anderswolleck

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer scared the living shit out of me and millions of other people after it was released after a lengthy delay back in 1989.

Now Henry is finally being given the respect it deserves in a special 20th anniversary edition DVD. The DVD includes brand new documentaries that have interviews with all the key players such as star Michel Rooker, Tom Towles and co-writer/director John McNaughton.

I got a chance to talk with McNaughton from the set of his episode of the new Masters of Horror series.

Buy the 20th Anniversary DVD of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

Daniel Robert Epstein: How is directing the Masters of Horror episode going?

John McNaughton: Very good. I like Vancouver very much. The people on the show have got their shit together it seems and its pretty smooth. I hate to put a curse on it, but so far so good.

DRE: Who wrote your episode?

JM: Its called Haeckel's Tale. Its a Clive Barker short story that was adapted by Mick Garris.

DRE: Whats it about?

JM: Necrophilia. What else would you expect?

DRE: Whos starring in your episode?

JM: I brought two American actors that Ive worked with before Derek Cecil, who starred in Push, Nevada a television show that I did the pilot for and Jon Polito, who was also in Push, Nevada. He has worked with me many times and you probably know him.

DRE: Yeah, I know Jon Polito. Hes short with a mustache, right?

JM: Yep. Bald and short with a little black mustache.

DRE: Hes in a lot of Coen brothers movies too I believe.

JM: Yeah, hes in most of them.

DRE: What else can you tell me about the episode?

JM: Its a story of a young, American medical student who is trying to resurrect the dead via following the experiments of Frankenstein because his father is gravely ill. Thats why he was studying medicine, to try and save his father. But should his father not survive then hes going to take the next step. In his quest, he runs across a necromancer, played by Jon Polito, who happens to be involved with a whole other subplot which has a young woman whose husband has died. She remarried to a man who hired the necromancer to help her reunite with her husband and of course she reunites with him in the sexual sense in the graveyard. He and numerous other members of the undead.

DRE: That sounds very sexy.

JM: Yeah, very sexy. We found a beautiful young actress that no one has ever heard of yet to play the role and shes really stunning.

DRE: Of course were talking about Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Theres no way you couldve thought that Henry would be remembered this long. What were your guys expectations for the film back then?

JM: There was kind of a dual expectation between the two people that wrote it, myself and Richard Fire. Richard Fire really came from the theater and if you watch the documentary and see Richard talk about the Aristotelian unities of time and space, you can kind of guess where Richard was coming from. Hes a man of the theater with rather lofty expectations, which was a wonderful thing because he really did elevate the material. I, on the other hand, was probably more of a fan of the exploitation genre among other things. Tennessee Williams is one of my favorites.

DRE: Certainly a major force in exploitation.

JM: [laughs] In his own way he was. If you watch some of those pictures like Reflections in a Golden Eye or Night of the Iguana, they are teetering on that edge. There were pictures that came along in the genre that pushed the envelope, stepped over the line and set a new standard for exploitation. Im thinking of pictures like Last House on the Left, Night of the Living Dead, Texas Chainsaw Massacre. When they came out they took the flag and moved it forward where no picture had gone before. I was hoping to do that with Henry and step into new territory, breaking the boundaries.

DRE: I spoke with Michael Rooker earlier in the week for another website and he was saying there was no real script for Henry.

JM: Thats absolutely untrue. Ive been spending a lot of time with Michael lately because weve got a writer in New Orleans working on a new script. There was an 83 page script and everybody had copies. We worked very hard on it. Michaels point of view is, which is true, that once we had the script we had two weeks of rehearsals with the three actors, Tommy [Towles], Michael and Tracy [Arnold]. Richard Fire had them go home and write the backstories to their characters. Tommy and Tracy had both worked in the theater with Richard so were very happy to do so. Michael felt that was sort of egghead theatre stuff. So he went home and basically while he was sitting on the toilet he dictated his backstory into his tape recorder. The truth of the matter is when they all came back with their backstory bios, there was much good material in there and we worked a good deal of that into the script. But to say there was no script is completely wrong.

DRE: Do you and Michael get along?

