The Innkeepers is centered around the final two employees working in a haunted hotel before it goes out of business. After over one hundred years in business, The Yankee Pedlar Hotel is about to close its doors for good. The last remaining clerks, Claire (Sara Paxton), a twenty something that has come to terms with her lot in life, and Luke (Pat Healy), a computer-smart loner, are convinced that the hotel is haunted and are determined to prove it. As time ticks down to the final days of operation, mysterious guests check in including Leanne Rease-Jones (Kelly McGillis), a former TV actress turned psychic, and an old man insistent on staying in room 353. As several strange occurrences begin to add up, both Claire and Luke must make the crucial decision on what to believe and what not to believe…
About The Production
The origins of “The Innkeepers” can be traced back to the production of Ti West’s previous film, The House of the Devil, shot in the spring of 2008, primarily in and around the town of Lime Rock, Connecticut. During the production, the cast and crew of the film -including West, producers Larry Fessenden, Peter Phok, Derek Curl, cinematographer Eliot Rockett, production designer Jade Healy, and line producer Jacob Jakffe – resided at The Yankee Pedlar Inn in the nearby town of Torrington, Connecticut.
“We were staying there because it was the closest place to the location. When I first showed up there, I thought it was a goofy place,” remembers West. “But it was kind of charming; you usually stay at some Best Western on the side of the highway because you’re trying to stay at the cheapest place possible.”
It wasn’t too long before West and company learned of the Yankee Pedlar’s years-long reputation of being a “haunted hotel,” an opinion held by many of the hotel’s employees and residents of the town of Torrington. And that was a feeling that began to grow in the minds of the House of the Devil company during their nearly two-month stay at the hotel.
“It was one of those things: We’re shooting a movie for twelve hours a day about the devil just forty minutes away from this hotel,” says West. “Making a movie is such a strange, traumatic adventure, and when you get back to where you’re staying after a long shooting day, it’s usually a pretty bland, straight-ahead experience. You get ready for the next day and then you crash.”
But the Yankee Pedlar ain’t no Best Western, as West quickly discovered. While staying in his room on the top level of the three-story Yankee Pedlar, he experienced a handful of moments that could certainly be interpreted as classic “haunted hotel” motifs, led by light bulbs that would burn out with alarming frequency (the replacement bulbs, as well) and a television that would turn off and on by itself. But as West remembers, there was more…
“It was really an overall vibe – like someone was in the room with me. Yeah, there were nights when I was in my room and it would just feel like somebody was in there with me, near me,” West recalls of his overnights at the Yankee Pedlar during the House of the Devil shoot. “It may sound bogus and I’m a skeptic as it is, but I don’t ever feel that way in my life. Ever.”
Skeptic or not, West was busy making a film and his daily “weird vibe” would have to take a back seat during the production. But not for too long…
As finishing touches were being put on The House of the Devil, and the movie was being readied for its festival rollout in the spring of 2009 and subsequent theatrical release in the fall, West began shifting his focus toward another movie that he was developing. But his experience at The Yankee Pedlar proved itself to be too strong to let go, particularly as it was so fresh in his mind.
By the fall of 2009, just as The House of the Devil was beginning its acclaimed theatrical run, Ti West’s idea about a film focusing on a haunted hotel in Northern Connecticut began to take root. What if a couple of hotel employees – generally slacker-type nine-to-fivers who begin to fancy themselves ghost hunters – set out on the eve of the hotel’s closing to prove that the hotel is genuinely haunted? Utilizing one of the employee’s knowledge of computer technology and the other’s overall enthusiasm and reality TV-inspired spunk, they could surely prove the mystery of the hundred-year old hotel. And what starts off as a slacker-styled search for proof of ghosts in a supposedly haunted hotel slowly transforms into something truly horrific? What if, indeed….
And so, The Innkeepers was born… “Ti knew if he could present the project in a doable way, he would have something. And by proposing we shoot in the same hotel we stayed in when we made House of the Devil, that was definitely something,” says producer Larry Fessenden. “And Ti wrote this very sweet script…”
Ironically (or not, depending on your point of view), West’s idea for “The Innkeepers” wholly revolved around shooting at The Yankee Pedlar Inn.
“I knew that if The Yankee Pedlar would agree to let us make the movie there, then we could make it right away,” says West. “But if not, if they didn’t want us to shoot there, then there would be no movie. It’s not a movie that could have been made anywhere else.”
