BLOOD IS CHEAP

Hollywood had Roger Corman, Australia had British-born Brian Trenchard-Smith. An intelligent, erudite and funny movie director who would always try to sneak in a political subtext between the blood, bullets and scantily clad women. The release of Mark Hartley’s documentary NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD: THE WILD, UNTOLD STORY OF OZPLOITATION! sparked a renewed interest in his films, especially THE MAN FROM HONG KONG, TURKEY SHOOT, STUNT ROCK and DEAD-END DRIVE-IN. In March 2009 he was a guest of the Offscreen Film Festival in Brussels, where he shared a lot of stories with Barend de Voogd. If you’re hungry for more, be sure to check out Brian Trenchard-Smith’s autobiography Adventures in the B-Movie Trade, which was released in 2020.

Mark Hartley’s documentary is a big success.

Huge. And deservedly so. It represents ten years of work. When he first contacted me ten years ago, to ask if I would license clips from my films, I said: certainly! He shot a little interview with me, relating to TURKEY SHOOT. Then it took him six years to get to the point where Quentin Tarantino signed on to help in any way he could. Then it still took another three years to get the film made. There was some resistance to financing the film from government film funding bodies, because NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD is inherently critical of some of the decisions they made as to what they would and wouldn’t fund back then. This was not the image that they felt was best for the Australian film industry. Eventually it was funded. And instead of being a dry academic, measured documentary, as retrospectives can be, he turned it into a rockumentary. There are six thousand cuts in one hundred minutes of running time, which is indicative of the enormous amount of energy that’s in the film.

And the documentary re-ignited the interest in your films as well.

Yeah, I was always a guilty pleasure in Australia. But this documentary helps people focus on what my underlying filmmaking personality was.

How would you describe that personality?

A little out there. A little left of center. There’s a sense of irony in my work and also some persistent themes. That might help critics who were dismissive of my work in the past go: Maybe there was something there after all.

You said you treat important themes in a whacky way.

Yes. Yes. Sometimes the best way to sell your message is through humor. Parody, irony, there are a variety of ways of doing that. For example, DEAD END DRIVE-IN is a socio-political allegory of the retro-future. There’s a bit of MAD MAX in it, which is a good commercial hook, but it’s really about how the youth in society are duped into negative values. The drive-in is youth culture. All the negatives aspects of it – violent movies on the screen, music videos in the cafeteria, junk food – are what the consumer society sells to our youth. And then we wonder why they are the way they are.

But the irony is also that you’re a part of that culture.

Absolutely. I’m guilty as charged. I don’t make Shakespeare. But I was also pointing to the ruthless nature of government, how they would incarcerate the most desperate members of society. In this case in a prison of junk values, supplying them with drink and drugs, just to get them out of the way. As opposed to lift them to another level of civilization.

And you deal with issues of racism and xenophobia.

Yes, that was very important to me. Because what would be the next logical step of an amoral, corporatist government? They would marginalize any minority group in society and find a way of putting them behind barbed wire.

Racism was already a theme in THE MAN FROM HONG KONG.

In that movie I wanted to reverse the old stereotypes. Generally, these movies would have a white guy who’d go to Asia and punch out all these excellent Asian martial artists and bed a couple of Asian girls and leave the continent a white supremacist. I thought: let’s have a Chinese Dirty Harry come to Australia and expose our fundamentally racist attitudes to Asia, in a humorous way. Australia did have a policy, in 1905 I think it was brought in, which became known as the White Australia Policy. It forbade the immigration of Asians and Africans. They were afraid their vast unspoiled land would suddenly become a magnet for the hordes of Asia. Strangely enough, it was the labor movement, the socialists, who were the most vociferous in keeping out what they feared would be coolie labor, who would undercut their wage structure. That lasted some time and was eventually taken of the statute books, but these were aspects of the national culture when I first arrived in Australia. Amongst young people it was considered a cool thing to do to run out of a Chinese restaurant without paying, because, you know, they didn’t really count.