JM: Yeah and in fact Ive been in LA for the last month and I saw Michael four times. He had me over to his house. I had him over to a party at the house I was renting. We had lunch with this young writer. We also did an interview together. Were good friends and we were back when we made the movie. But Michael, of course, wants to promote the idea of the influence that he had on the script. Believe me, they all had an influence on the script and I still like to work that way to this day. Its a wonderful way to work because if you just write a script and bring the actors in, once the actors find the characters, they know the characters better than the writer generally. Not in the case of Tennessee Williams maybe, but most writers arent of that quality. Being able to work with the actors and have them then come back once they find the characters and work their ideas back into the script makes the script better.

DRE: Michael was telling me that before Henry was released he got work because you spent a lot of time sending out tapes of the movie. What were you trying to accomplish by sending out multiple tapes of the movie to everyone?

JM: I have an old friend in New York named Steve Hager who was editor of High Times Magazine for 20 years but before that he worked for the New York Daily News. Steve was one of the first guys to go out and document the hip hop culture and the graffiti writer culture back in the day and he wrote a book called Art After Midnight. There was a piece in there about Keith Haring and how when he first came to New York he would go into the subway stations in the hip neighborhoods where he knew there would be journalists and writers and people involved in the culture industry. He started doing his drawings there in order to get the people of the culture industry to recognize him and start to write about him. Having read that piece, I figured that we would try and do the same thing. So we started sending cassettes to critics and writers and producers in Los Angeles. When we finally got a screening at the Chicago Film Festival a friend of mine and myself went out with 1000 handbills we printed with a picture from the film on it and at the top it said, Yeah. I killed my mama and when you do that its going to turn peoples heads. Matricide turns peoples heads. Then I bought a couple cans of red spray paint and I scored each one of those posters with a blast of red paint so it looked like a big blood drip. Then we went out a couple evenings before the film festival with a bucket of wallpaper paste and just papered the town in front of places like The Chicago Tribune, The Chicago Sun-Times and TV stations. Then the catchphrase I killed my mama started going around Chicago. Once you start that fire, it spreads.

DRE: A lot of directors dont like to rewatch their older films because all they see is things they wish they could have done. How was rewatching Henry for the DVD release?

JM: I think Henry holds up pretty well. We had $100,000 to make that picture and the first time I was on a movie set, I was the director. Some of the things we did were very innovative especially on the soundtrack with samples. Sampling was brand new and the device we used was an 8-bit sampler that could now fit on a keychain but at the time that was state of the art technology. I think the cinematography [by Charlie Lieberman] is good. I think its well cut and the music is good. Whatever flaws it has, considering its a very down and dirty kind of story, I think it works in its favor.

I think earlier on you see the mistakes but time softens things especially with a picture that has been so successful. When I watched the documentary on the DVD it was very interesting to see how my memories of certain things differed from other peoples memories.

DRE: Did the minimalist documentary type style come out of the fact that you guys had a small amount of money or did you write it in that fashion?

JM: Originally we were going to use a different cinematographer named Jean de Segonzac who is a director now, but he was a cinematographer on the show Homicide. He worked with the Polish director Marian Marzynski from Poland. Jean used to shoot all his stuff years ago and then moved on. Jean and I worked together in Chicago on some little projects many years ago and then I did five episodes of Homicide. But he was originally going to shoot Henry all handheld, very cinema verite. As it turned out, Jean had previous commitment to a documentary that was shooting in Spain and very unusually they pushed it forward right into our schedule. It was a commitment that hed already made so we lost him and we had like a week to find another cinematographer and chose Charlie Lieberman, who is not from the cinema verite. He mostly shot commercials in Chicago and had also done some narrative films on substance abuse counseling. But he was the only guy in Chicago that we found that actually had narrative storytelling experience. We hired Charlie and in the end it has that documentary feel of being shot more traditionally on the tripod. I think it really worked out for the best.

DRE: Did you get to direct The Borrower as a result of Henry?

JM: Yes because when Henry got to the Telluride Festival in 1989 it just blew up. Everybody got a hold of it and it became a huge thing to write about.