West completed his script and he headed out to Sundance in January 2010 to meet with MPI and pitch it. Dark Sky Films was immediately excited about West’s script, giving it a thumbs-up and approving the budget, contingent on The Yankee Pedlar agreeing to have the film shot on their premises. That left the producers with the task of approaching The Yankee Pedlar about shooting the film on location in the hotel.
“Our biggest goal was to get it greenlit, that was the first thing,” says producer Peter Phok. “Connecticut has a good tax incentive for filmmaking, so that certainly helped. I know Ti writes for location – when we’re locked in, he’ll do a re-write to make it more specific – but for “The Innkeepers”, it was all about the location.”
What could have been a major stumbling block proved to be just the opposite. “I couldn’t believe I was making the call, to use The Yankee Pedlar for the film,” remembers Phok. “But they were very agreeable to the idea – they remembered us from when we stayed there during House of the Devil, of course – and we made the deal.” “Then it was a matter of scheduling the shoot and a race for getting into the hotel quickly.” The Set…
“The Innkeepers” shoot was scheduled for 18 days in April 2010 and, in the great tradition of independent filmmaking, the fast-approaching shoot allowed for little more than two weeks for pre-production.
“It was a bit nerve racking going into something without a proper prep window. However Peter, Derek and myself were going into our fourth movie together in under two years, so by that point we had hit a rhythm and were operating at another level of efficiency,” says line producer Jacob Jaffke. “This being my second movie with Ti, I knew what to expect and knew what he would be needing for this film, so I was able to anticipate this a bit better than we had on Devil.”
As West wrote “The Innkeepers” specifically to be shot at The Yankee Pedlar (which retains its name in the film), the hotel was to more-or-less remain in its original condition for the production. When he and his production team arrived at the Pedlar eight days before shooting was scheduled to commence, the prepping of the hotel proper was relegated to “a matter of tweaking things here and there.”
A production office was set up in the Pedlar’s basement and arranged for equipment, while set dressing was stored in the hotel’s banquet room. For the crew, returning to The Yankee Pedlar smacked of nostalgia.
“The Yankee Pedlar staff remembered us and they liked us – we were a rowdier bunch when we were there for House of the Devil, but we’d all grown up a bit,” laughs Phok. “My team had lived there for two months for Devil, and we knew the hotel, we knew the town and we knew the vendors. That’s how we stayed on schedule.”
Arriving in Torrington for pre-production, production designer Jade Healy (whose work on West’s The House of the Devil represented first-ever feature production designer credit), set out to turn West’s Yankee Pedlar “tweaking” into an on-camera reality for “The Innkeepers”.
“Originally, we thought there wouldn’t be that much to do, but as we moved through preproduction and began to shoot, we realized that there was a lot to be done,” says Healy. “And we had to deal with the time element and budgetary restraints.”
Much of Healy and her team’s work went into some specific “antique-ing” of The Yankee Pedlar with various props that she found in antique stores and online. Older, worn-out couches and chairs, a vintage front desk bell, a drab carpet – all and more were added to the lobby and various rooms to replace more modern pieces to realize West’s vision of The Yankee Pedlar. One of Healy’s best add-ons was a mounted deer head, which proudly reigned over The Yankee Pedlar lobby. Healy found the deer head on Craig’s List; it now hangs in West’s apartment.
Perhaps the biggest physical “change” made to The Yankee Pedlar was the necessary creation of a large bookshelf for one of the lobby walls, which was used to wholly cover up the entrance to the attached hotel bar next door.
In re-crafting The Yankee Pedlar’s austere interior, Healy and her team painted over the walls of the lobby and several rooms used in the production, in addition to re-wallpapering several others. All of it jived with West’s color palette specifications, which he carried with him on a list in his pocket.
Challenges came in the form of dealing with the logistics of shooting in a 100-year-old hotel. Having to work within the confines of the Pedlar’s rooms (that weren’t all that big) and hallways (which weren’t all that wide), Cinematographer Eliot Rockett spent his pre-production days being both challenged and energized by the task of preparing the look and feel that West was looking for in his film in/about The Yankee Pedlar.
“What was really interesting about The Yankee Pedlar is that over the years, it’s been added on to and remodeled, but in its own, unique way,” says Rockett. “It’s not like Hollywood rustic – it looks like a place that was once old and grand and that people tried to restore to its grandeur, but the people did it in a slipshod way.”
Among some of the anachronistic, stranger elements were several hallways that were renovated at some point with modern drop ceilings and old woodwork that had been repainted with a bright, white finish. Additionally, the walls that lined traditional-looking interior hallways were unaligned and off-center.
