Don Coscarelli for directing Incident on and off a Mountain Road
by Daniel Robert Epstein for SuicideGirls (http://suicidegirls.com/)

What makes Don Coscarelli unique amongst the masters of horror is that the majority of his films are good. With four kickass Phantasms and one excellent Bubba Ho-tep making up the majority of his films, it’s obvious to see why. Now he can add Incident on and off a Mountain Road, which was the premiere episode of the anthology series, to that list. Directed and co-written by Don Coscarelli and based on a story by Joe R. Lansdale, Incident is about young woman [Bree Turner] who gets into an accident on a lonely back road. Then she is stalked by killer and must use the skills taught to her by her survivalist husband [Ethan Embry] to remain alive. Incident has just come out from Anchor Bay Entertainment and it packed with extras such as commentary by Don Coscarelli and co-writer Stephen Romano, a making of featurette and working with a master featurette.

Buy Incident on and off a Mountain Road

Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you doing today?

Don Coscarelli: Let’s see, today I got a bunch of housekeeping to do in terms of a couple of these different projects that I’m trying to get going. It’s an ongoing struggle to track down financing for these movies.

DRE: Anything you can talk about?

Don: I’m definitely still trying to get the Bubba Ho-tep sequel going. We got a lot of interest and just trying to get it crystallized. I’ve finally gotten started working on the script on it and it’s coming along real nice. I think it’s could be a lot of fun and Bruce [Campbell] really is excited to put on the old sequined jumpsuit again.

DRE: Joe R. Lansdale never wrote a sequel, did he?

Don: No, I hope to involve Joe but he’s a pretty busy guy these days. It is funny how Bubba Ho-tep really increased his profile, which is great. There’s a lot of activity around some of his projects.

DRE: Do you have something else that you are trying to get off the ground?

Don: Nothing I can really say. The Bubba sequel is really what I’m focusing on right now.

DRE: I know that guys like you get financing from foreign and sometimes old rich guys too. What’s the hold up on something like this?

Don: I think I was busy working on that Masters of Horror thing, which slowed things down so it’s not like there’s been any delay. One of the problems was we were going to go right ahead and make it over at MGM. But they were bought by Sony so that didn’t work out. Now there’s a lot of interest from a number of different companies so it’s going to happen in one form or another.

DRE: Is it going to be like a real sequel or a prequel?

Don: I don’t want to ruin the surprise but Bruce really wants to feature more of Elvis at age 39. So there’ll be a little more of that in this film. Nothing is cast in stone yet so we’re talking about a lot of different things.

DRE: I heard a rumor that you might not have been super happy with either the budget of the Masters of Horror episode or maybe the way it came out. Am I wrong?

Don: Completely wrong but I’ve heard that before. I knew what I was getting into when I signed on. The budgets were very tight but I certainly understand that financially they needed to crank out 13 of these things so they needed to create a bit of a factory. All of us were certainly wanted to make movies as best we could so I put a tremendous amount of effort into my episode. They only provided us with ten days of shooting per episode. So the only way to counteract that is to be overly prepared, which is what I did. They asked me to come back for the second season but I didn’t want to participate because I thought, “I probably put in as much effort into this thing as I would a movie so I really should go back to making movies.”

I’ve been in the position to pretty much control how the money’s spent so consequently the one thing I learned early on is that time equals better movies. When I made the Phantasm movies we would spend every dollar to extend the length of shooting time. The first Phantasm we shot over a year and even the second Phantasm I think I had ten weeks to shoot it and that was sort of a normal schedule. Beastmaster was shot on a really low budget and I didn’t have total control but the one thing was from the get go they had a 12 week schedule to shoot all that stuff that was important. Even though Bubba Ho-tep was a very simple movie with mainly a couple guys talking in rooms, we had about 30 to 35 to shoot. So you’re coming in with ten days to shoot what’s supposed to be a 60 minute episode. I’ll tell you what one day was like. The day we shot that scene at the shooting range between Bree [Turner] and Ethan [Embry], so Ethan is shooting the gun which is a little tricky and they’ve got a bunch of dialogue. Then we move up to another grassy area and we shoot the scene where he catches her, tackles her and then proposes to her. Then it becomes night time and we shot all the stuff on that crucifix. We had to get like five different crane shots and her running up. Then we had to have her exit at the end of the movie. We had to put the Ethan’s character on the crucifix. Then after that, we have to go into the forest with Moonface and shoot a whole bunch of running through the forest at night. So it’s these four gigantic different scenes, different emotions and do it all in 12 hours. It’s just not the way I like to work at all, but that’s the way they do it in television.

