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New edited edition with enhanced features
UK DVD RELEASE: 26th January 2009

Icon Home Entertainment is pleased to announce that the supernatural thriller, THE TATTOOIST, will now be released on Monday 26th January 2009 as a newly edited cut with enhanced features.  THE TATTOOIST is part of an ongoing collaboration between Sam Raimi's U.S. production company Ghost House Pictures and Icon Home Entertainment. 

The Tattooist will be the first of a number of Icon Home Entertainment DVD releases scheduled for 2009 produced under the Ghost House banner, set to include; The Grudge 3, Rise 2, Boogeyman 3 and Messengers 2 to complement existing releases in the 30 Days of Night franchise.  The new version of The Tattooist features a number of fresh, additional and amended elements overseen by Sam Raimi’s team during the production process.

With a screenplay written by Jonathan King (the director of Black Sheep), and directed by Peter Burger, the film stars Jason Behr, best known for his leading role opposite Sarah Michelle Geller in Takashi Shimizu’s 2004 horror thriller The Grudge, and the critically acclaimed  Sci-Fi television series Roswell.

Icon Home Entertainment’s General Manager Ian Dawson said “We are delighted to be working more closely with the Ghost House team in the U.S on our release of The Tattooist and these key films in their forthcoming production slate.”

The Tattooist was produced by Eyeworks Touchdown, Mediacorp Raintree Pictures and the New Zealand Film Commission

Filmed on location in Auckland, New Zealand and Singapore, American tattoo artist Jake Sawyer (Behr) wanders the world, exploring and exploiting ethnic themes in his tattoo designs. At a tattoo expo in Singapore, he gets his first glimpse at the exotic world of traditional Samoan tattoo (tatau), and, in a thoughtless act, unwittingly unleashes a powerful angry spirit. In his devastating journey into Pacific mysticism, Jake must find a way to save his new love, Sina (Mia Blake) and recover his own soul.

ABOUT THE FILM

The Tattooist is a fascinating supernatural thriller, the story of an outsider, an American tattoo artist who unwittingly unleashes an angry Samoan ghost. Everyone he tattoos becomes taken over by this spirit. Unfortunately, he also tattoos the woman he is falling in love with, and the film takes the audience on a mysterious, scary and thrilling journey into the supernatural world.

Director Peter Burger was excited by the opportunity to create a spine-chilling environment with tension escalating throughout the film. “It’s scary in a ghostly kind of way. It’s a world in which ghosts exist and tattoos can come to life and creep out and totally consume a person’s skin. I really enjoy working in a world where extreme and freaky things happen to people and this script was so well written and so visual that I loved it and thought it would be a whole lot of fun to make.

“It’s a supernatural thriller. Supernatural because the key figure is a ghost and it’s a thriller because it’s also a detective story with clues delivered along the way. Jake has to follow them and the audience goes with him as he figures out what’s going on. And these two elements, the spirit and the detective story come to a head in the climax.

“What makes it different is that Jake finds himself in a completely new environment because it’s a Samoan ghost and so he leads us into this new world of Samoan people living in Auckland.”

Even though, as Burger says, “it can never be the real world: it’s the movies”, the underlying theme of this movie is very real in Samoan terms, as Samoan cultural adviser and orator chief Pa’u Tafaogalupe Mulitalo (Tafa) explains: “There's a term in Samoan called lama avea. When a person steals something from a tattooist like an implement, a design or a title or when a tattooist performs without the proper traditional Samoan cultural franchise, the term lama avea applies. It means that his art has been cursed. So because Jake steals a tool from the Samoan tattooist Alipati at the Singapore tattoo convention, every new work that he does becomes lama avea. The evil spirit, the ghost of the art of tattooing, has gone through the tool to make the recipients of Jake’s tattoos the victims of the curse.”

