MAKE THIS MOVIE INTERESTING

His last big screen credit was for the screenplay of THE PREDATOR from 2018, which he wrote together with his longtime friend and collaborator Shane Black. But for a lot of horror fans Fred Dekker will always be the director of two seminal eighties horror comedies: NIGHT OF THE CREEPS and THE MONSTER SQUAD. Both movies have found a loyal following through the years, but back then they were not financially successful. He got another chance with ROBOCOP 3, but that movie was doomed when it got caught up in Orion’s bankruptcy. Although the circumstances were against him, Dekker himself will be the first to explain what’s wrong with the film. Roel Haanen talked to Dekker via Zoom in January 2022, about his career and how to surprise an audience.

I’m a big fan of THE PREDATOR. I thought it was the best one since 1987. I like how the movie starts out familiar enough, but then takes these unexpected turns, like the hero getting tossed in with the Dirty Dozen on the bus. It’s so much fun. Could you walk me through how you and Shane Black conceived this screenplay and what some of the ideas were?

As you know, Shane was in the original film. He has a great affection for that experience, so when the studio asked him to do this movie, it was kind of a no-brainer for him. He and I had done a pilot for a western series, called Edge, and we had gotten a rhythm going as a writing team. I was thrilled, because I had not had a big screen credit in years. Shane and I have written together many times and it’s always like two boys in a room thinking about what toys they want to play with.

One of the things I wanted to do, was to tip the hat to the Howard Hawks school of characterization. So, we wanted a tough-ass female lead. That’s where Casey Brackett came from, played by Olivia Munn. We also wanted THE DIRTY DOZEN, exactly as you said. The kid was something we felt would humanize the Boyd Holbrook character. We thought that was worth mining for the emotional undercurrent of it. There’s also a little bit of THE MONSTER SQUAD in the movie. I was pleased with the Halloween sequence where Jacob Tremblay goes outside with the real Predator mask.

But we failed in our concept, which was to explore the Predators’ culture and their agenda. Because I have to be honest, I’m not a big fan of this series. I think the first movie is special, which has a lot to do with Alan Silvestri’s music, but beyond that it’s really kind of sci-fi porn to me. I don’t care about the weaponry, the mask, the helmet. That’s window dressing. I said to Shane: Suppose you went to the Ozarks and you saw a guy hunting. When he’s done hunting, he goes home to his family. He has a job to go to the next day. Now, suppose that’s the Predator. What does he do after he’s done hunting? Does he have a job? What else are these Predators doing? That’s science fiction writing: taking something fantastical and applying a logic to it. We were trying to explore the mythology, which lead us to the notion that there were different factions, that there were good and bad Predators. But at the end of the day I don’t think anyone cared about that. What we were hoping to do, was to hit head-on what this clash between two factions would be. But it was way too ambitious for us to pull off.

And then we also failed with the third act. There were a lot of problems in the shoot towards the end where the studio felt we were going in the wrong direction. We were zigging and they wanted to zag. The third act is extremely compromised. Lots of rewriting and re-shooting.

What was your and Shane Black’s original idea for the third act?

The premise we had come up with was that the Predator’s crashed ship was an ark. There were specimens that were genetic creations that combined Predator DNA with other creatures’ DNA. As we wrote it, these creatures get away and our Dirty Dozen has to take them down. There was this big chase on a weaponized half-track. Our heroes are on it, together with two good Predators who want to help. It would have been THE ROAD WARRIOR with monsters. Really exciting. But the studio decided we had to go another route.

Doesn’t this show how difficult it is to balance the expectations of a studio and an audience and put in your own creativity as well, when you’re making a sequel within an established franchise?

It’s less about wanting to impose your own creative vision as it is about serving the audience. But I don’t think regurgitating something that you’ve seen before is serving the audience. That’s taking them for granted. Whenever we made a choice that was bold or different, it was specifically because we wanted to make this movie interesting.

What was the model for the Sterling K. Brown character?

He was our William Devane character from MARATHON MAN. Shane and I are big fans of that movie. One of our favorite things is that character. This is a spoiler for those who haven’t seen it, but we think Devane is a good guy and halfway through we find out he’s not. With Sterling’s character we know he works for the government, but you don’t know his agenda. Originally his character was much more front-and-center as the guy who holds this trump card, because he knows why the Predators are here. It’s a great performance by Sterling.

THE PREDATOR got some flak for portraying autism as the next step in human evolution. Was there any discussion between you and Shane Black or with the studio about the possibility of getting into trouble with that storyline?

