Masters of Horror: The Screwfly Solution is Joe Dantes best film yet. Thats high praise for the man who has directed such classics as Gremlins 2, The Howling and last seasons gem Homecoming. But it is not hyperbole. Learning from his days working on B-movies to the heights of the studio system, Dante was able to take the tiny budget that he was given and turn out some smart science fiction. The Screwfly Solution was adapted into a screenplay by Sam Hamm and it is about a world where an airborne disease is turning all the men into mass murdering religious fanatics. Someones plan was to wipe out the human race by having all the men kill all the women. One scientist may hold the key to a cure but first he must resist killing his wife and daughter. Now The Screwfly Solution is being released on DVD loaded with special features.
I got a chance to talk with legendary Dante from his office in California.
Buy The Screwfly Solution
Daniel Robert Epstein: There is a lot of anger in both episodes of Masters of Horror youve directed. Is that something that you were conscious of?
Joe Dante: Yeah because I am. Theres a little bit of anger in Small Soldiers but most of my stuff is fairly whimsical. When the Masters of Horror thing first came up it seemed to be an opportunity to do stuff that I wouldnt be able to do in any other venue. Originally I tried to get the rights to The Screwfly Solution for my first Masters of Horror but the rights werent available. Sam Hamm, the writer, and I were noticing that as the situation in Iraq and the country deteriorated, nobody seemed to be doing anything about it dramatically. Nobody was doing even any symbolic representations of what was going on and we figured, Well this opportunity isnt going to come along again. Here weve got a show where you can do whatever you want as long as you do it in ten days for not much money and nobodys looking over your shoulder. Youre not going to go with test groups or have sponsors telling you what you cant do. We figured it was an opportunity to make a blatant statement. Yeah we were angry and Im still angry about whats going on in the administration and how incredibly arrogant and stupid and incompetent they are. After [Hurricane] Katrina I think people started to wake up to the fact that these people were a disaster and now all the things they were trying to do behind the scenes are now coming to the fore. People are starting to pick up on the fact, that not only are they trying to do bad things but theyre incredibly incompetent at it.
DRE: If I had to guess, I would say youre liberal even though some of the things that youve been doing lately seems to be anti whats going on now. That doesnt make somebody necessarily a liberal.
Joe: I come from a liberal tradition but Im conservative on some things. I think the true conservatives have woken up to see that this is not exactly the party that they have bought into. These people are radicals. Theyre trying to change the basic tenets of the government and basically eliminate the New Deal and go back to when Hoover was present. I think patriotic people feel that the country stands for certain things and when those things start to get trampled and done behind closed doors and behind peoples backs, I think people on both sides of the aisle are right to get up in arms.
DRE: I know that youre a science fiction buff, but had you known of Alice Sheldons work?
Joe: I read The Screwfly Solution when it came out in the 70s under the name James Tiptree. I didnt know Alice Sheldon was James Tiptree. I thought it was terrific and unusual story. I was working with Roger Corman at the time and I thought it could be an exploitative movie but it was a little big for the kind of movies we were making then. I wasnt famous or well-known enough to get that off the ground but I did always keep it in the back of my head. When this series came around I thought Well maybe we can do something with it. Oddly enough, in the intervening years, none of her works had been adapted for film or television. That may be one of the reasons it was hard to get the rights when we tried to originally. Theres a biography out about her called James Tiptree Jr. the double life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Phillips and I found that she was a fascinating character and her stories are eminently filmable. They really come at the whole science fiction thing from a slightly skewed perspective. Id like to do some other stories of hers.
DRE: Do you think your movie is something of a feminist statement?
Joe: I like to think of it more as a humanist statement. She definitely was a feminist writer. It was interesting how convinced her colleagues were that she was a man. It just seemed to go right over their heads. Everybody was shocked when they found out that this was not James Tiptree, the lumberjack writer [laughs]. That this was actually this very lovely woman who had a lot of tragedy in her life and that is probably one of the reasons that she wrote the things that she did.
DRE: Was the religious subtext in your film in the original story?
Joe: Yes, its a pretty faithful adaptation in spite the fact that the original story takes place in a South American country. We shot in Vancouver, which looks like Vancouver. To be able to even suggest other locations and locales is extremely difficult. I thought the religious aspect of it was quite interesting and germane to the story.