DRE: None of the directors seem to like their picture on the cover of the DVD.

Don: It’s probably the only time in my life I’ll have any picture of myself on a DVD, so I think it looks great. But I certainly would make some changes. I think I’m looking a little cross-eyed and a little Asian, which is interesting. But the whole thing was a hoot. The whole thing was worth doing because when they sent me a copy of it and I opened it up and it was like a baseball trading card set of horror directors. That’s pretty neat.

DRE: The Masters DVDs are so packed, what do you think of yours?

Don: It really is packed. I had a lot of creative involvement in the Bubba Ho-tep DVD release in terms of extras and the Masters DVD just showed up on the door one day. They did the interview with me but they did that thing where they interviewed a bunch of people I’d worked with before. I didn’t know anything about and it surprised me because it is pretty flattering. There was only one little flaw. They have what’s advertised as our screenplay in the thing, but it’s not. It is more like somebody did a transcript of the movie. But other than that, it’s a really nice presentation of the thing.

DRE: Did they interview people who weren’t in the Masters episode?

Don: Yeah, they even interviewed Marc Singer from The Beastmaster. I haven’t talked to Marc for years. He said all these really fatherly things. It was almost an out of body experience watching the thing because it was like it was an obituary or something. It was really strange, but really nice.

DRE: Besides the nice compliments, did anyone say anything that surprised you?

Don: Absolutely, making movies isn’t easy. Frankly sometimes it’s hard to be civil on the set because it’s a disaster and things are crashing around you. I try as hard as I can to be helpful and supportive to the actors but I might say things that irritate them and antagonize them. So it is nice to know they still think highly of me.

DRE: I’ve seen all the [Masters of Horror] episodes including the Takashi Miike one.

Don: Oh how is that? I never did see it.

DRE: It’s really crazy.

Don: Is it as bad as Audition? If you tell me its worse I might not be able to watch it.

DRE: No, it’s not worse than Audition but it’s got like a 20 minute torture scene.

Don: Great. [laughs]

DRE: How do you think your episode fits into the series?

Don: We were fortunate enough to shoot early. We were like the third episode and I was fighting with them to keep a lot of the action in there because it’s a lot easier to shoot dialogue. I think after my episode, they started forcing people to get more dialogue and less action because it just takes a long time and it messes with the business part.

DRE: I got to speak to Stuart Gordon when his DVD came out. Guys like you and Stuart are often limited by your budgets but someone like Miike works on such a low budget for his movies simply so he can have all that control. What’s your impression of his work?

Don: He knows how to do it. I think it’s wonderful and I think that early on I used to hear snippets of conversation around the office that they were basically giving him the money to let him spend however he wants. I also heard at one time that Robert Rodriguez was going to do an episode but only on the basis that they send him a check and he’d do it down in Austin and turn over the tape. These guys have made a lot of movies and they have a comfort zone so they know how to do it. I also heard that Stuart had said “give me the money, I know how to use this money and get 20 days out of it.” I’m sure he does because he knows how to marshal his money. But they had a deadline to meet so consequently everybody got the ten days. I was interested to see what it would be like because I had never worked like that. So I wanted to see if I could do it and I wanted to see if I could make something decent in the context of that. That was a challenge that I was actually looking forward to trying.

DRE: Angus Scrimm said that you and Stephen Romano were working on something else.

Don: Steven’s a friend and we’ve got a couple of different projects that we’re cooking up. We had one script we were really excited and I’m not going to name names but another movie came out with a similar idea and it just shot all our work to hell. So we’re regrouping and working on some other stuff.

DRE: Anything going on with the Phantasm remake?

Don: No progress on that. It could still happen and there’s a lot of interest but no progress. I’m still committed to do something with the original cast. We’re cooking up some things but we haven’t quite got it formulated yet, but one way or another we’ll get something else out in the Phantasm world.

DRE: How often do people expect you to be a crazy wild man instead of the normal guy that you are?

Don: All the time. People think I should be some freak. But it’s all mental. [laughs] Not necessarily physical. The genre is pretty cool and I’m really fortunate to be working in it. Fans of horror fantasy and sci-fi are some of the smartest people because they’re interested in projects and stories and movies that give them something to think about. A lot of times their interpretations, certainly on my movies, are so intelligent and interesting and amplify on what I do.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck

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