Spirits and Shutter with Joshua Jackson

Although he's five years removed from his unforgettable small-screen role as Pacey Witter, it's hard not to think of Dawson's Creek when you see Joshua Jackson. As you'll find out below, Jackson will be returning to TV in the near future but not before horror fans will see him in Shutter, the latest remake to come down the cinematic pike about a newlywed couple who moves to Japan only to discover strange images within a series of photos, which leads to a deeper investigation surrounding a vengeful spirit.

Although fans of the dead-and-gone Dawson's Creek will be disappointed we didn't see the ghost of Pacey Whitter, The Deadbolt did catch up to Joshua Jackson at the Shutter junket where the Canadian born actor dished on everything from spiritual photography and working with director Masayuki Ochiai to his upcoming TV project and his favorite hockey team.

Joshua Jackson on learning about photography:

"The process of developing film I’m pretty comfortable with, given that I’ve worked in film for twenty years now. So obviously doing it in one frame per second and twenty-four frames per second is a little different but working in film and light is my job. The particularities of loading film and all of that kind of stuff, the boring technical stuff, was just a couple of days work. It was more having the time to be on set with fashion photographers and seeing this is obviously not the world I come from, not that you can tell [laughs]. But just seeing what the environment of those photo shoots is, that was the new piece of information for me going in."

Jackson on his view of spiritual photography:

"I’ve never had the experience of it. I don’t really work on absolutes, I think it’s impossible to say absolutely yes or no to just about anything. It’s just like my issue with faith. I’m not a man of faith and I have a real hard time when people of faith tell me that something is absolutely correct. But then it would be hypocritical for me to say it’s absolutely incorrect, so I’ve never had a ghost moment. I’ve never had a ghost in the machine, but I don’t deny that it’s possible."

What attracted him to the project:

"What attracted me to Shutter was, beyond the broader scope, personally was to play somebody - if you’re playing in a straight ahead drama, generally the arc - the transition that a character goes through - while it may be internally severe, is from A to hopefully Z, but [it's] usually sort of H or I. When you’re doing a horror film, you have the potential to do something much broader and much more shocking shifts. So for me to start here and end up as someone totally other, that’s fun. And you get to lay in all of those good red-herring things and lead people down this path and then hopefully show them something on the other side."

On working with [director] Masayuki Ochiai and getting past the language barrier:

"For Ochiai-san I think there were certainly moments of difficulty because when we would get into the meat of a language heavy scene, a dialogue based scene, I’m sure it was difficult for him to follow along. He understands a little bit of English, but when it starts going fast, fast, fast, I don’t think his English is that strong. But in terms of communicating with the actors and the rest of the Westerners on set, there was a woman named Chi ho, who is a phenomenal translator, who was able to not only translate directly the words, but had lived in the States and could contextualize. You know, it’s not what I’m saying but how I’m saying it that is important and was able to do the reverse. There are those really strong fundamental cultural differences between the West and Japan and we were trying to find a touchstone, an entry point into a conversation. It was really difficult. But once you could find the touchstone then you could go forward. Silly little things like taking your shoes off. There’s a sequence in the film where my friend is about to commit suicide, and we don’t know that walking in, but obviously something is not right. We probably talked for two hours over whether or not the characters would take their shoes off, because in Japan everybody does it. It’s unconscious, they don’t think about it. But for a Westerner, it’s an absurd idea - ‘My god, my friend is about to kill himself. Hold on a second, I just got to get at the laces.’ I mean, that’s the silly version of it but it was [stuff] like that, where the West versus East miscommunication sometimes happened."

Spirits and Shutter with Joshua Jackson Page 2