DRE: Yeah, it was pretty terrifying how close it was.
Your films have always included little nods to many, many different things but its hard to tell whether youre making a comment on the [Takashi] Miike film [Imprint] or if you put it in there because it was easy to get the rights or just because it was good imagery?
Joe: [laughs] There are very few of those fun bits in Screwfly because it just didnt seem to be appropriate. But there are a lot of levels to that kind of thing. For one thing, the Miike film was not allowed to be shown on Showtime. So theres the perverse thrill of getting even a couple of seconds of it on Showtime. That was fun. Have you seen Imprint?
DRE: Oh yes, Ive seen a lot of Miikes work.
Joe: I was just imagining being the sound mixers at the dub and having to watch it over and over again. Of course it is beautifully filmed. The guy is an artist. But I defy anybody to watch the entire film and not have to look away at least once [laughs].
DRE: It is rough.
With Screwfly it seems like you were really taking a stand against violence against women in the media and violence against women in everything.
Joe: Yes but its not so much a stand, its just an examination because it is pervasive. We now have a whole new subgenre of what I think is Abu Ghraib inspired horror-torture movie. Many of the victims, if not most of them, are women. Its a very interesting phenomenon. I wont say that the movies themselves are without merit because thats not fair but I do think that its a dead end. I remember when Scanners [directed by David Cronenberg] and The Fury came out, they had many different ways of disposing of the human body, blowing it up and everything. I thought that was a genre that was going to be short lived because how many things can you do to the human body? Here we are 25 years later and were still doing terrible things to the human body and figuring out new ways to show it. Of course, with the advent of CGI, you could do things you could never even imagine doing in the early 80s. As a cottage industry the destruction of the human body is probably going to go on for some time but as far as who the victims are and why these things happen to them, thats all up for grabs depending on what era youre in.
DRE: Its interesting because most horror geeks, when you come right down to it, are men.
Joe: Yeah, its basically male dominated. The female part of it comes in with the date movie aspect of it rears its head. Young guys want to bring their girlfriends so theyll scream and grab their arms and all that stuff. But now theres a new wrinkle with The Ring and The Others. We have this female driven horror film. Thats an interesting new phenomenon which I think is a comment on the male dominated horror films because the female ones are a little different.
DRE: My point was that part of the definition of a geek is that they dont have a lot of luck with women. Im not saying that applies to every horror fan. But I think theres an anger there. It is a release for them to see women get hurt. Do you think Im saying anything valid?
Joe: Im sure theres an element of that.
DRE: Speaking of torture porn, Ive spoken to [Darren Lynn Bousman] the director of Saw II and Saw III. I asked him Do you think these movies are scary? He said he doesnt think theyre scary, he thinks theyre mostly gross and disturbing.
Joe: I think thats true. I think the idea of actually scaring people has gone out of fashion. The way that people used to get scared was to have things left to the imagination and none of these current movies leave anything to the imagination anymore. It becomes an interesting experience in grossness. You can still startle people throwing something into the frame or doing a really loud music cue. But as far as actually giving them something to be afraid of, that all has to come from inside the viewer and movies dont like to give people credit for that anymore.
DRE: Did doing these Masters of Horror episodes take you back to those Corman days?
Joe: Yeah, it was weird because when I was doing Homecoming, I thought, Here I am making a ten day movie for no money and my first movie was a ten day movie for no money. Ive come full circle, maybe I should retire. [laughs]
DRE: Your most mature work seems to come out on television like this and The Second Civil War.
Joe: Everybodys more mature work comes out on television now. The movies that used to be made in the 70s as mainstream movies are all now made for television. The audience target now is under 19. When All the Kings Men flopped last year, that was the death knell of the classy literary adaptation. Youre just not going to see many of those except maybe from Britain. For the most part that kind of film has gone to HBO, to Showtime, to FX and the other cable companies because thats where the adults are. The Second Civil War was filmed for HBO but it was released overseas as a feature.
DRE: How did it do?
Joe: Its very popular overseas. Its a better movie now than when it was made. It has proven rather prophetic.
DRE: I read that you didnt have a particularly bad childhood.
Joe: I had a great childhood. I spent the entire time at the movies. I had polio and other bad things happened to me but I was pretty happy.
DRE: It seems to me that kids today see too many movies.
