WTF with Marc Maron Podcast - Episode 720 - Joe Dante / John Carpenter

Episode Date: June 30, 2016

Marc dives deep into genre waters when he welcomes madcap director Joe Dante into the garage. They talk about art school, Roger Corman, Piranha, minimal budgets, Gremlins, Innerspace, and more. But first, a master of modern horror also stops by the garage. John Carpenter tells Marc why he wanted to make scary movies and why he now wants to make music with his son. Sign up here for WTF+ to get the full show archives and weekly bonus material! https://plus.acast.com/s/wtf-with-marc-maron-podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's winter, and you can get anything you need delivered with Uber Eats. Well, almost almost anything. So no, you can't get snowballs on Uber Eats. But meatballs, mozzarella balls, and arancini balls? Yes, we deliver those. Moose? No. But moose head? Yes. Because that's alcohol, and we deliver that too.

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at a special 5 p.m. start time on Saturday, March 9th at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton. The first 5,000 fans in attendance will get a Dan Dawson bobblehead courtesy of Backley Construction. Punch your ticket to Kids Night on Saturday, March 9th at 5 p.m. in Rock City at torontorock.com. Lock the gates! all right let's do this how are you what the fuckers what the fuck buddies what the fucking ears what the fuck bergs how's that i don't know if i've said that how are you what's happening

it's mark maron this is my show wtf welcome to it i hope you are well i hope you are enjoying your morning afternoon evening i hope you're almost asleep if you're trying to get to sleep with the dulcet tones of my aggravation i hope that is helping you i hear that it helps some people i hear it helps some people sleep i don't know how that is but good night good night little ones so what's happening i i am trying to uh promote some shows the last couple episodes what is the last three i think episodes of marin are on wednesday nights at nine on ifc what else is happening as you know i'm doing some club dates i think you should know that if you're listening to this fairly regularly you should know all the trip Trippany House shows are done. I'm at the Ice House on July 3rd.

That's Sunday. That's sold out. Spokane Comedy Club, July 7th, 8th, and 9th. Tickets available. Spokane, Washington. Yeah, Wise Guys, Salt Lake City, July 14th, 15th, and 16th. And Salt Lake, I think there's tickets for that. The Comedy Attic, Bloomington, Indiana, July 28th, 29th, and 30th.

And Stand Up Live, Phoenix, Arizona, August 18th and 19th. So those are shows. Oh, yeah, 22, three days at Stand Up Live. That's a big old room. I'll be in Albuquerque, hometown, September 3rd. And the Comedy Club in Rochester, New York, September 9th and 10th. and the Comedy Club in Rochester, New York, September 9th and 10th. So, yeah, go to WTFpod.com slash tour to get hooked up with links to those tickets.

I'd like to see you somewhere if you're going to be there. New material and stuff is coming along pretty good. Went through a minor crisis last night because it was hot here. It's been hot here. I'm not complaining. This is the way L.A. is. L.A. has no seasons just uh kind of hot uh not as hot as arizona and then a little chilly at night those are the three seasons um and uh it's it's very bizarre after a certain point when uh when you live somewhere where there

are no seasons because you don't know how many fucking years have gone by holy shit i've been here how long 12 years jeez i wonder if i'm going to get a parking ticket in this season it's sort of like right like right now it's like all right things are on fire and there are ants must be summer los angeles did i mention there's a new batch of wtf cat mugs available from brian jones up in portland they go on sale at 12 noon eastern 9 a.m pacific today go to brian r jones.com to get yours also coming up forthcoming is it at some point uh in the near future chuck closterman will be on the show here but before that happens i want to tell you about his book but what if we're wrong thinking about the present as if it were the past.

It's out now. You can get it wherever you get books. I read it, and I learned some things, and I thought about things differently. Thank you, Chuck. It's going to be exciting to talk to you. Today on the show, we have sort of a doubleheader. I'm going to do a little chat with John Carpenter. And then the two directors, Joe Dante later in the show,

the director of Gremlins, Gremlins 2, Inner Space. He did that amazing section of the Twilight Zone movie. Obviously, John Carpenter has directed a ton of stuff. He's a fucking genius, the John Carpenter. They're both great directors, I think. John Carpenter, of course, Halloween, The Fog, Escape from New York, The Thing, Christine, Starman, Big Trouble, Little China, They Live, one of my favorite John Carpenter movies.

Probably The Thing is my biggest favorite. He was dropping by primarily to talk about his music, but we got some other stuff in we got a little still you got some other stuff in and me and joe talked for quite a while it's interesting i talked to these directors especially john carpenter because i'm not i was never a horror guy my brother was more horror driven but i have no patience for thrillers i don't really like horror uh only because uh it it it it punches my brain a little too hard i mean there are things i remember and i guess that's the point but uh but i think that

if i watched too many horror movies i would be scarred for for life i mean i i like them i guess aliens would be considered a horror movie and uh i don't know if you ever forget like there some horror movie memories are more visceral than than actual memories like i talked to a joe dante about the fly the sequel of the fly i think we were talking about and uh might have been the um the return of the fly but uh it was there was an image in there where a guy got in the machine with a with a rodent of some kind and he had like rabbit hands and rabbit feet and fucking scarred my brain i can't get out of my head scanners that guy's head blowing up it's like it's visceral and still very present to me

the uh dawn which with that is a day of the dead i like i like horror movies that have a satiric edge to them i liked um like what is it the dawn of the dead or day of the dead which is the one with the shopping mall scene what other ones i see like oh i talked to john carpenter a little bit about the thing and those the one guy when he's getting taken over by the thing and the dogs and oh man there are a few that really that really stay with me what was that great cannibal movie that guy pierce was in and ravenous ravenous that's one of my is that a cult movie does anyone know that movie robert carlisle jeffrey jones is in it it's a fucking great movie i would definitely consider it of the horror genre genre but as you

can tell i'm not uh i'm not a huge uh huge horror guy i mean i've seen a lot of carpenter's movies but not all of the horror movies. And the ones like They Live that had a sort of powerful satirical punch to them, I enjoy those the most. But The Kitten, let's talk kittens. That could have been a horror show, but it wasn't. Maybe it was last weekend that I just heard a kitten yelping on my porch at 2.30 in the morning. This tiny black kitten. And then it came to eat a couple of times, and it was really too small to be out there.

