CAN I BE THE BOSS?

After Brian Yuzna had established himself as a producer, making RE-ANIMATOR and FROM BEYOND, and as a director, with SOCIETY, BRIDE OF RE-ANIMATOR and RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD III, his goal was simply to ‘keep it going’. He put together projects like NECRONOMICON and CRYING FREEMAN, directed THE DENTIST on a shoestring budget and finally talked the head of the Spanish production company Filmax into letting him create a Fantastic Factory in Barcelona. Yuzna spent several years there, carving out an international market for Spanish horror movies and directing four features, one of which was the fun BEYOND RE-ANIMATOR. This is part 2 of a long interview Roel Haanen did with Yuzna in may 2021. You can read the first part here.

What’s the art behind you on the wall? Is that the Guyver?

Yeah. That’s a cell of the original Guyver anime. Because they did everything by hand back then. This is before they did it all digitally.

How did you get involved with THE GUYVER?

Actually, it came through Screaming Mad George. He had gotten a deal to direct this movie, but the Japanese company who financed the film asked me to produce it here in L.A. They wanted someone who had experience.

I wish it had done better. It seemed like such a commercial movie. I think it was hindered by having two directors. They didn't shoot scenes together. They split them up. Steve did most of the action scenes, George did the David Gale storyline and also some of the weirder effects scenes, the miniature action at the end.

They created the monster suits together. The suits were top of the line though. They told me if they had more money they could have air-conditioned them. Because those suits are very oppressive. Kind of dangerous even. On FROM BEYOND we had this body suit for Dr. Pretorius, which was pretty dangerous. I never realized it at the time of course, because I would never do something dangerous. But because the actor could not move, it was worse. In THE GUYVER the stunt guys were moving all the time, which keeps your blood circulating. But when you’re sitting still and you get too hot, or too cold for that matter, your judgment is no good. When I was shooting ROTTWEILER in Spain it was winter, and the actor had to be in the river. It was cold, but the stunt guy was really sure of himself. He was naked and in that freezing water. We were trying to get the shot and it didn’t work. Every time the stunt guy came out of the water there were people waiting for him with warm blankets, but he wanted to go back into the water and keep going. That’s when I stopped it, because I knew that when you get hypothermia you don’t get cold, you get hot. I didn’t trust his judgment, because if he was hypothermic his brain was not working right.

Did you ever have any real accidents on set?

I feel lucky that I’ve had very few incidents. There’s this driving force when you’re shooting a movie. Time’s always running out. You gotta get those shots. I was shooting [AMPHIBIOUS] on this fishing platform in Indonesia. It was two stories. We were shooting 3D. This was before they had the compact 3D cameras. We had two big cameras in a rig. We were trying to get a shot of the actors from above. The Indonesian crew was trying to hold that rig, but I just didn’t trust it enough to put the actors under there. So I stopped it. You lose a couple of hours of work.

Now, you could say: If I just get the shot quickly. But it’s not like that. Someone could get hurt. Before you know it you have a TWILIGHT ZONE situation. They also were trying to get the shot. The nature of directing is to keep pushing it, to go for something they haven’t seen before. The nature of the producer is to keep track of the money and the time. That’s why you have a stunt coordinator who is the boss when a stunt is done. The director and the producer should step aside. It’s really necessary, because if you’re a big time director or producer the stunt coordinator might give in to you, even though he shouldn’t.

In the mid nineties you were producing and you were directing your own movies. Was there a strategy or were you just taking the jobs that came along?

I had four kids. I was just trying to stay alive. My goal when I came to Los Angeles, was to make a living making movies. But I knew nothing about Hollywood. I had no connections, no training. I hadn’t gone to film school. When I made RE-ANIMATOR I had to borrow the money to make it. If it hadn’t worked I would have been in deep trouble. So, when it did work and I got work as a producer, I just had to keep it going.

The reason I made it in the business was because of the video revolution of the eighties. There was this big wave of independent money from video. But I had an added handicap of wanting to be the creative guy. I wanted to shape the movie. But that’s not the way to make money.

As for strategy, I wanted to do big movies. But I had never learned how to work within an organization or corporation where there’s a lot of heavy politics. I always worked for myself. I didn’t want anybody coming in and telling me what to do. I chose to be the big frog in the little pond. I never even got an agent. That’s how stupid I am. I’m not gonna get an agent! I’ll just do my own projects. Why join the union?