Joe: Its also so much different. When I was a kid, there were the movies at the movie theater which you saw on a Saturday afternoon and if your parents brought you to something at night. Then there were the two channels, the networks and the local stations, they would run old movies. There were always movies on, but you never knew when they were going to be on and if you didnt watch them when they were on, you were probably going to have to wait another year for them to run again. Sometimes the movies that youd see in the theaters didnt go to TV for five years.
DRE: Wow.
Joe: It wasnt like today where you can go to the video store and pick up anything you want or go to Netflix or turn on HBO. What I think kids are missing today is this tremendous panoply of earlier films that we had. We could watch silent movies, 30s movies, 40s movies. All those pictures were available to us. Now most kids arent exposed to any of those kinds of movies. All the movies that they see are the movies that were made within the last five years.
DRE: Because there are so many of them.
Joe: Yeah, because there are so many of them. The stars of yesteryear, even as recent as Chevy Chase, kids today dont know who he was. They dont know who Humphrey Bogart was, but they also dont know who John Candy was. All that fame stuff comes and goes much faster. People of my generation have this really great history of films to draw on and were very literate about film. Unless you go to film school where they force feed you black and white movies from the 40s, most people dont know about it and that includes emerging filmmakers, unfortunately. On the other hand youve got somebody like Martin Scorsese who goes out of his way to try to educate people and do documentaries to make sure people know about the things in the past and appreciate them. That education is really important because so many of the greatest movies were made between 1930 and 1970.
DRE: Like you, I am a huge Warner Bros cartoons fan. But do you think they should just stop doing new stuff with the Bugs Bunny cast of characters?
Joe: Frankly, that would be okay with me. That era was over in 1960. The theatrical cartoons that they produced after 1960, which I remember having to suffer through at the movies, were just abominable. They werent funny, they were badly animated, they were sub-television level and almost everything theyve done since is just a pale shadow of what the great cartoons were. I can tell you from experience that the people currently running Warner Bros have no interest or understanding of that period or those characters. I was making a movie for them with those characters [Looney Tunes: Back in Action] and they did not want to know about those characters. They didnt want to know why Bugs Bunny shouldnt do hip-hop. It was a pretty grim experience all around.
DRE: I did read about an old project of yours that never came to fruition about the animators at Warner Bros called Termite Terrace.
Joe: Yeah, they made Space Jam instead. Termite Terrace was a comedy but it was about Chuck Jones early years at Warner Bros in the 30s. Back when the unit was actually part of the lot with movie stars and stuff. It was a hilarious story and it was very good except that Warner Bros said Look, its an old story. Its got period stuff in it. We dont want that. We want to rebrand our characters and we want to do Space Jam. So they went and did Space Jam and Termite Terrace is just sitting in a vault somewhere and it will never get made.
DRE: Make it for HBO, its owned by Warner Bros.
Joe: No, youd be surprised. When it comes to those characters, they have people who are elected custodians. They have to sign off on every single use of the characters. Theyre very protective of what they think of as a money making brand. But theres a lesson there and the lesson is, you dont develop a script based on characters you dont own.
DRE: The big gross rabbit in your Twilight Zone segment scared the hell out of me. My wife cant even watch that segment when its on TV. What was the inspiration for the big gross rabbit?
Joe: [laughs] I dont even remember anymore. All I know is that there was a situation where George Miller and I were on our first studio pictures, as episodes of this movie. There had been the controversy of the accident earlier on, which wasnt even part of our unit, so the studio kept a completely hands off attitude about it because they didnt know if they wanted to be associated with it. So we got the mistaken impression that all you have to do to work for a big studio was show up on these big soundstages with all these technicians and do whatever you want [laughs]. We discovered quickly, when we did our next pictures that wasnt the way it worked. They actually very closely supervised what you were doing.
DRE: Is there an Iraq parallel in a third Gremlins movie?
Joe: Well, the whole idea of the inevitable third Gremlins movie is that the first ones were completely defined by limitations in the technology. Whatever we could get them to do, thats what we wrote and thats what we did. Now with CGI they can do anything, they can be anything, they can go anywhere. I have trouble figuring out what the handle would be to do another one of those. I would assume they would either do a straight remake with new characters. Im sure they would never do another sequel. My guess is that it would be made for video.
DRE: Would you be interested in being involved with any of the remakes they are doing of your movies?