That’s a good question. Now we are living on Planet Woke and everything is inappropriate. But back then that hadn’t quite happened yet. Let’s put it like this: if we were writing that now, I’m sure the studio would be much more johnny-on-the-spot about it. Shane and I asked ourselves: What if being on the spectrum means you are actually evolving as a human being? What I’ve learned since, is that people who have autistic children don’t think very much of that idea. They have to live with their child. But at the time the studio didn’t even blink.

What’s the process like when you and Shane Black work together? Do you write together in a room? Does one of you do dialogue and the other action?

We rarely write together in a room. Once we know what the scenes are we tend to cling to our strengths and our passions. Like the scene where Rory dons the Predator mask on Halloween and he runs into bullies, that’s something I wrote. And then Shane wrote most of the banter between the soldiers. One of the things I was proud of, was that I managed to channel Shane while I was writing the jokes on the bus. I know what he likes. So, I did homework online, cobbled together pieces of jokes that I read, and came up with stuff that I knew he was going to love. So, the answer to your question is free form. I did a lot of the scene work first and then Shane would revise it or he would ask me to revise it. But it’s a hard question because it always feels like this weird alchemy. We start with nothing and end up with a script, not exactly knowing how we got there.

Did you write more scripts together of movies we haven’t seen?

We wrote several more episodes of Edge when we were trying to get Amazon to commit to that series. More recently we wrote something together that is still in play, so I don’t want to blow the whistle on it. But it’s an existing property that people will recognize. We did that for television. We also wrote something called SHADOW COMPANY, which was a spec script in the eighties. Shane had written that and he asked me to help him on a rewrite. We did that rewrite for Walter Hill who was going to produce it. John Carpenter would direct. Here I am, fresh out of college, I always wanted to be in the movies, and I’m sitting in a room with Walter Hill and John Carpenter. That was pretty great. Ultimately it was not made, but we came very close. There are probably two or three more scripts that we wrote together.

You just said you always wanted to be in the movies. When did that start?

Movies were always calling my name. My dad had a great love of movies. He would take me to the drive-in when I was a kid. I had my sleeping bag in the back of our station wagon and I was in my pajamas. He took me to films that I still revere to this day: THE SAND PEBBLES, WHERE EAGLES DARE and a lot of the sixties adventure movies. But I gravitated towards genre. KING KONG was a huge movie for me. I remember looking at the TV Guide and seeing that KING KONG was on at three in the morning. I went to bed, set my alarm, got up, snuck downstairs and watched it.

In high school I made super-8 movies and did a lot of stage work: acting and directing. I wanted to go to film school, but I didn’t get in. So, I went to UCLA academically, because I liked the campus and the girls were cute. It was a place where I could thrive and enjoy myself. I met this great group of actors, writers and directors, many who went on to great fame. So, I got serious about making movies by connecting myself to likeminded people in L.A., like Shane and Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson.

Did you want to be a director or a screenwriter?

I wanted to be a director. At that time there were people like Francis Coppola and Paul Schrader and Lawrence Kasdan who had made great movies, but who all started out as screenwriters. That would be my way in. I was gonna write a script and attach myself to it as a director. That’s how a lot of them did it, so that’s what I did.

What was the first script you wrote? Was it HOUSE?

No, HOUSE was conceived as a short film. My friends and I went to see TWILIGHT ZONE: THE MOVIE and we loved it. So, we wanted to make our own anthology. We all wrote our own stories. We never made the movie, but the one I wrote was the kernel of what became HOUSE: a soldier comes home and is haunted by his war experiences in this house. When we didn’t make the anthology I thought it would become my first feature. Because my parents had this hundred year old Victorian house up in Marin County. It looked like a haunted house. All I needed was one actor who goes into this house at the beginning of the movie and comes out at the end, and in between is the scariest shit I could think of. But I never wrote the script. I had already started on another script, which became my first movie [NIGHT OF THE CREEPS]. While I was writing that, my roommate Ethan Wiley asked me if he could write the HOUSE script. I said: Sure, take a crack at it.

I had a good relationship with Steve Miner who had given me my very first job as a screenwriter. He had produced the first FRIDAY THE 13TH, and directed the second and third. He was a rising star. His obsession was Godzilla. Believe it or not, there had been no attempt to make an American Godzilla movie. So, he contacted Toho, told them what he wanted to do and they gave him the option. He hired me to write the screenplay. My first professional job in Hollywood: writing the script for this huge movie with an enormous budget for that time. Ultimately, that’s what killed it. Steve’s biggest budget had been for FRIDAY THE 13TH  PART 3 and he wanted to go from that to this movie, which was like an Irwin Allen movie on acid.

