We had the pleasure of sitting down with “Chicago Fire” star Taylor Kinney to talk about his new supernatural horror film “The Forest,” which hits theaters on January 8.
The Forest focuses on a young woman named Sara Price who is searching for her twin sister in the Aokigahara forest. It also doesn’t help that the forest (located at Mount Fuji’s northwest base in Japan) is where people go to commit suicide. Ignoring prior warnings, Sara still braves the forest, while battling her inner demons and the pissed off souls of the dead. The film stars Natalie Dormer and Taylor Kinney and is directed by Jason Zada. It is written by Ben Ketai, Nick Antosca, and Sarah Cornwell. Taylor plays a travel journalist from Australia who is in Tokyo to do an expose on the forest.
You go on this crazy trip in forest full of ghosts. In real life what would you really take? You had a ton of gear on you, but what would you really take.
Taylor: Probably along the same things as the character. Some food hopefully, some sustenance, probably a knife, a gun if I had one. I don’t know, a tent and then just gear to get by. The place is real. It’s based in reality this location the forest that we based the film off of or where it takes place. So I don’t know that people are lining up to go stay over night.
I would hope not.
Taylor: But people do and it’s just really dense, not a lot of wild life you know there’s iron deposits, compasses getting mixed up, you don’t get cell phone signal. So I think it’s fair to say that most people maybe go in and get out if they really have the inclination to go see it otherwise, I don’t see why I would camp out there.
Did you get a chance to see the real forest when you were filming?
Taylor: No, I know that Natalie Dormer (my co-star and the lead) I think she shot maybe 2 to 3 weeks in Tokyo. She got to go and check it out, but we did the bulk of our shooting in Serbia. So Serbia for Japan and so I didn’t, but I would have like to.
Who would you take in real life on a crazy hike?
Taylor: I don’t know … I’d take my brother!
What attracted you to the project?
Taylor: Well it’s just like you said, it’s more of a thriller and the script really was a good script. I met with the director Jason. I knew Natalie was in and I had a meeting with Jason Zada the director and we started bouncing ideas. I said what do you think about this about in terms of the character arc and I have ideas for this and we had the same sort of vision and I think that translates when we got to Serbia when we started shooting, we started playing. It just kind of evolved from there. Natalie was amazing to work with, a great actress and we really had a good repertoire and chemistry. If I had an idea, she was ears, Jason was ears and we really got to do our thing there and that doesn’t happen all the time, but that was cool, that was special.
