Naomi Watts has spent a lot of time in front of the camera screaming her head off.
She starred in two thrillers based on Japan’s “The Ring,” was ape-handled by “King Kong” and plans to do a remake of Hitchcock’s “The Birds.” On Friday, the Americanized version of the brutal “Funny Games” hits theaters.
“True, but it’s not like I started out going, ‘I’m such a fan of this genre, and I’m scouring the paper for my next horror film,’ ” the 39-year-old English-born, Australia-raised actress insists. “This particular film is one foot in the genre and one foot out.”
“Funny Games,” directed by Austrian Michael Haneke, was first made in German in 1997. In its almost shot-for-shot remake, as with the original film, a pair of sociopaths in tennis gear and white gloves disrupts the vacation home of a conventional couple — Watts and Tim Roth — and insists that they play some sadistic games that seem headed toward a homicidal conclusion.
Approached to appear in the new version, Watts asked to be shown the original before deciding.
“I just couldn’t believe how it disturbed me,” she recalls. “I was with a friend watching it, and we had to talk to remind ourselves that we were actually watching a film. That we were not in that room too.”
As an actress who has done her share of horror films, Watts really appreciates how “Funny Games” often sets the audience up for one jolt, then pulls the rug out from under them.
“Particularly with this genre, you know exactly when the beats are going to come and, yes, you still fall prey a little bit,” she says. “The door slowly opens, the music slows down, there’s a pause, she looks over her shoulder and BAM! You know what I mean?
More Top Picks Best Reading Glasses For Women
“We know that formula so well, and yet it does still get you.”
Watts became a mother for the first time last year, with her partner and “Painted Veil” co-star Liev Schreiber.
“Funnily enough,” she says, her son was conceived while she was on location making “Funny Games.”
She initially was reticent about doing the movie.
“Now that I’m a mother, I probably would take more time to make that decision. But ultimately, I would hope to think that my son will wait until he is old enough — and when I say old enough, he can wait until he’s 18 to see the film. After then, he’s an adult, so I can’t control it,” Watts says. “I would hope he would understand my reasoning behind it, that it is in my mind an intellectual exercise, and that’s all I can say.”
Watts has plenty of film projects lined up, including the sequel to “The Da Vinci Code” called “Angels and Demons,” but her son is her chief priority.
“I’ve done one thing since I had him and it was only a five-week stint on a movie, which felt completely doable.” The movie is called “The International,” a Tom Tykwer production about an arms smuggling ring, due out in August.
According to Watts, it was a lot less damaging to her psyche than “Funny Games.”
“It was the kind of film that wasn’t harrowing like this one, so it felt like I could switch it on and off at the beginning and the end of the day.”