In the new horror thriller A Cure for Wellness, Dane DeHaan plays an ambitious young executive sent to collect his boss from an isolated spa in the Swiss Alps.
Soon his character begins to worry that something nefarious is going on there. DeHaan was drawn to the project because, as he says, "it reeked of originality. It was unlike anything I had read before, and I loved how crazy and wild and terrifying it was. It's not a movie I would have done with just any director, but I knew Gore [Verbinski, who made Pirates of the Caribbean] could pull it off. It's certainly a wild ride, and that was definitely evident from reading the script."
To get ready for the movie, Verbinski asked DeHaan to watch a series of scary movies for inspiration. "Yeah, it was like The Shining, Rosemary's Baby, The Tenant, The Omen and just those kinds of movies," DeHaan says. "None of which was like obviously specifically like what he based the movie on, but all had tonal or performance aspects that were definitely helpful in understanding what he was going for."
The actor says that he admired Verbinski's filmmaking approach, even though it often challenged him. "One of the things that's so amazing about Gore is that he has such a visual cinematic mind. He knows exactly how he wants it to look," DeHaan says. "So there were a lot of scenes that were very challenging. Especially the deprivation tank, which was probably the hardest sequence. We had rehearsals to make sure these scenes weren't dangerous, but Gore wanted to get the shot where you see the water continually rising. So I feel this pressure building inside my body, but I couldn't equalise it. I took it for as long as I could, but I finally had to make the hand signal to stop the shot. That's when the diver dove in and cut my cables so he could get me the hell out of there!"
DeHaan says that the final film makes all of the pain worthwhile. "I think it's disturbing and freaky, but I also think it's super fun," he says. "I think there's a lot about it that almost like a huge roller coaster. But you know at the same time I think it asks a lot of important questions. I think it's a cool movie. And I think it's an original movie, which is rare these days."
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