“It adds to the creepiness in a way that you can’t put your finger on completely,” nods Rockett. “But this hotel is crooked and weird and not quite right – it’s a more off-kilter kind of place. And as the story of the movie goes on, what was initially kooky then becomes more foreboding.”
The Casting…
Three very different stories accompany the casting of the three leading players in “The Innkeepers”.
The first and arguably easiest casting coup came in the form of Pat Healy, who portrays The Yankee Pedlar’s technologically literate loner, Luke. Healy was making the rounds of the festival circuit as the star of the film Great Wall of Sound several years back when he first met West, who was on the road with his film Trigger Man.
“We met briefly, shook hands and that was pretty much it,” remembers Healy. “He was a nice guy.”
At the time, Healy was taking a step back from his acting career for a few years to concentrate on his screenwriting (which has since yielded Healy a handful of writing credits on the HBO series In Treatment). After seeing The House of the Devil, though, Healy wanted to get in touch with West to express his admiration for the picture. But West beat him to it with an email…
“Pat was someone I’d known for a little while after meeting him at one of the festivals and I shot him an email to see if he was interested in “The Innkeepers”,” says West. “He works a lot and I enjoy watching him on screen, so I approached him early immediately.
“Ti got in touch with me and asked me if I wanted to do the part and I didn’t even have to read the script,” recalls Healy.
“There’s so much attention paid to paranormal events these days and that’s what attracted me to “The Innkeepers” – it’s about the people who get into that area,” says Healy of his initial interest in the script. “What makes them want to do that kind of thing? Are you seeing ghosts or are you losing your mind?”
Casting for the role of The Yankee Pedlar’s enthusiastic minimum wage ghost hunter Claire took a bit longer.
After considering a number of twenty-something actresses for the role, Paxton’s name came up. The one-time child performer had just appeared in the remake of the seminal Seventies shocker The Last House on the Left and was currently in New York shooting the horror entry Enter Nowhere, which co-starred Katherine Waterston, a friend of Ti West.
West called Waterston to get the lowdown on Paxton to see if she might be right for the role of Claire and to find out what she was like.
“She told me that Sara was the greatest, so I followed up with her agent,” West remembers. “Then I got on the phone with Sara and decided she was the one.”
“My manager called me to tell me that a guy named Ti West wanted to talk to me and read a script,” Ms. Paxton remembers of initially hearing about “The Innkeepers”. “Then I’m in New York and my friend Katherine Waterston tells me that Ti was contacting her about me and I’m, like, ‘Okay, this is weird -I’m hearing about this Ti from all sides!’”
Though she was looking to take a little time off, Ms. Paxton spoke with West on the phone, read the script and then met with him when she returned to L.A. the next week.
“I liked the script – I liked the idea that a huge chunk of the movie just asks a simple question: ‘Are there ghosts?’” says Ms. Paxton. “What attracted me to my character in THE INNKEEPERS is that she’s very likable. She’s just an ordinary girl living in any town being scared in a hotel.”
A few weeks later – on the night of her 22nd birthday, in fact – Ms. Paxton was on a red-eye flight to Torrington, Connecticut. And a couple of days and wardrobe fittings after that, she was portraying Claire in the first day of shooting on “The Innkeepers”.
“You want someone who’s talented, yes, and someone who likes the material, but you also want someone you’re going to like as a person,” says West. “You need a group of like-minded people and you want to have a kind of shorthand when you have a short shooting schedule. Sara and I got along really well. She seemed super-cool and she was definitely excited about the movie. ”
Just as computer and digital technology plays a major role in determining if The Yankee Pedlar Hotel is haunted in THE INNKEEPERS, so does it also factor into the casting of the accomplished Kelly McGillis as Leanne Rease-Jones, a TV actress turned psychic who checks into The Yankee Pedlar during its final week of operation and gives the resident innkeepers a lot of potentially terrifying things to think about.
Ms. McGillis was suggested for the role of Leanne relatively late in the game by the film’s producers, who had recently worked with her when she starred in Stake Land. At the time her name was brought up in the spring of 2010, Ms. McGillis was in London starring in a UK tour of Terrence McNally’s play Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, and West and THE INNKEEPERS team were in the midst of pre-production in Connecticut.
“We set up a Skype video chat with Kelly in London while I was at the Pedlar,” West recalls. “We told her what ‘The Innkeepers’ was all about and she asked a lot about it and why it would be good for her.”
“I liked what I read and Leanne seemed like a fun and kooky character,” says Ms. McGillis. “I also liked the challenge of working with someone who’s written the piece as well – they always have a very strong visual idea of what they want.”