But still, CRYING FREEMAN was a pretty big movie for you to produce.

Yeah, but it was something I pieced together myself. It came out of a financing experiment I did with NECRONOMICON. I came up with a scheme in which I would make an anthology Lovecraft movie that would be financed by European and Japanese money. I thought that if I could get half the money from Europe and half from Japan, then I could own a third of the movie myself, without investing any money in it. Of course, it didn’t work that way. They quickly pushed me out to just do the work. I got paid for the work, of course.

To convince the investors, I gave them the right to choose their own directors and have the directors choose their own Lovecraft story and screenwriters. Then we would shoot it in L.A. I would direct a segment and I would also direct the wraparound, because I’m greedy. I quickly sold this idea to Takashige Ichise who later became famous for producing all the J-horror movies, like RINGU and DARK WATER. I knew him well, because I had helped him to find a house and settle into L.A. when he came over here. So Taka signed on, but I couldn’t find the European money and I was getting nervous.

Then I got a call from Samuel Hadida who had bought the French distribution rights to THE GUYVER. He wanted to borrow the internegatives, so they could make prints. During that phone call he asked me if I had any other anime properties, which I happened to have a ton of, because after THE GUYVER the Japanese asked me if we could make more movies out of these. So I mentioned a couple that I thought were good, among them CRYING FREEMAN. And Samuel just went bananas. He had been trying to get the rights for years. He had a director, Christophe Gans, whom he wanted to make the movie. I told Samuel that I didn’t think the Japanese were going to accept Christophe as a director, because he hadn’t made a feature yet. But, I said, if you finance half of this NECRONOMICON, you can choose your own director. You can appoint Christophe. If he does a good job, the Japanese will accept him for CRYING FREEMAN. And if he doesn’t do a good job, you should be glad you only let him do a segment. So, CRYING FREEMAN came out of that deal that I put together.

While NECRONOMICON was still in post, we made the deal to make CRYING FREEMAN with Christophe as director. Taka and Samuel financed it, they each got their own territories and the rest they split. I got to produce a bigger movie, that’s what I got out of it. So, you see how complicated all that is? It would have been so much easier to have your agent send you in to take a meeting, but I didn’t have an agent to negotiate for me.

One of your best films is THE DENTIST, in which you combine the gruesome and the comical to great effect. It’s also psychologically interesting to see how Dr. Feinstone’s life is unraveling and how he sees no way out of his problems. Did you do any research into these types of killers?

We visited dentist offices. I learned that from Stuart. He was really big on field trips. For RE-ANIMATOR he took the whole cast to the morgue. I followed his example. Even though you’re making a genre movie, you should make everything as logical as possible within the world you’ve created. We talked to the radiologist, the desk manager, the hygienist and we asked them if they thought a dentist could do something absolutely crazy. And they all said: Absolutely! They’re crazier than you could ever think. That’s because they are a king in their office. The research helped us to create the psychology of the character, but also to get the details right.

Was it a difficult movie to make?

Yeah, it was a tough movie for me, because until then I had only done weird stuff. I mean, SOCIETY was total kookooness between me and Screaming Mad George and Woody Keith. I had never done a movie that took place in bright lights. I had never done a body count movie. My movies are not about the kills. I didn’t know how to make that interesting. Mark Amin, the head of Trimark, who financed it, didn’t want anything weird in the movie. No zombies, no aliens, nothing fantastical. His idea was to make a movie about how scary it is to sit in a dental chair.

So, the idea for the movie came from Trimark?

Yes, Trimark was a video distribution company that had just started getting into production. They wanted to make their own movies and release them into theaters. They’d had one big success at the time which, believe it or not, was LEPRECHAUN. You know: I want me gold! After the success of that movie they got very bold and did a big theatrical release of WARLOCK II, which didn’t work. So, then they pulled back on RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD III. I think RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD III could have worked as a theatrical release, but I did think it should have had another title. Anyway, I had lunch with Amin and he asked me what I wanted to do next. Rather than pitch him an idea, I asked him what he wanted to do. Because if it’s his idea, it will probably get made. That’s when he came with the idea of doing a scary movie about a dentist. He already had some artwork done. I said: That’s great! But honestly, I wasn’t enthusiastic about it at all.