Joe: I think its just usually better for people to do a new take on it. A lot of the movies that we love the best, like The Wizard of Oz and The Maltese Falcon, were remakes so you never know which one of the remakes is going to be the one that becomes a classic so my feeling is to just let people run with it.
DRE: You havent made a straight up horror film since The Howling, are you still interested in that kind of stuff anymore?
Joe: I would do one, but the ones I get offered are just splatter fests. Im really not interested in redoing what people have done before, well, everything I do is what people have done before but I like to try to put it in a different context.
DRE: Are you offered anything feature-wise thats appropriate for you?
Joe: Sure, sometimes you get offered things that dont happen. Very often you get involved in a movie and then theres no financing or they cant get a star. Getting movies made is much more difficult these days than it used to be partly because they cost so much and so much of the financing doesnt come from any one source. It comes from different countries and they all want to know whos in the movie. A person who is a star in Japan might be somebody who was a star here five years ago and now isnt. So all of the elements that you have to put together in order to get a film made on your own are pretty tough. I have things that Ive been pursuing and some of them Ive been pursuing for a while. But the things that come up the transom are usually studio pictures. Pictures that somebody wants to make for one reason or another or as a vehicle for somebody and for the most part theyre not really that interesting.
DRE: Are you okay with not having made a feature film that youve been happy with for a while?
Joe: Well just making a feature film is a big event now. Everything Ive done up to Second Civil War I have been very happy with. On Second Civil War there were some fights with HBO that led to some changes that I wasnt that crazy about, although in retrospect it seems to me that the movie is okay. But Small Soldiers was a difficult picture to make because of interference from the studio. Ever since then all of the theatrical experiences that Ive had have all been fairly difficult but I think if you talk to any director they will tell you the same thing.
DRE: Is that because you dont have the power?
Joe: No, its because none of us has the power unless weve just had a gigantic hit. They dont like to cede power to the directors anymore. That era is over, it is now the era of the studio. Just pick a director at random out of DGA book and call them up and ask them what their experience was on the last picture and I guarantee they will tell you it was difficult.
DRE: Any news on the third season of Masters of Horror?
Joe: We dont know. Thereve been some changes in the setup of the show. By this time last year they were already shooting. When I talked to Mick Garris he sounded upbeat about the possibility of there being another season but I havent heard anything for sure.
DRE: Would it be you and Sam working together again?
Joe: I would certainly go to Sam first.
DRE: Where did the two of you meet?
Joe: He hates when I tell people this but we did a 3D film for Busch Gardens called The Haunted Lighthouse. It is one of those movies that they play at theme parks and they throw water at you. It was in 70mm 3D which I found challenging and interesting so thats why I did it. I dont think they run credits on those things so once youve done them its usually a secret unless you tell people.
DRE: Im amazed that they got guys like you and Sam to do it.
Joe: Well, its because it was like, Gosh, Ive never done this before. This looks like it would be fun to do.
DRE: What else do you do besides making films and trying to make films?
Joe: Mostly watch films [laughs]. I would love to say Id invented the artificial heart but unfortunately I havent.
DRE: Do you collect prints?
Joe: Yeah, Ive collected prints since I was in college.
DRE: What have you gotten lately?
Joe: I just bought a 35mm print of Frankenstein Created Woman. I got it from England so it is Technicolor because all the American prints have faded
DRE: Do you meet weird collectors like in John Carpenters Cigarette Burns?
Joe: I find that film collectors tend to not be quite as dark in person as they turn out to be in the media. [laughs] Certainly the FBI tends to make them out to be dark. But the funny thing is, in the 70s there was this huge attempt in Hollywood to arrest film collectors for having supposedly illegal prints. One of the people arrested was Roddy McDowall who had been given all his prints by [20th Century Fox founder] Darryl Zanuck. There were a lot of people who collected films like Rock Hudson, Mel Torm and they collected films because they were film buffs. The MPAA tried to make a big deal out of it. Flash forward, now weve got the video revolution and DVDs are coming out and suddenly studios are looking in their vaults and saying, Hey, we dont have that missing reel of A Star Is Born. Where the hell did that go? Well, where do they end up finding it? A collector. So they had to change their attitude about film collectors because if it wasnt for film collectors a good portion of film history would be on the scrap heap. These people never gave a shit about any of this stuff and thats because they didnt think it could make them any money. Now every old movie has to come out with missing scenes and alternate endings so those things are worth their weight in gold. Obviously preservation has come to the fore and again people like Martin Scorsese are getting the studios to get their act together and make sure they protect their negatives and all that stuff. But 20 or 30 years ago that wasnt the case. I think film collecting is a noble profession.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
I got a chance to talk with legendary Dante from his office in California.
