‘We used pig squeals to create their shriek’ … how we made Invasion of the Body Snatchers

‘We filmed it in a rough area of San Francisco. One day, a totally naked guy who was watching us said, “Are you remaking Invasion of the Body Snatchers? The first one was better”’

I was still a teenager when I saw the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers and was really affected by it. Two decades later, when I started to think about doing a new version, I went to see Don Siegel, who directed the original. While we were talking, his movie’s male lead, Kevin McCarthy, happened to pop in. They told me they’d wanted to make their version funnier, and with a really scary ending, but the studio had made them add the scene where the FBI solves everything. I cast them both: Don plays the taxi driver, and Kevin is the guy who runs into traffic trying to warn people, just as he did in the first movie. In my mind, he’d been running for 20 years from small town America to urban San Francisco. I wanted to show how paranoia had transferred to the city centres.

Continue reading…