So, how did Stuart Gordon and Dennis Paoli get involved with THE DENTIST? Did you hire them?

Stuart came to a meeting with Trimark, to see if they could find a project for him. They showed him what they were working on. When he saw THE DENTIST he said: I wanna do that one. They told him I was already on board as a director. Then Stuart said: I’ll write it. He and Dennis came up with a treatment that’s basically the core of the movie. Their idea was that the dentist is fastidious, a clean freak, very neurotic. They also came up with that great opening where he sees his wife giving a blowjob to the pool guy, he makes her bite off his dick and then he goes to work. The movie was almost real-time. Once he was in his office, it almost became a play. I thought it was a great treatment. But when Stuart and Dennis finished the script, Trimark felt it needed more. They wanted it to take place over the course of two days. They told Stuart what they wanted, but Stuart is a little like me in that he didn’t want anybody telling him how to do his work. He just wouldn’t hear it. So, they got another writer.

At the same time I was getting ready to go to Vancouver to produce CRYING FREEMAN. I told Mark Amin if he needed to get another director I would understand. I went to Vancouver for over a year and when that was finished I didn’t have any project lined up. I moved back to L.A. with no job. I called Mark Amin. He told me they were getting ready to do THE DENTIST. They wanted Pierre David to make it up in Montreal real cheap. But Mark said, if I wanted to direct it, I could make it here. But I had to start casting on Monday. This was a Thursday. Then I learned that they had cut the budget. It was now a super cheap movie. I was hesitant about doing it, so I called Sammy [Hadida] to ask if he had a better job for me. He offered me a job as a producer on FREEWAY, which he co-financed with Oliver Stone. So, now I had to decide. On FREEWAY I would be one of the producers, but on THE DENTIST I get to be the guy. That has always been my downfall.

Anyway, they had the script rewritten by Charles Finch who added some really cool stuff. He came up with the idea of having the dentist at the mental hospital at the beginning, telling his story. That way, the movie had an unreliable narrator, which freed me up. The more we saw things from the dentist’s twisted point of view, the more things could be acceptable. For example, when he’s trying to rape the blonde girl. That’s not something I want to see or show you. I’m not making IRREVERSIBLE. But if we see inside his mind what’s happening, then you have a way out.

You just mentioned that THE DENTIST was your first film to be filmed in bright lights. How did you figure out how to make that visually interesting?

I had learned so much working with Christophe Gans on NECRONOMICON and CRYING FREEMAN. When I work as a producer, I can usually predict how a director is going to shoot something. But with Christophe I could never figure it out, because everything he would do was based on many different movies. Every scene is an homage to something else. He’s an encyclopedia of movies. So, I shot THE DENTIST in a more formalist way. Being careful about the frame. How you go from one shot to the next, or one scene to the next, I had figured most of that out in advance. By the way, this movie was so cheap I couldn’t even have a storyboard artist for one day; I had to draw them all myself. I devised that opening scene, with the dentist using imaginary tools in the mental institution, which made it theatrical. When he turns on his imaginary light, a real light comes on. Him making shadows with his hands. It’s more expressionistic than I had done before and it was all inspired by Christophe. And for the kill scenes I also did what Christophe would do: I took inspiration from a bunch of murder scenes that Hitchcock had done.

At the end of the nineties you went to Barcelona to create the Fantastic Factory for Filmax. How did you get involved with them?

I was at the festival in Sitges with THE DENTIST 2 and Julio Fernandez, who owned Filmax, had bought the picture for Spain. Julio liked to make money. He liked the glamour and excitement. I had known him ever since he had bought SOCIETY years earlier. He didn’t speak any English and he liked the fact that I spoke some Spanish. And he liked what I said at the press conference in Sitges, where I talked about how genre movies should make their money back. They are made to have an audience. The Spanish film industry at the time was all about artistic expression and social commentary. Movies were mostly made with public funding and a lot of them nobody went to see. It was that way in a lot of European countries. Nowadays, everyone understands that movies are an industry that is worth supporting.