DRE: Im only going to ask you one Borrower question. In the film the alien is switching heads and starts off as a white guy. But then when he switched heads with a black guy obviously the actors hands were black too. Did anyone say Should we put gloves on him?

JM: I know. I somehow remember that whole thing. We didnt have to put gloves on because when he switched heads with Antonio Fargas there was no need to. There was no need to put gloves on him because the idea was that the idea being was when the body took a new head, the whole being more or less transformed. Believe me; we agonize over that kind of stuff. Early on in my career I used to obsess over stuff like that, now I realize that its a movie. There are certain things you can get away with that make no sense if they make emotional sense and there are certain things you cant. Its experience that teaches you the difference, whats going to go by an audience and what theyre going to nail you on.

DRE: What makes you keep casting Tom Towles?

JM: I use Tommy whenever I can. Tommys an actor. Tommy came out of the Organic Theater Company where Richard Fire came out of and people like Joe Mantegna, Dennis Franz.

DRE: And Stuart Gordon as well.

JM: Yes Stuart Gordon, Dennis Farina. That was a very talented group. Tommy worked on the stage for years and can do pretty much anything. Right now hes off doing the Miami Vice movie for Michael Mann in Miami playing a bad guy of some kind.

DRE: When you were going in for meetings for other movies, were people ever afraid of you because of Henry?

JM: Yeah, when I went to my first meeting with Martin Scorsese for Mad Dog and Glory, I went to the best menswear store in Chicago at the time and bought a brand new beautiful Armani suit. I walked into Martys office and he was kind of shocked. I would always compensate for the fact they expected some kind of savage to come walking in.

DRE: Your film Wild Things is constantly on HBO. Ive talked to Neve Campbell a couple times. She always says that theres always a certain kind of person that comes up to her and asks her about that film. I assume shes talking about horny guys.

JM: Probably.

DRE: How was it shooting that one sex scene with her, Denise [Richards] and Matt Dillon?

JM: That was a hard day and it was very technical. People think that shooting those kinds scenes is sexy but its usually very tense and difficult. By the time we got to that sex scene the physical difficulties of working in Miami like the heat and the insects had really gotten to us. There was also some sort of viral inner ear infection that hit many of the crew and caused extreme dizziness. So our first assistant director, our boom man and our key grip all had to be hospitalized. It turned out really well but it wasnt as much fun as you might think.

DRE: Whats going on with your film Speaking of Sex?

JM: It got buried when Studio Canal, which is a division of Canal Plus, which is a part of the whole Vivendi thing, went into serious financial tailspin. It just got buried in that mess.

It may come out eventually on DVD in America. I happened to have been in Australia a couple years ago scouting for a picture that never got made. One of the people who was our guide when we got there, Tony Cavanaugh said, Oh. I really loved your film. I said, Well, which one? and he goes, Oh, the new one. Speaking of Sex. I went, How did you see it? Because I dont have a copy. He goes, Well, I rented it at the video store. I had this deal made with Studio Canal where they said that every dime that comes in you get a piece of. None of that was true. I actually gave Tony Cavanaugh $100 and I said, Well go rent it again and tell them you lost it. Thats how I got my copy.

DRE: I saw a couple of other future projects credited to you called The Night Job and Redliners.

JM: Redliners is just dead. Thats gone. That was something my former agent set me up in, which was just nonsense and Im no longer with that agent. The Night Job is a picture and in fact I just sent an email to the producer Michael Mailer, Normans son, so its moving along. Im hoping that well be making that picture early next year.

DRE: Whats your cast looking like?

JM: The cast is looking like Ray Liotta, Marisa Tomei and Mickey Rourke are in right now.

DRE: Is that the next thing youre going to be a part of?

JM: I hope so. Also Michael Rooker and I met with a young playwright named RJ Tsarov a couple weeks ago in LA. Hes working on a follow up picture to Henry that we would both be doing.

DRE: Does it pick him Henry up 20 years later?

JM: Yeah, in prison.

DRE: How much of a go is this picture?

JM: I think its just a matter of working out the deal. I think theyll be many people interested in producing this picture. Theres a couple already. Its just a matter of how were going to work out the deal with the original producer. Whether theyll put up the money or whether well get money from outside.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

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