And I didn't know if it was completely feral or not. It seemed a little young to be fully feral. But Sarah, who's a cat-trapping wizard, wanted to trap it and see what we could do. And it's hard. It's hard to trap out here because you could trap it and see what we could do. And it's hard. It's hard to trap out here because you could trap a skunk. You could trap a raccoon. You could trap a shitload of hairy trouble in those traps if you don't keep an eye on them. So we got this little kitten.

And I don't think it's – I think it's maybe six weeks old. So it's definitely not feral. It's over at Sarah's integrating, getting fed. I'm running around too much. I got my two cats here. I can't manage the kitten situation. She's managing it for now. But I do think I'm going to take it in and give my cats a friend.

Give my two cats, Monkey and LaFonda, a little friend. If not a friend, some sort of little guy to beat up on. But see, I don't want to do that. I don't want to do that to the cat we'll see it's an adorable black cat it's healthy needs to be dewormed and it needs a flea bath but it's jumping around it was a little nuts at first but now it's just a little kid and we got it i think we got it in just a nick of time before before it turned into a totally scary wild fucking animal within it's weird because within weeks it would have been a totally scary wild fucking animal i think we just made it under the wire where we can do the like no we're your parents so that worked out

that is actually going to be the first tame cat i've had in a long time. So John Carpenter was here and we talked for a bit. Sometimes these talks yield what they're going to yield. It was a good talk and he came here to talk about his music, which is great. I enjoyed the records. His most recent album of original music, Lost Themes 2, is available now. We did get a little bit of movie talk in, but we did what we could. It was nice to meet him and good to hang out for a bit. This is me and John. You can get anything you need with Uber Eats. Well, almost, almost anything.

So no, you can't get snowballs on Uber Eats. But meatballs and mozzarella balls. Yes, we can deliver that. Uber Eats. Get almost, almost anything. Order now. Product availability may vary by region. See app for details. Hi, it's Terry O'Reilly, host of Under the Influence.

Recently, we created an episode on cannabis marketing. With cannabis legalization, it's a brand new challenging marketing category. And I want to let you know we've produced a special bonus podcast episode where I talk to an actual cannabis producer. I wanted to know how a producer becomes licensed, how a cannabis company competes with big corporations, how a cannabis company markets its products in such a highly regulated category, and what the term dignified consumption actually means. I think you'll find the answers interesting and surprising. Hear it now on Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly.

This bonus episode is brought to you by the Ontario Cannabis Store and ACAS Creative. carpenter how's this good with me can you hear you an fm announcer yeah do it thank you very much there's not many of us who remember that anymore i know it's bizarre isn't it it is bizarre dude that guy hey what's going on we're gonna play the side one of jesse collin young's new record oh stop jesse collin young wow wow for some reason that's the one name in my mind that sticks out from when i was in high school is that guy always playing whole sides of records i was like not fogelberg the fuck who needs fogelberg i don't mean to shit on that's okay i don't know if he's a friend of yours no he's not you don't know him no i don't know so

john carpenter uh not scary in person no unfortunately huh how did you get uh you know i did listen to um we can start out with that that music because you know i'm a big fan of the sacred bones label uh-huh and they do a lot of great rock music and experimental music how'd you get We can start out with that music because I'm a big fan of the Sacred Bones label. And they do a lot of great rock music and experimental music. How did you get linked up with those guys? Where did that happen? It was kind of by accident. I got a music attorney.

And she said, have you got any new music? And so I sent along some music that my son and I had been improvising. Oh, really? Okay. And a month later, she said, you have a record deal. That was it? What's your son play? My son's a synthesizer guy on drums and various things.

And you have this, because I know that you scored all the films. I actually this morning went and reminded myself of the Halloween theme. I knew that was a big part of that film and a part of what scarred me and many others as a child. My pleasure. Uh-huh. But I was surprised, maybe not surprised, but pleasantly surprised when I listened to the first Lost Themes record, how nicely it sort of plays as a whole record.

I listened to the whole side straight through on the good equipment, flipped that shit over and listened to the next side all through. It was like Tangerine Dream, you know? Yeah. You get that kind of flow. I love Tangerine Dream. Do you?

Oh, I love them. How fucking great are they, right? Oh, man. And they've been around for a while, too. Are they still all around? I don't know. I think so. Did an album with Jean-Michel Jarre this year.

They were on it. Yeah. Yeah. So that was sort of, you know, that was in your head, huh? Yeah, I guess so. Did an album with Jean-Michel Jarre. Uh-huh. Yeah, they were on it. Yeah. So that was sort of, you know, that was in your head, huh? Yeah, I guess so. For how long? I mean, how long have you known about this? Well, I first knew about Tangerine Dream back from a movie called Sorcerer in 1978. William Friedkin.

I just had him in here, man. Oh, he's awesome. We were talking about Sorcerer for like a half hour, man. Sorcerer is a great movie, and he's a great director. Yeah, but Tangerine, I didn't even put that together. I knew they did the soundtrack because I was thinking Thief. I remember the soundtrack. That too, yeah, yeah.

