THAT IS NOT A MOVIE

Luigi Cozzi was a guest of the Offscreen Film Festival in Brussels in February 2011, where his STARCRASH from 1978 was shown in a special science fiction theme program. Often cited as a blatant STAR WARS rip-off, STARCRASH is actually also an homage to everything Cozzi admired, like the work of Ray Harryhausen he would later try to emulate with two HERCULES movies. Barend de Voogd talked to Cozzi, who started out as Dario Argento’s protégé, made his own movies in the seventies and eighties, and then ended up working for Argento again, managing his movie paraphernalia shop Profondo Rosso.

Let me start by asking you about the GODZILLA movie you edited in the seventies.

I was always a huge fan of GODZILLA, so much so that they used to call me Cozzilla. At that time I was working as a distributor, buying theatrical rights of movies from the fifties and reissuing them in the theaters. At a certain point I did GODZILLA, the American version with Raymond Burr. My regional agent told me that if I wanted to reissue it successfully, I needed to colorize it. KING KONG, the version by De Laurentiis, was coming out. So, I decided to do an experiment. I asked a guy who I had met, who would later do the stop motion effects for STAR CRASH, if he could colorize GODZILLA using stop motion. I gave him two minutes of the black & white GODZILLA to experiment on.

So, how did that work? Did he have to color every frame by hand?

No, you project the diapositive and before it reaches the screen, you put in colored gels. Green here, yellow there, some pink where the faces are. It’s difficult to color in the lines if the camera is moving, but if the camera is still it can be done. It looks strange, but it’s color. It was much more primitive than colorization with computers.

Then I thought: the destruction scenes of GODZILLA were great for 1954, but not for 1977. So I bought some stock material of buildings being destroyed and ships exploding and World War II footage. I opened with the bomb on Hiroshima. In the end I put an extra twenty minutes of material into the picture. I also did big stereophonic sound.

In the end the picture opened in the big theaters. That was in the summer, which is the dead season for films in Italy. But it did enough business. We needed little money to break even, you know?

Do you know if Ishirô Honda ever saw it?

I made a deal with Toho, not with Honda. The deal was that they owned the rights to the colorized version for the whole world, except Italy. That was the deal.

I have never seen your first film, TUNNEL UNDER THE WORLD. Could you tell me about it?

It was made when we were all really young. I got permission from an American writer [Frederik Pohl] to adapt his story for the screen. We took the idea from the story and made the movie very hastily in five days, without a script. But it worked. It was shown at film festivals and it got good reviews. It was very much influenced by ALPHAVILLE, which I liked a lot. My goal was to make a movie. Not even a good movie, just a movie. And we succeeded.

You wanted to become a filmmaker at that time. And you knew a lot of people, like Mario Bava and Antonio Margheriti. How did you get to know them?

I wanted to become a director, but I was very young. I was working mostly as a writer for a pop music magazine. I tried to put some articles on cinema in it, mainly horror films. Then I became friends with Forry Ackerman. He wanted me to work for his magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland as his Italian correspondent. When I went to the studios to pick up photos for the magazine, I met Bava, Margheriti, and all those guys. And I discovered I was the only Italian who cared about them. So, we became friends. They knew I was a writer and a science fiction fan, and they asked to bring them story ideas.

Did you ever work with Bava on a story idea?

Oh yeah. I was working for the first Italian horror magazine in 1968 or 1969. The magazine had a comics section. And there was a story that Bava really wanted to bring to the screen. For a while I worked with him, trying to adapt it for the screen. But he dropped it because it was too difficult. And later, when I was doing STARCRASH, I had written a story which Bava liked very much. He came to the set and we discussed the special effects he would need. He wanted to use my people for the effects. But it was also dropped, because it was too expensive to make.

So, you were influenced by science fiction and you were very fond of the Italian horror directors of that time. I believe you were also influenced by Ray Harryhausen, right?

Yes. I never got to meet him, but I did exchange letters with him at the time of STARCRASH. Those letters disappeared when I moved. I got his address from Caroline [Munro]. I love stop-motion and I wanted to tell him that we were doing these stop motion scenes in our movie. He wrote back that he would love to see the film.

