that approach worked well."



Arquette recalls what turned out to be another, unintentional, horror experience when, shortly after completing the first SCREAM movie, he agreed to do a guest shot opposite his wife Courtney Cox on the long running sitcom FRIENDS.

"It wasn't a good character," he says. "People didn't seem to react very well and it may have been the longest episode they ever shot. We went until three in the morning because they had to rewrite everything. It just wasn't working so I'm sure I won't be getting that call back anytime soon. I would love to do it again. I mean, they know my number. If they wanted me back, I would love to."

Truth be known, David Arquette, despite his occasional forays into mainstream films like EIGHT LEGGED FREAKS, the SCREAM series and a highly entertaining series of telephone commercials for television, is at his soul an indie kind of guy. Next up is the small and very independent Holocaust drama THE GREY ZONE.

"I started off doing a lot of independent films and I want to get back to doing that kind of stuff. A lot of the reason I do a movie like EIGHT LEGGED FREAKS, the SCREAM movies or READY TO RUMBLE is so I can build a name value so I can help with foreign financing to help produce independent films."

However, he is not above doing a big Hollywood film as long as the attraction is as strong as it was on EIGHT LEGGED FREAKS.

"I don't typically get to play the heroic action character," he says. "I didn't have to carry all the humor so I could play things slightly subtler. I'm not completely straight in this movie. And on top of everything else, I was thrilled by the script. So who wouldn't say yes to this?"

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