I’m not suggesting that Australia is that racist in its attitudes now. There’s been a recognition that the indigenous population, the Aboriginal people, was very badly treated by the white settlers. Efforts have been made to put some of that right, for so far that it can be put right after it has already happened. The Labour government of 1973 introduced a broad policy of multiculturalism and encouraged immigration from Asia. That has helped. Now, there’s a multicultural society in Australia, which largely works. Obviously, sometimes there’s friction. Europe has its problems too, but I think you have to be careful that they don’t become a self fulfilling prophecy. If you marginalize immigrants and put them in banlieus, like they do in France, their resentment is going to fester and eventually it will explode. Somehow you have to help immigrants become absorbed into society without them losing their core identity. You can’t scrub that out of anybody. That will induce resentment.

When did you come to Australia?

I came in 1966, but I’ve lived in America since 1990.

And did you move there with the intent to become a filmmaker?

I did try to get into the film business in England, but the British film union ran a closed shop. You couldn’t get a job without a union ticket and you couldn’t get a union ticket without a job. Catch-22. All of that has changed now. I thought I would go and visit the land of my father, where there was no film industry, only some television. But no restrictive trade practices. I took a ship – the Achille Lauro, which subsequently had a whole history before sinking – and within three weeks I was working as a TV news editor. I graduated to making television promos for new shows. An American company saw my work and asked me to come and make trailers for movies in England. So I did that for two years. I did the trailer for THE VALLEY OF GWANGI and ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST and a Chuck Connors spaghetti western called KILL THEM ALL AND COME BACK ALONE. I made about twenty-five trailers, a lot for Hammer films, which gave me an insight into horror. The Australians asked me to come back and run the network promos for four stations. And I said I would if they’d let me make programs. And they did. So that was my transition into production and eventually directing.

Did I understand correctly that you were a stuntman for a while?

No, that’s not accurate. When I directed for television, I was always looking forward: if I were to go independent, what kind of film or program would I be able to sell? Not just within Australia, but internationally. I realized that action was the universal currency of the film market. It transcended every language barrier. A good punch up sold just as well in Iceland as it did in Hong Kong. So, I made a TV special about stuntmen. That was my first introduction into the actual mechanics and technology of stunt work. And in the course of that I started to do stunts, but mostly to learn how to effectively photograph them. You learn from being on the inside of anything. I have fallen down stairs, I’ve been set on fire seven times.

How did THE MAN FROM HONG KONG become a coproduction?

The idea was that I would make a documentary on Bruce Lee and I would present him with my script, which was called YELLOW PERIL at the time. But as my plane touched down in Jakarta, on my way to Hong Kong, I read a big newspaper headline that Bruce Lee had died. There I was, committed financially to making a documentary about him. So, instead I made a tribute to him. I got to meet his producer Raymond Chow and I pitched him the idea [of YELLOW PERIL]. He said it was possible to find another star. That’s how we got Jimmy Wang Yu, who was the Steve McQueen of Asia. We paired him with George Lazenby, who also had a contract with Raymond Chow’s company Golden Harvest. Suddenly, it had a little bit of commercial appeal internationally, because he was a one-time James Bond. That helped compensate for the fact that no one knew Jimmy Wang Yu outside of Asia.

It looks like you had a reasonable budget for that movie.

Well, it was made for only five hundred and fifty thousand dollars. This was possible because, although I was part owner of the film, I wrote and directed it for only five thousand dollars. That was the kind of pay scale people were on. One of my skills as a filmmaker is production value. By choosing good locations you can really enhance the level of spectacle. Setting the opening sequence at what was then called Ayer’s Rock gave the film immediate size and scale. It set the bar for the audience’s expectation. When we made a sale to 20th Century Fox for the US market they thought we had spent two million dollars. I’m glad people feel that way. Unfortunately, if you have this skill of making a lot out of a little, that’s all people want you to do. They’re not going to give you any more. I had to make my next film for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which was DEATHCHEATERS. But I’ve also made a twenty million dollar movie, so…

Which one was that?

