I WILL MAKE THE PICTURE

In 2006, five years after their first interview with Roger Corman, Phil van Tongeren and Roel Haanen got a chance to speak with him again, at the 22nd Amsterdam Fantastic Film Festival, during which he was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award. This time they tried something different: they would show him clips of movies, let him guess which movie it was and then talk about it. ‘I didn’t move to home video voluntarily. I was forced out of theatrical distribution by the powerful majors.’

Movie clip: SORORITY GIRL (Roger Corman, 1957). The scene: sorority girl Sarda is spanking another student with a paddle.

Ah, this is probably SORORITY GIRL.

It is. These AIP-films you made in the fifties, were they just a job for you or did you try to put something of your own into them?  

A combination of both. They were working assignments. I had to live up to what was required of me, but at the same time I could put in my own ideas. For instance, this film was about the caste system of American colleges and it was a commentary on the sociology involved and the psychology of people caught up in it.

You directed a total of nine films in 1957. How did you do that? 

Very often I would be shooting, preparing another film and in the evening cutting a third.

What kind of state of mind were you in at that time? 

It was exciting. I liked making films. It was an exciting time. They were all two week pictures, so I was shooting for 18 weeks that year. The rest of the time I was either in pre-production or post-production. After that I thought: maybe I should ease back a little bit.

Susan Cabot, who plays Sabra, was already somewhat of a celebrity when you hired her for this picture.  

Yes. She had been under contract to Universal and had played leads opposite some of the major Universal stars. They expected her to become a star, but she was a little bit temperamental. As a result they offered to renew her contract but they said: because you’ve been causing us a bit of trouble, we won’t give you a raise. She refused and went back to New York, back to the stage. She had already been on Broadway a few times. After that I brought her back to Los Angeles for two or three pictures.

She quit after THE WASP WOMAN. 

Yes, she went back to New York.

And later she was killed by her son and the media painted a picture of her as if she was a crazy old has-been from SUNSET BOULEVARD. 

It wasn’t that. She had some psychological problems.

Did you notice this when you worked with her?  

A little bit, not much. We got along very well together and of course I was told she caused trouble with other directors, but she never caused troubled with me.

I don’t think anybody ever had trouble with you.  

Pretty much not. Once or twice a few tense moments gotta happen, but generally I got along fine with everybody.

Movie clip: THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER (Roger Corman, 1960). Scene: Philip Winthrop (Mark Damon) has a nightmare in which he tries to rescue his beloved Madeline from a tomb.

This is easy. THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER.

This was a turning point in your career.  

Yes, up until that point I was making pictures generally on a schedule of ten days. AIP had a distribution pattern of putting two ten day black & white pictures together as a double bill and sending them out together. For example: two gangster films, two science fiction films or two action films. They asked me to do two ten day black & white horror films. And I was getting tired of that distribution plan. I thought they were starting to repeat themselves. So I said: what I would rather do is make one fifteen day color horror film. They asked me what I wanted to do and I told them THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER. And there was some discussion, because they weren’t certain they wanted to do it, but it was a friendly discussion and in the end they decided to go ahead. The interesting thing was: Jim Nicholson, who was head of production, both he and I had the same man in mind for Usher, who was of course Vincent Price. So the casting was very easy.

Was Price easily persuaded to take the part? 

Yes. Dick Matheson was a very good writer who wrote an excellent script. Based on that and on my discussing the part with Vincent he agreed immediately.

It’s obvious you aspired to higher things with this movie than with your previous films. Did it ever occur to you, during the making, that you were making something really special, a classic? 

I didn’t know. I never thought of it as a classic, but I did feel it was a step forward for me. Mostly in terms of production though. Suddenly I had fifteen days to shoot and I was shooting in color, although I had worked in color before once or twice. I had a great script and a good cast, so I felt I was making a picture of greater quality than some of the things I had done before.

What attracted you in the stories of Edgar Allan Poe? 

I had been fascinated by Poe’s stories ever since I had read them when I was in school. And I always wanted to make THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER. I didn’t really plan to do any more, but USHER was the biggest success AIP had ever had, so they asked me to do another Poe picture. And I actually wanted to do THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH as the second picture, but there were some similarities between that and THE SEVENTH SEAL and I was afraid that if I made MASQUE people would think I was copying Ingmar Bergman. [Laughs] So I chose THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM instead. Each of the Poe pictures was successful – I made a number of them – and after a few years I still felt that I had to make THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH, so I said: I don’t care if people think I’m copying Berman. I will make the picture. When it was released nobody even mentioned Bergman. [Laughs]

THE HAUNTED PALACE was presented as an Edgar Allan Poe film, whereas the story was actually The Case of Charles Dexter Ward by H.P. Lovecraft. Did you also have a fondness for Lovecraft? 