Having worked with producers Phok, Fessenden and Derek Curl just several months earlier, Ms. McGillis knew what she was getting into when she returned to the U.S. following her tour and made her way to Torrington for THE INNKEEPERS.
“I haven’t actually seen a horror film since I was a kid, and that’s no offense to Ti and others who make those kind of movies,” Ms. McGillis laughs. “But speaking to Ti when I was considering THE INNKEEPERS, I liked the kind of interesting, fresh perspective he seemed to be bringing to the genre.”
The Shoot…
The shoot for “The Innkeepers” was scheduled for 18 days in April 2010, but it didn’t come in exactly on time: the film was shot in 17 days, with principal photography wrapping one day earlier than planned. The fact that the cast and crew of nearly 40 worked and lived in The Yankee Pedlar for the entire shoot certainly helped.
“We rented out the entire hotel and moved everyone in, though there were a couple of weddings and guests already pre-booked at the hotel that couldn’t be changed,” says Phok. “But it wasn’t really a problem; we just adjusted our schedule and made it work.”
The cast and crew primarily lived in the upper floors of The Yankee Pedlar, while the shoot utilized several of the lower rooms and hallways, the lobby and the basement. The principal crew members all agree that shooting and living on location kept the production on schedule – and often ahead of it.
“We were actually getting a little too far ahead of the production at times. Sometimes the next scenes on the schedule weren’t even set up yet,” remembers Rockett. “There’s no time lost when you’re living on location – you can walk up or down the stairs to any location you want, you can always find out what’s going on and you’re always just right there.”
“The biggest saving grace was that we were in the same location for 17 days. We worked, ate, and slept in that hotel,” agrees Jaffke. “There was one day that required us to go outside of the hotel to another location and everybody got a little kooky. You know when you would go on a field trip to the museum as a kid and how everybody just went a little extra crazy? It was like that.”
Comparing a tight film shoot to a summer camp or family trip is nothing new, but in the case of “The Innkeepers” being within shouting distance of each other 24/7 only helped to bring everyone closer to each, particularly the cast members.
“Everyone being under the same roof was a great way to get to know one another, particularly since Sara and I met in the make-up chair for the first time right before we began shooting,” says Healy. “It was a great way to make the movie. When there’s not a lot of time, you’ve got to be good at what you do and you’ve got to get along.”
Ms. McGillis also got a charge out of the experience of “living where I work.”
“Maybe it’s because I was only there for 10 days, but it reminded me of that whole Sixties theater thing, like I was part of an ensemble in college,” she says. “It sparked that huge romantic ideal for me about the theater and being close with your collaborators in the creative process.”
Only the L.A.-born Sara Paxton was thrown (just a bit) by the overall working space/living space experience. Much of that was due to the general size of The Yankee Pedlar rooms (“Tiny!”), the overall creepiness she felt when was alone (“Definitely a strange feeling…”) and the dreams she experienced over the course of the shoot.
“Every night, every night, I would wake up in the middle of some vivid, weird dream! And I wasn’t the only one – so many others were having them, too,” says Paxton.
Ah, yes, the dreams. Just as Ti West and the House of the Devil team had their own dreams and paranormal pangs during their stay at The Yankee Pedlar two years earlier, so did the cast and crew of THE INNKEEPERS while on the premises. (For some of their comments, see the attached Making Movies in a Haunted Hotel page.)
But if anything, The Yankee Pedlar experience seems to have inspired the team to bring in West’s ghost story with a contemporary twist without a single a hitch.
What writer / director Ti West is most excited about is that his latest film is, well, a Ti West film that wholly retains his original vision. (That it came in on time and on budget doesn’t hurt either.)
“We’re a rag-tag group of people who know how to do what we know how to do,” says West. “Whenever it’s time to do that, don’t mess it up, just let us do it. When we’re left to our own devices, we do it very well together.”
Ultimately, West is extremely happy with “The Innkeepers”, a nifty, darkly humorous horror piece about a possibly haunted hotel that grew out of his own experiences staying in a possibly haunted hotel while making an earlier horror film.
“It’s very different from The House of the Devil, and it’s very different from what I’m going to do next, but you can still tell “The Innkeepers” was made by me,” concludes West. “It will be very interesting to see how it’s received. There’s enough of it that feels familiar to understand what you’re getting, but it’s not what people are going to expect.”
Directed by: Ti West
Starring: Sara Paxton, Pat Healy, Kelly McGillis, George Riddle
Screenplay by: Ti West
MPAA Rating: R for some bloody images and language.
Studio: Magnet Releasing
Release Date: February 3rd, 2012