Because that soundtrack was like right up. It was almost bigger than the movie. So when did you start writing music? Well, my father was a music teacher, so he decided when I was about eight years old that I needed to start learning the violin. Unfortunately, I had no talent at it, but I struggled, and I finally quit. But I went on to keyboards and guitars, and I had a local rock and roll band in the little town I lived in. Where was this?

Bowling Green, Kentucky. In Kentucky, a rock band. What year are we talking, John? We're talking the 60s, the 67s. You doing covers? You doing originals? All covers. Taking acid?

What are you doing? No, no, no. Straight boy. Yeah? But then I went to California to learn movies. Was your dad a composer? He was, in addition to being a violinist and a teacher. So you grew up in a house where-

Filled with music and classical music. And he had a piano, I imagine. Oh, yeah. Yeah, could he lay down on the keys too? Can he do it? So that's a beautiful thing. Yeah, yeah. That's where I came from.

It's good. It's better than hating the house. That's correct. That is absolutely correct. And where did he teach? He taught at Western Kentucky University, which is a college, was a teacher's college there in Bowling Green. Became a university. It's now growing a university.

Still there. And he was the head of the music department? That's correct, yeah. And what'd your mom do? Well, she was a secretary, just a mom. My father was one of the founding members of the Nashville Strings. And what that is is is backup strings for Roy Orbison and Brenda Lee and all the Nashville recording artists. Really? So he played for everybody. He played for Johnny Cash. He played for everybody here in Nashville.

So he's on all those records? Oh, yeah. On the Roy Orbison records? On the Roy Orbison records. Those are beautiful strings. You know, crying? Yeah, that's him. Crying.

That's him. Really? Yeah. Oh, yeah. oh yeah oh my god so you grew up with that too yeah was it was he doing it when you were a conscious person absolutely i was conscious and i would go down with him to the recording studios and i got to see roy orbison and a bunch of them doing it laying it down oh my god that's awesome that's amazing because uh because i just got that uh the the box set of roy's that's all that on that one label i don't remember what label and it's all it must be all your dad on there because it's all that orchestration that's right god he was a heart-wrenching artist roy orbeson had an incredible voice it was just unbelievable

transformative voice yeah it was uh it you can feel it it kind of cuts through your guts yeah yeah and And did you see Johnny Cash, too? I did not see him, no, I didn't. Who were some of the other guys you were in there? God, who did I see? Brenda Lee. Oh, yeah. What's her name? Teresa Brewer. Uh-huh. My father recorded with Dusty Springfield

back when she was a member of a group, the Springfields. No kidding. Yeah, is that weird? How far is Nashville from Bowling Green? About 60 miles. So it's an hour run. Yeah. He did this before he was a professor or during? No, during. Oh my god. Moonlighted. Yeah, and how

that's a good childhood experience. Yeah, that's where I came from. I had that in my back pocket and I brought it with me into the movie business because, you know know when you're making little movies you're making student films or low budget movies you don't have money for sure score so i could do it myself and you can write music i can't write it i just improvise it uh-huh i hear

it and what what's your primary instrument when you're right working it well i'm a piano synthesizer yeah yeah because like you know i I noticed on the Lost Themes 1, and I'm glad she brought me to because they gave me a digital download, but I become sort of a vinyl snob. I understand, yeah. Is that, you know, there's a groove to it. I mean, there's a drum, there's a push to it. You know, it never sits still.

And, you know, there's a full-on momentum, and it carries you through the whole thing. Even more so in two. Two is even a little bit further than one. Oh, yeah? Yeah, yeah. Well, good. I got something to look forward to after this.

That's right. And no digital, huh? You're a pure vinyl maker. No, no, no. I got digital, but if I can get the vinyl, I'd rather sit and listen to it on that. It does make a difference, I think. Maybe I'm crazy. I don't know.

I don't know either. I don't know. I mean, I guess it's the same with anything analog. Where do you stand on films? Well, film has kind of disappeared. They're not projecting it anymore in the United States. Is that saddening you?

Yeah. What is even crazier is, look, when I was a kid, growing up in the 1950s, the television was threatening the movies. Sure. So what did the movies do? They had to come up with something to get people in the theaters.

Yeah. One of the things they came up with was CinemaScope. Remember that? Yeah. Widescreen. And there's still one down over by on Sunset, right? Sunset and Vine. But guess what?

Yeah. Now you watch a movie on your phone? That's crazy. Well, wait a minute now. See, it's all gone a different direction than I imagined. Yeah. Movies are supposed to be seen on a big screen. Right.

With other people around. Right. I'm just an old school guy. Right. But I think that the argument is, is like even in the, well, there seems to be something wrong with watching a movie on a phone. Because, like you said, the experience of what we grew up as movies was supposed to be all-encompassing.

It wasn't supposed to happen passively or you stop and start. It was a real journey and a real escape, and you were able to sort of completely immerse yourself. That's right. That's the whole point. Right. And now people, I guess, do that with video games. Yeah. It's just a different world, man. But that's okay. It's all right. That's the whole point. Right. And now people, I guess, do that with video games. Yeah. You know, it's just a different world, man. But that's okay. Yeah.

It's all right. Everything moves on. You can't fight it. So you just got to go with it. You do. You just got to keep moving. All right. So when you decide to get into movies, now you got brothers and sisters?

No, I'm it. You're it. Yeah, I know. It was all on you. Yeah. The family name. That was it. Yeah.

When did you decide to get into film? Where'd you go to? I was eight years old. I saw a movie that transformed me. Which one? I got to do that. What? Forbidden Planet was the name of the movie.

