INTERVIEW: ‘The Yeti’ storms into movie theaters
Photo: William Sadler stars as Hollis Bannister in the horror film The Yeti. Photo courtesy of Well Go USA Entertainment / Provided by KWPR with permission.
Writers-directors Gene Gallerano and William Pisciotta are having fun in the cryptozoology realm with their new film, The Yeti, which will play exclusively in AMC Theatres April 4 and 8, with a digital release planned for April 10. In the movie, a rescue team heads to the northern reaches of Alaska to find an oil tycoon and adventurer who have gone missing; what they find is the legendary Yeti, and all hell breaks loose.
The Yeti stars a who’s who of acting talent, including Brittany Allen, Eric Nelsen, Jim Cummings, Christina Bennett Lind, Linc Hand, William Sadler and Corbin Bernsen, according to press notes. For the creative team behind the flick, their love of monsters and horror movies goes all the way back to their childhood.
“My dad bought me a VHS copy of The Thing when I was like 8, and I watched it so many times,” Pisciotta said in a recent Zoom interview. “It just scared me forever. I still watch it a lot because my whole life I was thinking about The Thing.”
For Gallerano, his entry into monster movies was Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. He also mentioned Cujo and Pet Sematary as influences. “Any scary Bigfoot movie,” Gallerano said about his favorite flicks. “Back then it was Harry and the Hendersons, not really scary.”
For The Yeti, the two creative partners tried to put their own unique spin on an oft-told tale dealing with a legendary bipedal creature in the wilderness. “What I’m really excited about is hopefully seeing audience feedback,” Gallerano said. “The arguments, even online in the horror community, are so passionate and dialed. [They look] at the details so well that it’s really exciting to see what they think and how they perceive it.”
The two thought up this movie back during the pandemic when Gallerano was filming a movie in hospitals in New York City. That documentary was keeping him busy, but Pisciotta had this awesome idea that couldn’t wait any longer.
“Will kept calling me every day,” Gallerano said. “I was like, ‘I don’t think you understand what I’m doing. I’m in this really harrowing situation. I’m documenting this. It’s really alarming everything that’s happening. It’s really intense.’ He kept calling me and calling me. I’m like, ‘I can’t talk, I can’t talk, I can’t talk.’ Eventually he got through, and he’s like, ‘Yeti, Yeti.’ I was like, ‘I need more than one word, Will.’ He said, ‘Yeti film. We’re going to make the Yeti film. We need more Yeti. This is the movie.’ I was like, ‘OK, I don’t really understand,’ and every single day he kept calling me.”
Eventually Gallerano grabbed a minute to think about the project, and he agreed that there was great potential in a Yeti-focused film. “What he kept saying, which was completely to Will’s credit, was this is unexplored,” Gallerano said. “We get to be the ones that can hopefully make the definitive first fingerprint of the Yeti, and when people get to watch the movie, they’ll see our vision of the Yeti. And so we have to make this film, and it kind of took off from there. That was push one of getting The Yeti made.”
Some viewers might think that a Yeti movie would be set in the Himalayas, the traditional stomping ground of this mythical beast. For Pisciotta, moving the story to Alaska made the most sense.
“There’s a lot of reasons why it’s not in the Himalayas,” Pisciotta said. “Some of them are budgetary. It was originally in the Himalayas, but we wanted a forest. All of the Himalaya stuff was above the tree line, so it posed a lot of issues. … We are like, we’ll have to put our own spin on it, so we did a kind of Americana thing and decided to make it about the late-’40s and capitalism boom and oil tycoons taking over the whole planet. They’re trying to, but the world is not theirs to take. It’s the Yeti’s.”
Helping the team is that long list of actors, and Gallerano said they were selected because they wanted to travel on this journey with them. He was most interested in performers who had a sense of adventure.
“The whole team is really talented, been around, done a lot of excellent work,” Gallerano said. “You’re assembling a team, an ensemble, and they all have to complement each other. … We weren’t inviting people to come on to a green screen. We were saying, ‘We’re going to do The Revenant in a box. We’re going to build the Arctic on a soundstage, and the cabin is real. The bivouac is real. It’s aboveground, of course, but we’re creating all of this. And we’re going to create a 9-foot Yeti monster. We’ve been working on it for eight months. You will get to look into its face when it’s there, and then it’s going to hide in the fog.’ And so I think that’s the most important part is convincing them to go on the journey, and the second part is getting out of the way once they start doing their awesome work. Let them cook.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The Yeti, written and directed by Gene Gallerano and William Pisciotta, opens April 4 at AMC Theatres. Click here for more information.
