Taglines: There are two sides to every crime.
The quiet suburb of New Salem is being terrorized by a brutal serial killer who abducts and tortures young women, holding them captive for weeks before murdering them. Aubrey Fleming, a talented pianist and aspiring writer, appears to be his latest victim when she disappears without a trace during a night out with friends. As the days tick by, the special FBI Task Force convened to track the killer begins to lose hope of finding her before it’s too late.
Then, late one night, a driver discovers the young woman by the side of a deserted road, disheveled and critically injured, pleading for help. The girl is rushed to the hospital, where Aubrey’s distraught parents, Susan (Julia Ormond) and Daniel (Neal McDonough), wait by her side as she slips in and out of consciousness. When she is finally able to speak, she shocks everyone by claiming to be a down-on-her luck stripper named Dakota Moss who has never heard of Aubrey Fleming.
Convinced Aubrey is suffering from post traumatic stress disorder, her doctors, parents and law enforcement officials can only wait for rest and therapy to restore her memory. But after returning to her parents’ suburban home, she continues to insist that she is not who they think she is, despite bearing bizarre wounds identical to those of the serial killer’s previous victims. The FBI agents are further mystified when they search Aubrey’s computer and discover a short story about a girl with an alter ego named Dakota.
When Dakota begins to suspect she may be Aubrey’s identical twin sister, Susan shows her a video of her pregnancy ultrasound clearly revealing there was only one fetus in her womb. Confused and terrified, Dakota starts seeing visions of a menacing figure slowly butchering his captive. Convinced that time is running out both for Aubrey and herself, Dakota confronts Daniel with a shocking truth that leads them on a frantic hunt for the killer.
I Know Who Killed Me is a 2007 American psychological thriller film directed by Chris Sivertson and starring Lindsay Lohan, Julia Ormond, Neal McDonough, Brian Geraghty, Garcelle Beauvais-Nilon, Gregory Itzin, Michael Esparza, David Figlioli, Cornelia Guest, Jane Galloway Heitz and Amy Fuehrer.
The film was released on July 27, 2007. It was nominated for nine Golden Raspberry Awards and won eight, setting a new record for most awards won in a single year until Jack and Jill won ten in 2012. Lohan tied with herself to win Worst Actress and also won Worst Screen Couple for both characters she portrayed. The film premiered on July 27, 2007 to what Entertainment Weekly called “an abysmal $3.5 million.” The film ultimately grossed $9 million worldwide on a $12 million budget.
The score for I Know Who Killed Me, composed by Joel McNeely, was released on July 24, 2007. Despite the film’s critical and commercial failure, the score itself (which had drawn comparisons to the television mystery scores by Billy Goldenberg) received almost unanimously positive reviews from film music critics, with James Southall of Movie Wave calling it an “unexpectedly classy score seems to go beyond the call of duty” and Clark Douglas of Movie Music UK rating it 5 stars and calling it “one of the year’s best scores, a must-have for those who are willing to take a trip into a deep, dark, and sometimes terrifying musical world”.
Before filming Lohan actually took pole-dancing lessons to prepare for her role as a stripper. Filming dates took place between December 2006 and March 2007. Principal photography was mostly held in California. In the first week of production, filming was halted after Lohan was hospitalized, her representative saying “she was overheated and dehydrated.” Production stayed halted soon after as Lohan underwent appendix surgery. Filming was soon then delayed even longer after the incision was infected and the filmmakers were waiting for a doctor’s approval for Lohan to continue working.
The Making of I Know Who Killed Me
When producer Frank Mancuso, Jr. first came across the script for I Know Who Killed Me, he was instantly intrigued by its unique premise. After almost 30 years in the film business working on projects ranging from the Friday the 13th franchise to the international espionage film Ronin starring Robert de Niro, Mancuso has learned to trust his instincts when he selects a property. “One of the first criteria I employ is ‘Do I want to see this movie?’ ” Mancuso says. “When I first read this screenplay, I saw a story that I hadn’t seen before. The characters were richly drawn. The scenario was compelling. It really sucked me in.”
As Mancuso began looking for a director for the project, one of the first names to come up was Chris Sivertson. A relative newcomer to features, Sivertson’s debut film The Lost had generated controversy and acclaim on the film festival circuit with its frank depiction of a charismatic sociopath. “I was knocked out by it,” says the producer. “He made the film for very little money. As soon as I saw it I knew we had found our director.”