OMEGA CODE 2, which is one of my guilty pleasures. It was financed by a Pentecostal Church. They wanted to make a film about the battle of Armageddon. While I don’t believe there will ever be a battle of Armageddon – I was certainly not an adherent to their splinter group of Christianity – I have never seen a battle I didn’t like to film. This battle of Armageddon will be fought with Gulf War tanks, it would appear. But I had fun. It was shot in 37 days in Los Angeles, Jerusalem, Rome and Nairobi. Quite a big undertaking. It has had minor distribution all over the world, because it’s rather strange, but it does have Michael York playing the antichrist. You should look it up.

I certainly will.

You might detect a slight vein of humor running underneath the surface which my Pentecostal producers luckily did not detect.

In the documentary much is made of the fact that you found it a little bit difficult working with Jimmy Wang Yu.

Well, it was certainly a new experience for me. This was my first film and I was not expecting that from an actor. Little did I realize at the time that he was not an actor, he was a star. Stars have big egos and they feel they have the need to protect their territory. They will have a perception of how good the director is and how good the movie will turn out. If they feel it’s not going the way they want, they’ll start making noise. He didn’t really grasp my sense of humor. To him it was just a straight action movie. He felt he could get rid of some of the verbal humor by simply translating it differently in the Chinese version. When he’s making love to that girl by the waterfall and she says: Hmm, this is nice. And he replies: What do you expect? Acupuncture? In the Chinese translation he says: What did you expect? A jackhammer? But I am eternally grateful to Jimmy for the athletic skill and ferocious energy he brought to the action scenes.

For me, the big star of the movie is Sammo Hung. How was it to work with him?

Sammo’s great. He didn’t speak a word of English and I didn’t speak a word of Cantonese. He was only twenty-two years old, but already a brilliant fight choreographer. I plugged into everything he had to offer.

Did Sammo Hung do all the fight choreography?

A lot of it. Of course, Jimmy did a certain amount of his own choreography. I had written the fight scenes fairly… well, not blow-by-blow, but in the restaurant fight I had written that we would use every nasty implement available: choppers, frying pans, hooks. And of course the famous squirrel grip.

It’s the highlight of the film, that fight scene.

It is, and in a way it’s hard for subsequent fight scenes to live up to that. That’s actually the lesson I learned: be careful not to blow your big guns too early. The Chinese are really good in doing a graduated rise in intensity in their martial arts films. They might start off with a short, sharp fight that gets your attention and promises things to come. They save the epic combat for the end. We tried to make the finale epic with lots of furniture getting thrown around and then finally George getting set on fire. I wanted to do a fight scene where someone was one fire and still trying to fight. I suppose the accumulation of events in that climax – the hang glider, penetration of the building, the fight, the grenade in the mouth, the slide down the rope and the building blowing up – makes for a pretty good last ten minutes.

Let me ask you about STUNT ROCK, which has a Dutch angle. You had Monique van de Ven as one of the leads. How did that come about?

It was a Dutch coproduction and they told us to have Monique van de Ven in the film. I said: Fine, what’s not to like? She was a beautiful woman, very smart. One of her reasons for doing the film, was to give her some Hollywood exposure. She had gone to audition for some big blockbuster and didn’t get the part. It went to a French actress instead. But her handicap was that she wasn’t able to remove her Dutch accent. This was a time when Hollywood didn’t really care for foreign accents. Maybe a light delicate French accent was okay, but I guess that guttural Dutch pronunciation was difficult for the American ear. If she were to play ILSA, SHE-WOLF OF THE SS her accent would have been perfect, but for romantic leads? No. But I’m told she’s a director now, which pleases me a great deal. She had a great brain.