So, Julio asked me if I could make a movie like THE DENTIST in Barcelona. I told him the better idea was to make a label, a line of films, much like Hammer. The movies may vary – some will be better than others – but they will become a brand. Furthermore, if you work with low budget movies, you can be shooting one movie, have another one in post and another one in pre-production. You can make three movies a year. Of course, you’ll change writers and directors, but a lot can just keep going. If you sell the movies yourself, you’re getting the money directly from the buyers. You can push the movies as hard as you think they need to be pushed, instead of wondering why the sales company that you hired isn’t doing its job. Julio liked that idea. Despite the vociferous resistance by his brother, who ran the company, he agreed to do it. 

You left L.A. and moved your family to Barcelona and stayed a couple of years. Was that a hard decision?

It was October when I talked Julio into the idea for Fantastic Factory. In December I went to London for a launch party. Tartan Video was putting out SOCIETY and the RE-ANIMATOR movies. I took my wife with me. After that we flew to Barcelona, so she could see the city, see if she wanted to come over. Because I was gonna do it anyway. The option isn’t to stay home and not work. When I took her to L.A. for the first time, I asked her: Do you want to stay here? And she answered: Only if we have money. [Laughs] In January I moved to Barcelona, living in a hotel, moving back and forth every few weeks. I was shooting FAUST. At the beginning of the school year, my wife and two of my kids came over as well.

But it was hard professionally, because I felt I was going from the NBA to the NBA Europe. You know, if you can’t make it in the NBA you can always go to the NBA Europe. The film industry in Spain wasn’t as up to date.

On a lot of Fantastic Factory films you are credited as creative producer. What was your role exactly?

That had to do with semantics. In Spain the producer is generally what we consider to be the executive producer in the States. Most of the time, it’s the money guy. And the executive producer in Spain, or the productor ejecutivo, is the one who actually produces the movie. That’s what I was. My concern was that if I got the credit I deserved in Spain, I was going to be the productor ejecutivo, but I didn’t want that, because in the U.S. they would translate it to executive producer. I also didn’t want to be confused with a line producer or something. So, I invented this credit. I wanted to show that I’m not just putting together these movies, but that I was a creative part of it as well.

Was the idea initially to bring over American directors and let them make movies in Spain?

We wanted to make the first couple of movies indistinguishable from movies I would produce for Trimark or something. Because there was no market for Spanish genre films at the time. The idea of Fantastic Factory was to make the first couple of movies in English, shoot them in Spain, which would be cheaper, and get financing from the subsidies and tax incentives. In order to apply for subsidies and tax incentives in France or Belgium, the main creative people had to come from that country. The Spanish weren’t that strict. After World War II European countries began solidifying their social democratic political structures. Spain was a dictatorship. When Franco died and the left took over, there were no political structures. It was a free-for-all. That gave us a big opening. But the idea from the beginning was to simultaneously develop stuff with Spanish directors, so that when we had created the market for Spanish horror, we could then shoot in Spanish with Spanish directors and the buyers were still going to buy it. The ultimate goal was achieved, albeit after Fantastic Factory had ended. That was with [REC].

That could not have happened without Fantastic Factory?

I don’t think so. Fantastic Factory really changed the Spanish film industry. Of course, nobody knows it because nobody knows anything about the Spanish film industry. I told Julio when we started that we had to move fast. Because everybody involved in the Fantastic Factory movies would realize they could do the same thing with another company. What we were doing was no secret. Even though the way I made movies was to a certain extent unique to me, you could say that all I was doing at Fantastic Factory, was what we did back in L.A. The Spanish just didn’t know about any of that.

Were there problems with American directors working with Spanish crews?

Sometimes. Not everyone could handle it. ROMASANTA for example, which turned out to be a beautifully looking film by Paco Plaza, was supposed to be directed by Chuck Parello. But he just left. He couldn’t handle working in Spain. Usually, when Americans shoot abroad, they bring everything. But I just brought in the director. I didn’t even use actors from L.A. because they need a lot of help, working in another country. The English are used to being in European countries. American actors get all worked up when everything is different and they don’t have the right toothpaste. It’s true.

You had a tremendous responsibility of running Fantastic Factory, and at the same time you directed a number of features for the label. How did you juggle those different responsibilities? Wasn’t it difficult?

It was terrible. That wasn’t even all I did. I helped Filmax set up their foreign sales. I worked on a lot of different movies with them. There was this thing Filmax called Fantastic Discovery, which was a spin-off of Fantastic Factory, in which they would have new directors make genre movies. Paco Plaza’s first film, SECOND NAME, was one of those. I was basically involved with everything Filmax was developing at the time.

