When South African filmmaker Richard Stanleys low budget science fiction horror film Hardware was released in the early 90s many people heralded him as the new face of the genre. That is until his second feature, Dust Devil, was released in the States to dismal reviews and returns. Though Stanleys directors cut of Dust Devil was released in many other markets around the world, after many years Stanleys directors cut of Dust Devil has been released in the United States in a massive five disc DVD set that includes the directors cut, the original US theatrical release, the soundtrack to the film and three of Stanleys most controversial documentaries.
Buy the DVD of Dust Devil - The Final Cut
Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you up to today?
Richard Stanley: Im completing post-production on my short film Sea of Perdition.
DRE: I read a description of Sea of Perdition that said it is like a Warren style comic.
RS: Yeah, very much. Thats certainly what Im going for. Maggie Moore plays a member of the American Mars expedition who becomes lost on a Martian landscape, wanders down to a subterranean world and is met by a creature which morphs into her naked double, sucks out her memories and then takes her place on the flight home.
DRE: Oh it sounds good [laughs].
RS: I have little things I like, space girls, Martian temple weirdness and monsters.
DRE: Are you planning on getting this film on television or to just show at festivals?
RS: No plan as yet. Its been shot largely just as a convincing argument to anyone who thinks that we cant do certain things on a budget. We thought if we did some big, epochal, Martian temple, another planet, whatever, then people would trust us when it came down to something smaller scale.
DRE: So youre looking to develop another feature as a result of it.
RS: Yeah, theres another feature in the offing which Im hoping to get.
DRE: How long has this big Dust Devil DVD set been in the works?
RS: Pretty much ever since the thing happened. 14 years in the coming. Really its been about five years since Ive been working so hard to get this DVD out in the States. Just getting the rights to do so was hard.
DRE: Was this able to happen because Miramax didnt have the DVD rights since it was released before DVD?
RS: Yeah, the rights got passed from one company to another and honestly Dust Devil isnt worth anything to anyone. It hasnt made any money and it hasnt been a real advantage to anyone.
DRE: Had you shown your final cut anywhere?
RS: My final cut was the one released in England and parts of Europe. For a long time the television version in England was the same one thats now out in the States, but for some reason it was only the States that held out on Dust Devil mostly because of various people.
DRE: I read that you never saw the version Miramax put out.
RS: Its too painful. It was a real harsh. Its not all their fault, they tried to do everything they could with the material they had. They were working without the benefit of being able to go back to the rushes. The stunts, the truck accidents and the head explosion dont really work in the Miramax cut because theyre culled from a much earlier stage of the post production. I obviously had nothing to do with the additional voice over. It was just too painful to want to go near.
DRE: Earlier this year I interviewed Terry Gilliam who made Brothers Grimm with Miramax. I asked him what Brothers Grimm had taught him about making big movies. He said it was the same lesson that he knew before, dont work with the Weinsteins.
RS: Yeah, theres a lot of talk about Miramax but Dust Devil wouldnt have been made without them so I will give them that. Terry Gilliam cut free of Miramax and did marginally better by making Tideland. These things are nothing personal. Dust Devil got caught in the legal fallout of different multi-nationals eating each others back catalogs. It got lost when the company that owned Dust Devil got taken out by Polygram and then Polygram got broken up. The Weinsteins are a bit of a handful though.
DRE: So the cut that were seeing on the new DVD is the one that you are happy with.
RS: Yeah, sometimes I regret that I shortened it as much as I did because it still could have been longer but at the same time its about ten minutes too long. I think the cut thats out there is about where I want it.
DRE: Whos idea was it to pack this DVD full of all this supplemental material like the soundtrack and your other films?
RS: It was Norm Hill at Subversive Cinema. Norm has done great work with the Werner Herzog films. The three documentaries on the Dust Devil DVD set arent available in the UK or Europe so that work is pretty much unique to America.
DRE: I read you started Dust Devil even before Hardware.
RS: Yeah, that was pretty much how Dust Devil came into being. It started off as being a pitch for a low budget movie in South Africa with three people in a car about as bare bones as you can get. When Hardware started making money hand over fist, someone had the rights to Dust Devil and they rushed off onto production with me directing.
DRE: Was Dust Devil a difficult shoot?
RS: It was really no more difficult than expected. No one lost their lives or was seriously injured. We covered about 1500 kilometers of desert and lost around 45 company vehicles in the course of the movie.
DRE: What made you want to do Dust Devil?