It was very difficult to do the stop motion in STARCRASH, because nobody in Italy was doing it. I had to find people who knew how to do it, who had the same machinery that Harryhausen had. It was an East German machine, a stop motion projector in combination with a stop motion camera, that allows you to do the Harryhausen effects alone and cheaply. But the trouble was, nobody was using it. Only Karel Zeman in Czechoslovakia, who was making beautiful pictures, and Harryhausen. I knew it was no use to ask Harryhausen to come and work on STARCRASH, because he didn’t even want to go work for George Lucas when he asked him. We tried to hire Dave Allen from the United States, but it turned out to be too complicated. He needed to move all of his equipment. In the end we found a guy in France. He was not as good as Dave Allen, but it was easier to hire him.

Is it true that you originally had a different story in mind for STARCRASH?

Yes. I had made some money as a distributor and I decided to use that money to make a promo reel for a science fiction movie.  A good promo reel with special effects. I had written a story which was sort of a CASSANDRA CROSSING in outer space. This was in 1976, the time when disaster movies were popular. I tried to sell the project with the promo reel and the story. I approached many producers, but nobody was interested in Italy. So I tried a French producer, Nat Wachsberger, but he wasn’t interested either. This was at the end of April 1977. The next month STAR WARS came out in the USA and Wachsberger called me back: Did you say you had a science fiction project? I said: Yes, I do, but  you didn’t even want to look at it. He said: Yes, yes. I am interested. Let’s discuss it. But when I proposed my idea he said he wanted something like STAR WARS. He told me he was going to be in Rome the next week and I had to meet him and tell him the story.

But I had a problem: STAR WARS had not opened in Italy. Luckily, because I was a big science fiction fan and I was always buying magazines and books, I remembered that I had bought the novelization that had come out earlier, the one by Ballantine Books. Usually, they do the novelization after the picture, but Lucas wanted to promote this new project, so he insisted that Ballantine publish the novel before the premiere. It was a disaster. It only became a bestseller after the film came out. But a few copies made their way to Italy and I had seen it in the book shop. You know, with the beautiful Ralph McQuarrie cover. I never buy novelizations, because they are always crap. But that cover was so fantastic, that I had to have it. So, I bought it and put it on the shelf with all the other thousands of books I have. So, I looked for the book and found it. I started reading it and I recognized immediately where it came from. It came from Flash Gordon, from John Carter of Mars, from the pulp novels.

You took inspiration from a lot of places, not only STAR WARS. There’s some BARBARELLA in your movie too.

The thing is: I didn’t want to do something similar to STAR WARS, because I did not have the time or the money. Lucas prepared STAR WARS for a long time. I only had two months. So I tried to put in all the things I liked. I thought: Why not make the hero a girl, like in BARBARELLA? I was a science fiction fan all my life. I could think of all these other great sci-fi stories and comics.

Did you cast Caroline Munro because you saw her in Harryhausen’s THE GOLDEN VOYAGE OF SINBAD?

Exactly. She was gorgeous. I thought it was impossible. I told the producer she would be perfect for it, but I never thought we could get her. Then suddenly he says: I got that girl that you wanted. Turned out it was easy. Caroline was terrific. A perfect professional. Very British. Between shots she was knitting. On the screen she is really tough, but in real life she is quiet. Very nice lady. And she was excited to be in the film.

You said you had two months to prepare. That’s not a lot.

No, it was very little time. Almost no preparation. That’s why we shot the exteriors first. If you notice, all the exteriors are without build-ups. It’s caves, the sea, the river. Nothing else. We shot outside for two or three weeks while they were building up the sets at Cinecittà. And then another five or six at Cinecittà. Total of eight weeks with the actors.