At his first meeting with Sivertson, Mancuso was equally impressed by the director’s vision for I Know Who Killed Me. “I had this immediate sense that this guy really wanted to make the same movie that I did,” Mancuso recalls. “He was sucked in, in the same way I was. Chris had all the right sort of instincts that were going to elevate the movie and take it beyond a genre movie, beyond a horror film.”
As evidenced by his debut feature, Sivertson is attracted to material that explores the darker side of human nature. “Too often thrillers are populated by twodimensional characters,” he says. “This is one of those unique scripts where the characters are truly pushing the plot forward, which is the main thing I’m looking for when reading a script. Even before I was halfway through, this character Aubrey, who I found myself caring about, all of a sudden says she’s Dakota. And Dakota turns out to be one of the most fascinating characters I’ve ever seen in a script.
In stressful situations the brain – understandably – finds ways to cope with the trauma being inflicted on the body. – Dr. Summerly
As the filmmakers began casting the film’s central, dual role of Aubrey Fleming and Dakota Moss, they were faced with a number of intriguing questions, recalls Mancuso. “Did we want to go with somebody well known? Did we want to discover somebody? Should we populate the movie with competent, strong performances, or were we looking for stars? We had the freedom to take it in any direction we wanted, so we asked ourselves: Who would make people stand up and take notice of this movie?
“Lindsay Lohan is certainly a celebrity, but what’s interesting to me is the quality of the work she’s done up to this point,” he says. “Unlike a lot of people who have attained that status at her age, she really has the goods.”
Lohan, who has been acting since she was a child, remains at the forefront of the current crop of celebrated young actresses. Ironically, her movie career launched with a film in which she played two complementary characters: the twin sisters at the center of the Disney hit movie The Parent Trap. Nine years later, she is eager to make the transition from starlet to leading lady.
Director Sivertson believes the strong parallels between Lohan’s real life and the characters she is playing give her performance an authenticity that would be difficult to plan for. “The movie is about a girl who is at a point in her life where she’s leaving her childhood behind and becoming an adult,” he says. “The more I got to know Lindsay, the more it just seemed natural that she came up doing one thing in her childhood and now’s the time to move beyond that and grow up on camera.
For her part, Lohan was sold on the project before she even finished the script, despite – or perhaps because of the film’s edgy material. “I e-mailed them after I had read just a few scenes and said, I’ll do it,” says the actress. “One of the scenes I read was the stripping scene. Initially, I thought, can’t they rewrite some of that? But in the end it was part of what really interested me. The second I said I couldn’t do certain things, I thought, okay, I have to do it.”
Lohan was a fan of Sivertson’s work before signing on and calls The Lost one of her top five favorite films. She was delighted to find that she and the director were very much in tune in terms of their ideas about the characters. “For me to be able to be doing the things that I’ve done in this movie, I needed a director I was on the same wavelength with. I had my first love scene. I wouldn’t even call it a love scene, it’s a sex scene.”
Sivertson says Lohan saw the film as an opportunity to grow as an actress. “We talked about it in detail and I could sense in her a mixture of nervousness and also excitement about doing it, because it was so different from her previous roles,” the director continues. “She’s a pretty bold person in reality, so to see her bring that to the screen was great.
Some of Sivertson’s directorial techniques reminded Lohan of legendary director Robert Altman, with whom she had worked on The Prairie Home Companion, his final film. “He will sometimes keep rolling after the scene is done and just see what happens, and I’ll start improvising. He’s always willing for me to bring any ideas and thoughts that I have.
Sivertson is effusive in his praise for Lohan. “She’s got an incredible amount of raw talent and what she does on camera seems almost effortless. It’s not, of course; she works really hard at it, but she’s just got a very natural way of working. She’s not a method actress who stays in the moment between each take. But as soon as we were rolling she was right there. And she was very easy to direct because I could tell her very simple things without having to dress it up in any kind of fancy language and she just understood it instantly and was able to build upon it.
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I Know Who Killed Me (2007)
Directed by: Chris Sivertson
Starring: Lindsay Lohan, Julia Ormond, Neal McDonough, Brian Geraghty, Garcelle Beauvais-Nilon, Gregory Itzin, Michael Esparza, David Figlioli, Cornelia Guest, Jane Galloway Heitz, Amy Fuehrer
Screenplay by: Jeff Hammond
Production Design by: Jerry Fleming
Cinematography by: John R. Leonetti
Film Editing by: Lawrence Jordan
Costume Design by: Rachel Sage Kunin
Set Decoration by: Betty Berberian
Music by: Joel McNeely
MPAA Rating: R for grisly violence including torture and disturbing gory images, and for sexuality, nudity and language.
Studio: Columbia Pictures
Release Date: July 27, 2007
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