When ID4 producers Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich set out to make an updated version of a classic 1950s matinee creature feature, they knew it would be difficult to strike a balance between horror and camp. They found the balance they were looking for in a short film making the film festival circuit entitled Larger Than Life. The 13-minute, black-and-white film depicted a woman fighting off a giant spider in her house. After viewing the film, the producers knew they had found the perfect tone for their film, and convinced Warner Brothers to sign first-time feature director Ellory Elkayem to the project.

Actors David Arquette and Kari Wuhrer, both big fans of classic science fiction, quickly signed on the project as well. Arquette, who has made a name for himself in comedic roles, was looking for a chance to play an action hero as well as a romantic lead. Wuher has been involved in several SF projects, including a starring role in the television series Sliders, and was excited about the possibility of working with Devlin and Emmerich.

Science Fiction Weekly recently spoke with Devlin, Arquette and Wuhrer about the challenges of updating a classic genre film for today's audience and what it's like working with giant CGI spiders.

So the studio had actually re-titled the movie Attack of the Killer Spiders. And Roland and I, we understood what they were trying to do, but we thought you couldn't do it. Besides the fact that there'd been Attack of the Killer Tomatoes and Attack of the 50 Fort Woman, George Lucas was just about to have Attack of the Clones. So we said, "Look, if you really want to have some kind of retro title, you know, take a line out of the movie." I kind of jokingly said, like, "Call the movie Big Ass Spiders or Eight Legged Freaks or, you know, something like, out of the picture."

So about a week or so went by and they called me back and said, "We're going with your title." And I said, "What title?" They said, Eight Legged Freaks. I said, "Guys, I was kidding! I didn't mean it!"

Devlin: The origin was [producer Roland Emmerich] actually just walked into my office one day and asked, "How can we make a movie like Tarantula viable for an audience today?" And we had a lot of conversations about it. ... What we tend to do in Hollywood now is take B movies and turn them into A movies. The problem with a lot of B movies is if you did that, you would destroy the very thing that made them good. And I think Tarantula is one of those. You don't want to destroy the very thing that makes it really cool by trying to make it into a $100 million picture.

Also, making a $100 million picture has to appeal to a much broader audience simply because it costs so much money. And we didn't want to water down what's fun about a giant spider movie. So we really were wrestling on how to do it when we saw Ellory's short film. And Ellory's film was really a love letter. I mean, it was shot in black and white. It had this overwrought score on it. And it was funny but it made you scared. He really walked that line really well. And that's when we said, "Okay." The trick is to make it funny, keep it scary but not compromise on the special effects, because even in his short film the effects were wonderful. And we said, you know, "All right, that's the trick. Can we take the special effects of a $100 million movie and put it in a $10 million? What happens then?"

Arquette: First off, I knew that Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich were involved and I've wanted to work with Dean since I'd met him on Stargate. And then I read the script and it's sort of a heroic character, a kind of heroic action character, which I don't typically didn't get to play. And Rick Overton and Doug E. Doug were in the film, so they would sort of carry the humor element of the picture and it would allow me to be slightly subtler, not that I'm completely straight in this movie.

Then I read the script and I just got really thrilled by it and saw Ellory Elkayem's short film and ... he really understood the tone of this film and how to sort of balance the humor and the scariness of it. Then I was really at that point I was like, "I've got to do it." So I called up every connection I had at Warner Brothers and I was like virtually begging them for it. I said, "You didn't let me try out for Scooby-Doo, so you're going to have to let me do this."

Wuhrer: Dean called me up personally on my cell phone and told me, "So, you're doing our movie?" And I was like, "Wait, who is this?" It's just unbelievable. They were the most incredible team on Independence Day and The Patriot and they're able to take the sci-fi genre and expand it, and make it for a real crossover market. ... In Independence Day, you have action and humor and you have drama and all these elements and I thought, my god. I would bring Dean Devlin coffee on the set. I would light Roland Emmerich's cigarettes by rubbing sticks together.

How did you go about casting the lead roles?