Was it Robbie the Robot? Right. Sure. Sure. I remember that. And it had an electronic score. It was not no orchestral music. And that was the one.

So right out of the way, you're like. It transformed me. I got to do this. Because was it funny to you or was it amazing? It was amazing. It was amazing. I had big old eyes. They got you on the line.

Oh, boy. Yeah. And in terms of other cinematic influences early on, what were they? When did you start to appreciate the bigger pictures? Well, probably it all came clearer in film school because I began to watch a lot of directors' work. So you gave up rock and roll completely. Well, not completely, but I did. I left it.

I said goodbye. I'm going into the movie business. And this is the late 60s, so shit is happening. Big time. Like everything's changing. Hollywood's changing. Music is changing. Big time.

Culture is changing. Big time. Huge. And you go and you leave and you tell your dad who I imagine was supportive. Yes. Of the decision to go to USC. Yep. And at that time, I mean, that school churned out everybody.

Yeah, and it had close ties to Hollywood. So we, as students, we got to see old classic Hollywood directors, Orson Welles Alfred Hitchcock they come and talk to you or they come and lecture us really Howard Hawks John Ford just amazing people would come through there uh-huh so we got to see their movies and listen to their stories and it's we try it we're trying to figure out how does this all this work right how does this business work what does it mean to be a director and they were laying it out for you oh man oh yeah big i mean because you look at the like

somebody like uh like john ford you saw him talk oh yeah that's amazing because if you look at the number of films these guys made i know you know as employees of the studio and then you know some of them on their own but like it, that's a lot of movies. Well, yeah. So it was a real job. Oh, yeah. That was it. And they, oh, man.

Ford made 150 movies. That's insane. I know. But some of them were silent. And he kept making movies until he couldn't walk. Yeah. But back to film school, we were seeing a little of everything there. And we were seeing experimental artists.

Yeah, like who? And I can't remember their names now because I was so disinterested in that. I was interested in Hollywood films. Like Kenneth Anger? Yeah, that kind of thing. I didn't particularly care. But it was all happening at that time.

It must have been, there must have been sort of a lot of influx of a lot of weed and long-haired dudes saying like, we're going to do something weird. But it was Vietnam. Right. That was the driving force in everybody's life. We were deep in it by that point, right?

When did you go out there? We were. And that was 68 when I was there. And so that changed culture, and it changed everybody's mind. It changed movies, the kind of movies that people were going to see change. Completely change. Right. It shifted away from the musicals and the westerns.

There was a disconnect. Who were your contemporaries when you were there? Oh, a lot of them. Robert Zemeckis was there. In class with you? He was one class below me. George Lucas was a year ahead. He had just graduated when I was there.

And what were you working on in school? What did they teach you outside of listening to these great directors, which is obviously a great benefit of having a college connected to Hollywood. But what was the actual training? Plumbing. Everything. You had to learn everything. Camera, editing, sound, everything.

We had to do it all. Yeah. We had to do it on cruise, and we just kept building up experience, and you started working in 16 millimeter. And you worked in the lab, and you worked in animation, and you got an experience

of every single aspect of motion pictures uh-huh how does all this go together here's how it goes together and you learned so if you can make a little film like this you can make a bigger film right make a you know a big studio it started to seem possible it's exactly uh-huh that's exactly and what was going on in hollywood that you were sort of uh you know picking up on at that time because you're a kid and you're well i mean usc isn't right here but what was going on in Hollywood that you were sort of picking up on at that time? Because you're a kid and you're, well, I mean, USC isn't right here, but what was going on in the strip? Did you know that Corman was plugging out shit over there? Sure. He was very impressive to me since I was a little kid.

I recognized Roger Corman movies. They had an energy to them. They were all exploitation. They were all like a tack of the crab monsters and stuff like that. But they were great. So he was doing the trip and stuff like that at the time. It was wonderful. I love Corman movies.

You never thought about going out there trying to get a gig out there? Well, I wanted to, but it just never worked out. Did you ever meet him? Sure. Yeah? We became friends later. Oh, yeah?

Yeah, I love Corman. He's a great guy. Well, he certainly knows how to bring them in under budget. Oh, man. And he's made just an incredible number of movies, almost like John Ford. Different kinds of movies. And he created a great place for people to learn, whether he liked it or not. Big time. Big time.

Actors, directors, all the cats who were, you know, they took a lesson over there. Who was it? John Demme, I think. Jonathan Demme was there, but Martin Scorsese, Bogdanovich worked for him. But you know, the strip, you talk about the cultural. This was a great time for rock and roll in LA. Oh man, are you kidding? It was unbelievable here. So when did, did you graduate over there? I never did. I just moved on. I made a, started a student film, started a graduate film that became a feature film called Dark Star.

That was my first one. And who worked with you on that? Dan O'Bannon. Oh, he went on to write some big movies, huh? He wrote Alien. Yeah. That was his big deal. And what was your movie about?

What was Dark Star about? That was an outer space adventure made by a student filmmaker on the cheap. And it was a kind of comedy. And it was what it was for the time. So you always had a sense of humor about it. I think that must have come from Forbidden Planet and Corman Films. Maybe. I don't know.

But you did do some serious space work. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. Worked on it a long time. But I wrote my way into the movie business. And finally, in the late 70s, I started making my own films. Well, what was the...

So you did Dark Stars. That was a student film. What was the first... Assault on Precinct 13 was my first 35-millimeter feature. And what was that a reaction to? Nothing. It was just kind of an urban western. Okay.