RS: I spent about 16 years in South Africa. Back in the Apartheid years, the South African government was quite happy to release films into the cinemas that were political like Cry Freedom, World Apart, A Dry White Season. The movies they hated and banned for years were devil movies. They banned The Exorcist and The Omen.
DRE: Wow, I didnt know that.
RS: When the cheesy movie Frankenstein the Monster from Hell was released, they actually took the words from Hell out of the title. So it just said Frankenstein the Monster with a black glitch next to it. Missionary cultures are more afraid of the devil and the superstitious aspects of the fall of white culture than the actual political side that was in power. I thought these people deserved their very own devil. I figured if the devil was going to come to Africa, the devil would have to be American and he would have to be sexy, blonde and blue eyed. He would have to look like Elvis Presley or Jim Morrison or Clint Eastwood.
DRE: What was the film industry in South Africa like at that time?
RS: It was pretty underdeveloped for very good reasons. Theyve got great locations down there and plenty of money, especially in the old days, but for some reason they always failed to reproduce the kind of work they got from Australia. Dust Devil was shot during the Apartheid years with American money, again thanks Harvey and Bob, and was shot entirely over the border in Namibia. Ironically a South African movie was shot with no cooperation with South Africa and with no South African money and with largely Americans playing South Africans.
DRE: What made you cast someone like Robert Burke?
RS: It was because of The Unbelievable Truth [directed by Hal Hartley].
DRE: How was working with Robert Burke?
RS: He was great. I really wish Roberts career had gone further. He is one of the most cooperative men of action Ive ever had to deal with. He was playing a virtually impossible part. To play a mythic archetype is hard for an actor to crawl into sometimes. You have to hit the right level between playing completely straight and camp and he more or less pulled it off.
DRE: How famous is the Dust Devil story in South Africa?
RS: Not entirely, as in the movie, it is like three stories. There was a serial killer in Southern Namibia at the time of the elections. They didnt catch him and it went on for about a year and a half. Then after that there was a shootout and a headless body was turned up and was eventually buried. At the same time there is the vanishing hitchhiker tradition with stories about people picking up hitchhikers who then disappear. It is a global phenomenon. Theres a book called the Vanishing Hitchhiker by some Mormon chappie named Jan Harold Brunvand which is a compilation of some American vanishing hitchhiker stories.
DRE: How did you come up with the look for the Dust Devil in the film?
RS: Once we had locked on the idea of Clint Eastwood, the look followed pretty fast. Clint Eastwood was voted the sexiest man on the planet for more consecutive years than any other actor. The look of the devil had been evolving for a number of years. Clint tried suggesting he was the devil in High Plains Drifter and he changed his mind in Pale Rider and tried to say he was god instead.
DRE: Why have you had so much trouble getting another feature made in the past ten years?
RS: For a number of reasons. Plainly I wasnt telling the right stories. At the time I had failed to perceive the way I was going to make high budget movies with those kinds of messages. I guess Ive become a little bit more realistic about it and I wouldnt even try to get a movie like [The Island of] Dr. Moreau made now. That was plainly just too damn big and Hollywood is never going to allow me to make those kinds of movies on that kind of level, not the way things stand.
DRE: Obviously youre a comic book fan. Are you interested in doing any comic book adaptations?
RS: Id like to go the other way and do more comic books. We did a short comic book of Dust Devil thats with the DVD. I was definitely taken with the idea of getting that guy to do more stuff. Id love to see the Walking Man walk again.
DRE: What comic books do you read now?
RS: Well I dont really read too many lately. Ive been moving around too much. But my life was twisted out of shape by Warren comics. I loved reading those things. I grew up on them and they were great. Another reason I came to hate the Apartheid machine in South Africa was because they banned foreign comics.
DRE: I read that you directed some promo that Dario Argento starred in,.
RS: Yeah that was a piece of fun. It was a favorite assignment.
DRE: Hows his acting?
RS: Well, the guy talks his way through it. It reminds me of William Shatner in the old days. I think he also has some class, Dario Argento reminds me of Uncle Creepy. Hes always had an Uncle Creepy look about him.
DRE: Do you have a feature that you want to try and get going?
RS: Were on the brink of one. I wish it was just a little ways further down the line and I could tell you about cast.
DRE: Is it another horror film?
RS: Oh yeah, I wouldnt do anything else. Not in the near future anyway.
DRE: Do you still do music videos or commercials?
RS: No, I dont do commercials. I try to stay away from them.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
Buy the DVD of Dust Devil - The Final Cut
Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you up to today?