So, Ethan wrote HOUSE. He gave the script to me. It wasn’t the movie I envisioned. It was goofy, but it was fun and I thought it was terrific. I gave it to Steve on a Friday. Monday morning he called me and said: I want to make this movie. He got Sean Cunningham to put up the money. So, that was the first movie with my name on it.

I read that you wrote NIGHT OF THE CREEPS in a week.

I think it was three. But one week sounds better.

You wanted to sell NIGHT OF THE CREEPS, only if you could direct it. Was that a hard sell?

No, I was very lucky. Prior to the Godzilla script I had written a spec script, a big budget time travel movie. That script got me an agent, David Greenblatt. He has been my agent ever since. When I finished NIGHT OF THE CREEPS he sent it to a couple of producers to see if they liked it. He found a wonderful producer named Charles Gordon, or Chuck as we called him. He’s not with us anymore, I’m sorry to say. Chuck produced WATERWORLD, FIELD OF DREAMS and a whole bunch of other movies. He liked my script and he called Jeff Sagansky at TriStar and said: I’m giving you an exclusive look at this, but I’ll need to hear from you first thing in the morning, or I’m sending it to everybody else. Of course, he had already sent it to a whole bunch of people. But Sagansky liked it and he greenlit my first movie. I was twenty-five years old and got to make a six million dollar movie.

They took a chance on you, right?

Well, I already had a movie with my name on it, which was HOUSE. I had written a couple of screenplays, so they knew I could write. And I had taken some of the money that I made from writing and made a little short 16mm film, a little time travel movie. The funny thing is: I never finished that movie. But I had about eight minutes of footage, which I sent to TriStar. I went to a lot of trouble to make it look professional. They saw it and said: He knows what he’s doing, let’s go!

I really love the prologue and the last shot of NIGHT OF THE CREEPS, with the spaceship and the aliens. It’s something that makes the film even more crazy. But I could image a studio telling you: Get rid of that. It’s too expensive and we don’t need it. 

That didn’t happen though. I don’t know what battles Chuck fought on my behalf, but Jeff Sagansky was always very supportive of me. Casey Silver, who went on to run Universal a couple of years later, was also very supportive. Now, six million dollars is not a lot of rope to hang yourself with. Even though this was already a weird movie on the page, they really left me alone. That is until we did a preview of the movie.

What happened at the preview?

It was the most miserable night of my life. A disaster. The movie just lay there. Which is interesting, because it was sort of the same movie, with just a couple of key changes that we made. The executives came up to me, shaking their heads, going: We have a real problem here. My heart sunk. They wanted the studio editor to take a pass at it, to suck some air out of it. That’s why there are some continuity errors. But to their credit they said: Anything you hate, just tell us, so we can find a way to make both of us happy. Again to their credit, they let me do a few reshoots to give it more oomph. So, I came up with new stuff.

What were some of the extra shots you did?

There were a couple of changes. When Chris and Cynthia are blowing away the zombies, we built some more animatronic puppets. We made that a little more exciting. The whole scene where they go into the shed, to protect themselves from the zombies, that whole sequence was added. I think that made a big difference. And then there were a lot of tweaks and cuts, but that’s something you always do with a movie.

Did you have second test screening?

We did and it went much better. It’s an odd movie. Nobody ever sets out to make a cult movie, but there are movies a wide audience will immediately take to, and there’s NIGHT OF THE CREEPS which is a strange mish-mash of detective story, horror movie, romance, science fiction and comedy. But that’s what special about it. At the end of the day I’m pleased with it. I pulled it off.

The studio didn’t do much with it. I think there was someone at the studio at that time, who shall remain nameless, who thought I was too big for my britches. This person decided to teach me a lesson. I think that’s why the movie was not released in L.A., because someone had it in for me.

Wow.

Yeah. So, that’s the sad part. But the happy part is that it found its audience. It just took fifteen or twenty years, but it has a wonderful and warm fanbase. That’s because of cable television and video. A whole lot of movies have just disappeared, especially when they didn’t do well at the box office.

I was thinking about what you said about NIGHT OF THE CREEPS being this mish-mash of genres. I’m a huge fan of that. It’s why I like Larry Cohen’s movies so much, like GOD TOLD ME TO and Q THE WINGED SERPENT. It’s also the reason why TEMPLE OF DOOM is my favorite Indiana Jones movie.

