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THE MOVIE:
The Mothman Prophecies

THE STARS:
Richard Gere
Laura Linney
Will Patton
DIRECTOR: Mark Pellington

THE CONCEPT:
Loosely based on true incidents that took place in West Virginia in 1967, the movie tells a contemporary story about a Washington Post journalist, John Klein (Richard Gere) who investigates bizarre supernatural occurrences in the small town of Point Pleasant, that culminate in the disastrous collapse of the Silver Bridge.

U.S. RELEASE DATE: January 25, 2002
Certificate: PG-13

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THE COMMENTS:

MARK PELLINGTON (Director):
"When I read the script it was contemporary and it worked for me. This is before I knew it was based on something that had happened in the sixties... And when I did find that out, the knowledge of that didn't hit me on such an emotional level that I felt that it had to be period. Richard Hatem, the original screenwriter, did a fantastic job.
By creating the character of John Klein as the pole by which all of these events revolve around, he established a hero for the story.This is difficult territory, and it's really easy to veer into melodrama or wackiness. It's really kind of unbelievable so you have to go deeper, to a metaphysical, naturally surreal, enigmatic, mysterious emotional place with this material to make it work. Otherwise, it's ridiculous."
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RICHARD GERE:
"Frankly, The Mothman Prophecies is not my favorite title, but the powers that be decided that this was a money title for whatever reason. But I think it's misleading because it's not really a monster movie."
Gere on his reporter role • Back to top

LAURA LINNEY:
"I play a small town police officer named Connie Parker who works in the town where she grew up, which is Point Pleasant, West Virginia. People are claiming that paranormal activity is going on around her town. She has to be open to what is going on, but she doesn't want to add to any potential hysteria. So she's caught between being afraid herself and trying to figure out what's happening."
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WILL PATTON:
"My character, Gordon Smallwood, works in a chemical plant, and some genuinely terrifying things begin to happen to him that he has no reverence for. I think he has not been facing up to some kind of truth in himself, and that's a lot more scary than the dark woods at night."
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GERE:
"My guy functions in the story as the empiricist, the reporter who gets the facts and wants to know the truth. We see him essentially go through a Job story. We see a guy in the beginning that's got a beautiful wife, they're deeply in love, when she has this accident and dies very quickly. He's in a total malaise and based on the fact that he can't get his life together, he gets in the car in the middle of the night and somehow travels 400 miles without knowing how he got there. That sets the story in motion. By the end we see that he's not the empiricist at all, he's just this wet rag of emotion."
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Text by Judy Sloane. More from Richard Gere, Laura Linney, Will Patton and director Mark Pellington here: PAGE 2 • Back to top

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Images above © Sony Pictures / Lakeshore Entertainment
Feature © Visual Imagination 2002. Not for reproduction.