A glimpse at the 'Chernobyl Diaries'

Over there, it took a while for the movie to get introduced, internally, to Paramount, and for a long time, more than a year, we didn’t know what was going to happen with the movie. It was a very frustrating period for me, where I just wanted to know whether the movie was going to be released or not and we just had to sit and wait.

DC: And on the internet, there were rumors that Dreamworks was just going to remake the movie. Can you talk about that?

OP: That’s correct, the original plan was for Dreamworks to do a remake of the movie and they were going to let me direct it. I didn’t like that idea, but it was the best offer we had because no one wanted to release the original movie. But what we ended up doing, before we started production on the remake, we had a test screening in front of all the Dreamworks executives, and when they saw how the movie was playing in front of an audience, that’s the last time anyone said anything about a remake. Immediately, they decided to release the movie as-is with only a few changes to the ending.

DC: What do you think of Hollywood’s recent shift toward found-footage, especially in non-horror films like “Chronicle” and “Project X”?

OP: Personally, I like the found-footage format. I don’t think it always makes sense; for a while, we were thinking of doing it for “Chernobyl Diaries,” but then when we developed it, we realized it wasn’t going to make sense so we ended up filming it more traditionally. But for other movies, I think it makes great sense to make them in found-footage, for instance “Chronicle,” which did well using found footage without being a horror movie. I don’t know if anyone, certainly not me, could have predicted what works and what doesn’t in the format, but I think there will be a lot of trial-and-error in the format in the future.

DC: Has production started on “Paranormal Activity 4”?

OP: My general policy is that I can’t discuss anything upcoming at all; all I can say is that it does exist and will be released October 19.

DC: Do you have any updates on the long-in-development “Area 51”?

OP: Unfortunately, that falls into the topic of projects I can’t comment about.