Horror Director Vincenzo Natali Was Almost Killed By His Own Creation
Vincenzo Natali mapped his brilliant, uncompromising vision in the 1997 sci-fi horror "Cube," a film that has retained its cult status over the years. Natali's work has always been rather unconventional within the ambit of the horror/thriller genre, where entries like "Cypher" and "Splice" embrace these eccentric sensibilities, focusing purely on the nuances of storytelling. "Cube" also follows a rather high-concept premise, where six individuals are thrown into a deadly and bizarre game of life and death, leaving little to no space for standard moral considerations. It is a film that challenges our understanding of how humans function within spaces that defy societal constructs, such as a death maze that demands the opening of doors to areas that defy logic with alarming mathematical precision.
"Cube" could have been yet another run-of-the-mill horror offering that relied on brutal shock effects for scares, but Natali evades such trappings by focusing minutely on the moral and philosophical themes that define the premise. After meticulously working on the sequence of filming post-storyboarding, Natali originally intended to film the sequences in chronological order. While such a structure is inherently difficult to pull off, Natali and his crew were faced with a unique problem: the doors of the 14x14x14 cube that was integral to every scene in the film refused to open.
The latest issue of SFX Magazine details the director's struggles while shooting "Cube," which include Natali recounting an unfortunate accident that could have killed him, along with other practical obstacles that made the filming process rather troublesome.
Handling cubes is dangerous business
As the majority of "Cube" takes place within, well, cubes, Natali geared up to shoot the scenes by order of events, as it would have been easier to make sense of the color-coded rooms and their significance as the film progressed. However, things did not quite go as planned:
"I thought nothing unexpected could happen because we had designed the space and I had storyboarded and meticulously planned every shot. Then, on the first day, the doors to the cube wouldn't open."
Now, this was a real problem as the opening scene features a man going through sets of doors before being brutally killed by a trap, which helped establish the treacherous nature of the physical space that the other characters were trapped in. Although this sequence from the script was retained, Natali had to improvise with hatches and work around some details to accommodate the unique problem he faced. Describing the situation as a "disaster that became the first in a series of small disasters that kept destroying [his] plans", Natali also explained that this issue prompted the film's executive producer to threaten that production would be shut down before it was wrapped.
Forced to make massive changes in the script, Natali opted for an introductory prologue that cemented the characters we follow throughout, but a potentially grave accident occurred during filming: "The cube was huge and almost fell on me. I was almost crushed by my own cube, which really could've killed me."
After evading this near-death mishap, Natali massively reworked his story, and the stress added to the "excruciating" process of altering his vision last minute. Nevertheless, Natali remarks that these toils were "worth it," as "Cube" turned out to be as visceral and complex as he intended in the end.