That was what it was. There's no societal message in that movie. There's nothing except guys trapped inside a police station fighting for their lives. So what was the next film? Well, the next movie I made, a TV film, but the next movie I made a tv film but the next movie i made was halloween and that was 1970 78 yeah i i was in uh i was in high school you were you're a child i didn't realize what your child you were oh in 52 wow yeah and uh it was pretty big deal john halloween was a pretty big deal it kind of kind of set the ball rolling for everything in that genre.

But let me explain to you what it was about. People saw this movie come out and said, oh, look at that. This cheap little movie made a whole bunch of money. Right. That's what it set the ball rolling. That's what Hollywood said. That's exactly right. Hey, they can do this for this amount of money.

Let's make some money like that guy. How cheap was it? It was $220,000. And it grossed? $75 million, something like that. Pretty good? Pretty good return? Not bad.

Now, when you did that movie, I mean, I know you were, as you just said, a fan of fantasy and science fiction, but was horror your thing? Yeah, I loved horror. Horror was great. Why? Because I grew up with it as a kid. I would watch the shock theater on television with Bride of Frankenstein and Dracula and all those movies, and they were great. And we didn't have much in the 50s in terms of youth culture. So we needed monster movies.

Monster movies was it. But did you approach it with humor or were you actually looking? Because, I mean, Halloween, I think, began something that there was suspense, but the mixture of horror and suspense that was actually violent and that there was going to be a relentless sort of kind of journey through many murders just for the sake of it, in a way, just for the thrill of it, was fairly new, wasn't it? I mean, those movies like Frankenstein and stuff, I mean, you knew that it was bullshit on some level. My brother liked them.

I was not a horror movie kid, but he liked them because he got a kick out of them. The whole point of Halloween was simply to scare the shit out of you right that was it they're for real though not like not frankenstein that scared people in those days you've got to understand did it yes big time big time are you kidding the depression era audiences were terrified of those movies huh that really got them yeah oh big like he did that the frankenstein movies dracula scared people uh psycho began the slasher craze okay all right that was the that's the granddaddy right right so the shower scene you can't get more famous than that right so i couldn't outdo that so all i could do was make this movie that scared people because

you didn't know what was going to happen next. But you knew it was going to be bad. And you were afraid of what you might see. You didn't see anything on Halloween. There was no gore to it. It was nothing but it's what you thought you might see. We saw bodies. So what?

You're saying you didn't see the act necessarily. You didn't see the act necessarily. You didn't see the guy's face. Later on, I've done tougher things, but that one was pretty soft. And when you were making it, was your intention to sort of do something new with a genre or to make money? No, I wanted to be a director. Yeah. That's all.

I didn't care about the money. Money was secondary. I wanted to be a movie director. And that was what you wanted to do that those kind of movies any kind of movie hell yeah what i did the same year as halloween was the tv movie elvis right with uh per russell i remember that i don't care if it's scary or a musical or a western i want to do it yeah yeah yeah yeah let's shoot yeah yeah yeah. And so from there you worked. I kept working, yeah. And after Elvis, what was the next big movie?

Well, then we did The Fog and Escape from New York. Escape from New York. That was a completely different sort of movie. And like, you know, when I think about them, like, you know, I guess getting known to work within those budget restraints, that you really had to be creative in a way that wasn't afforded to people who were making multi-million dollar budget movies. That's right. We were low budget movies.

So we had to work a little bit harder and figure things out ahead of time. Yeah. We had to know what we were going to do. And how to make the illusion work. That's right. And with Escape from New York, I mean, it worked. So how old were you in 1981? I was just graduating high school.

Okay, what were you doing? I was deciding maybe I shouldn't go to college, maybe smoking a little weed. Oh, that sounds good. Yeah, but I was definitely going to movies. Sure. Because we had a revival house and we got very excited about movies coming out. We saw that movie when it came out. And I think 81 was Raging Bull Year.

Oh, yeah, good stuff. Yeah, yeah. So me and my buddy Devin were definitely movie heads. Sure. But we were always looking forward to what you were going to do, and the fact that this was so different from the other thing. And Kurt Russell, I think it was sort of a breakout thing for him, too, because we all knew him as that Disney movie kid.

That's right. And here he was, just heavy. And I think that our general reaction was like, he did all right. Yeah. He did okay. Hell yeah, man. Way to go, Kurt. What was your relationship with him?

Because he's gone. We became friends. Yeah? And we became friends over the work ethic. We both had this work ethic. He came from Disney movies where, man, you had to do it. Right. You had to show up and know every line, and you had to hit your marks, and you had to

just do it perfectly. Mm-hmm. And I came being responsible. Man, I have to do this. Get all this work done today. Right. So we both became friends over that over the work ethic like getting shit done that's right and believing in the vision because like he

must have trusted you a bit he did he had to to guide him through this thing and i i said well if you can play all of us i could direct this i thought he did a pretty good job as i remember he was good he was and then and then in 82 yeah that the the thing your remake of the thing is still still there are images from that that still fuck my head up now good that's definitely i'm happy about that i do you feel i feel like that was one of your best horror movies i think it was the best um you know it know, it was hated at the time. Why? I don't know.

It was too strong. In what way? It's too strong, too bleak. People needed, I guess they needed some hope back then. I don't know. They needed hope from that movie? I don't know. They were looking at the wrong place.

I know. These guys are stranded in the Arctic, right? Yeah, but, you know, I thought, oh, I've done it. I know, I've really made a good movie. And I don't think a lot of people thought so. What was it like shooting that? Where'd you do it? It was pretty tough.