My wife played the other girl. I was always giving her thankless parts. She forgave me. She’s left acting and has become an academic. She’s a PhD history professor. She saw the film last year for the first time in thirty years. She didn’t think it was as bad as all that.

But the music is atrocious.

Or you could say it’s so bad it’s good. I was promised a band the caliber of Kiss or The Eagles. I even took a red eye to New York to meet with Foreigner who said they’d be happy to do it, but we had to wait until they finished their tour. But the financing of the film was predicated upon us having it ready by June 30th. So, it had to go into production. We found a band we could get by Monday.

When you say you were promised a big name band, do you mean by the Dutch producer?

Yeah, a company called Intertamar. I don’t think they’re in existence anymore. Look, in this business lots of people promise you things. No doubt it was a sincere promise. Suppose I promised you Brad Pitt for the lead, because I have a great script and all the money in the world to give Brad Pitt what he wants. But if he doesn’t want to make a movie that month, you will have to get somebody else.

The real star of STUNT ROCK is Grant Page. You made quite a few films with him.

Well, I discovered him and managed him for five years. He was a trawler fisherman and a sometime salesman. Grant’s a very persuasive person. There’s nothing he can’t sell. He had been trained as a commando. For my television documentary THE STUNTMEN I needed someone who understood rope slides. Someone suggested I meet him and I immediately thought he was interesting. Once we started shooting him talking about his stunts, I saw he had more to offer than just being a stunt double. So, I put him under a five year contract. I promised him I would have his name above the title after five years. I actually managed to do that within eighteen months.

That was with STUNT ROCK?

No, that was later. This was with a TV documentary I made called KUNG FU KILLERS, which was a follow up to the Bruce Lee documentary. It asked the question: who would succeed Bruce Lee? Famous Australian stuntman Grant Page – well, I say he’s famous, so therefore he must be – will go to Hong Kong to find out who is Bruce Lee’s successor. That’s the first time I got his name above the title. After that I put him in THE MAN FROM HONG KONG, I put him in the Danger Freaks TV series.

I gathered from Hartley’s documentary that the production of TURKEY SHOOT was a mess.

It was a mess. But it’s like the Chinese proverb: what does not kill you, makes you stronger. TURKEY SHOOT was a train wreck while it was being made, but I learned a lot about how to deal with a situation like that, if it ever happened again. As a result, completions bond companies have hired me to step in when a film has gone out of control, to take over.

What films did you save?

Some I can’t talk about. But I can name two martial arts movies I took over. DAY OF THE PANTHER and STRIKE OF THE PANTHER. They were shot back to back, but the director departed in four days. I would never have written them that way or cast them that way, but that was what I had to work with. I got them made and they eventually turned a profit for their investors. They were facing a total loss had I not come on board. I also did a children’s film where I was brought in the second week. I scrapped most of what I had seen. That film won second prize at the Montréal International Children’s Film Festival. It was called FROG DREAMING, but known in the United States as THE QUEST. Henry Thomas, the kid from E.T., was in it.

Do you always get a director’s credit in such cases?

In the cases I just mentioned, yes. In the cases I can’t mention, not. I’ve been hired to come in after a movie’s been shot, to shoot additional material and re-edit the entire film.

Back to TURKEY SHOOT. Was it really that bad as mentioned in the documentary? The producers going to the race track and all that?

Well, they did spend a certain amount of time at the track and money was short. I don’t really think they were trying to supplement the shortfall of the budget by betting on the right horse. But David Hemmings was a gambler. So was the line producer. And another fellow certainly had to have treatment for compulsive gambler later in life.

Hemmings was also a reputed drunk.

He came to the cutting room one morning at nine a.m. with a bottle of wine, which he finished. He certainly had the capacity to put it away. He and I had a slightly difficult relationship. I recall pouring beer over his head once. I possibly shouldn’t have done that, but I felt he deserved it at the time. But the poor man is dead now. Finally his liver gave out. Died on the set of a movie in Bulgaria or Rumania. He was a very talented actor and he had some gifts as a filmmaker. He made a couple of films that were quite good, but his arm was not as long as his reach.