Which one of the Fantastic Factory movies are you the most proud of?

I don’t know. They’re all so different. Maybe the one that’s the most complete is DAGON. It’s not perfect though. It could have been more fun. Of course it was a victim of the era as far as the digital effects go. ARACHNID had the same problem. FAUST was definitely flawed, but just the fact that we pulled it off, not knowing what was going to happen. That was a movie with a lot of challenges and obstacles. BENEATH STILL WATERS was very uneven, even though I like the underwater stuff. I never thought I could pull it off. It was done by people who had never done that before. The rest of the movie is clunky and awkward.

I really like BEYOND RE-ANIMATOR. It feels complete. It ends really horrific. It’s funny. And it’s a real prison movie as well, which is cool. We even had a big riot. It could have been better, of course, but it was an idea I was working on for a long time and to then be able to make it, was great. The effects are weak, which had to do with the industry in Spain. They don’t do enough effects, so there aren’t enough people who have the right technique or materials.

I think the effects looked pretty good, overall.

I brought over Screaming Mad George for some of the effects and the stuff he did was top-notch. And the guy who did the opening scene, Pedro de Diego, was great. He worked in the same way most effects guys in L.A. work. But there was one company that was hired to do a lot of the effects and they didn’t deliver, even though they had months to prepare. There was another guy, named Amador Rehak, who did the half-man effect. He didn’t have the right materials, but he had the concept and he showed the actor what to do. He is also the guy who did the fight between the rat and the penis. He’s a puppeteer. He made them come to life in shadows. It’s just him performing. It’s amazing.

Since you’re from The Netherlands, I also want to mention the amazing contribution of Richard Raaphorst. He was a big part of Fantastic Factory from the beginning. He did the concept art and storyboards for FAUST. I staged many scenes exactly the way he drew them. The same goes for some of the other movies, like the opening of BEYOND RE-ANIMATOR with the dead guy drinking the milk which pours out his throat. That’s something Richard drew. He did tons of concept art for Fantastic Factory. He also did a lot of great credit sequences, like for BEYOND RE-ANIMATOR. His credit sequence for ROTTWEILER is better than the movie. Richard is a friend. He let me stay at his house in Gouda when I was doing post-production on AMPHIBIOUS. It was a terrible production. Very unorganized. But I liked being in The Netherlands. I also lived in Amsterdam during that time.

You were involved in the development of a horror movie that would take place in Amsterdam.

Yes. I was invited to the Weekend of Terror at the Tuschinski Theater by Jan Doense, Mr Horror. I liked Amsterdam so much, I wanted to spent some time there. The best way to do that, is to make a movie there. I took the tour of the Anne Frank house. I had always heard about how Anne Frank and her family lived in the walls. It never made much sense to me, but when I saw the house, I realized what they meant. Since the houses were taxed by how much canal frontage they had, they could go backwards as far as they wanted. The houses were very complicated. The walls that Anne Frank lived inside of, were basically rooms, but you wouldn’t know it was there. So, I thought it would make a good idea for a ghost story. I thought about how the evil guy should be a painter. It would be great if you could open the movie by just going passed his paintings. By the end of the movie, you’d see them again and they would mean something horrific. Like how the great Dutch paintings were about everyday life, but there were symbols hidden in them. When I lived in Amsterdam to edit AMPHIBIOUS, I actually lived in one of these houses, on the Keizersgracht, and it was freezing. I was always hoping something ghostly would happen.

What happened to that project?

Jan Doense and I were on the verge of making it. We announced it and everything. But it coincided with me going to Barcelona to set up the Fantastic Factory, which was a much bigger project. At one point I tried to bring the Amsterdam ghost story, which was called EXHIBITION then, to Fantastic Factory, but unfortunately it never got made. I always liked that project, and still hope to someday make it. Shooting in Amsterdam, on the canals in the winter, cursed by a perverted Dutch master of the 16th century. Now that's a horror movie!

With AMPHIBIOUS you were trying to do what you did in Spain in Indonesia.