	THE STORYLINE American tattoo artist Jake Sawyer (Jason Behr) explores and exploits ethnic designs from around the world. At a tattoo expo in Singapore, he glimpses the exotic world of traditional Samoan tattoo (tatau) in the work of the fiercely proud Alipati (Robbie Magasiva). Fatefully, Jake is attracted to Alipati’s beautiful cousin, Sina (Mia Blake). When Jake impulsively steals an ancient Samoan tattooing tool, he unwittingly unleashes a powerful angry spirit. Suddenly, his art takes on a frightening new dimension, exposing everyone he touches, including the feisty Singaporean Victoria (Caroline Cheong), to mortal peril. Sensing the solution can only lie with the Samoans; Jake follows them to Auckland, where he runs into an old adversary, tattoo artist Crash (Michael Hurst) and a new one, the respected Samoan elder Aleki Va’a (David Fane). His investigation takes him on a devastating journey into the dark heart of Pacific mysticism. There, Jake must recover his own soul if he is to save the woman he loves and escape with his life. Jason Behr was attracted to the role of Jake by the fresh ideas in the story: “It’s set in the Samoan spirituality arena and it’s dealing with things that I've never come across, and that was a great drawcard for me. As I read the script I thought it was exciting and it had an element of fear coming from things I was not familiar with. Everything was very new and fresh and that’s great. When you’re telling a story about fear and ghosts and spirits in a world which is all new to your audience, it can be one hell of a ride.” Behr says his character, the tattoo artist Jake, “was considered to be the rock star of the tattooing world until about two years ago. He got there by stealing someone else’s design, so he fell on hard times and didn’t really live up to the expectations that everyone put on him, and he’s now just using tattoos as a way to make money. He’s been reduced to travelling around picking up what he can from other cultures and working at these tattooing expos, giving people McTattoos. It’s a sort of fast food tattooing where he just gets somebody in the seat, tattoos them, and then gets them out. He’s a rambler, a take-life-as-it-comes kind of guy. All he has is the shoes on his feet and the shirt on his back and he goes where the wind takes him.”  That’s how it was for Jake until his chance encounter with the Samoan tattooists, when he reflexively steals the tattoo tool and sets in motion a horrifying chain of events which forces Jake to confront his own values and wake up to life.

TATTOOS AND TATTOOING
Before coming to New Zealand, Jason Behr did some research in the contemporary tattoo world in Los Angeles and discovered a distinct subculture. “They have their own jargon, their own dialogue and their own social order. It was invaluable for me just to go in there and watch them and I tried to get the bare bones of the technical aspect of how tattooing is actually accomplished. It’s not an easy thing to do and it takes a lot of talent, a lot of time and a lot of learning. It’s a scary thing when your canvas is someone’s skin, so it takes a lot of balls to be a tattooist.”

In addition to learning enough to be able to act as a tattooist, Behr needed to become a walking example of the tattooist’s art. This meant his make-up tattoos had to be the coolest-looking designs possible as well as serving as a pointer to Jake’s character as a global wanderer with an interest in tattoos - a collector of tattoos from around the world. The design of Jake’s body is a result of a collaborative process involving Auckland tattoo artist Dean Sacred, director Peter Burger, production designer Gary Mackay and make-up supervisor Deb Watson.

Sacred, who describes himself as an artist who makes his living as a tattooist, says, “The design and style for Jake’s tattoos was a collection of different influences that he’s gathered over his time as a travelling tattooist. It’s as if he’s got a little bit from everywhere and put it all together. A lot of people travel the world and when they meet other cultures and other tattooists they just share each other’s art.”

Behr says, “Jake’s collection of tattoos on his body is his history. Tattoos mean different things to different people as individuals and culturally. For him it’s a collection of where he’s been. He has some Marquesan designs on his arm, with some Japanese influence on the sleeve and the piece on the shoulder and the back is from Yokohama. There are some lightning bolts from Berlin and a lot of Asian influence, some from Borneo. There’s Aztec on his shoulder and a massive skull on his abdomen that’s really old school and has a New York City urban street feel. It's a very eclectic collection of tattoos that just tells the story of Jake.”

In a romantic scene in which Sina traces Jake’s tattoos while he tells her where they come from, director Peter Burger sees a deeper dynamic at work. “Eventually Sina gets down to his left wrist and there’s the scar marking where his father cut off his first self-inflicted tattoo. That’s the wound he’s been carrying with him this whole time, which is unresolved. His right arm with all the tattoos represents what he’s been doing since he became an adult, so it’s his travels and all of his strong stuff, the emotional armour. But his left arm is completely bare except for this scar, his vulnerable part.”

Creating and applying the tattoo designs for all the characters in the film called for several different strategies on the part of make-up supervisor Deb Watson and her team, which included Dean Sacred and tattoo designers Karla Hansen and Meng-Ho (Moon) Lee.

The tattoos for Jason Behr were crucial, since they were elaborate, covered such a large part of his body and had to be worn every day. For these, Watson turned to Los Angles-based film industry tattoo supplier Tinsley Transfers. They used a digital process to transfer the original designs onto a thin plastic skin which is then stuck onto the actor in a strictly prescribed pattern by the make-up team. The pieces look like a dressmaker’s suit pattern, designed flat but constructed to fit a three-dimensional human body. Real tattooist Dean Sacred pays possibly the highest tribute to the film make-up tattoo process when he says: “It’s amazing how they look like real tattoos.”

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