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Daniel Robert Epstein: There is a lot of anger in both episodes of Masters of Horror youve directed. Is that something that you were conscious of?
Joe Dante: Yeah because I am. Theres a little bit of anger in Small Soldiers but most of my stuff is fairly whimsical. When the Masters of Horror thing first came up it seemed to be an opportunity to do stuff that I wouldnt be able to do in any other venue. Originally I tried to get the rights to The Screwfly Solution for my first Masters of Horror but the rights werent available. Sam Hamm, the writer, and I were noticing that as the situation in Iraq and the country deteriorated, nobody seemed to be doing anything about it dramatically. Nobody was doing even any symbolic representations of what was going on and we figured, Well this opportunity isnt going to come along again. Here weve got a show where you can do whatever you want as long as you do it in ten days for not much money and nobodys looking over your shoulder. Youre not going to go with test groups or have sponsors telling you what you cant do. We figured it was an opportunity to make a blatant statement. Yeah we were angry and Im still angry about whats going on in the administration and how incredibly arrogant and stupid and incompetent they are. After [Hurricane] Katrina I think people started to wake up to the fact that these people were a disaster and now all the things they were trying to do behind the scenes are now coming to the fore. People are starting to pick up on the fact, that not only are they trying to do bad things but theyre incredibly incompetent at it.
DRE: If I had to guess, I would say youre liberal even though some of the things that youve been doing lately seems to be anti whats going on now. That doesnt make somebody necessarily a liberal.
Joe: I come from a liberal tradition but Im conservative on some things. I think the true conservatives have woken up to see that this is not exactly the party that they have bought into. These people are radicals. Theyre trying to change the basic tenets of the government and basically eliminate the New Deal and go back to when Hoover was present. I think patriotic people feel that the country stands for certain things and when those things start to get trampled and done behind closed doors and behind peoples backs, I think people on both sides of the aisle are right to get up in arms.
DRE: I know that youre a science fiction buff, but had you known of Alice Sheldons work?
Joe: I read The Screwfly Solution when it came out in the 70s under the name James Tiptree. I didnt know Alice Sheldon was James Tiptree. I thought it was terrific and unusual story. I was working with Roger Corman at the time and I thought it could be an exploitative movie but it was a little big for the kind of movies we were making then. I wasnt famous or well-known enough to get that off the ground but I did always keep it in the back of my head. When this series came around I thought Well maybe we can do something with it. Oddly enough, in the intervening years, none of her works had been adapted for film or television. That may be one of the reasons it was hard to get the rights when we tried to originally. Theres a biography out about her called James Tiptree Jr. the double life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Phillips and I found that she was a fascinating character and her stories are eminently filmable. They really come at the whole science fiction thing from a slightly skewed perspective. Id like to do some other stories of hers.
DRE: Do you think your movie is something of a feminist statement?
Joe: I like to think of it more as a humanist statement. She definitely was a feminist writer. It was interesting how convinced her colleagues were that she was a man. It just seemed to go right over their heads. Everybody was shocked when they found out that this was not James Tiptree, the lumberjack writer [laughs]. That this was actually this very lovely woman who had a lot of tragedy in her life and that is probably one of the reasons that she wrote the things that she did.
DRE: Was the religious subtext in your film in the original story?
Joe: Yes, its a pretty faithful adaptation in spite the fact that the original story takes place in a South American country. We shot in Vancouver, which looks like Vancouver. To be able to even suggest other locations and locales is extremely difficult. I thought the religious aspect of it was quite interesting and germane to the story.
DRE: Yeah, it was pretty terrifying how close it was.
Your films have always included little nods to many, many different things but its hard to tell whether youre making a comment on the [Takashi] Miike film [Imprint] or if you put it in there because it was easy to get the rights or just because it was good imagery?
Joe: [laughs] There are very few of those fun bits in Screwfly because it just didnt seem to be appropriate. But there are a lot of levels to that kind of thing. For one thing, the Miike film was not allowed to be shown on Showtime. So theres the perverse thrill of getting even a couple of seconds of it on Showtime. That was fun. Have you seen Imprint?
