The Messengers

No commentary track (phew!) and two Making Of featurettes. Plus a trailer. That’s it for extras. Be grateful.

The Making Ofs have quirky titles – Exhuming The Messengers and Webisodes – but basically they do exactly the same thing, talky-talk with actors, producers, the Pang brothers, etc, about working on the film, as well as show how certain scenes were put together.

Although this has been done a million times on other DVDs, this one is better. Forget the producers, because they just want to make things sound cool and exciting, and you have an insight into the US debut of the Pang brothers, whose Asian ghost stories (The Eye, Ab-normal Beauty) caused such a stir.

Rating the actors’ contributions as talking heads: Dylan McDermott 2, William B Davis 4, Penelope Ann Miller 7, Kristen Stewart 7, John Corbett 8. The remaining content can be compartmentalised into Pang Vision, the crows, building the house and creating ghosts.

The Pangs are young-looking fortysomethings, identical twins, Danny and Oxide, who speak English – just. Danny will direct today and Oxide tomorrow. While Oxide is shooting, Danny will edit yesterday’s rushes. Alicia Keynan, the production designer, says: “They are the most visual directors I have ever worked with.”

Choosing the location was weird. The film takes place in Middle America in the summer when sunflowers are in bloom. The producers brought the Pangs to a bleak snow-covered valley outside Regina, Canada, in mid-winter. They drove snowmobiles into the wilderness and, miraculously, found what they wanted. “The Pangs had the whole movie in their heads,” Keynan remembers. “They knew where everything should go.”

The haunted farmhouse is a weathered wooden building from the early 20th century that looks deserted, battered and dark. When she first saw it, Miller’s immediate reaction was, “That’s a major fixer-upper.” It was built from scratch by Keynan and her team and is a masterpiece of ingenuity (and fake ageing).

The crows are something else. They play a big part in the film, too big, perhaps, because they are asked to do very uncrowlike things. Twenty-five ravens were brought over from the Czech Republic. The rest were either hand puppets, or CGI. The tame ravens perch on their handlers’ wrists, like falcons, until required to perform. In this scene they must attack John Corbett – he was nervous they might peck out his eyes – as he runs through the sunflower field with pieces of raw chicken sewn onto his shoulders.

“They are not good after two or three takes,” the trainer says. “They did it once, got the chicken and that’s it!”

Everyone agree that ravens (not crows) are the most intelligent of birds.