We were spending a lot of money, but still we did it cheaply. Because the prison is the same set as the Count’s station. It doesn’t look the same, but it’s the same set. I used a lot of tricks. Like, in the battle, you see a lot of people dying as they are hit with the gun rays. There are explosions on their bodies. That took one hour to prepare, so we couldn’t do too many of those shots. That’s why I shot the same man with three cameras. It’s the same man who dies three times. But you don’t notice because one camera is traveling, the other is from a whole different angle, and in the editing they are spread apart. I kill five people, but you see fifteen. Things like this made the movie look bigger.

The producer wanted a STAR WARS rip-off. Did that give you enough freedom to put in your own ideas?

Luckily, the producer lived in Paris, so he only came over on Friday to look at the rushes. The only thing he kept telling me was: Do it like STAR WARS! But he knew nothing about sci-fi. And he knew nothing about special effects. I shot a lot against black, so I could put in the effects later. But he didn’t understand that. The first eight weeks, when I was shooting with the actors, he was very happy. The shoot was going very quickly. There were no big expenses. But then when the shoot was finished and we were doing the special effects, he went crazy. It went slowly. It cost money. So, he says: Cut this! Cut that! But we couldn’t cut anything, because we were already making the effects. Besides, without the effects it would just be two hours of actors against black. That is not a movie.

So, how long did it take to do post-production on STARCRASH?

Oh, about one year. That was very hard, because every day the producer would be like: Finish it! Finish it! Why is it not finished yet? Ugh! And I was stuck, because there was no way back.

Tell me about Marjoe Gortner. How did he end up in STARCRASH?

STARCRASH had been bought by American International Pictures for the American market. And Marjoe Gortner had been in a big hit for them, which was THE FOOD OF THE GODS. He was also a friend of Sam Arkoff’s son. They said: Marjoe will play Akton. Actually, in my script the character was an alien. What I had in mind was the mutant from THIS ISLAND EARTH. But Marjoe didn’t like it. He wanted no makeup on his face. So, I tried and tried, but then the producer said: No makeup! Then I decided to change his character, to give him powers. Because otherwise he would just be a meaningless character. And also, why would Stella Star need him? She could get along without him. So, I made him into a sort of Peter Pan.

Was it always like this, in your career, that you had little say in which actors you could hire?

Always. There was always someone coming with some actress: This is so-and-so and she’s a friend of the distributor. She will play this role. Always the same.

Did you also get David Hasselhoff that way?

No, I was looking for an American to play that part and from Los Angeles they sent me cassettes of young TV actors, who were doing soap operas. There were three or four of them. When I saw David, I knew he was perfect for the prince. Tall, beautiful. David had done a lot of soap operas, but no movies. So he really wanted to do the picture. On set he was perfect. Because he had done so much TV, he knew all his lines, he was always ready.

Was Joe Spinell difficult? There are some stories that he was a heavy drinker.

Everybody tells me that, but I never saw it. He was very funny, told a lot of jokes. Remember, at the time we were filming, STAR WARS was still making a dreadful amount of money. And everybody knew that this would be the second picture after STAR WARS, that it would become a big hit – and it was a big hit - so everybody was happy to be in it. I had no problems with anybody. Well… the only troublemaker was Caroline’s husband [Judd Hamilton].

Why was that? He played the robot, right?

Yes. He was an actor and he asked to play the robot. Well, he wanted to be an actor, but nobody cared about him. I had no role for him to play, so we let him play the robot. Even as the robot he made problems. He would stop the scene and say: I’m sorry, I said the wrong line. I said: Who cares? We are going to dub you anyway!

I heard there was talk of a sequel to STARCRASH.

No, there was never real talk, because the producer, after waiting one year for the movie to finish, said he would never produce another science fiction movie again. Then, because he made so much money of off STARCRASH, he stopped making pictures entirely! He made so much money from it.

How do you look back on the movie now?

It was the best I could do, given the circumstances. I succeeded in putting in most of the things I wanted. I don’t like to watch my old movies, but in 2005 they invited me to a screening in Paris, in the Méliès Theater. It’s huge and they had a lot of kids in the audience. I was terrified, because I didn’t know how they would react. I hadn’t seen STARCRASH for such a long time. Afterwards, they all clapped. The kids started asking me a lot questions about the characters. That means that they were invested in them. I was so surprised. You know, movies now are so much faster than the ones made in the seventies. But STARCRASH still goes by pretty fast, because it offers things the audience does not expect. Like, the scene where the emperor stops time. No one expects that to happen.