I liked Lovecraft, but for me, the psychology of Poe was a little more complex and interesting. I was surprised when AIP called it THE HAUNTED PALACE and presented it as Poe, instead of introducing Lovecraft for a new series of pictures. But they explained to me they wanted to continue the success of the Poe series. It was still the same picture.

Would you have made more Lovecraft movies if they had released it as such? 

I might have. Later on I produced THE DUNWICH HORROR which was directed by Dan Haller. That one was specifically released as a Lovecraft story.

Do you think Lovecraft is hard to translate to film? 

His stories are pretty much straightforward. When you get into the mysticism and some of the horror sequences it requires a fair amount of special effects, more so than Poe. Just from a technical stand point they are more difficult to make. But the stories themselves presented no greater challenge.

On the other hand, Lovecraft never really describes the monster in great detail. He always uses some vague, ominous suggestion.  

I knew we didn’t have a great deal of money to create the monster, so I used those vague suggestions to tantalize the audience and only show the monster in the end. As I recall, what we did have wasn’t quite that good.

Around the time when you made the Poe pictures there was Hammer in England and Mario Bava in Italy, also doing these period horror movies.  

Yes. Hammer made good pictures, Bava made excellent films. But I hadn’t seen any of them when I started my series. That was much later.

Movie clip: THE INTRUDER (Roger Corman, 1962). Scene: William Shatner’s character is trying to stir up racial hatred in a white crowd.  

Ah, the speech from THE INTRUDER. It’s interesting how we shot it, because we were shooting in the South and we didn’t have much money. It was just my brother and I who made it. When we did this scene we needed a crowd, so we announced on the local radio station that we were going to shoot a meeting at the town hall. And I knew from experience that people come out to see a picture shoot, because they’re interested, but then they find out how long it takes to set up the camera between shots and so forth and then they start drifting away. So my first shots were the big reaction shots, because I knew we would have a smaller crowd later on. Bill was doing the speech, but not every single line [laughs]. It wasn’t until three or four in the morning that we reversed the camera on Bill and he did his whole speech. By that time his voice had become a little bit hoarse, but I thought it actually added something to his performance.

It’s a great performance by Shatner.  

He was really great in this. This picture won a number of minor festival awards, I won a couple of awards and Bill also for his performance. As Bill would love to tell me he won one award more than I did for directing [laughs].

In a previous interview, five years ago in Belgium, you told us that this was the first time you tried to lecture the audience instead of entertain them. Is that why you think it failed as a commercial picture? 

I think it failed for two reasons. One: the audience at that time, the early sixties, simply didn’t want to see a picture about racial integration. Two: it was more of a lecture. From that moment on I thought my films should be entertainment on the surface and I should deliver any theme or idea or concept beneath the surface.

If you could go back in time and change this movie, what would you change specifically?  

I’d probably try to make the characters and dialogue more complex, especially Bill Shatner’s character. To make it not so black and white. I learned the hard way that people are not black and white, they are grey.

It looks like his performance is influenced by Hitler.  

Yes, when he said ‘I’m an American’ and he uses his closed fist like he’s punching, that’s Hitler.

Movie clip: DEMENTIA 13 (Francis Ford Coppola, 1963). Scene: before the title sequence a woman dumps her dead husband from a row boat into the water. A little transistor radio, playing nonstop rock & roll music, is thrown in after him.

 This is DEMENTIA 13, Francis Coppola’s first picture.

When you saw the finished film, did you immediately think Coppola was going to be great film maker? 

I felt from the beginning that Francis was very talented. I thought he had done an exceptional picture for a very low budget and I was convinced he was going to be a good and successful director. But I didn’t anticipate that he was going to be a great director.  

Let me tell you how he got the job. I was shooting a Grand Prix Formula 1 racing film in Europe. We had all of our equipment built into a Volkswagen microbus. Shortly before it was finished I knew I had to go back to the United States for another film, and it occurred to me we had all this equipment in that microbus and a small crew of four or five people. You could take those four or five people and the microbus and shoot another picture. Actually, it was the best group of assistants I ever had. The number one assistant was Francis Coppola, number two was Bob Towne who would go on to write CHINATOWN and a number of other great films, number three was Mehahem Golan who would later form Cannon Films. Now Bob had no ambition to direct. He wanted to be a writer. So I said to Francis and Menahem: if you can come up with a story for a low budget film that you can make in a few days after we finish this, then I will put up the money. I told both of them: probably the best place to shoot is Ireland, because it’s right across the Irish sea from Liverpool and you could shoot a movie there without any permission, whereas in England there were problems. As a matter of fact, when we went to Liverpool we told the authorities we were just going to shoot the Grand Prix and didn’t say we were making a film. Francis followed my advice and came up with the story that could be filmed in Ireland. He just needed to take the microbus on a ferry from Liverpool to Dublin. Menahem also came with an idea to put everything on a boat, but he wanted to ship everyone to Israel to shoot a film there. It seemed a little impractical to do that. Also, I liked Francis’s story a little better.