When during the making of TURKEY SHOOT did you decide to amp it up with the gore?

Very early on I realized: Oh, shit! I’ve got thin production values. I’ve lost the first fifteen pages of the script, which was a big sequence in which the three principal characters are chased through a futuristic city and captured.

You lost them because of…?

Money. They didn’t just fall out of the script. The producers tore them out. This was a ninety-four page script. People say it’s a minute a page, but with action it cuts quicker than that. So, we start with a ninety-four page script. First fifteen pages get scrapped, because we couldn’t afford to do it. We had to start with the prison camp. Now we’re down to eighty pages. And oh, this actor wants too much money to play the mad pilot who hunts by helicopter. Well, we can’t afford the helicopter anyway. So these four pages with helicopter stuff are out as well. Just give his lines to other characters. Goodbye! Left me in the hands of the gamblers. I’ve got seventy-five pages of script, out of which I have to make a ninety minute movie. I had to improvise a certain amount. They only paid the stuntmen to show up, not to do any actual stunts. So, guards falling out of exploding towers, that was out as well. But I did already have the explosives, those were paid for. And I did find some 35mm footage of Australian Air Force jets. It was silly of course, but I thought it could work. And selectively used, it would look great in the trailer. Finally I thought: How can I make up for this loss of production value and action impact? Well, blood is cheap…

Plus, you had Roger Ward.

Yes, the guard from hell. Roger was kind of a mascot of mine. He was in THE STUNTMEN and in DANGER FREAKS. He used to do some wrestling. And if you look very closely at some scenes in MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY, I believe you can see Roger as a nineteen year old lad in some of the Tahiti sequences. He just happened to be in Tahiti at the time and he was recruited as an extra.

All this blood in TURKEY SHOOT became a problem when the British censors seized on your film.

They cut the film to get an X-certificate. They cut it by three or four minutes. Even so, it broke box office records at the Warner West End Theater 2, where it took ten thousand pounds in the first week, in a blizzard in February. Of course, another thing we did, in addition to throwing around a lot of blood, was to name the commandant of the camp Thatcher. So it had a special resonance for the British.

That was your idea, to call him Thatcher?

Yeah, yeah. Because again, there was a political message. It was the beginning of the Reagan era and supply-side economic theory. I just wanted to suggest that once you allow the rich to have a dictatorship, there is nothing they will not do. Because they have no moral core. It’s not impossible to believe that they would consider people who disagree with their philosophy of life to be less than human and therefore to hunt them like animals. The elite always feel they’re on a higher plane of civilization than anyone below them. Those people are expendable. Wars are not fought by politicians, they’re fought by the lowest economic strata on their behalf. In England, the Wars of the Roses, that big fratricidal conflict about who would control the country’s resources, was pretty much the last time the rich did their own fighting.

Was TURKEY SHOOT considered a video nasty?

You may be right about that. You see, the cut version was permitted to be released on home video. The full version remained banned, until eight or nine years ago when they re-released it under a new title: BLOOD CAMP THATCHER.

The controversy probably didn’t hurt it.

It didn’t. Of course, there are aspects of the film that are, creatively speaking, not of the highest standard. If I had set out to make a high camp splatter movie from the get-go, then I might have written it differently. I intended it to be a genre hybrid: 1984 meets THE CAMP ON BLOOD ISLAND where they play THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME. It was going to be ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK in the jungle. It was to have all these elements and be a fast-paced, spectacular action adventure. It wasn’t supposed to be this bloody and sadistic. But as I said: blood is cheap, sadism is cheap. So, I decided to take a leaf out of Lucio Fulci’s book and add exploding heads. What’s not to like?

You always seem to describe your films in terms of hybrids of different movies.