But did you intend those moments to be funny? Because people laugh at those moments.

Of course it is a joke! Because if you imagine a suspense scene with a bomb, all the way back to Hitchcock with the bomb on the bus, there are a number of ways such a scene can play out. They can find the bomb. They can throw it away. They can diffuse it. It could explode. But now the emperor comes and says: I am the emperor of the galaxy, what is time for me? I can stop it! I’ve seen dozens of scenes in other movies with bombs, and my solution to that problem is absurd.

STARCRASH is filled with absurdities, because that is what I liked about the movies I watched from the fifties. I think I went beyond it. Even when I wrote THE KILLER MUST KILL AGAIN, I wrote a scene where the killer gets his car stolen. We were laughing so hard at that.

The start of your movie career was very much intertwined with Dario Argento’s. How did you meet him?

I met him immediately after my first film. I was doing interviews for movie magazines. I saw his first picture in the theater and I loved it! He was not famous then. I said: This movie is a revolution! This is going to change horror and thrillers in Italy. So, I wanted to get to know him. I was the first movie critic who wanted to meet him. There was only seven years difference in our age. We had the same taste in movies. So, we went to the movies together a lot and we became friends. At a certain point he said: Why don’t you write my next picture with me?

How was that writing process with Argento?

We were meeting every day and exchanging ideas. I would write pages and give them to him. He would give me a certain book and he would say: See if you can put that scene into the script. In the end we tried to put all the best ideas into the script. And when he started filming, he knew I wanted to direct, so he asked me to be his assistant. I accepted of course.

And did he help you with your own giallo, THE KILLER MUST KILL AGAIN?

Well, that project was offered to him first. It had no story, no title. It was just a giallo project that they wanted him to make. But Dario could not accept, because he wanted to produce his own movies, with his father. So he said: Here is Luigi, my helper. Let him do it. He will make a good movie for you.

But was the giallo genre as close to your heart as science fiction?

No, I’m sci-fi always. I only do horror when I cannot do sci-fi. Or I do sci-fi masked as horror. Sci-fi masked as fantasy. If it was up to me, I would only do sci-fi.

You also wrote with Dario’s wife Daria Nicolodi.

Yes, that was THE BLACK CAT. I was looking for an idea for my next movie. And she asked me if I wanted to do a movie with her. I said yes. She had written SUSPIRIA and INFERNO with Dario, but they had split up in the meantime. She wanted me to make THE THIRD MOTHER. In the beginning I said sure. But then I realized it was too much like a Dario Argento movie. I couldn’t do that. I was still working with Dario. He was my friend. I couldn’t make THE THIRD MOTHER behind his back. So, I changed it drastically. That was science fiction masked as horror, because it was about mind powers.

Eventually, Dario Argento would make LA TERZA MADRE. What did you think of it?

I think it’s very difficult to do a sequel twenty or thirty years later. You change, the public changes, expectations change. Also, he had a lot of money to do SUSPIRIA and INFERNO, but today he can’t get that kind of budget. At the same time it is much more expensive to make a movie like that.

The strange thing is that people tell me that Dario’s THE THIRD MOTHER has elements from my fake THIRD MOTHER. Aside from this it’s a totally different story. I patterned THE BLACK CAT after the movie THE POWER, the George Pal [produced] movie which I like very much. That movie had a more scientific ambiance, THE BLACK CAT has a horror atmosphere, but the main story is the same.

You and Argento have worked together, but your styles and methods are very different. He is famous for working slowly and meticulously, and you work quite fast and more commercially.

I have to, with the kinds of films I want to make. If I took as much time as Dario, it would be too expensive. I always had to find shortcuts to make my movies look bigger than they are. Nobody would have let me make CONTAMINATION if I couldn’t make it fast and cheap.

