RING TONES
Principal photography on “The Ring Two” began in Los Angeles, where the newsroom of the former Los Angeles Herald Examiner building in downtown doubled for the offices of The Daily Astorian. The actual newspaper that serves the citizens of Astoria, Oregon, The Daily Astorian was generous in allowing the production to use its name and banner in the film.
Other southern California locations utilized in the early weeks of filming included St. Luke’s Hospital in Pasadena; the Mary Andrews Clark Residence, a circa-1912 courtyard apartment complex located in the Mid-Wilshire district, which became a women’s shelter; and the Terminal Annex building in downtown Los Angeles.
Following three weeks in and around Los Angeles, the production moved to the quaint, picturesque town of Astoria, Oregon, where the often gloomy weather helped lend an ominous tone to the proceedings. Built on a peninsula, Astoria’s relationship with water was also very much in keeping with one of the story’s major themes. Explaining water’s significance to the film, Hideo Nakata offers, “I’m from Japan, which is an island country surrounded by water. Through natural disasters, water itself can be a symbol of death, so we have a natural fear of water that influences me. And, of course, in this movie, water becomes a sign of Samara’s evil spirit, because she had been kept at the bottom of a well for a long, long time.”
Ehren Kruger observes, “As a symbol, water is a life source, but it is also an environment in which we can’t naturally live, so it’s the perfect elemental metaphor for both life and death.”
The water theme was also very influential in creating the film’s color scheme. Production designer Jim Bissell states, “Water is very important to the film, and as a result, most of the colors are cool blues and greens. The gray overcast sky, which we see quite a lot in the Pacific Northwest, influenced the tone, too. It has a very monochromatic look, and in some ways it’s a bit claustrophobic, which made it the perfect setting for our horror film. I’ll elaborate by saying that things are scarier if you don’t telegraph the fact that you’re about to see something scary. You can take an atmosphere that appears perfectly natural, almost welcoming, and just shift the light level a little bit and it suddenly turns into something very foreboding.”
To that end, Bissell collaborated closely with director of photography Gabriel Beristain to evoke the overall color palette. The cinematographer attests, “We needed to respect that there is a recurrent water element in the film, as well as the greens of the bucolic countryside, so we avoided heavy pastels and strong primary colors and went for the blue, green, gray and earthy tones.”
Beristain also used the changing weather patterns of the region to his advantage. “Rachel is looking for normalcy, welcoming back a world that she wants to be tranquil, a world that doesn’t give her any memories of the nightmare that she lived. We welcomed sunny days, because this is a new world, a new time, a new city. But the weather of Astoria is very volatile—it might be sunny, but five minutes earlier, it was pouring.”
To match shots, the creative team decided to wet every shot, as Beristain says, “just in case. And it turned out to be beautiful—you know that look when the sun comes out after the rain, and everything glistens. We made virtue of whatever weather Astoria decided to give us. We couldn’t wait for perfect weather so our perfect weather became the unpredictability of Astoria.”
Reinforcing the ill-omened relationship between animals and the evil energy of Samara, Rachel and Aidan’s disturbing confrontation with a herd of deer was filmed on the tree-lined roads of Fort Stevens State Park, located in Hammond, Oregon, about 10 miles outside of Astoria. For practical and humanitarian reasons, no actual deer were used in any part of the filming because they are notoriously difficult to train. Instead, the deer were all created with computer-generated imagery produced under the supervision of Rhythm & Hues visual effects supervisor Betsy Paterson and her team of CG animators.
The involvement of deer in the story was significant to Hideo Nakata, as in ancient Japan, deer were considered sacred—divine messengers that are still protected as national treasures today.
WELLSPRING
When shooting in Astoria was completed, the company returned to Los Angeles, for the final scenes to be filmed on soundstages at Universal Studios and LA Center Studios. Water again played an integral role in two of the film’s most pivotal sequences. The first was in Max’s bathroom, where the water is literally repelled from the presence of Samara. Like an anti-gravity water chamber, water is forced out of the bathtub and coats the ceilings and walls before crashing down in a torrential pool of water. Nakata explains, “Basically, the idea is that Samara, who was kept in the bottom of a well for many years, now has the power to repel water.”