Devlin: Kari actually had the most difficult role in the picture because on the one hand, she's a very modern female action hero. She's the one who's driving the action in the picture. She's with the shotgun. She's the sheriff. She's a tough character. On the other hand, she's the classic babe of the movie, you know. And then add a third dimension, she has to be a believable mother. And there were very few actors who could come in and really do all three things. And I thought she really struck the balance between all of that and maintained a sense of humor though the whole thing. I thought she did an enormous job.

And then David Arquette, you know, he's our male lead, but he's not the action hero, which again, I think helps redefine it for today's audience. David made a very conscious effort not to be the kind of buffoon that he'd become famous to do, the outrageous clown. He really said to me from day one, "I want to do something different, I want to play this as a romantic lead." And at first we were scared of that, because this is a movie that needs a great deal of humor. But to his credit he never let being a straight lead interfere with his comic timing. So he was able to stay very funny and yet give us a performance that we'd never see him do before. And I'm really proud of what he did.

Arquette: I actually didn't have any scenes with the real spiders. But I've held them a couple of times. They were on the set once. I didn't think I was really afraid of spiders until I like had this big tarantula climbing up my arm and it kind of ... threw up its legs and I was like, "Take it off me. Take it off me." So at that point my calm exterior crumbled. But I'm not really afraid of spiders.

Wuhrer: I have a normal, healthy, primal human fear of spiders. No phobia or anything. Definitely, if I ran into a tarantula in the wild, I'm going to run the other way. But in a controlled environment with a wrangler and everything, it's a piece of cake.

Were the spiders in the film based on real spiders?

Devlin: Ellory was really strict on wanting all the spiders to actually come from nature and to look and behave as they do in nature. So the way they attack, their body structures, all of that is absolutely 100% accurate.

Wuhrer: I had to learn about what the different spiders do. There's the trap-door spider, who pops up from the ground and snatches his prey. There's the orb weaver, who shoots and spins the webs to attract the spider. There's the jumping spider, which I think is the coolest of all. And you've just got to imagine, too, you've got a little tiny spider this big and he can jump like 25 feet away. That's a really strong creature, so imagine that really strong creature the size of an Astro minivan and he's gonna get all that strength and power. I thought about that and that's kinda scary and freaky.

What are you reacting to when you're in scenes with the CGI spiders?

Arquette: There's nothing. There's not even like a tennis ball or anything. It's down to such a science. The process they used on our film, the didn't even need like a blue screen. So we just react to nothing, really.

Wuhrer: Yes, the itsy-bitsy invisible spiders. We got to see what the effects team was building with the spiders before we started filming, and they had a sequence, sort of a temp sequence with the motocross action. We saw the jumping spiders attacking the guys on the bikes and thought, "Wow, this is really cool" and they were nowhere near the finished product.

Arquette: They had this big sort of hard-shelled spider. A spider got killed or something and they needed it to sort of sit in the corner. They put the real spider there just to tie in reality with these computer-generated images. So that was cool because we'd see like, the actual size of them. Like big dogs. And sort of give you a sense as if there was a real spider there. And then other times you just sort of have to imagine it, really. And you have to sort of fool yourself into thinking, if you were in that situation how would you feel, get in touch with how your heart rate would be and your breathing and your adrenaline and then just kind of depend on Dean and Roland and Ellory to bring all those elements together that would make it believable to the audience.

The spiders all seem to have these funny little personalities, was that in the script?

Arquette: I think it was sort of understood that they'd have these personalities, but I think they drew a lot. A lot of these computer animators, the artists, have really great senses of humor and senses of sort of sci-fi and they're sort of quirky in their own way. So they definitely incorporated a lot of that. But also, I mean, even when I read it, it read a lot like a sort of Gremlins kind of movie and they sort of have that persona at times. They get into trouble and they fall off something they'll shake it off and giggle at things. And supposedly, like, Ellory has told me that there's spiders doing things that you'll miss in just watching the movie. It'll take getting the DVD and slowing it down. It was like two spiders pulling on a body or something weird, you know, in the background of something. One's like kind of dancing. You just won't see until later.