That one starts out as a musical.   

Yeah, and it becomes slapstick, a screwball comedy, a horror movie. It’s all these different things.

I completely agree. I love that movie. Maybe it’s our ADD. We just like to be surprised and challenged throughout. 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, like Larry Cohen’s movies.  

Tom Atkins was quite the horror guy for a while there. He had already been in THE FOG, CREEPSHOW and a couple of others. Was that why you cast him?

Not in a million years. It’s funny, because I had seen all those movies and I was a fan of those.  HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH is by far my favorite of that series, because it’s not what those other movies are. I had written the character as this winking homage to a Raymond Chandler detective. He was kind of glib and flippant on the page. But when Tom came in, not only did he say the lines exactly as I had heard them when I wrote the script, he also brought this sadness to the character. I realized that he could make the difference between a cult movie that’s winking at you and a cult movie that actually has something bubbling under the surface that’s powerful and human. At the end of the movie, you realize that he’s making all these jokes, not because he’s trying to be funny or impress the sorority girls so that they’ll sleep with him, no, he’s going crazy! Because what he’s seeing doesn’t make sense anymore. The world has gone insane. So, he’s like: Well, I’m gonna ride this all the way to hell, because that’s where we’re headed. Tom’s audition made me realize who that character was. That character is the best thing in the movie, by far. It’s a wonderful performance.

I agree. When you call someone on their cell phone and they see it’s you, do they ever answer by saying: Thrill me?

It has happened.

How did you come up with that line?

I wanted to serve notice that this character was not gonna be predictable. My two favorite scenes in the movie – not that you asked, but I’ll tell you anyway, because the rest of the movie you can take or leave – are his nightmare and the scene in which Tom Atkins tells the Jason Lively character about what happened to his girlfriend. I think that scene is measured, emotional and true. It elevates the whole movie. The nightmare scene I was really pleased with. I was ripping off Spielberg in that section, with the cross wipes. It’s Roy Scheider at the beach. But that’s okay. Steal from the best, I say. I think it’s genuinely unsettling. Then he wakes up and you see this dingy, nineteen-forties apartment and he’s drinking bourbon under a ceiling fan. They’re clichés, but you wouldn’t expect them in this movie that’s all been college kids and hijinks up to this point.

Jason Lively's character is named after George Romero, so it is safe to assume his NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD was a source of inspiration for your film. What were your thoughts on the three zombie movies Romero had made at that point?

I think anyone of a certain age who’s ever made a horror film has been influenced by George, not to mention his pioneering work in the field of independent film making in general. NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD was a watershed moment in cinema, and clearly ahead of its time. I think DAWN OF THE DEAD was, in many ways, a perfect sequel, taking the premise and world-building of the first film and expanding on it without just being a remake. The bold choice to make it independently, and not be beholden to Hollywood and the ratings system, also allowed DAWN to plumb depths of tone and violence that are as gut-punching today as when the movie was released in 1978.  

DAY OF THE DEAD is my favorite of the three. The darkest and most potent as social commentary, it's not just a scary-as-fuck thriller but also a whip-smart depiction of how the divisions in human intelligence inevitably make a disastrous situation worse. It truly feels like the end of the world, which is also what makes John Harrison’s oddly spunky music score and the film's oddly hopeful ending so effective.  

What I’m not a fan of is the way Romero’s mythology has been stolen and regurgitated ad nauseum, and sadly, that includes my film to a degree. 

Let’s talk about THE MONSTER SQUAD for a bit: you recently posted something on Facebook saying that ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN is a favorite of yours. How did it influence THE MONSTER SQUAD?

In a weird way ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN is my favorite of the Universal monster movies. THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN and SON OF FRANKENSTEIN are better movies. But I don’t think DRACULA or THE WOLFMAN is better. I loved those monster movies as a kid. Then I also loved the black and white comedians of the thirties and forties: Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, Abbott and Costello. I saw all of their films on television on Sunday morning. One day I stumbled upon the fact that they were in the same movie! A little homework taught me that the monster movies were starting to run out of gas. They were huge in the early thirties, making a lot of money for Universal. So, they kept making them. When they started to get diminishing returns, they spent less money on them and they added more monsters. Abbott and Costello, believe it or not, were the top earning movie stars for about seven years. They made three movies a year. They were it. But then they started getting diminishing returns. So, some genius at Universal came up with the idea of putting them together. Now, we’ve been talking about tone, but I remember watching that movie as a kid and laughing, but still feeling it was scary. When they’re at this old mansion on the island and the monster gets up and comes after Lou Costello, it’s funny, because Costello is being Costello, but it also scared me. I really thought the monster could kill him. That made a huge impression on me. The other black and white comedies I loved from the thirties were the Little Rascals series, which I saw on television in the seventies. So, I thought it would be fun if the Little Rascals met the monsters. That was the beginning of THE MONSTER SQUAD.