Yeah, I went to Indonesia, which had a totally undeveloped film industry. Ideally, I wanted to make movies there that would sell all over the world, but that could also be released in the theaters that were owned by the main investor. But we never had the time. It got cut short by the great recession. There’s so many weird stories out there in Indonesia. It’s disappointing that it didn’t get to happen.

Are you now mostly retired or are you still working on projects?

Well, I’m not retired by choice. I still need to make money. I’ve been working ever since I got back to L.A. I’ve been selling movies and developing stuff. I’m trying to get a TV series going. I’m developing a SOCIETY series with a British company.

I always thought that RE-ANIMATOR had a great chance at another sequel or reboot.

I’ve been trying to make a new RE-ANIMATOR happening forever. Two years ago I had a deal to make RE-ANIMATOR UNBOUND, but at the last minute the company backed out. You develop it, you get a deal, it’s financed and then something happens and it falls apart. The same thing happened with HOUSE OF RE-ANIMATOR, which was another sequel we tried to make. It took place in the White House. Stuart was going to direct it.

It’s so hard these days to get funding, even for a movie or series that is a brand name. I realized that the name of the IP [intellectual property] and my involvement isn’t enough. It doesn’t ring any bells. Then you’d say: But there’s tons of fans of RE-ANIMATOR. If you keep the budget low, you should be able to finance it just for the fans. But the fact is: you can’t show an investor how they’re gonna recoup. Because it’s all streaming. Back in the nineties, you could say to an investor: If we make it for this amount, and there’s some name there, these are the minimums you could get from other countries. You could give a guarantee that they would make at least eighty percent of the budget back. But you could also hit a home run. With streaming, you don’t know how much money you’re gonna get. Everyone thinks that if Netflix buys their movie, they’re a success. Well, they might be a success among their friends and family, but what Netflix pays for a low budget movie is twenty or thirty grand. And they don’t give you more if it’s a hit. They will pay a ton of money for movies or series that make people subscribe. Movies that aren’t driving the subscriptions are interchangeable.

Haven’t you had any offers to buy the intellectual property that is RE-ANIMATOR?

I’ve tried to license the rights many different ways. I negotiated a deal with MGM who wanted to make a RE-ANIMATOR series. But when you get down to the details of these deals, it’s worse than a crap shoot. Because if it doesn’t happen perfectly, you end up with nothing. The worst thing is: you can’t do anything yourself, because then you have to pay them a ton of money.

In the first interview, you said of Stuart Gordon: He made low-budget movies. But they were his movies. Is that how you view your own filmography as well?

Pretty much. Stuart and I came from the same generation. From the time he was in high school, he knew he wanted to be a filmmaker. He worked as a theatre director, while I was in a commune and doing all kinds of weird stuff. But we both came up in the sixties, with the anti-war stuff and counterculture. We both did our own thing. We shared that mentality. All my decisions were based on the question: Can I be the boss on this? But that limits you. That’s not the way to do big stuff. You’re always going to do little things.

The big frog in the little pond.

Pathetic, but true.

But you’ve accomplished a lot. You’ve left your mark on the American horror landscape of the eighties and nineties, as producer and director, and what you did in Spain was bold and unique.

I do feel a certain level of satisfaction, having worked with so many people, in so many places, doing so many different things. Most people do a more narrow part of movie making. Even big time directors mostly know only what their world is like, they don’t know how to go to a different country, figure out what the industry there is like and then start producing movies that make money. To do that, you have to know about all the different parts of the business. I don’t think I’ve hit it out of the park with many of my movies, but I do feel very confident about a lot of what I’ve done.

But you know, back in the eighties and nineties I was working on three movies at a time. Of course it was a different time. It was the video age. But a lot of it has to do with age as well. I had so much energy at that time in my life. For a long time now I’ve been the oldest guy in the room. The people that make decisions are often younger than my kids. When I made RE-ANIMATOR I didn’t go looking for the guy that reminded me of my dad. I worked with people my age. I didn’t want some old guy around to make me uncomfortable. That’s who I am now. The old guy.

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• Brian Yuzna (1)

Special thanks to

• Richard Raaphorst for providing his artwork. Be sure to visit his website or check out his latest graphic novel.

• Xavier Mendik for letting us use his photograph of Brian Yuzna at the Cine Excess Festival.

• Jan Willem Steenmeijer for his beautiful photograph of Brian Yuzna. Be sure to visit his website.