Richard Stanley: Im completing post-production on my short film Sea of Perdition.
DRE: I read a description of Sea of Perdition that said it is like a Warren style comic.
RS: Yeah, very much. Thats certainly what Im going for. Maggie Moore plays a member of the American Mars expedition who becomes lost on a Martian landscape, wanders down to a subterranean world and is met by a creature which morphs into her naked double, sucks out her memories and then takes her place on the flight home.
DRE: Oh it sounds good [laughs].
RS: I have little things I like, space girls, Martian temple weirdness and monsters.
DRE: Are you planning on getting this film on television or to just show at festivals?
RS: No plan as yet. Its been shot largely just as a convincing argument to anyone who thinks that we cant do certain things on a budget. We thought if we did some big, epochal, Martian temple, another planet, whatever, then people would trust us when it came down to something smaller scale.
DRE: So youre looking to develop another feature as a result of it.
RS: Yeah, theres another feature in the offing which Im hoping to get.
DRE: How long has this big Dust Devil DVD set been in the works?
RS: Pretty much ever since the thing happened. 14 years in the coming. Really its been about five years since Ive been working so hard to get this DVD out in the States. Just getting the rights to do so was hard.
DRE: Was this able to happen because Miramax didnt have the DVD rights since it was released before DVD?
RS: Yeah, the rights got passed from one company to another and honestly Dust Devil isnt worth anything to anyone. It hasnt made any money and it hasnt been a real advantage to anyone.
DRE: Had you shown your final cut anywhere?
RS: My final cut was the one released in England and parts of Europe. For a long time the television version in England was the same one thats now out in the States, but for some reason it was only the States that held out on Dust Devil mostly because of various people.
DRE: I read that you never saw the version Miramax put out.
RS: Its too painful. It was a real harsh. Its not all their fault, they tried to do everything they could with the material they had. They were working without the benefit of being able to go back to the rushes. The stunts, the truck accidents and the head explosion dont really work in the Miramax cut because theyre culled from a much earlier stage of the post production. I obviously had nothing to do with the additional voice over. It was just too painful to want to go near.
DRE: Earlier this year I interviewed Terry Gilliam who made Brothers Grimm with Miramax. I asked him what Brothers Grimm had taught him about making big movies. He said it was the same lesson that he knew before, dont work with the Weinsteins.
RS: Yeah, theres a lot of talk about Miramax but Dust Devil wouldnt have been made without them so I will give them that. Terry Gilliam cut free of Miramax and did marginally better by making Tideland. These things are nothing personal. Dust Devil got caught in the legal fallout of different multi-nationals eating each others back catalogs. It got lost when the company that owned Dust Devil got taken out by Polygram and then Polygram got broken up. The Weinsteins are a bit of a handful though.
DRE: So the cut that were seeing on the new DVD is the one that you are happy with.
RS: Yeah, sometimes I regret that I shortened it as much as I did because it still could have been longer but at the same time its about ten minutes too long. I think the cut thats out there is about where I want it.
DRE: Whos idea was it to pack this DVD full of all this supplemental material like the soundtrack and your other films?
RS: It was Norm Hill at Subversive Cinema. Norm has done great work with the Werner Herzog films. The three documentaries on the Dust Devil DVD set arent available in the UK or Europe so that work is pretty much unique to America.
DRE: I read you started Dust Devil even before Hardware.
RS: Yeah, that was pretty much how Dust Devil came into being. It started off as being a pitch for a low budget movie in South Africa with three people in a car about as bare bones as you can get. When Hardware started making money hand over fist, someone had the rights to Dust Devil and they rushed off onto production with me directing.
DRE: Was Dust Devil a difficult shoot?
RS: It was really no more difficult than expected. No one lost their lives or was seriously injured. We covered about 1500 kilometers of desert and lost around 45 company vehicles in the course of the movie.
DRE: What made you want to do Dust Devil?
RS: I spent about 16 years in South Africa. Back in the Apartheid years, the South African government was quite happy to release films into the cinemas that were political like Cry Freedom, World Apart, A Dry White Season. The movies they hated and banned for years were devil movies. They banned The Exorcist and The Omen.
DRE: Wow, I didnt know that.
RS: When the cheesy movie Frankenstein the Monster from Hell was released, they actually took the words from Hell out of the title. So it just said Frankenstein the Monster with a black glitch next to it. Missionary cultures are more afraid of the devil and the superstitious aspects of the fall of white culture than the actual political side that was in power. I thought these people deserved their very own devil. I figured if the devil was going to come to Africa, the devil would have to be American and he would have to be sexy, blonde and blue eyed. He would have to look like Elvis Presley or Jim Morrison or Clint Eastwood.