You succeeded, because THE MONSTER SQUAD is funny when it’s funny, scary when it’s scary and even endearing when it’s endearing.

I really appreciate that. You know, Quentin Tarantino has a theater here called the New Beverly and they showed THE MONSTER SQUAD back in October. My son got us tickets. We went and I was surprised at how funny it still was. But that was mostly Shane. He can write humor as well as anyone who ever did. And to pat myself on the back, I think the lines are delivered properly. I coached the kids: Say it like this. Say it slower. Say it faster. And it works. I think it’s a hoot.

It works because these are just kids being kids, while monsters are roaming the suburbs.

Exactly. Even early in the picture you have the kids questioning the rules of the monsters. Some of that is just jokes, like why does the Wolfman wear pants? But then they learned stuff from the movies that turns out to be true, like you can kill the werewolf with a silver bullet. You take something and make a joke out of it, then you spin in it so it becomes serious, and then you spin it again to make a joke. That’s the tonal tightrope we’re talking about.

Just to go back to the New Beverly screening for a bit: did you go incognito or did they recognize you?

They recognized me. I signed some stuff. People find me. It’s extremely gratifying, particularly for a movie that didn’t do any business when it came out.

THE MONSTER SQUAD came out in a time when there were many of those Spielbergian movies in which the fantastical invaded the suburbs or a little town. They mostly involved kids. EXPLORERS, GREMLINS, THE GOONIES, E.T. THE EXTRA TERRESTRIAL. Was that just something that was in the zeitgeist?

Don’t underestimate the magnitude of E.T. THE EXTRA TERRESTRIAL. It was the biggest hit of all time, when it came out. It struck a chord in audiences young and old. Just as a sideline: I  had a meeting with Dino De Laurentiis, rest his soul. He wanted me to write the sequel to KING KONG, the John Guillermin movie. I guess he’d read my Godzilla script. In that script a kid has this symbiosis with Godzilla, as dumb as that sounds. He’s three-and-a-half feet tall and Godzilla is several stories high, but whatever. Dino wanted this kinship between a kid and King Kong. And I looked at him and said: Really? He replied very seriously: “Kong is E.T.!”

De Laurentiis wanted to cash in on a success, whereas for me, E.T. is not only one of my favorite films of all time, because it’s beautiful, but it also opened the possibility of normal kids having run-ins with fantastical creatures. And why couldn’t those be my beloved Universal monsters? How they came up with THE GOONIES or EXPLORERS, I don’t know, but I do think E.T. was the flashpoint for that. It was in the zeitgeist, as you said. Writing about young people dealing with really fantastical stuff was not really done before E.T.. It was all Disney stuff, like THE GNOME-MOBILE.

What were your thoughts on the documentary WOLFMAN’S GOT NARDS?

I think it’s very heartfelt. Andre [Gower] did a wonderful job directing it. Henry McComas did a wonderful job editing it. It’s a beautiful valentine to the people who care about THE MONSTER SQUAD.

Before they made that documentary, did you have any idea of how big the fanbase for THE MONSTER SQUAD was?

No. I mean, I’ve been doing the occasional convention, so I knew, as with NIGHT OF THE CREEPS, that the movie had found an audience on cable and video in the late eighties and nineties. But I didn’t know the depth of the emotional connection people have with that film. I was a nerdy kid. I did not play sports and when I did, I did it poorly. I had friends. I wasn’t unpopular. But I was the kid that got up at three in the morning to watch KING KONG. So, there’s something to be said for seeing yourself in a movie. I think a whole bunch of people enjoy it because, as you said, there’s lots of scary stuff and funny stuff, but they also see these kids as outcasts. They have their clubhouse where they can be nerdy, because they don’t want people to see them being nerdy. At school they’re a little embarrassed by it. I think that really rings a bell with young people. I don’t know of any adults who see this movie for the first time and think it’s great. You probably would have to have been a kid when you saw it the first time, because then you wrap it up and take it home and feel it for years after.