DRE: Oh yes, Ive seen a lot of Miikes work.
Joe: I was just imagining being the sound mixers at the dub and having to watch it over and over again. Of course it is beautifully filmed. The guy is an artist. But I defy anybody to watch the entire film and not have to look away at least once [laughs].
DRE: It is rough.
With Screwfly it seems like you were really taking a stand against violence against women in the media and violence against women in everything.
Joe: Yes but its not so much a stand, its just an examination because it is pervasive. We now have a whole new subgenre of what I think is Abu Ghraib inspired horror-torture movie. Many of the victims, if not most of them, are women. Its a very interesting phenomenon. I wont say that the movies themselves are without merit because thats not fair but I do think that its a dead end. I remember when Scanners [directed by David Cronenberg] and The Fury came out, they had many different ways of disposing of the human body, blowing it up and everything. I thought that was a genre that was going to be short lived because how many things can you do to the human body? Here we are 25 years later and were still doing terrible things to the human body and figuring out new ways to show it. Of course, with the advent of CGI, you could do things you could never even imagine doing in the early 80s. As a cottage industry the destruction of the human body is probably going to go on for some time but as far as who the victims are and why these things happen to them, thats all up for grabs depending on what era youre in.
DRE: Its interesting because most horror geeks, when you come right down to it, are men.
Joe: Yeah, its basically male dominated. The female part of it comes in with the date movie aspect of it rears its head. Young guys want to bring their girlfriends so theyll scream and grab their arms and all that stuff. But now theres a new wrinkle with The Ring and The Others. We have this female driven horror film. Thats an interesting new phenomenon which I think is a comment on the male dominated horror films because the female ones are a little different.
DRE: My point was that part of the definition of a geek is that they dont have a lot of luck with women. Im not saying that applies to every horror fan. But I think theres an anger there. It is a release for them to see women get hurt. Do you think Im saying anything valid?
Joe: Im sure theres an element of that.
DRE: Speaking of torture porn, Ive spoken to [Darren Lynn Bousman] the director of Saw II and Saw III. I asked him Do you think these movies are scary? He said he doesnt think theyre scary, he thinks theyre mostly gross and disturbing.
Joe: I think thats true. I think the idea of actually scaring people has gone out of fashion. The way that people used to get scared was to have things left to the imagination and none of these current movies leave anything to the imagination anymore. It becomes an interesting experience in grossness. You can still startle people throwing something into the frame or doing a really loud music cue. But as far as actually giving them something to be afraid of, that all has to come from inside the viewer and movies dont like to give people credit for that anymore.
DRE: Did doing these Masters of Horror episodes take you back to those Corman days?
Joe: Yeah, it was weird because when I was doing Homecoming, I thought, Here I am making a ten day movie for no money and my first movie was a ten day movie for no money. Ive come full circle, maybe I should retire. [laughs]
DRE: Your most mature work seems to come out on television like this and The Second Civil War.
Joe: Everybodys more mature work comes out on television now. The movies that used to be made in the 70s as mainstream movies are all now made for television. The audience target now is under 19. When All the Kings Men flopped last year, that was the death knell of the classy literary adaptation. Youre just not going to see many of those except maybe from Britain. For the most part that kind of film has gone to HBO, to Showtime, to FX and the other cable companies because thats where the adults are. The Second Civil War was filmed for HBO but it was released overseas as a feature.
DRE: How did it do?
Joe: Its very popular overseas. Its a better movie now than when it was made. It has proven rather prophetic.
DRE: I read that you didnt have a particularly bad childhood.
Joe: I had a great childhood. I spent the entire time at the movies. I had polio and other bad things happened to me but I was pretty happy.
DRE: It seems to me that kids today see too many movies.
Joe: Its also so much different. When I was a kid, there were the movies at the movie theater which you saw on a Saturday afternoon and if your parents brought you to something at night. Then there were the two channels, the networks and the local stations, they would run old movies. There were always movies on, but you never knew when they were going to be on and if you didnt watch them when they were on, you were probably going to have to wait another year for them to run again. Sometimes the movies that youd see in the theaters didnt go to TV for five years.
DRE: Wow.
