Serkis remembers that at 13 all he wanted was the chance to see Steven Spielberg’s classic Jaws. “I was furious that my older sister could see it and I couldn’t. So I borrowed a pair of shoe lifts and my sister’s mascara to fill in the tiny bit of moustache hair I had and tried to pass myself off as older to get into the theater. It didn’t work.”
A touchstone of their common experience is evident in the film’s “Thriller” dance sequence — a nod to Jenna’s childhood and the 1980s. It takes place at a hip New York party for Jenna’s Poise magazine at which she innocently tries to liven things up, with a group of people who have apparently forgotten how to have fun. When Jenna starts to dance, however, her guests drop their poses and soon everybody’s dancing.
“I had only one cassette tape growing up and it was ‘Thriller,’” says Garner. “So getting to do that dance, to rehearse it and have all the back-up dancers was seriously one of the most fun experiences I have ever had.”
Ruffalo agrees, though when it came time to actually dance, he suffered from a bit of stage fright at first. “That was my youth,” he recalls. “‘Thriller’ was the tape that everyone passed around. But I was really nervous about the dance because I really don’t dance. We had to take lessons. I wound up having a very good time.”
Greer also had a good time during the dance rehearsals. “It was really enjoyable to work with the choreographer and learn the routine,” she says. “ It was so cool to be part of a great big dance number in a movie. It was also tougher than it looks. My feet hurt for three days.”
Like Ruffalo, Serkis was a bit apprehensive about the dance number — actually, “terrified” is a better word, he says. “I had no idea it was going to be a full-fledged routine. I got a call in London, where I live, saying they wanted me to do a moonwalk. So I spent ages with a choreographer. When I arrived on set the first day of dance rehearsals it seemed as if everyone knew the routine very well. I was terribly frightened. Fortunately, we were allowed to fall in and out of it, just as people who are remembering an old dance would normally do.”
The spirit of the dance number proved to be infectious. Even producer Matthews got into the swing of it. Dusting off her 80s dance shoes, she stepped in front of the camera and let her hair down. “Like everyone else, I was obsessed with “Thriller.’ I stayed up until midnight when it premiered on ABC. I recorded it on my Beta deck and memorized every move. When we started rehearsing, all the moves came back. They were ingrained in my memory.”
For Winick, the challenge of the dance sequence was to harness the actors’ energy and make the scene build organically to serve the story. “I didn’t want it to feel like a music video. I wanted it to work dramatically. As good as the dancing is, the reason the scene works is because it’s plot oriented. Jenna is saving the party the way a 13-year-old would, not an adult.”
There are other 80s references in the movie — from pop icons like Madonna, Rick Springfield and Pat Benatar, to slang like “grody” and “gag me with a spoon.” Since most of the actors grew up in that period, “it was super fun,” says Greer. “I’d forgotten a lot of it, but after awhile it all came back”
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