My girlfriend saw it for the first time when she was in her forties. And she loved it.

I’ve never been happier to have been proven wrong.

I think Tom Noonan is a great asset in your film. What was he like to work with?

I love Tom, but he was a little difficult. I think there was a method thing going on. One of my regrets is that I didn’t have that many opportunities to work with great actors and convince them to do things I wanted them to do, like great directors do. With Tom I made a very cagey move when I first met him. I knew he was the real deal. He was very serious about his work and I really wanted him for the part. I told him that to me the character was Lennie in Of Mice and Men. He’s a brute, he’s physically big, he’s not comfortable in his own skin and he’s a little bit addled. What do we say in today’s woke terms? Lennie’s got mental issues. As does the Frankenstein monster, because we don’t know whose brain he has. Tom responded to that. Once we got into it, he became very methody. He wouldn’t talk to the kids, except in character. He would be in his trailer and only come out to do the work. He made a real effort to keep a distance, so that the illusion was real to the kids. In retrospect I can really respect that, but at the time it was difficult. He would just refuse to do things. Duncan Regehr was tricky, too. I had more trouble with those two than with any of the kids.

I saw in the documentary WOLFMAN’S GOT NARDS that you were almost fired by Peter Hyams halfway through the movie.

You’re not going to find a bigger Peter Hyams fan in the world than me. I saw CAPRICORN ONE and it blew me out of my seat. Then I saw HANNOVER STREET, which nobody ever talks about. It’s fantastic. So, when my career was starting to take off, I asked my agent to send my time travel script to Peter Hyams, because I wanted to meet him. Anything to be in his presence. He liked my script and agreed to meet me. I met him at MGM. This was after 2010, his sequel to 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. I walk into Peter’s office and HAL 9000 is on the wall! And his eye is lit. During the whole meeting I was like: Oh shit, HAL is watching me! Peter knew I was a fan. He kind of patted me on the head and said: We’ll see, kid. Maybe we can make your picture.

Now, what happened on THE MONSTER SQUAD is that I had never learned the ABC’s. In the old studio way of movie making there are certain things you always do. To this day some of those I just don’t agree with. One of them is: you always need a master shot, which is a wide shot of the whole scene and you play it all the way from the beginning to the end. People as exalted as John Ford knew damn well that if you shoot anything that they can use, they might force you to use it at some point. So, I was only shooting what I wanted to use. I was editing the movie in my head. And Peter thought I didn’t know what I was doing, even though he had seen my other movie. It was a difference of approach. He was a stern taskmaster, but I can’t imagine what would be in my head about directing without having him teach me.

And actually, it wasn’t halfway through that Peter wanted me fired. It was at the end of the first week. Rob Cohen, who was also a producer on it, was a big fan of NIGHT OF THE CREEPS. He went to bat for me and said: Look, maybe he’s got beginner’s jitters. He’ll shoot your masters and it’ll work out. From then on I did it by the numbers, but I still did some crazy stuff that’s in the movie. And Peter, who was on set the whole time during that first week, kind of disappeared into the background. But he did shoot second unit for me. He shot the Wolfman in the phone booth scene. That’s all Peter.

What did he think of the finished film?

Peter’s a sweet guy, but he’s also a manly man. He doesn’t want to show his hand. I would talk to him in his office and we would chit chat, but he would never say: I saw the dailies, good stuff! Or anything like that. Except for one time, while we were editing. This was when we were nearly finished. I was working with Jim Mitchell who edited all of Peter’s films that I love so much. And Peter came up to me and said: “Hey, I was talking to Jim today and he said this might be special.” And then he started talking about baseball.

I have a question about your RICOCHET script, which was originally intended as a Dirty Harry installment. Having only seen the film that it became it’s kind of hard for me to see a Dirty Harry movie in there. What was the original storyline that you came up with?

First of all, I really like DIRTY HARRY and MAGNUM FORCE. I’m a huge Eastwood fan. He’s one of my favorite movie stars. I think that Dirty Harry character was lightning in a bottle, because after the first two the rest of the movies just weren’t up to snuff. So, I thought I would write a spec script.

Unbeknownst to me I was ripping off a movie I hadn’t seen, which was CAPE FEAR. I said: What if Harry arrested a guy years ago and the guy gets out of jail and starts making his life hell? It’s fairly generic up to this point. My producer Joel Silver claims to have sent it to Clint, but that doesn’t make any sense. Joel had his own production company. He could just make it himself, which he did. He said that Clint thought it was “too grim” for him.