Yes, I did a true crime black comedy called HAPPY FACE MURDERS which was my attempt to do RASHOMON meets FARGO by way of TWIN PEAKS. I like putting these hybrids together, where their flavors complement each other and create a new flavor. I love all genres of cinema and I like to mix them up. The dinosaur picture I made, TYRANNOSAURUS AZTECA, which was made on a budget best described as the smell of an oil rag, was my homage to THE VALLEY OF GWANGI. I made the trailer of that film back in 1969 and I loved it: cowboys versus dinosaurs! So, I thought: Well, what about conquistadors versus dinosaurs? And how would I do this? Well, let’s imagine that this was a concept that Hammer Films had come up with in the sixties, like the cheap summer spectaculars that they would make, one a year, to complement their horror movies. Films like THE PIRATES OF BLOOD RIVER, THE DEVIL-SHIP PIRATES and THE SCARLET BLADE. Let’s do it in that kind of serious, classical style. No shaky-cam. I hate shaky-cam by the way. It’s so silly. Who is the invisible man that’s shaking the camera? I gave it that solid Hammer look, but I ramped up the blood a great deal more than what Hammer would have been able to get away with, especially in their summer spectaculars. We had the dinosaurs chomping on people, limbs falling out of its mouth, guts on the sand. It’s a straight-faced, splendidly silly film. You’ll see Dichen Lachman, who is in fact Australian and was in Neighbours for sixty episodes, wearing hardly any clothes, which is the way I like to see a lot of women on the screen. You certainly get a lot more butt cheek than is normally seen on television. The loin cloth flaps in the wind a lot. Well, never mind…

After TURKEY SHOOT you made BMX BANDITS with Nicole Kidman, before she was a celebrity.

Yes, she was a school girl at the time. There was another girl intended for the role but she backed out. We auditioned another bunch of girls. Nicole was one of them and she was just a knock-out. Very good grasp of comedy timing. The producer didn’t want to cast her initially, because she was taller than the two boys. I said: What does that matter? She was written as the tag-along girl, but I suddenly decided to put her in the foreground as much as possible, because she has tremendous presence. And she has gifts as an actress in the right part. She has frequently been put in the wrong part. A brain surgeon of twenty-three is not really credible.

In preparing this interview I was going through my DVD and VHS collection to see which films of you I own, and I was surprised to find I own a VHS of THE SIEGE OF FIREBASE GLORIA.

Really? What language?

It’s the English version with Dutch subtitles.

I’m trying to get people to release that on DVD. MGM have the rights to it. [In 2015 THE SIEGE OF FIREBASE GLORIA was finally released on DVD and Blu-Ray by MGM - Ed.]

It’s a really good movie.

I feel proud of that one. It was made in the Philippines in thirty-five days.

How did you end up making it?

The writers were Australian, one of whom had served in the Australian forces in Vietnam during the last couple of years of the war. He might even have been in the Tet Offensive when it happened in ’68. One film that had a lot of impact on me, in my last years of school, was a film called ZULU. Fantastic film. While it tells the story of the battle mainly from one side, it does give the other side dignity. Wars are fought by brave young people on both sides who are simply obeying orders, but history is written by the victors. So, the losers get demonized. Prior to that, there had not been a war movie that had given the North Vietnamese any credit for doing what they had been doing for a thousand years: trying to throw out the foreign invaders. They had been invaded many times, by different countries and they always fought to the last man to get them out. The Americans were going to suffer the same fate.  So, I tried to show the battle from both sides and show how the North Vietnamese manipulated the Vietcong, used them for cannon fodder and then took over their positions in the South.

That’s an interesting angle. I’ve never heard it told like that, that the Vietcong were manipulated by political machinations.

When you’re making a genre movie, it doesn’t mean you have to avoid the truth or check your intelligence at the door, and do the standard dumb things the genre is known for. I wanted to give the audience plenty of battles but also some real history. So people might think: Hmm, maybe I should read something about this.

