Hunter Hunter Star Devon Sawa Talks the Twisted Survival Thriller

In the new horror film Hunter Hunter, star Devon Sawa had to tap into some primal instincts not only as required by his character, but filming in the frigid Winnipeg forest meant a genuine reliance upon coping with such a climate. As if the idea of a dangerous animal wandering the woods wasn’t frightening enough, the narrative confirmed that trying to find the threat could be just as deadly as staying in your home, as it would be an inevitability that you’d cross paths with the lurking dangers. Hunter Hunter lands in select theaters, on Digital HD, and On Demand on December 18th.

Hunter Hunter follows a family living in the remote wilderness earning a living as fur trappers. Joseph Mersault (Sawa), his wife Anne (Camille Sullivan), and their daughter Renée (Summer H. Howell) struggle to make ends meet and think their traps are being hunted by the return of a rogue wolf. Determined to catch the predator in the act, Joseph leaves his family behind to track the wolf. Anne and Renée grow increasingly anxious during Joseph’s prolonged absence and struggle to survive without him. When they hear a strange noise outside their cabin, Anne hopes it is Joseph but instead finds a man named Lou (Nick Stahl), who has been severely injured and left for dead. The longer Lou stays and Joseph is away, the more paranoid Anne becomes, and the idea of a mysterious predator in the woods slowly becomes a threat much closer to home.

ComicBook.com caught up with Sawa to talk the new film, his survival instincts, and his passion for Idle Hands.

ComicBook.com: With Hunter Hunter, you definitely experienced some pretty intense things playing this character. Growing up, since you’re an actor, you have to live in Hollywood or near Hollywood, so were you an indoor kid growing up or were you an outdoor kid?

Devon Sawa: Until I was 12 or 13, when I fully made the switch over to starting working full-time in the business, I was a pretty outdoorsy Canadian. We had some pretty sick evergreens around us. I mean, listen, Winnipeg is a whole different world where we shot this film. It’s a whole different cold, Vancouver is the tropics of Canada so we never really dealt with that kind of cold, but I had that kind of environment outdoors. We were running around in trails and we had BMX bikes and we were disappearing into that environment.

We definitely had that evergreen. thick evergreen outdoor environment when I was growing up, so it wasn’t that new to me.

I’m out in Seattle so I’m definitely familiar with the environment you’re talking about.

Then you have exactly the same environment. So just think 20 years ago, back out in the bush in Seattle. Same thing.

When you took on this role, obviously you’re shooting in a different part of Canada, but when you took on this role, were you like, “Oh, I’ve totally got this. I’m used to the outdoors, this is totally fine.” Or were you like, “I’m going to have to learn how to fake hunt and how to skin an animal.” Did you have to learn a lot of skills to play this character?

I’m definitely not a hunter. It’s not that I’m against hunting, I think that people that hunt, to me, most is fine, I didn’t know much about it. I had to do a lot of listening and I had to put a lot of trust into [writer/director] Shawn [Linden], who does have some experience with it and I had to get into that mindset where it was just part of life. And without flinching, “This is what you do and this is how you don’t ruin the animal and this is where you cut and you’re going to want to cut here.” Because I didn’t know that, you cut the stomach and any of the stomach juices get on the meat and you can’t eat that meat or you can get extremely sick. There’s a lot of stuff I didn’t know and so I was just a sponge and I just did a lot of listening to Shawn.

With that new appreciation, when you returned to “normal life,” did that inspire you to, maybe not go hunting, but decide, “I’m going to spend more time as a survivalist. I’m going to go out in the woods more, I’m going to take my kids out into the woods?”

I don’t know about being a survivalist or living off the land or anything like that, but I was reminded of where I came from and what a beautiful country Canada is and just what it’s like to be out there in the wilderness and without the malls and the strip malls and the phones and the Twitter and all that stuff. It really is something. I travel a lot with my family, we’ve been all over Southeast Asia and in Europe and whatnot and I had forgotten how beautiful America and Canada can be and what’s out there. And Winnipeg was definitely a reminder of that, so we’re going to try to do that more, explore our own countries.

As far as the difficulty of the shoot, do you remember any particularly challenging days, days you thought it was going to be an easy day and a bunch of obstacles popped up, or just a day that you just knew this is going to be the worst day of the shoot and it lived up to that?

Well, we were, at one point, we were racing a storm. There was a storm coming and this is the end of September, I believe, early October. And it ended up being a record snowstorm and so we were trying to get the shots, trying to get everything done at a certain time because we needed to get out of the bush and get all our trucks and everything out of there, because there was a potential that there would be this snowstorm and we’d be snowed in or locked in or whatever. So, there was a couple of those days and it was cold, man. The elements were nasty up there at some points.

Much of the film sees you all alone in the elements, having to tap into these primal instincts. Was it difficult getting yourself into a more primitive mindset?

No, you get into it pretty quick. It wasn’t just the elements, it wasn’t just the cold, the outdoors. It was also the wardrobe they had us in. The backpacks, the guns, it was like everything played into it and you just start feeling it really quick. There was a lot of the crew that were used to that kind of environment. We didn’t have weeks before, there wasn’t a lot of time between getting off the plane and the first day of production, so we just had to get into it. We just had to turn the switch on and be those people and it’s pretty easy when it’s blistering cold and you’re dressed that way and the wind is going.

I recently read that this movie was 10 years in the making, had you been involved with the project for a long time?

I think I was attached two weeks before I got on the plane. I know that they had it up and running at one point, years and years ago, and it fell apart and they struggled to get it back up and running for a while and then it fizzled away and then they got it up and running again. And I think it was as fast as, “Okay, we’re going. Let’s start shooting.” And then they made an offer and I was on a plane and we just started shooting it. I know that they spent a lot of time and a lot of love getting this thing off the ground.

I’ve seen a lot of horror movies and I can typically see the direction a movie is heading, but this finale definitely took me by surprise. Can you remember what your first reaction was to reading the end of that script?

Reading what happened in the script was pretty much, “Oh, my God, that happened.” But then to actually see it visually was phenomenal. And then also knowing what happens to my character, or not knowing, however you want to look at it, it blew my imagination away, from reading it to actually seeing it, it just blew me away. It was done perfectly and I think this ending is going to be talked about by people, especially in the horror community.

This year marked the 25th anniversary of Casper and, even though you’re barely in that movie, you get to deliver an iconic line. How often do people bring up that final scene with you?

Well, I made a joke on, I think, Twitter or Instagram or something that this is the annual time for Casper DMs or whatever, but literally, I guess maybe 15-20 people sending me GIFs or whatever videos of themselves watching Casper or they quoted it, so it’s flattering, it’s good. It has legs, it’s survived all this time. It’s good.

From Casper to Little Giants to Final Destination to Idle Hands, you have a lot of movies that fans have loved over the years, and I know Final Destination is getting a reboot, but is there another movie you’ve been in you’d like to see get updated for a new generation?

I think Little Giants would be a fun movie to see with a revival maybe Rick Moranis comes back in and coaches his grandkids or something. I don’t know. I know it’ll never happen, but to reboot Idle Hands and have a new, young Anton and see what somebody does with the hand stuff. There’s such young, fresh talent nowadays, I would love to see what a non-’90s version of Idle Hands looks like. I’m all for that stuff. Every time they put out a new Final Destination, I’m all for that seeing what a young cast does.

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Hunter Hunter lands in select theaters, on Digital HD, and On Demand on December 18th.