CONTAMINATION was also patterned after some famous movies of the time, like ALIEN and ZOMBI 2. 

I took some elements of ALIEN, but I took much more from QUATERMASS 2. Nothing of ZOMBI 2 because I had not even seen it at the time.

I thought the opening with the ship was very similar.

That I took from an old Warner’s movie from the fifties called THEM! It’s exactly like the beginning of CONTAMINATION. In THEM! you see two police men in a helicopter, a girl working in the desert and a police car approaching the girl. I did exactly the same, but instead of the desert it’s the sea and instead of the girl there is a ship. So, the opening I patterned after THEM!. And then when the people get inside of the ship and they find the bodies, that was patterned after an Ishirô Honda movie called THE H-MAN. It has the exact same scene, with a ship that is abandoned on the ocean, many sailors are dead or infected by radiation. Then they get attacked by the slimy creature. It is the same sequence. I loved it when I was a kid and I loved recreating it. My films are filled with things like this.

You shot in Colombia. A lot of Italian movies were made in South America. Was there anything in terms of a film infrastructure?

Actually, we were supposed to shoot at a sugar plantation in Santa Domingo, but then the production was moved to a coffee plantation in Barranquilla, Colombia. So, then we had to change the sugar ship to a coffee ship in the movie.

But to your question: the main reason was that you didn’t have to pay taxes in Colombia. In Italy, if you paid a worker one thousand, you also had to pay the state one thousand. The other reason why many films were made in places like this, was that the producer could export capital. For example, he would say to the state of Florida: I want to come and make a five million dollar movie. Of course he gets permission. But then he would only spend one million and put four million in the bank. They had no way of checking the expenses. It’s not like a shop where you can go inside and see what they are selling. When the picture is finished, you have a can and a film inside of it. This is the main reason why you would see all these strange co-productions.

But getting involved with producers like that is also risky. Many filmmakers have been ripped off by people like that.

Yes. That is common. In the past we had pirates, now we have producers. Same people, they just changed their profession.

You also shot in New York for CONTAMINATION.

Yes. We spent one week in Colombia and three days in New York. We shot as much as we could in three days. It was just two guys and a handheld camera. We shot in the streets of New York.

Did you have permission?

Absolutely not. All Italian movies shot in America have been made like this. We ask no permission. If anyone asks, we are just filming some home movies, you know?

After THE BLACK CAT you stopped directing features. Why?

Because the industry stopped. The big companies had taken over everything and there were no more opportunities to do pictures of that kind. The people I depended on to make my films abroad, came from all parts of the world. But they also stopped being available for these kinds of movies. For a while I worked with Dario again, on TWO EVIL EYES and THE STENDHAL SYNDROME. Then I did three documentaries about his movies, some video clips for music groups.

Almost all Italian genre directors stopped making features around that time, except for Argento.

Yes, but he has always been a star in Italy. Like I said, the industry is gone in Italy. We had one horror movie last year which was really good, called SHADOW. It’s selling very well abroad and does well at  festivals, but it did nothing at the box office. But the director, Federico Zampaglione, is a rock star in Italy. He paid for the movie himself. Even if he lost all the money on it, he can just make another record and be okay. I cannot do that! My point is: it’s a special case.

In Italy, all distribution and cinemas are now property of television companies. So, they only produce what they cannot buy abroad. They are not going to give me a million and a year to make a sci-fi movie if they can get the new STAR WARS movie from America. It’s financially safer to go with STAR WARS. They can even see it before they distribute it! Why would they waste their time with me? This is how they look at things.

Some of your Italian colleagues went into television, in the nineties.

Yes, I could have done that as well. But I don’t want to make the kind of things they make on television. I had no problem, because at the same time when the movies stopped, Dario opened the shop [Profondo Rosso] and he asked me to work with him. We do the shop, we do publishing. It’s the kind of job I love to do. I’m still in my sci-fi fantasy world, you know?

Related talks:

• Ray Harryhausen

• Caroline Munro

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.