We went to Stewart, British Columbia, which is an ice port. And there's a glacier up there. An ice port. So you're out there. You're really in the ice. And we built a set up on a glacier and shot up there. And it's pretty cold and rough and rugged and there weren't any girls and a bunch of hollywood actors arrive and you

know um they live yeah at the time i saw that uh i was fairly consumed with a certain amount of uh paranoia oh were you well yeah i uh you know i'd done a little drugs uh that got me a little bit of mental trouble and i'd seen i was seeing the world as a as there was a conspiracy a dark conspiracy involved which there is but you know we know who they are but when when they live happened i was like he knows yeah that guy knows well you know that was uh my rage at the Reagan revolution and yuppies and the greed of the 80s. I just couldn't take it. So that was a direct reaction. That was it.

And I got to work with the late, great Roddy Piper, who was just fun to work with. And that was his one big movie, wasn't it? Yeah. He did great in it, too. He did great. Came from another world that's you know wrestling's whole another sure world sure but you're like so you were you were conscious of channeling uh an attack oh yeah all fed up yeah what was it fed up with the values and they just

changed so much since i don't know since i was uh they changed so much since the 70s they changed it was so right yeah and you know he's an icon now yeah reagan's icon certain people yes well not to me the values that he brought to the country and i just was so angry about it and that was the result that movie was the result because yeah because there's a sort of you know ongoing metaphor that that you know we're sort of dealing with the culture of death yeah but i but that but the 80s never ended uh-huh they are still with us today yeah and they live is truly more of a documentary than it is a than it is a dramatic film it i mean it it is real. These people are crazy out there. There are no lizard people.

There is no dark conspiracy in the Sphinx. There's nothing like that. The eye in the pyramid is meaningless. No, no, no. Now that doesn't mean anything. The Freemasons aren't scary. However, business does run us. It runs our politics and it runs our country.

And an unregulated free market will do nothing but destroy the world you got it that's it and that was what that reaction that's all it is it's it's not it's not that free markets are bad right markets are great right but you can't let them bury us yeah i don't it's fascinating to me well what it is is like you know this idea that capitalism is a a functioning, which it is. But if it's just untethered, how do people not think greed isn't going to consume anything good? That's correct. You got it.

You got it. I don't know where the logic came. Is that a surprise to bankers figured out how to rig the system? But capitalism is not a religion. It's not a pure virgin that you must untouch. Exactly. Exactly. We like to survive a little bit.

That's right. That's correct. So when you saw such mainstream, like now, like horror couldn't be more mainstream, couldn't be more marketable. Do you think it is? What, The Walking Dead? Yeah. Oh, that's true.

And the vampire stuff? I mean, it's not my bag, but somebody's making some big bread off that shit. When you put it that way in terms of The Walking Dead, it's true. It's crazy. But you understand something. That was a movie that George Romero made back in 68. Yeah. And they have milked, people have milked his movie, and they are still milking it.

Yeah. Oh, it's unreal. It's unbelievable. Are you friends with him? Yeah. Yeah, I they are still milking it. Yeah. Oh, it's unreal. It's unreal. It's unbelievable. Are you friends with him? Yeah, I'm a good friend. Those three drive him crazy. They do.

Yeah. I mean, come on, man. Anyway. Well, he should be getting a little bit, right? He should get a little piece of that. But I think horror is due for a new beginning here. It's due for a resurgence. And we have to change it.

We have to change it up. We can't do these cheap poltergeist movies either. Right. Paranormal. Uh-huh. That's what I'm talking about. Right, right. Stop.

Please stop now. Right. It's just a cheap movie. Come on now. We're due for a change. And it'll come. Well, how do you see it? Well, horror movies have been with us since the beginning of cinema.

And they're always the same. Most of them are bad. A few are average. And a couple are really good. Right. And they keep changing with the culture. Right. Okay.

It's like Vietnam. You saw the violence change. Okay. Horror movies change too. So they'll change again as the culture changes, as we evolve and move through time. Now, what's it like working with your son? It's awesome.

Are you kidding? What's the family? What do you want? How old is he? He's 31. Yeah. My godson's 34 and we're just a little family operation.

Yeah. Mom and pop shop. And you do it out of the house? Yeah, we do. We do downstairs. We have a computer system down there. It's a Logic Pro computer set up with a lot of plug-ins and a lot of

sounds. We bring guitars in. We bring whatever we need. Yeah. And you just have fun. We're making music. It's awesome. It's awesome. Is it selling the music? Is it selling? Yeah. People seem to like it. That's great, man. I mean, it's not... I'm not making as much money as I did in the movies, but I don't care.

Yeah. I just don't care. You know, I'm an old guy now, and I just never thought I'd have a second act. Because usually people in America don't have second acts. But here I am playing music. I'm going to go out on tour. Are you kidding? Are you?

Life is great. Yeah, we're touring this year. Who are you going to tour with I'm going to go out on tour. Are you kidding? Are you? Life is great. Yeah, we're touring this year. Who are you going to tour with? My kids. Right? And a band. We have the Tenacious D's band playing with us. Oh, yeah?

Yeah. It'll be fun. That's a blast, man. But are you telling me you're done with movies? No, no. Maybe. We'll see. But I just don't care like I used to.

You know? I've gotten old. I've looked back on my career, and I'm happy about it. Yeah. I just don't care like I used to. I've gotten old. I've looked back on my career and I'm happy about it. I don't have the same consuming drive that you do when you're young. I don't know if you know what it's like. It's starting.

You have to let that go. You have to embrace the zen of life. Right. I like saying it on your microphones. The zen of life. Was that a struggle for it on your microphones. The zen of life. Was that a struggle for you to do? Yeah.

Well, what broke you? Well, see, you get addicted to what you do, your work. And I don't know, I just got burned out. I said, I have to stop. Well, I love the records and I appreciate you hanging out.

