Long talks with movie folks
Penelope Spheeris
TEAR THE FUCKER DOWN!
“The first thing I heard was a woman who stood up and started yelling at me: How dare you glorify these heathens! I was really used to having my mother scream at me, but to have this stranger scream at me in front of all these people, I felt very belittled on stage. Even though I had my punk rock boots on, I didn’t have an answer for her. I should have said: Fuck you, lady!”
Fred Dekker
MAKE THIS MOVIE INTERESTING
“A lot of movies feel leaden to me, because they tell you what they’re gonna be and then they are that and then they tell you what they just showed you. I like it when a movie surprises me. But it is a hard juggling act. I walked into my movies being completely naive about how hard it is to have all these things in them and still have a consistent tone.”
Rae Dawn Chong
I’M IN THIS SKIN
“Some of the best films are made by people you wouldn’t even want to have a meal with. Hateful men, but they can have a pure vision. It takes a lot of I-don’t-care-what-you-think-of-me to become a really good director. Now that I’m almost sixty, I look around and I think: Oh my God, there are so many things I would rather do.”
William Friedkin
FASCINATING BEYOND BELIEF
”I think they’re shit! Okay, most of them anyway. Based on comic books and video games… It’s stuff for kids! When I grew up there were films for kids and films for adults. Now the adult films are comic books and video games!”
Caroline Munro
WONDERFUL!
”I was asked to go the Los Angeles premiere as well, but when I heard all the women’s groups were up in arms against the film, I thought: No way! I chickened out. I have only seen the film once and a half and that’s enough for me.”
David Morrell
KILLER INSTINCT
“The big deal in the beginning is when Rambo asks Trautman: Do we get to win this time? That line overshadowed everything. Together with Rambo’s speech in the end, where he talks about making sacrifices for your country, those two bookends caused some people, including Ronald Reagan, to ignore all the stuff in the middle where the United States has been deceitful.”
Jack Sholder
WHERE FATE HAS TAKEN ME
“I remember, it was in the spring and they were showing trailers of the upcoming summer movies, like the BATMAN sequel and a bunch of other high profile films. The audience is cheering and going crazy. Then they show the trailer for RENEGADES and it’s pretty quiet. At that point I knew I was in trouble.”
John Irvin
WHEN IT COMES TO WAR
“When I got back from Vietnam I went to a party at Life Magazine and they were talking about the casualties in terms of baseball scores. I freaked out. That’s when I decided to quit making documentaries, which was an overreaction, because obviously I could have made documentaries on many other topics besides the moral sink that was Vietnam.”
Franco Nero
AGAIN, NO SCRIPT!
“We invented Italian westerns. Our photography was the best in the world. We had great directors. I managed to work with the top of the Italian directors at that time. The sixties were the best period for Italian cinema, I think. Still, today, all over the world they know DJANGO.”
David Cronenberg
SOME PLACE REALLY DEEP
”I don’t think I’ve ever been obsessed. I don’t think of myself that way at all. In fact, you can’t really make a film like A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE without investing a lot of your personal passion in it. Think of the sex scenes in that movie, or the scenes with violence, the way I constructed those scenes is very personal, as much as anything else I’ve made.”
Craig Wasson
A LESS THAN PERFECT GUY
“I remember going to the premiere. Lot of big shots were there. I brought my girlfriend. My agent was sitting behind me. At first people were responding positively and I leaned over to my girlfriend, saying: I think it’s going well. But after it was over, there was no applause. Just this sort of hush. I thought: Oh, man, that’s not good.”
Ken Foree
SUCH A DEEP SCAR
“It goes back to that first guy who called me the n-word. To this day I cringe when I hear that word, even when it’s said by my own people. I just cringe. Because I’m still that kid who wants to pick up that brick. I’ll never get over it.”
Sarah Kernochan
BOUNCING AROUND AGAIN
“There were no opportunities for me whatever as a director. I didn’t even have any role models in movies, because there were no women directors back then. No one. There were female producers, few and far between. Some editors. Otherwise it was a very closed club. It didn’t upset me very much, because my ambition had never been to become a director, especially one of documentaries.”
John Waters
THINGS THAT SHOULD BE ILLEGAL
“In 1972, when PINK PLAMINGOS came out, DEEP THROAT had become legal. That was a huge thing. It sort of ended underground movies, because you could show anything. So, I was asking myself: What can’t I do? What is illegal still? What would shock hippies? And the stuff I came up with… Who would do that today?”
Tobe Hooper (2)
THINGS THAT COULD HAVE BEEN
“Looking back, it’s one of those strange films, where you wonder how it ever got made. You don’t know why it exists, like SHOWGIRLS, which I liked a lot. Taking chances is cool, but it may not be smart. Those were cool times. Life was cool. What can I say?”
James Glickenhaus
OUT OF CONTROL
”I don’t think anyone will ever shoot a scene like I did in SHAKEDOWN, where we shut down 42nd Street between Broadway and 8th, for three nights in a row! We shot from midnight ‘till four in the morning and staged real stunts there. That just doesn’t happen anymore. And I miss it. I do miss it.”
Ingrid Pitt
I DON’T LIKE TO PLAY VICTIMS
”I got hooked on nude scenes, because they would always bring you hot water, brandy, champagne, whatever you needed to feel comfortable. They’re always so afraid that you’ll change your mind. That the silly cow suddenly doesn’t want to do it and jumps back in her clothes.”