There were about five seconds when I was going to direct it. I met with Kurt Russell about playing the cop. That’s when I should have had my Tom Noonan moment. Before I went into that office, I should have said: I have to convince Kurt Russell to do this movie! But I failed to win him over. That should be my tombstone: “Husband. Father. Failed to win Kurt over.”

Do you know why he passed on it?

I don’t. But at the end of the day I don’t know if directing that movie would have been up my alley. I wrote that script at a distance. I was trying to capture something that I liked, but it wasn’t organic to me.

The scene where the Denzel Washington character is abducted, drugged and sexually abused, was that also in the Dirty Harry version of the script?

It certainly wasn’t. I only saw the movie once and I don’t even remember that scene.

I think ROBOCOP 3 has an undeserved bad rep. I thought ROBOCOP 2 tried to outdo the original in its nihilism, but it felt forced and as a consequence the movie just feels a bit nasty to me. What I like about ROBOCOP 3, is that it does something different. It has more of a friendly spirit and even some genuine emotional moments. My question to you is: even if the studio had given you permission to make an R-rated movie, is that dark, cynical stuff even something you’re interested in?

I honestly don’t think so. This goes back to the beginning of our discussion, about not wanting to repeat something that we’ve already seen. I’m a huge fan of the first ROBOCOP. I love filmmakers whose work has a recurring sense of them. Paul Verhoeven is certainly an example of that. I completely concur with what you said about ROBOCOP 2. Irvin Kershner is a great director. Arguably the best STAR WARS movie was directed by him. But he was trying to do something he wasn’t  born to do. All of the nihilism and over-the-top stuff and the little kid drug dealer, all of that was meant to shock, just like in the first movie. But there was an effortlessness about the first movie. You can hear Verhoeven giggling. He’s having tremendous fun. Whereas I don’t get the impression that Kershner was having fun. It’s like he’s making the movie with a gun to his head. I know from people who have worked on that movie that there was friction on set. They were changing it a lot. I don’t think I could ever make a movie like Verhoeven’s. It’s not as nasty as the second, but it’s kind of nasty. For me, it goes against the grain to be mean. I like to have some heart and soul in my movies. But I will also tell you what I think is wrong with ROBOCOP 3, if you’re interested.

Absolutely.

One thing that happened was that the release was held up because the studio was filing chapter eleven. So, between the time we finished the movie and the time we released it, two other movies had hit the market place that changed everything: JURASSIC PARK and TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY, both of which had made the quantum leap from special photographic effects to computer generated effects. Any movie thereafter is going to pale by comparison. Although, there’s a lot of bad CGI in the nineties that just looks terrible.

If the studio had given me the opportunity to do whatever I wanted, I don’t think I necessarily would have made an R-rated movie. It would not have been nastier. I would have hired Jackie Chan’s stunt team and give the movie a Hong Kong sensibility. This was before THE MATRIX and before this became common in Western action movies. I wanted that ninja to be the most fucking amazing thing you had ever seen. The action scenes were the important thing, but I got too wrapped up in the transition between scenes and working with the actors. That movie needed to be more exciting.

But I stand by Robert John Burke. I’m so sick of people saying: But you didn’t have Peter Weller. So what? ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE didn’t have Sean Connery and it’s pretty fucking good. This isn’t the first time they’ve switched an actor in an important part.

What was the moment when you knew the movie was not turning out the way you wanted?

That’s a great question. I have to be completely honest. Apart from the problems I had with it, like the effects and the fight choreography, I don’t know what I could have done differently at that time in my life, with the script that I had. Now, if someone gave me a time machine which would only allow me to go back and make ROBOCOP 3 all over again, I would do some of the things I just talked about, but I would also bring back Nancy Allen’s character as a cyborg at the end. The ninja robot would beat the shit out of Robocop, in a Tsui Hark kind of way. Robo is down. His arm is off. His helmet is cracked. He’s completely fucked up. We know he’s gonna die. And then we hear [robotic sounds] and in comes this sixteen foot tall four armed robot with Nancy’s face. Everybody would go: The rest of this movie sucks, but man, that is great!

That would have been something.

And Nancy would have been happier. She was not a happy camper on this movie.

She didn’t liked the fact that her character was killed off, right?

She did not. And she didn’t have a good experience on the second movie either, because a lot of her stuff was cut out. That’s something I learned. If God willing I ever make another movie, I know that nurturing the actors is really important. It affects the whole thing. We got along fine on the set, although we had some wardrobe issues. She didn’t want to wear her police uniform. I said: But in every scene you’re on duty!