That's fun. Well, thanks, John. Good talking to you. Thank you. That was me and John, tight chat. It's as much as he wanted to talk. I will tell you that right now. Joe Dante was here.

Again, the movie Gremlins, great satire. In my mind, and when the little things pop out, oh, how fun is that? It's like you feel bad for a little gizmo, and then you like oh poor gizmo oh look at those oh there's more but uh there was a couple of things that dante did and i talked to him about it that that really had a profound impact on on me you can check out joe's web series trailers from hell at trailers from hell.com yes so now let's uh let's join me and joe dante here in the garage that's an interesting thing to say you know bring you to the orphanage is something you grow up with

i know i don't not many people use that word but me yeah but you must have grown up with it somebody must have said it was the orphanages were where you sent food for uh-huh like biafra was the other place oh right right yeah the biafra that's in africa correct yeah but that's interesting that's like a catholic east coast thing it feels like definitely a cath Catholic East Coast thing, which is what I am. Yeah? Where'd you grow up? I grew up in various places in New Jersey. Jersey?

Livingston, New Jersey, Morristown. Oh my God. Morristown. Yeah. I was born in Jersey. Well, it's all changed. It's gone, huh? Have you been back? No, there's no reason for me.

Well, you're right. There is no reason. But it used to be very verdant. It was called the Garden State. Yes. Now it's the macadam state what's that mean it's just everything's sort of flattened out and strip mauled strip mauled and lots of pharmaceutical companies really yeah i always remember it in the summer being humid and lush and you drive it was you almost felt high because it was so humid and And there was almost like a mist to it. A haze. A humid haze.

That's it. A haze. And it was all green. And they had those tomatoes. Remember the Jersey tomatoes? Jersey tomatoes, yeah. That was the thing. You can't find a good tomato anywhere ever now.

And they weren't covered with pesticides then either. Right. And they were big. You could eat them like an apple. What happened to those days, Joe? I don't know. Those days are gone along with a lot of other things. Chasing fireflies.

We used to do that. That's right. Chasing fireflies all around. And remember when they built Paramus Park? Or Willowbrook Mall? Willowbrook Mall. Willowbrook Mall was a big deal. Big deal.

People came from far and wide. It was the original mall, I think. Yeah. That was like what defined mall culture. But that was a little... Did you... I think I probably had escaped from there by then. Yeah?

That was probably in the 60s. I think I was probably... Is that when you ran away in the 60s? I didn't run away. I went to college and that was in Philadelphia. Oh, yeah? Right in Philly? Yeah.

In the late 60s? Philadelphia College of Art from 64 to 68, I guess. So that was it. That was... Everything was shifting. The entire world was it. That was, everything was shifting. The entire world was changing. It was a completely different world. It was a very interesting place

to be during that time because it was, as I wasn't political until the Chicago Convention. Uh-huh, 68. And then I was radicalized watching television and suddenly realized

that there was stuff going on here that I needed to be a part of. And back then, the New York Post was a liberal rag. Really? Yeah. It was almost like the Village Voice.

I mean, it was really- No shit. I can't even imagine that. Catherine Graham ran it. And so that was where all the Jimmy Breslin type writers were there. Jimmy Breslin. Did you know that he was William Friedkin's first choice or second choice for Popeye Doyle? Yes. I did know that.

It's crazy. No, it'd be great. He just, he wasn't really much of an actor. That's what I hear. I talked to Friedkin. He said he was a little bit of a drunkie and he didn't show up and he wasn't much of an actor. But Jackie Gleason. What a good writer.

Yes, Jackie Gleason was his first choice. Yeah, that would have been interesting. It would have. It would have certainly been. He's a great actor. Sure he is. But he couldn't have made that would have been interesting. It would have. It would have certainly been. He's a great actor. Sure he is. But he couldn't have made that run. There's a lot of running.

No, I think he had some double work in there. Yeah. Hackman did a lot of running. Right, so you're there, 64. Like literally the country changes from when you start art school to the end. Yeah. Well, you got to remember this is the beginnings of the Beans and theic era and all that stuff it was just basically creeping up and it was all tied to the vietnam war right uh and the draft which as you may recall uh the the one of the

big reasons why they were uh protests the stuff was because people were literally being plucked out of their american lives and sent into the jungle. Whereas in the Iraq War, everybody's a volunteer. Right. So you didn't get that level of back home. Panic. People were still upset, but there wasn't really much organized resistance, particularly to the beginning of the Iraq War. And it was mostly cheerleading.

It was mostly, well, great, fine, let's go do this. It's great. Yeah, because we were coming off a string of what were framed as victories other than Korea, really. And I guess no one could assume what a clusterfuck that Vietnam was. Well, we always had victories. We never had defeats. Just anything we did, we could do. Yeah.

So were you drafted? Did you have to? I had my number. I was 1Y. What does that mean? 1Y, I had had epilepsy when I was a kid. Oh. And so that ruled me out.

So I didn't have to shoot my foot off. I didn't have to go to the draft board with my finger twitching as if I was going to be shooting a gun. Or fill your asshole with peanut butter so you could act crazy. I didn't have to do that or go to Canada, but a lot of my friends did. Did you have siblings that were drafted? No, my brother was too young. Oh, yeah? Yeah.

And when do you start? Because, I mean, it seems to me that, like, in terms of film, that you were certainly of your generation, at least as a film fan. Well, yeah. I mean, I was a movie kid, basically. We didn't have a TV when I was a little kid. We had radio. But movies were bigger than life. They were up on a big screen. It was the every Saturday, the first boy and girl in line would get in free. It was a quarter. Yeah, yeah.

But if you got in free, you could spend your money on candy. Right. Which was very cheap at the time. Sure. And they would run two features, 10 cartoons, and a serial chapter.