Joe: It wasnt like today where you can go to the video store and pick up anything you want or go to Netflix or turn on HBO. What I think kids are missing today is this tremendous panoply of earlier films that we had. We could watch silent movies, 30s movies, 40s movies. All those pictures were available to us. Now most kids arent exposed to any of those kinds of movies. All the movies that they see are the movies that were made within the last five years.
DRE: Because there are so many of them.
Joe: Yeah, because there are so many of them. The stars of yesteryear, even as recent as Chevy Chase, kids today dont know who he was. They dont know who Humphrey Bogart was, but they also dont know who John Candy was. All that fame stuff comes and goes much faster. People of my generation have this really great history of films to draw on and were very literate about film. Unless you go to film school where they force feed you black and white movies from the 40s, most people dont know about it and that includes emerging filmmakers, unfortunately. On the other hand youve got somebody like Martin Scorsese who goes out of his way to try to educate people and do documentaries to make sure people know about the things in the past and appreciate them. That education is really important because so many of the greatest movies were made between 1930 and 1970.
DRE: Like you, I am a huge Warner Bros cartoons fan. But do you think they should just stop doing new stuff with the Bugs Bunny cast of characters?
Joe: Frankly, that would be okay with me. That era was over in 1960. The theatrical cartoons that they produced after 1960, which I remember having to suffer through at the movies, were just abominable. They werent funny, they were badly animated, they were sub-television level and almost everything theyve done since is just a pale shadow of what the great cartoons were. I can tell you from experience that the people currently running Warner Bros have no interest or understanding of that period or those characters. I was making a movie for them with those characters [Looney Tunes: Back in Action] and they did not want to know about those characters. They didnt want to know why Bugs Bunny shouldnt do hip-hop. It was a pretty grim experience all around.
DRE: I did read about an old project of yours that never came to fruition about the animators at Warner Bros called Termite Terrace.
Joe: Yeah, they made Space Jam instead. Termite Terrace was a comedy but it was about Chuck Jones early years at Warner Bros in the 30s. Back when the unit was actually part of the lot with movie stars and stuff. It was a hilarious story and it was very good except that Warner Bros said Look, its an old story. Its got period stuff in it. We dont want that. We want to rebrand our characters and we want to do Space Jam. So they went and did Space Jam and Termite Terrace is just sitting in a vault somewhere and it will never get made.
DRE: Make it for HBO, its owned by Warner Bros.
Joe: No, youd be surprised. When it comes to those characters, they have people who are elected custodians. They have to sign off on every single use of the characters. Theyre very protective of what they think of as a money making brand. But theres a lesson there and the lesson is, you dont develop a script based on characters you dont own.
DRE: The big gross rabbit in your Twilight Zone segment scared the hell out of me. My wife cant even watch that segment when its on TV. What was the inspiration for the big gross rabbit?
Joe: [laughs] I dont even remember anymore. All I know is that there was a situation where George Miller and I were on our first studio pictures, as episodes of this movie. There had been the controversy of the accident earlier on, which wasnt even part of our unit, so the studio kept a completely hands off attitude about it because they didnt know if they wanted to be associated with it. So we got the mistaken impression that all you have to do to work for a big studio was show up on these big soundstages with all these technicians and do whatever you want [laughs]. We discovered quickly, when we did our next pictures that wasnt the way it worked. They actually very closely supervised what you were doing.
DRE: Is there an Iraq parallel in a third Gremlins movie?
Joe: Well, the whole idea of the inevitable third Gremlins movie is that the first ones were completely defined by limitations in the technology. Whatever we could get them to do, thats what we wrote and thats what we did. Now with CGI they can do anything, they can be anything, they can go anywhere. I have trouble figuring out what the handle would be to do another one of those. I would assume they would either do a straight remake with new characters. Im sure they would never do another sequel. My guess is that it would be made for video.
DRE: Would you be interested in being involved with any of the remakes they are doing of your movies?
Joe: I think its just usually better for people to do a new take on it. A lot of the movies that we love the best, like The Wizard of Oz and The Maltese Falcon, were remakes so you never know which one of the remakes is going to be the one that becomes a classic so my feeling is to just let people run with it.
DRE: You havent made a straight up horror film since The Howling, are you still interested in that kind of stuff anymore?
Joe: I would do one, but the ones I get offered are just splatter fests. Im really not interested in redoing what people have done before, well, everything I do is what people have done before but I like to try to put it in a different context.