Who was the actor that played the Vietnamese commander?

His name is Robert Arevalo. One of the most noted actors at the time in the Philippines. He had a great reputation. He learned to speak Vietnamese phonetically. I was very impressed with his dedication.

You shot it on the old sets of APOCALYPSE NOW?

Not on the sets, but we did build the firebase out of Pagsanjan which was where a lot of APOCALYPSE NOW was shot. I wrote a blog about the making of FIREBASE GLORIA, which is still in the archives.

Yeah, I read it. I also read about you being in the middle of a civil war.

The New People’s Army pretty much had control of that whole territory. Once you’re two hours out of Manila, the central government wasn’t really that much in control. We dealt with them honestly. It helped that we were not Americans. We brought a cast of Americans, but myself and the producers were Australian. The Australians had been co-opted into the Vietnam war  by the Americans, in return for various economic guarantees and loans, or as we called it: fellows for dollars. But as I wrote in the blog, we negotiated with the New People’s Army for the sight of the firebase. They really didn’t give us any trouble. Well, there was one time when the producer was late with the monthly payment. It was five thousand a month for them to be our security guards. I had left for Manila to continue shooting interiors. The editor stayed behind to shoot some second unit stuff for me. But the NPA gave him a warning: your boss hasn’t paid us, so don’t leave the hotel or we’ll kidnap you. He didn’t leave until the money was paid and from then on it all went back to normal again. Just like collecting the rent.

On the other hand you had to deal with the central government to get helicopters and such.

That’s right. As I mentioned on my blog, one day they were off shooting real people.

By the way, I have to compliment you on your blog. Those are some really good stories you share.

Thank you. I’m not even sure how many people actually read those. Doesn’t earn me a penny though. Apparently you only make money if people actually click on the ads. I would love to write for a real newspaper or magazine sometime. [In 2020 Brian Trenchard-Smith wrote his autobiography Adventures in the B-Movie Trade. - Ed.]

I have to be honest, I haven’t seen many of your films after FIREBASE GLORIA, movies like LEPRECHAUN IN SPACE…

These are fairly wacky genre parodies, most particularly LEPRECHAUN IN SPACE. I crammed it with all sorts of genre references. There’s a bit of ALIENS, some FULL METAL JACKET. The guy who plays the space marine sergeant was the same guy who was initially hired by Stanley Kubrick to play the drill sergeant in FULL METAL JACKET. But when he saw Lee Ermey, who had been hired as a technical advisor and who had also worked on APOCALYPSE NOW, he thought: Hey, this guy is better than the actor I hired. That launched Lee’s acting career. This actor, Tim Colceri, was understandably mortified. But he was given a consolation part, as the mad machine gunner in the helicopter. When he was working on our LEPRECHAUN movie, in 1995, he was still nursing the wounds of that. So, I hired him to finally let him play the role he was meant to play in FULL METAL JACKET.

But people don’t always know what to do with those movies. The Germans, especially, didn’t know what to do with it. They released it as a straight space adventure called SPACE PLATOON.

You’re working on a new PORKY’S movie now, right?

Yes, I’ve delivered my cut. I’m told the executives like it. It’s been made in a way that it could go direct to DVD and pay-per-view. It’s aimed at the fifteen year old in all of us. Well, fifteen year old male in all of us. This is not a touchy-feely chick flick, though there might be a few chicks in it you might like to touch and feel. It’s a teen sex comedy. I’ve done one before and I think I’ve given this one a slick, modern feel. It’s wall-to-wall filled with music. It will undoubtedly find its audience. Hopefully a bit sooner than some of my other films. I might have been a bit ahead of the curve with DEAD-END DRIVE-IN and pictures like that. [Later in 2009, this fourth addition to the PORKY’S franchise was released as PIMPIN’ PEE WEE or PORKY’S PIMPIN’ PEE WEE - Ed.]

Is there anything that you hope to do in the near future?