Movie clip: VOYAGE TO THE PREHISTORIC PLANET (Curtis Harrington / Pavel Kloesjantsev, 1965). Scene: the cosmonauts are under attack by a flying monster.

I believe this is one of the Russian pictures I bought and dubbed into English. We shot a couple of added scenes. Francis Coppola worked on one of them and Peter Bogdanovich on the other. I bought them because at the time these were really good special effects. Better than the low budget science fiction films that were done in the United States, but they were filled with outrageous anti-American propaganda. In one of them the American space team got drunk and lost control over their ship and they’re falling into the sun, meanwhile calling for their mothers to save them. And the brave Russian space ship saved them. I knew that sequence was not going to work in the United States [laughs].

Maybe it was a normal practice then, but how do you look back on that now? 

It wasn’t that normal. It wasn’t done that much. I did it only two or three times and I told the Russians what I was going to do. I said: we have propaganda against you, you have propaganda against us, but I have to cut this out. They understood. The pictures were only moderately successful. The production value was tremendous, but the audience didn’t accept the lip syncing. So, I did it only two or three times.

Movie clip: THE TRIP (Roger Corman, 1967). Scene: last shots of the movie. Peter Fonda looks out over the ocean. The shot freezes and bursts apart like a sheet of glass.

This is the closing scene of THE TRIP. Now, my meaning with this scene was simple: the trip was over, he had slept, it was dawn, the start of a new day. I wanted it to be ambiguous as to what reaction he had to the trip. But AIP put that effect in to show that he had had a bad trip. It didn’t bother me that much, but I thought it was a stupid thing to do. Nobody would know what the crack means. I told them that: to you it means he had a bad trip. To the audience it will be just be something strange. But they sent it out that way. The major changes they made were this crack at the end and they put some sort of disclaimer before the picture started that they were against drugs. And they might have cut out one or two little things. The last three pictures I did for them they did a little bit of recutting. They recut a bit on THE WILD ANGELS, they recut some more on THE TRIP and then they recut a whole lot on GAS-S-S-S. They just cut the whole picture apart so it didn’t make any sense anymore. They were becoming a more conservative company and I was becoming a more radical director, so our views were parting. So after GAS-S-S-S I started my own company. 

Were the films you made at the end of the sixties, like THE WILD ANGELS and THE TRIP, also a reaction to the studio films you made at the time? [Corman directed THE ST. VALENTINE’S DAY MASSACRE for Fox and THE SECRET INVASION for United Artists.]

Yes. For instance, my original casting for THE ST. VALENTINE’S DAY MASSACRE was Orson Welles as Al Capone and Jason Robards as Bugs Moran. But the studio came to me and told me: Look, you’re a young director. This is your first studio picture. No director can control Orson Welles. He just does whatever he wants to do and doesn’t listen to what the director says. You don’t need that kind of trouble on your first picture. Years later I had dinner with Welles and Peter Bogdanovich and I told him this story and he said: I never caused any trouble! I always obeyed the director! I’m a director myself! I would have loved to be Al Capone! Now, that’s easy to say when you’re having dinner and few drinks. But I think the casting would have been better. Orson fit Al Capone. Jason, who was a more slender built and different kind of actor, fit Bugs Moran. I think the picture turned out well, but as a director I think I pushed Jason a little bit too strong to try to get the strength of Capone which was not inherent in his character. But he was a brilliant actor.

But didn’t you also have a problem with the way the studio’s handled their finances?

That was almost a joke. I looked at the books at the beginning of shooting and they were sending me reports. I said: these reports have nothing to do with what I’ve spent on the picture. Don’t bother sending me these. I know exactly what I’m spending.

So you were disillusioned with the studio’s and you decided to go back to work for yourself.  

Well, I did a couple of pictures for United Artists where I had a little more freedom. With the first one, THE SECRET INVASION, they pretty much left it all up to me. For the next one, VON RICHTHOFEN AND BROWN, which was also released as THE RED BARON, they forced me to dub the actors in a German accent after we had previously decided not to use German accents. That hurt the performances terribly.

Movie clip: VON RICHTHOFEN AND BROWN (Roger Corman, 1971). Scene: after an attack on the Allied Forces fighter pilot Von Richthofen (John Philip Law) gets into an altercation with one of his men, pilot Hermann Goering who has been shooting civilians during the attack. 