What part of filmmaking do you enjoy the most? The writing and conceiving of the movie? Or the actual directing and editing?

Any director worth their salt will tell you that editing is the most fun. Shooting is invigorating. It’s a social thing. If I had to jettison one thing it would be the writing. Not because I don’t like writing, but because it’s an albatross to me now. I was so lucky to have Shane Black in my corner. There’s so much of him in THE MONSTER SQUAD and it makes me look good. Now and then I write something I don’t hate or even kind of like.

What was your role exactly on the Star Trek series you worked on? You’re credited as a consulting producer.

I was a staff writer. When you write in television, your agent asks for a certain amount of money but they also negotiate a certain credit. So, if you watch a series and you see supervising producer, consulting producer or associate producer, most of those people in television are staff writers.

Were you a Star Trek fan?

I liked the original series, which I saw in re-runs in the seventies. But I was never a Trekker. THE WRATH OF KHAN is the best that Star Trek ever got, in my opinion. Everybody else on that staff was a Star Trek nerd. I was a little bit of a fish-out-of-water. It wasn’t a pleasant experience. I met some wonderful people, but it wasn’t the best time of my life.

Because you were in movie jail?

I was absolutely in movie jail, but that wasn’t the reason. Like I just mentioned, writing is not my favorite part and this was just writing. It was also a very weird experience, in terms of how the scripts were generated.

What are some of the projects you have worked on that didn’t come to fruition? What’s the one that got away?

The biggest one that got away was right around the time I was working on Star Trek Enterprise. I’ve always been a big Richard Matheson fan. He takes one guy and really puts him through the wringer, using some fantastical conceit, whether it’s I Am Legend or The Shrinking Man. It occurred to me to rip off I Am Legend and replace the vampires with aliens. I concocted this movie called INVADED which starts out with this guy who goes into a supermarket. It’s all trashed. Garbage all over the place. He’s looking to see if there’s any liquor in there. He’s got a dog with him. When he goes outside you see there’s nobody for miles and miles. We learn there was this horrible alien invasion. The aliens are still here. They’re these ten foot long slugs that zap you with venom and then eat you. That was the premise.

I had set it up at Constantin and Thomas Jane was interested in playing the lead. And then I came very close to making it at Lightstorm, James Cameron’s company. We were already designing things in the art department. Ultimately, I think Jim just wants to make his own movies. He did produce a couple of other projects, like the Kathryn Bigelow movies, but his heart is really in his own projects. That’s fine. But what pisses me off is that since I wrote that script, it has been done fifteen hundred times, in movies and television, all the way up to A QUIET PLACE. That was very frustrating. Because if everybody hadn’t done that since, I could go back to it. We ended up selling it to SyFy at one point. Neil Marshall was going to direct it as a pilot. But at that point I had lost interest.

Last question: JAWS is your favorite movie, right?

[Fred goes away and comes back with a framed original one-sheet of JAWS and an autographed picture of Spielberg talking on the phone on the JAWS set.]

Look, he signed it over his face because he hates this picture. This was 1978.

How did you meet him?

I met him a couple of times. First time was in San Francisco at a little festival and the second time was at USC. He signed this for me at the Norris Theater at USC. And I got to work with him briefly at Warner Brothers. I had written the very first episode of Tales From the Crypt that Robert Zemeckis directed. He really liked that and wanted me to write an episode for him. We had a meeting, which was very exciting. But because he’s a busy guy he ended up not directing the episode. Howie Deutch directed it.

My question about JAWS was this: have you got any insights as to why it’s such a beloved movie?

I can only speak to my own experiences. Seeing JAWS for the first time with an audience in 1975, at the Sequoia Theater in Mill Valley, was a life changing experience. Everybody in the room was wired in the same outlet. I could see and feel the effect Spielberg’s choices had on the audience. You could see his thumbprints. It’s a vision. He didn’t follow the rules either. When Scheider talks to the mayor on the ferry, that whole scene is one shot. And then there are scenes that have cutting all over the place. It’s just so effective. It’s the first time I thought: I wanna do that, what he does! It’s never left me.

I hope to see more movies of you in the future.

That’s very sweet. From your lips to God’s ears.

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This talk was edited for length and clarity.

Thanks to Kimberley French for letting us use her set photo of The Predator. Visit her website at: www.kimberleyfrench.com