Umberto Lenzi
A BUTCHER’S JOB
“Look, there’s too many people around who see film just like merchandise. As if you buy a loaf of bread. So when the Italian producer sold the movie, the new owners thought they could do with it what they wanted. That happened to Rossellini and Antonioni as well. You can’t defend yourself. I don’t want to talk about it anymore, capice?”
Margot Kidder
A BIT OF A DISASTER
“We were supposed to film SUPERMAN and SUPERMAN II at the same time. They filmed almost all of it, except for maybe three or four scenes. And then the first one came out and it made a ton of money. The Salkinds didn’t want to pay Richard Donner the percentage that they owed him. And they only had to pay him if he finished SUPERMAN II. So they fired him. And it broke his heart.”
Steve Carver
DANGEROUS AS ALL HELL
“We couldn’t use any of our own special effects people, because of South African rules, and the people we worked with used nitro-glycerin and black powder. Everything that blew up was done with nitro-glycerin, which is very deadly and explosive. Must I go on? We were lucky that no one was killed.”
Photo by Jan Willem Steenmeijer
Lloyd Kaufman
ANYTHING I SO DESIRE
“I’m not going to forget that Elia Kazan named names. They give him an award! Someone here at the festival said to me they were upset that Kazan had to fly coach to come to a festival in Europe. He should have been made to swim! He shouldn’t even have been invited. He’s a disgrace to humanity.”
Ernesto Gastaldi
DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES
“I don't know why, but after Steven Spielberg had told Leone that his best movie was MY NAME IS NOBODY, which he did NOT direct, people started spreading ridiculous rumors about who actually directed that movie. The film was shot entirely by Valerii, with the exception of a few simple scenes in Spain that were shot by Sergio with a second unit crew.”
Photo by Jean Aretz
David Carradine
BACK IN THE BIG TIME
”How are you going to feel when you’re playing this part? Are you going to feel bad for two and a half months? Playing a part you don’t like, in a movie you don’t like? It’s kind of destructive. If it’s a movie I wouldn’t want to see, I’m not going to make it.”
John Douglas
THIS GUY WAS OUT OF HIS MIND!
"We were so stressed out. And here we get word from higher up that there’s this movie director called Jonathan Demme who wants to come down here and do this movie with Jodie Foster. And I say: Damn, we don’t have time for this crap!”
Photo by Jean Aretz
Fred Williamson
LOOK AT THE HAMMER, MAN!
”What did the NAACP do? They gave the producer an award! How the hell are you giving the producers of MANDINGO an award? They just didn’t get it, man. Their heart was not in the right place. It was all lip service.”
Ian Sharp
COWBOYS AND INDIANS
“In Britain they couldn’t see past the politics. I always suffered for that. I was offered HIGHLANDER and it was between me and Russell Mulcahy, who’s a very gifted director. The American producer wanted me, but on the British side they said I was a right-wing fascist. I know that for a fact because the American producer told me.”
John Carpenter
FUCK ‘EM, I DON’T CARE
”I don’t have a magic wand here. I can’t wave it and say: I’m gonna do this now! It’s the reality of the movie business. Sometimes you take the first offer that looks good to you; sometimes you wait for something better. It depends on your age, it depends on your career.”
Photo by Jean Aretz
Ronny Yu
RUNNING OUT OF TIME
"First day, I thought: we should have all of the cast there. Right? Everyone was there. And then the cameraman, rather than help me, put me on the spot. He said: Okay, Mr. Director, where do you want the camera? He knew immediately: This kid knows nothing.”
Photo by Jan Willem Steenmeijer
Jeff Lieberman
I WAS A WUNDERKIND
“People make mistakes and I made a really big one. I was just so frustrated that I had made these movies that I thought were really good and they were handled so badly in distribution. Even though I got paid, it was still a real letdown when nobody sees the film. So, after JUST BEFORE DAWN, I said: Fuck it, I’m not going to do another independent film.”
Dwight Little
TO CONTROL THE FRAME
”There’s this crazy ending where Edward Albert is on top of the building, trying to diffuse the bomb, and Joe Don Baker is shooting at him from the helicopter. They were flying that thing thirty feet away from the tower! You could never shoot something like that today, not in a million years. That whole movie was a vanity project for these guys.”
Photo by Jan-Willem Steenmeijer
Ray Harryhausen
IT HAD TO BE IMPRESSIVE
"CGI is so overused. When I started out with THE BEAST FROM 20.000 FATHOMS, the unusual visual image was impressive because you seldom saw them on the screen. Now, in a 30 second commercial you see the most amazing things. So, nobody’s amazed anymore.”
Roger Corman (2)
I WILL MAKE THE PICTURE
“It occurred to me we had all this equipment in that microbus and a small crew of four or five people. You could take those four or five people and the microbus and shoot another picture. Actually, it was the best group of assistants I ever had. The number one assistant was Francis Coppola, number two was Bob Towne who would go on to write CHINATOWN, number three was Mehahem Golan who would later form Cannon Films.”
Scott Glenn
WHEN THE PART PLAYS YOU
“At one point I did not understand Jackson Pollock. He could sit down and look at you, draw you and hand you the picture and it would look like a photograph. He was technically that good. He wound up climbing a ladder with buckets of paint and dripping them down on the canvas. But – excuse my French – he knew what the fuck he was doing. I’m scratching the surface of that.”