DRE: Are you offered anything feature-wise thats appropriate for you?
Joe: Sure, sometimes you get offered things that dont happen. Very often you get involved in a movie and then theres no financing or they cant get a star. Getting movies made is much more difficult these days than it used to be partly because they cost so much and so much of the financing doesnt come from any one source. It comes from different countries and they all want to know whos in the movie. A person who is a star in Japan might be somebody who was a star here five years ago and now isnt. So all of the elements that you have to put together in order to get a film made on your own are pretty tough. I have things that Ive been pursuing and some of them Ive been pursuing for a while. But the things that come up the transom are usually studio pictures. Pictures that somebody wants to make for one reason or another or as a vehicle for somebody and for the most part theyre not really that interesting.
DRE: Are you okay with not having made a feature film that youve been happy with for a while?
Joe: Well just making a feature film is a big event now. Everything Ive done up to Second Civil War I have been very happy with. On Second Civil War there were some fights with HBO that led to some changes that I wasnt that crazy about, although in retrospect it seems to me that the movie is okay. But Small Soldiers was a difficult picture to make because of interference from the studio. Ever since then all of the theatrical experiences that Ive had have all been fairly difficult but I think if you talk to any director they will tell you the same thing.
DRE: Is that because you dont have the power?
Joe: No, its because none of us has the power unless weve just had a gigantic hit. They dont like to cede power to the directors anymore. That era is over, it is now the era of the studio. Just pick a director at random out of DGA book and call them up and ask them what their experience was on the last picture and I guarantee they will tell you it was difficult.
DRE: Any news on the third season of Masters of Horror?
Joe: We dont know. Thereve been some changes in the setup of the show. By this time last year they were already shooting. When I talked to Mick Garris he sounded upbeat about the possibility of there being another season but I havent heard anything for sure.
DRE: Would it be you and Sam working together again?
Joe: I would certainly go to Sam first.
DRE: Where did the two of you meet?
Joe: He hates when I tell people this but we did a 3D film for Busch Gardens called The Haunted Lighthouse. It is one of those movies that they play at theme parks and they throw water at you. It was in 70mm 3D which I found challenging and interesting so thats why I did it. I dont think they run credits on those things so once youve done them its usually a secret unless you tell people.
DRE: Im amazed that they got guys like you and Sam to do it.
Joe: Well, its because it was like, Gosh, Ive never done this before. This looks like it would be fun to do.
DRE: What else do you do besides making films and trying to make films?
Joe: Mostly watch films [laughs]. I would love to say Id invented the artificial heart but unfortunately I havent.
DRE: Do you collect prints?
Joe: Yeah, Ive collected prints since I was in college.
DRE: What have you gotten lately?
Joe: I just bought a 35mm print of Frankenstein Created Woman. I got it from England so it is Technicolor because all the American prints have faded
DRE: Do you meet weird collectors like in John Carpenters Cigarette Burns?
Joe: I find that film collectors tend to not be quite as dark in person as they turn out to be in the media. [laughs] Certainly the FBI tends to make them out to be dark. But the funny thing is, in the 70s there was this huge attempt in Hollywood to arrest film collectors for having supposedly illegal prints. One of the people arrested was Roddy McDowall who had been given all his prints by [20th Century Fox founder] Darryl Zanuck. There were a lot of people who collected films like Rock Hudson, Mel Torm and they collected films because they were film buffs. The MPAA tried to make a big deal out of it. Flash forward, now weve got the video revolution and DVDs are coming out and suddenly studios are looking in their vaults and saying, Hey, we dont have that missing reel of A Star Is Born. Where the hell did that go? Well, where do they end up finding it? A collector. So they had to change their attitude about film collectors because if it wasnt for film collectors a good portion of film history would be on the scrap heap. These people never gave a shit about any of this stuff and thats because they didnt think it could make them any money. Now every old movie has to come out with missing scenes and alternate endings so those things are worth their weight in gold. Obviously preservation has come to the fore and again people like Martin Scorsese are getting the studios to get their act together and make sure they protect their negatives and all that stuff. But 20 or 30 years ago that wasnt the case. I think film collecting is a noble profession.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
VIEW 6 of 6 COMMENTS
"Homecoming" was genius.
Great Interview!