The idea for making this picture was mine. I was very interested in the fact that Von Richthofen was a German baron and he was a nobleman. He came from a long line of Prussian military men. He represented more or less the aristocratic  concept of the knight, who fights with honor but who fights to kill. Whereas the man who shot him down, Roy Brown, was a garage mechanic from Toronto, Ontario, who when he took off was so nervous he had to drink a quart of milk to calm his ulcers. But he was a natural, like a football player coming from a poor neighborhood and having no particular education, but having incredible coordination. That’s what Roy Brown had. He could just flip his plane around in the air faster than anybody else. And Von Richthofen also had great coordination, but it was Brown who shot Von Richthofen down. Symbolically the death of Von Richthofen was the death of chivalry in war and the beginning of modern mechanized warfare.

It’s Roy Brown in the film who comes up with the idea to attack the enemy while they are on the ground, which is not very chivalrous.  

Exactly. Roy Brown says something like: This is a war! Don’t tell me about honorable ways of fighting. Our job is to kill the enemy!

This was your last film as a director for a long time. Why did you want to quit? 

I was really tired. I had directed about 55 films in less than 15 years. I had to stop, at least for a while. I never planned to stop completely. I needed a sabbatical, during which I started my production-distribution company and it was successful immediately. 

Why did you return to directing in 1991 with FRANKENSTEIN UNBOUND? 

Actually I didn’t want to do it. Universal had done some research and found out that a picture called ROGER CORMAN’S FRANKENSTEIN would be successful. So they came to me and asked if I wanted to make such a film. And I said: no. There had been so many Frankenstein movies already. But they came back to me several times and each time they kept offering me more money. They thought I was negotiating, but I just didn’t want to do it. Finally, they offered me more money than I ever made in my life, so I thought if I could find a new way to do Frankenstein I’ll do it. Then I read Frankenstein Unbound by Brian Aldiss. But just as happened before [with the studio’s] they recut my picture after I made it. Although there are some sequences in it I like very much.

Did you decide after that never to direct again? 

Well, you never know. If I get interested in something I might go back, but at my age…

There was a rumor that they offered you a Masters of Horror episode.  

Yeah, as a matter of fact I already agreed to do it. But then I was so busy I never had time to prepare the script.  

Incidentally, I know this is an interview about me, but Joe Dante is a very good friend of mine and we were at a festival together and he told me the story of his episode: soldiers killed in Iraq come back to haunt the Bush administration. I thought it was a brilliant idea!

Movie clip: DERSU UZALA (Akira Kurosawa, 1975). Scene: Russian explorer Arsenev and local hunter Dersu Uzala, who serves as his guide in Siberia, have to build a shelter for the storm.

This is DERSU UZALA by Akira Kurosawa that I distributed. It won the Academy Award for best foreign film. Brilliant film! It was a Russian-Japanese coproduction and to my knowledge the only time Kurosawa shot outside of Japan.

Was there money to be made distributing these films or was it a pet project? 

It was really a pet project. There was a little bit of money, but I didn’t think I was going to be making any giant amounts of money on this. On the other hand it wasn’t charity either. I didn’t plan to lose money. I just felt that since I had a distribution company it would be good to distribute these kinds of films and help the filmmakers reach a wider audience. If I could break even or make a little money that was fine.

Movie clip: PIRANHA (Scott Levy, 1995). Hungry piranhas attack a group of school children swimming in the river.

Ah, PIRANHA. Joe Dante’s film.

Look closer.  

Is it the remake? That was not as good as the first one. Joe did a terrific job. The remake was well done, but it wasn’t my idea to do it. Showtime, which is the number two cable network in the United States, came to me and asked if I was interested in remaking a few of my better known titles. I told them I wasn’t particularly interested because I had already made these films. But they made a very good financial deal, so I said yes, on the condition I could make some new pictures as well. I made 33 pictures for them in three years. It was a good relationship. They wanted to do more, but I had had enough.

In the seventies and eighties a lot of your production got a theatrical release. In the nineties you moved to home entertainment. A few years ago you told us the majors were starting to monopolize the home video market as well. What is the situation now? 

I didn’t move to home video voluntarily. I was forced out of theatrical distribution by the powerful majors. They have started to dominate home video in the same way. I didn’t give up, but I cut down my theatrical distribution company and told my staff: you’re all home video salesmen as well as theatrical. Just last year I gave up home video. A lot of majors knew I was looking to get out so they made me various offers. Sony-Columbia came up with the best offer and I thought I was going to them, but at the last minute the Walt Disney Company came up with an even better offer. So my arrangement now is that Disney distributes my old films as well as my new films on home video. They are obligated to distribute six new pictures a year. I put that six picture maximum limitation on it to prevent me from making more films.

Related talks:

• David Carradine

• Roger Corman (1)

• Monte Hellman

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.

Special thanks to Jan Willem Steenmijer for letting us use use wonderful photograph. Be sure to visit his website.