Devlin: That's where you went from the real to the unreal, where suddenly we have to make them either dizzy or drunk or angry or pissed off. And that's where the animators then took everything that they had learned and threw it out the window and so, like, had one knock its head and go, "Brrrrrr." Because we didn't want to get the humor out of cheesy effects. We wanted the effects to look as good as anything we'd seen before. But to let the humor come out of the behavior of those well-made effects.

Did they incorporate any of your actions into the animation?

Arquette: I did notice that, like, in a scene where you run out and look to the right and they'd say, "There's spiders everywhere." That's, like, your direction. Okay, so you run out and you just look around and then these great artists would just incorporate where you look and put a spider there and a spider there and just, like, incorporate what was really there. And they had this great method because Dean is such a pro at doing this. He knows how to combine all these elements and part of it that really sells it is when you combine realistic objects, things that are actually there in the scene, with this computer-generated image.

So, in the scene where a spider walks into Scarlett's room they attached, like, fishing string to the windows, and there's a bunch of stuffed animals and they attached fishing string to about three stuffed animals. They'd slowly pull the windows open and then pull one stuffed animal down and then another. And then when the artists get back there they tie it all in by putting the spider's leg as if it's kicking these things and it just makes it seem so much more realistic.

Are you a big fan of the old monster movies?

Wuhrer: I loved Them and I remember seeing it as a kid, but then getting reacquainted with it again before we started shooting. When I was a kid, it was always really scary, you know. But now, as an adult, you can see the campy quality to it and the cheesy special effects, but as a kid it's really scary but not scary to the point where you'd have nightmares. You flick on the lights and monsters disappear.

Devlin: I am a big fan of them. I was born in 1962, so I didn't see them in the theaters. I saw them on the Sunday afternoon creature features and that's where I fell in love with them. But my strongest memory was that when my friends and I would watch these creature features we would mock them, we would make fun of them, but then that night none of us could sleep because we were scared of them. And that was always, I think, the brilliance of it. On one hand, it's kind of silly and fun, but on another level it actually does frighten you. And so when we sat down to reinvent the genre we said, "How do we make it viable today?" And so the trick was really walking that line between the comedy and the scares. And I think Ellory did a fantastic job on creating that balance.

How did you go about maintaining that balance throughout the film?

Devlin: You just put your finger on the single biggest problem of the movie. Because again, I think if something is too funny then it's not scary anymore, and if it's too scary you know, you can't have that kind of funny. You can have nervous laughs but you can't laugh at the movie at the same time. So that was the constant problem. And I think that that's something we wrestled with every single day of writing it, of shooting it, of making it. And it's the thing that I want to give Ellory the most credit on. I mean, he really found that balance. And it was a thing that you easily could have screwed up. I mean, if it was a little bit sillier than it is now, I think that you wouldn't have jumped or been scared by anything.

Wuhrer: It was hard, ultimately, to get the tone set right, it was a delicate balance between humor and horror. If we had too much humor in the wrong places, it was going to be campy. And we really had to maintain the fear factor of the spiders. I was really impressed at the final result of the film to see how we actually did do that successfully. That's why kids and adults are really enjoying it, because it's not a campy mess. It's only an homage to these B horror films of the '50s. It's not a remake.

Is it more fun to do something like this or a bigger film like ID4?

Devlin: Oh, it's much more fun to do a bigger, larger, easier shoot. You can breathe. You can actually sleep on the weekends. The joy for me of this movie was actually when we were done shooting. Honestly, not that it was a bad experience. It was just so much work. I've literally never worked that hard in my life. From the moment you were awake until you fell asleep you were shooting something. You didn't even have time to plan anything. And then, when the 40 days were over, we all kind of just took this big sigh and went, "I can't believe we got this finished." I had never worked that fast in my life.

How do you expect audiences to react to this film?

Devlin: Let's put it this way. I think if you willingly pay money to see a movie called Eight Legged Freaks, you get your money's worth.