DRE: What was the film industry in South Africa like at that time?
RS: It was pretty underdeveloped for very good reasons. Theyve got great locations down there and plenty of money, especially in the old days, but for some reason they always failed to reproduce the kind of work they got from Australia. Dust Devil was shot during the Apartheid years with American money, again thanks Harvey and Bob, and was shot entirely over the border in Namibia. Ironically a South African movie was shot with no cooperation with South Africa and with no South African money and with largely Americans playing South Africans.
DRE: What made you cast someone like Robert Burke?
RS: It was because of The Unbelievable Truth [directed by Hal Hartley].
DRE: How was working with Robert Burke?
RS: He was great. I really wish Roberts career had gone further. He is one of the most cooperative men of action Ive ever had to deal with. He was playing a virtually impossible part. To play a mythic archetype is hard for an actor to crawl into sometimes. You have to hit the right level between playing completely straight and camp and he more or less pulled it off.
DRE: How famous is the Dust Devil story in South Africa?
RS: Not entirely, as in the movie, it is like three stories. There was a serial killer in Southern Namibia at the time of the elections. They didnt catch him and it went on for about a year and a half. Then after that there was a shootout and a headless body was turned up and was eventually buried. At the same time there is the vanishing hitchhiker tradition with stories about people picking up hitchhikers who then disappear. It is a global phenomenon. Theres a book called the Vanishing Hitchhiker by some Mormon chappie named Jan Harold Brunvand which is a compilation of some American vanishing hitchhiker stories.
DRE: How did you come up with the look for the Dust Devil in the film?
RS: Once we had locked on the idea of Clint Eastwood, the look followed pretty fast. Clint Eastwood was voted the sexiest man on the planet for more consecutive years than any other actor. The look of the devil had been evolving for a number of years. Clint tried suggesting he was the devil in High Plains Drifter and he changed his mind in Pale Rider and tried to say he was god instead.
DRE: Why have you had so much trouble getting another feature made in the past ten years?
RS: For a number of reasons. Plainly I wasnt telling the right stories. At the time I had failed to perceive the way I was going to make high budget movies with those kinds of messages. I guess Ive become a little bit more realistic about it and I wouldnt even try to get a movie like [The Island of] Dr. Moreau made now. That was plainly just too damn big and Hollywood is never going to allow me to make those kinds of movies on that kind of level, not the way things stand.
DRE: Obviously youre a comic book fan. Are you interested in doing any comic book adaptations?
RS: Id like to go the other way and do more comic books. We did a short comic book of Dust Devil thats with the DVD. I was definitely taken with the idea of getting that guy to do more stuff. Id love to see the Walking Man walk again.
DRE: What comic books do you read now?
RS: Well I dont really read too many lately. Ive been moving around too much. But my life was twisted out of shape by Warren comics. I loved reading those things. I grew up on them and they were great. Another reason I came to hate the Apartheid machine in South Africa was because they banned foreign comics.
DRE: I read that you directed some promo that Dario Argento starred in,.
RS: Yeah that was a piece of fun. It was a favorite assignment.
DRE: Hows his acting?
RS: Well, the guy talks his way through it. It reminds me of William Shatner in the old days. I think he also has some class, Dario Argento reminds me of Uncle Creepy. Hes always had an Uncle Creepy look about him.
DRE: Do you have a feature that you want to try and get going?
RS: Were on the brink of one. I wish it was just a little ways further down the line and I could tell you about cast.
DRE: Is it another horror film?
RS: Oh yeah, I wouldnt do anything else. Not in the near future anyway.
DRE: Do you still do music videos or commercials?
RS: No, I dont do commercials. I try to stay away from them.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
VIEW 7 of 7 COMMENTS
I just got the 5 disc Boxset of DUST DEVIL, and I will tell ya....this director may be forgotten when w go to think of good fliks, as I am still shocked by the amount of fols I meet who have never seen, let alone heard of, HARDWARE.
Again, we are treated to a desolate story in one of the most desolate places, The Outback...The character of The Dust Devil, and the complicate Magick, that I may add is right on the money when it comes to JuJu, especially when something like a gun is seen close to useless.
I have recommended this film, especially the limited Boxset, to all my members of The Abominable Apothecary, and I haven't heard anything but good things from them as well...
Once again, Thanks for the great Interview...