Take Me To Your Teacher
Take Me To Your Teacher
EDITED & DIRECTED BY: Robert Rodriguez
STORY BY: Bruce Kimmel and David Wechter
SCREENPLAY BY: Kevin Williamson
MUSIC BY: Marco Beltrami
STARRING: Jordana Brewster, Clea DuVall, Laura Harris, Josh Hartnett, Shawn Hatosy, Salma Hayek, Famke Janssen, Piper Laurie, Christopher McDonald, Bebe Neuwirth, Robert Patrick, Usher Raymond, Jon Stewart, Daniel von Bargen, Elijah Wood
RUNING TIME: 104 Minutes
DISTRIBUTED BY: Dimension Films
A group of students at Herrington High School begin to notice some incredibly strange behavioral changes in the teachers and other students. These outcasts find out that the school is being taken over by alien parasites, like the Invasion of the Body Snatchers or The Puppet Masters. They must band together to stop it before they're next.
The faculty began as a spec script by Bruce Kimmel and David Wechter. The script was unproduced for 5 years until Miramax went looking for some teen-horror scripts to have Kevin Willamson (hot off of Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer) re-write. Since he rewrote nearly all of the dialog he receives sole screenplay credit and Kimmel and Wechter get story credit. Willamson also changed the characters personalities to fit the mold of the main characters from one of his favorite movies The Breakfast Club.
Once they had a script they started looking for a director. After making From Dusk Till Dawn Robert Rodriguez was offered the chance to direct Scream but he turned it down because he was in talks to direct The Mask of Zorro a job that eventually went to Martin Campbell. After not getting Zorro Rodriguez signed a 5 picture deal with Miramax, and they told him that they wanted this to be his first project of the five. He said that he wanted to do a family comedy first, but they said that he had to do this movie first because "in another year this whole teen-horror craze will be over." (Sharp guys those Weinstein brothers). Robert agreed to do it, but said that he wanted to make the high school stuff like the hell that he remembered, not a glossed over world that most movies portray. Robert said that he most identified with the character of Casey (Elijah Wood). In fact the whole thing where Casey gets run crotch first into the flag pole was something that he had seen happen at his high school.
For the cast Miramax went with the Scream formula of 'hot young rising stars'. Elijah Wood who has been acting since he was a little boy. Shawn Hatosy who previously appeared in In and Out, Niagara, Niagara, and Inventing the Abbotts. Laura Harris who's previous work consisted of TV movies. Josh Hartnett who had been on the short lived TV show Cracker before making his film debut in Dimension/Willamson's Halloween H20. Jordana Brewster's only credit was some soap operas. Most of Robert's regular actors could not appear in this one, no roles for tough middle aged Hispanics in a high school movie, the one exception is Salma Hayek who Robert cast at the school nurse. For the grown ups they cast a surprising number of established actors; Piper Laurie (Carrie), Christopher McDonald, Bebe Neuwirth (Cheers), Robert Patrick (Terminator 2), Famke Janssen (Goldeneye) and Jon Stewart (The Daily Show). In a supporting role they cast teen R&B singer Usher Raymond. Also of note Harry Jay Knowles (the webmaster/film critic of aint-it-cool-news.com) was cast in a cameo as a film teacher.
The movie was given a budget of $15 million and was filmed on location in Texas. In a rather novel marketing campaign Tommy Hilfiger supplied all of the cloths worn in the movie in exchange for a series of ads for their cloths using the cast of the movie. The movie was filmed during the spring of 1998. For the longest time it did not have a title. It was first referred to as 'Untitled Kevin Williamson/Robert Rodriguez Project', than as Feelers which is what the film-makers called the aliens in the movie, than finally The Faculty. Being a monster flick they needed some good makeup effects and they contracted KNB Efx group (who worked on From Dusk Till Dawn and Scream).
On a movie like this the soundtrack can be a big money-maker so Dimension went about putting together a good one. They got Layne Staley (Alice In Chains), Tom Morello (Rage Against The Machine), Steve Perkins (Jane's Addiction/Porno For Pyros)and Martyn Le Noble (Porno For Pyros), and Edward Tate and the First A.M.E. Voices of Gospel Youth Choir to remake Pink Floyd's Another Brick In The Wall (Part 1 & Part 2). Also 2 Alice Cooper covers Creed doing I'm 18, and Soul Asylum remaking the all time high school rebellion tune School's Out. Shawn Mullins covered David Bowie's "Changes" to round out the remakes. Besides the remakes they also had new songs by Oasis, The Offspring, Sheryl Crow, Garbage, Stabbing Westward, Neve, and D Generation. Scream's Marco Beltrami did the musical score for the film.
Especially after Halloween H20 made $55 million at the box office Dimension decided that they were going to put some big promotional muscle behind this movie; they committed $30 million (yes, twice the film's budget) to advertising the movie. They were set on a Christmas 98 release date and began saturating magazines with ads for it and attaching trailers to Buena Vista 's The Waterboy and Enemy Of The State. The movie opened December 25, 1998 against some heavy competition and came in at number 5 with $11.8 million. It ended up making $40 million which was a bit less than they were hoping for, but when you factor in soundtrack sales, foreign markets, and home video they came away with quite a lot of cash.
Trailers also show pieces of other scenes that did not make it into the movie:
Many of us were hoping that Dimension would give us a good DVD for this movie. Instead they gave us a disc that has no bonus features to speak of; no deleted scenes, no commentary, no making of special. Since Robert Rodriguez is known for doing damn good commentaries on many of his other films (El Mariachi, Desperado, From Dusk Till Dawn) and he is now Dimension's goldenboy with Spy Kids it is possible that dimension could be persuaded to release a better DVD like they did with the successful "special edition" DVD of From Dusk Till Dawn. One thing that could work against us is the fact that in this post-columbine day and age they may not want to stick their necks out on a film about kids killing their teachers (even if the teachers were aliens).