THE DEADBOLT: It’s interesting that a lot of the SCI FI movies, including Lake Placid 2, are filmed overseas. In terms of location, is there some type of contract with Bulgaria?

DAVID FLORES: No, the SCI FI network itself doesn’t get any money from there. In fact, I know they don’t. They’d prefer, maybe, the movies not be shot there. It’s just the nature of the beast in this kind of thing, because there’s not a lot of money being put in these things and they’re designed to be made quickly and efficiently. The cost savings by doing the movie in Bulgaria, and the infrastructure that’s set up there, now seem to be too beneficial to it. It’s almost becoming a part of the appeal of these movies anyway. People are getting very aware of these movies being shot in Bulgaria and they’re looking for these silly nuances that might be Bulgarian or Bulgarian like.

THE DEADBOLT: To tell you the truth, I couldn’t tell that it was Bulgaria until I looked at the credits.

FLORES: Well, it’s a heck of a lot easier to do a movie like Lake Placid 2 in Bulgaria because you’re not dealing with suburban streets and things like that. When I did Boa vs. Python , we had to shoot in the city and that was a nightmare. Everything is in Cyrillic, all of the street signs are weird, the roads are different, and the cars... there are no American cars there. There are very few Japanese cars, but it’s mostly just Fiats and these other Communist cars. I was like, "Sh*t, I can’t make this work. It would take a massive legal [department] to make this whole street work."

THE DEADBOLT: When I checked out the features on the DVD, I had to stop on the segment with the wild boar. What was it like working with a boar?

FLORES: Oh, he was nothing. Okay, this is the weirdest thing - They had this dummy boar and the production designer and the first AD were like, "Look, just use the dummy boar, we’ll put it in there, and it’s gonna be better. You won’t have to deal with this real one." I was like, "No, it will look like a stupid dummy boar sitting in the net. I’m never gonna go for that." So I kept insisting and finally the animal handler showed up with this boar and he was restless and turning around. It took five guys to load him in the net. We put him in the net and pulled it up in the air and the boar just went limp, it just did nothing. It just stayed there frozen. I couldn’t f**king believe it, so I told them to put the doll in.

THE DEADBOLT: Since the stunts were so physical, were there any injuries or close calls?

FLORES: No, there weren’t any injuries or close calls either. The thing about stunts is that they’re usually pretty calculated. They seem to look dangerous and they’re usually not. I think the dangerous part is running to the set and checking the guy, because it looked like he just broke his neck. The guy that flew off of the boat was in a weird rig. We had to have it tied down so that the boat would stop hard. When you read it in the script, it’s like, "Oh yeah, the boat hit something and the guy goes flying off. That will be easy." Then we started discussing it and we asked, "How do you make a moving object floating in the water stop on a dime?" You have to anchor it down in some place, and even an anchor doesn’t work just right without breaking the anchor off. So stuff like that took a little bit more thinking than we originally imagined.

THE DEADBOLT: Do you know where the Tips for Surviving a Croc Attack DVD feature came from?

FLORES: I have no idea. I don’t know who comes up with this stuff. I was certainly not involved with it [the DVD], but it was pretty creative though. I looked at the website and they had all kinds of cool stuff on there.

Shooting Crocs in Lake Placid with director David Flores Page 2