I would certainly like to do more horror comedy, provided it be smart. Someone has remade the first NIGHT OF THE DEMONS. Maybe they’ll ask me to remake the second one. They’ve certainly borrowed some ideas of it, judging from the stills I’ve seen.

I’m not too keen on doing torture porn. There might be people who want to come to the theatre to feel anxiety and purge themselves of their anxieties brought on by their troubled lives by having this vicarious experience of terror at the hands of a serial killer for an hour and a half. I recognize that a certain amount of talent goes into making these films… TURKEY SHOOT was sadistic and bloody, but more in a self-parody kind of way. I pushed things way over the top. It was the horror of the absurd.

You have some ideas for RAMBO 8.

Yes, but in a way I’ve already made my Rambo movie. It’s a lesbian Rambo movie called IN HER LINE OF FIRE. What is RAMBO? Basically, it’s gun porn. It’s an American superhero who blasts countless poor Third World people, who are working for an evil man admittedly, with his big gun. Now let’s have tall, good-looking and lesbian Mariel Hemingway do the same thing to these poor people. I’ve also made a gay submarine movie, called TIDES OF WAR. This gay and lesbian TV network got me to make these two films. I thought: I’m an old married man with two grown sons, but I believe in tolerance. Love is love. You could marry your parakeet as far as I’m concerned. Doesn’t threaten my marriage.

Seriously? They were made for a gay and lesbian TV network?

Yeah. In America, in the five hundred channel universe, there is something for everybody. A company called Regent Entertainment own the Here Network, as well as The Advocate, which is a gay magazine. I knew the principals of the company and they asked if I would make these films for them. Of course I would! Both movies had to be made in two versions. TIDES OF WAR was the gay version of the submarine film and PHANTOM BELOW was the straight version. I always thought PHANTOM BELOW would have been a much better title for the gay version. I even suggested doing a third version called PINK TORPEDO: THE MUSICAL, but they didn’t bite on that one.

Both films are based on the premise that we’ve all seen action movie heroes do wonderfully heroic things. But there are a lot of gay heroes too. So let’s have them on the screen. We would do just enough gay scenes so that the audience gets the point.

So, what was de non-lesbian version of IN HER LINE OF FIRE called?

The non lesbian version is called AIR FORCE 2 and it just skips over the two lesbian kisses. They were easy to cut out. It’s not like there was extensive muff diving or dildo manipulation. Could have been fun though.

I really admire how you’ve kept your enthusiasm for making movies. Even if you have to work with smaller budgets now. How do you keep going?

I’ve been obsessed with cinema since I first saw a flickering image on a sheet hanging from a pole on an airfield in Libya. My father commanded an air force base out there. The first film I ever saw was a 16mm print of a western being projected on this sheet. I like the theatre too, but I haven’t directed a play since I was nineteen. I’m just more at home being able to change the audience’s perspective on the event, when they’re not just looking at it in a proscenium arch. You can use angles to dramatizing effect. It’s a wonderful tool.

All filmmakers are incredibly lucky to be allowed to make movies, even if you don’t get all the toys you want. By all means, complain, but don’t let it get in the way of your creativity. Work with what you’ve got. Enjoy what you are doing. That will come through. My films have a certain amount of energy to them. I think it’s important to provide that energy to a film, because it will give the film a longer life. The faster a film is, the more people might want to revisit it. Also, if you are full of enthusiasm on set, everybody gets infected by it. That helps the general work ethic and the output of energy by everybody else. I just love what I do. I think I’m lucky to be able to do it. I try to show it on screen.

Related talks

• Roger Corman (1)

• Roger Corman (2)

• Ray Harryhausen

Brian Trenchard-Smith’s book is called Adventures in the B-Movie Trade and is available at Amazon and other places.

This interview first appeared in a shorter version in the Dutch fanzine Schokkend Nieuws. Above is the full version of this talk, edited only for clarity.