To accomplish the scene, special effects coordinator Pete Chesney used two separate bathroom sets. One was an entirely upside-down bathroom, where about 100 thin wires were utilized to hold all the towels and curtains in place. They were then able to flood the “ceiling” in a kind of small pool. Shooting then segued into the right-side-up bathroom set, where the effects team built a series of seven long, skinny dump tanks made out of clear polycarbonate. The tanks were all on latch relay timers that would open in sequence from one end of the room to the other, allowing the team to have a progression of water from one end of the room to the other. Multiple cameras were used to capture the water-drop sequence, several shooting at a high frame rate to capture the scene in slow motion. Betsy Paterson’s visual effects team then completed the scene by integrating and augmenting all of the visual elements.
The final days of filming on “The Ring Two” were among the most difficult because they were set in the well where Samara met her terrible end and where she again draws Rachel. The iconic, pixilated well clearing that appears at the beginning of the cursed Ring video was recreated onstage at L.A. Center Studios in Downtown Los Angeles. Production designer Jim Bissell and his crew filled the entirety of Stage 1 with freshly laid sod and 220 alder trees, surrounded by a giant green screen on which the visual effects team crew would later substitute the image of a steep cliff at the edge of the clearing. The well opening looked down into a pit under the stage that allowed the actors to climb up a ladder and into the clearing.
For the climactic well chase sequence, multiple interior well sets—both dry and water-bottomed—were erected on two soundstages at Universal Studios. Nakata says, “For me, it was the third time going back to the well site, which gave me a very claustrophobic feeling and it was very tough to work in, too.”
“There’s something very spooky about being there, even though you know it’s not real,” Naomi Watts admits. “It was a great set.”
Watts performed most of her own climbing sequences under the guidance of stunt coordinator Keith Campbell. A stunt double was used to work out the sequence and then Watts donned the safety harness and was rigged up for the climb. “Harness work is the most uncomfortable thing to do,” Campbell states. “Unfortunately, it was also a very steep angle and those rocks were incredibly hard. It wasn’t actual stone, but they were just as hard, and it was also wet, slippery and mossy. It even smelled dank in there, so it was a tough thing to do, but Naomi did a great job.”
Samara’s unnatural spider-like walk made the chase all the creepier. Nakata reveals, “Samara’s movements become more and more weird, so there was a discussion of how to achieve it—maybe even CGI—but I felt it wouldn’t work in the scene.” Instead, Bonnie Morgan, a professional stuntwoman and contortionist who has lent her unique talents to such films as “Minority Report” and “Men in Black 2,” was brought in. As the stunt Samara in the well, Morgan twisted her limbs to perform Samara’s bizarre walk.
STIRRINGS
There were some bizarre happenings off-camera as well. Throughout production on “The Ring Two,” a sequence of unsettling occurrences repeatedly affected the production.
The strange events began May 20, 2004, coincidentally the “seventh day” of production. Early in the morning, the office staff arrived to discover that the production office had been flooded overnight. Though the reason turned out to be a burst water pipe in the wall, for some the pooling of water—so closely tied to a major theme of the movie—was an omen of possible things to come.
In an effort to forestall any future problems, director Hideo Nakata requested that a Japanese purification ceremony, conducted by Shinto Minister Reverend Igawa, be conducted at both the production office where the flooding occurred, as well as on set. Walter Parkes recalls, “I looked at the call sheet, and it said, ‘8:30 p.m. – Purification Ceremony.’ I’ve worked on more than 30 movies, and that was a first. I said, ‘I’ll be there for that,’” he laughs. “It was great. I think it bonded the cast and crew early on.”
Although the production was now officially blessed, nevertheless a string of strange coincidences continued:
While on location, a swarm of thousands of bees suddenly descended on the prop truck, prompting the immediate evacuation of the prop department, before the bees left just as quickly as they arrived.
For no apparent reason, a five-gallon water jug burst open in the production office kitchen, once again flooding the room that had flooded only weeks earlier.
One morning at the lot at Universal Studios, a set costumer stepped out of the parking garage to discover an antlered buck charging across the asphalt in her direction. Though it’s a regular occurrence for deer to descend onto the lot from the surrounding hills, the similarity to the deer attack in the film was uncanny.
These incidents sparked many in the cast and crew to speculate that somehow Samara was making her presence known.
Nakata observes, “The idea of a threshold between reality and another world can be very frightening, and I think Samara’s presence is much closer in this movie than in the previous films. Samara is not just inside the TV; she is right beside you. That is probably the biggest fear for audiences in this movie.”