So, you know, you could dump the kid off. For the day. For the day. And then he comes home and he, you know, saw this stuff. And the 50s

was an interesting period because almost all adult movies were still suitable for kids right and there was a lot of kid movie stuff

sure it was also you know the atomic fear era right the giant insects the you know the idea

we're going to go to space so there were a lot of space stuff and what we find there well there'll be enemies like the communists you know and this is what filled your child imagination filled my childhood's along with comic books the idea we're going to go to space, so there were a lot of space stuff, and what we find there, well, there'll be enemies like the communists. And this is what filled your child imagination.

Filled my childhood's imagination, along with comic books, because I was a huge comic book fan, and I wanted to be a cartoonist. Oh, you did? Yeah, and my favorite comic was Uncle Scrooge, which was written by a guy named Carl Barks, who was known as the quote, the good artist of the Disney cartoons.

And his whole Duckburg saga of the backstories and all this stuff were light years apart from the cartoon Donald Duck, who was basically a Daffy Duck type. But this character was sophisticated and intelligent. They were really well-written stories. And for instance, Raiders of the Lost Ark is based on a Uncle Scrooge comic called The Seven Cities of Sybilla. Spielberg has admitted this. Was that Kaz?

He was a huge Barks fan as well. But was that Kazdan's script? That was Kazdan, yeah. Uh-huh. And so, but Spielberg conceived of the story? He was a huge Karl Barks fan. And when I would go to his office, he would have these actual commissioned paintings

for Karl Barks of the ducks, which are now worth a fortune. So that was a generational thing, because I don't know, I'm not a big comic book guy, forging so that was a generational thing because I don't know I'm not a big comic book guy but I don't know anything of it I don't know it was when you were in the 50s as a kid there were different kinds of comics there was superhero comics and the kind that were always popular but there was a little cadre of nerdy kids who really identified with the Donald Duck duck world and um so and spielberg obviously was one of them and i went to a lot of trouble to seek out carl barks and

get paintings from him and really he was alive yeah isn't that something okay but that was an offshoot of the donald duck world yeah and uh all right so you're watching all these uh you know so you're a cartoon freak i'm a cartoon freak, I'm a comic book freak and a cartoon freak. And the 10 cartoons were interesting because the Disney cartoons were the best and everybody would applaud. And then the Warner Brothers cartoons, they were great. And then you'd go down a line and there would be a little less applause or maybe sometimes groans if it was Little Audrey. Yeah. Or the Paramount cartoons with those awful characters.

I can't remember the names of them. Herman and Catnip, stuff like that. Stuff that were copies of copies of copies. And then you'd get to the Terry Toons with Paul Terry and Heckle and Jekyll. And these cartoons were so poorly animated that kids would kind of get a little dizzy and sick while watching them. Because of the repetition? Well, just because it was sloppy.

They didn't want to spend a lot of time. Right. Nonetheless, there were some gems in all of those cartoon groups. But after a while, you really, they would all sort of run together in your head. But there was a constant supply because studios were still making cartoons.

Right. And they basically stopped. In the early 60s, Warner Brothers kind of gave up on their cartoons but which had been suffering for quite a while they were they were much cheaper they had to be tv animation style and the jokes weren't as good and right and then when they got to the pink panther cartoons which are actually really terrible uh-huh um they were the audiences started to consider them an annoyance like i want to see the feature why are we running a cartoon? So that's what happened.

So the resources ran out, the intention ran out. Well, the cartoons got bad. The Ant and the Aardvark was not exactly something we're sitting around waiting. Oh, I want to see another Ant and Aardvark cartoon. I mean, they just weren't funny. And they were made by some of the same people who had made the great cartoons, but they were getting older. They had a lot less to work with.

And even when Chuck Jones tried to do Tom and Jerry, he just didn't have the kind of Tom and Jerry mind that Hanna and Barbera had. And so his cartoons, while artistic, are not really very funny. Right. And so it was a theatrical cartoon era was dying, and it had been partly killed off by television.

Right, and also, like, I imagine generationally, things are changing, right? Well, yeah. I mean, it's a different audience. And also, I imagine generationally, things are changing, right? Well, yeah. I mean, it's a different audience. And the audience is more sophisticated. Right. And so, when you were a kid watching that, what were the features that you were going to that resonated with you as a kid? Well, I liked Westerns a lot. I was a big Odie Murphy fan. But it was really the science fiction pictures that we really loved. And I remember going to see Them, which was a giant insect movie. And it was very well done.

And it was terrifying. And they made sounds that were kind of like crickets, which I had outside my window. And they had antennae, which would rub up against my window, sort of like tree branches. And I could imagine that there were giant ants coming out of the lot in the back of my house. So that attention to detail. And my parents would say, well, if these pictures give you nightmares, why do you go see them? And I said, because I have to.

There was just something about being scared that was exciting and comforting. It was, you know. Comforting. The standard, you know, because you're playing out your fears of whatever, of death or whatever your fears are, in a safe way. You're in a theater. It's the reason why people go on rollercoaster rides. Sure.

And that's why the genre has been so popular. But you're taking it home with you. Well, I did take it home with me, as did most kids. Right. So it doesn't really work. It's not an enclosed experience. No, no. You still wake up in the middle of the night

in your own little bed. The only problem is if you look under your bed, there could be a large economy-sized tarantula down there yeah so when did you see the fly the original oh of course that thing like i was older then though yeah it came out later the fly came out in 58 you know what i remember about that one is the guy who was in the machine with with the rabbit or whatever when he had the big doofus hands? That's Return of the Fly. Oh, it is? Yes, that's the sequel. That was horrifying. It was more horrifying than the little head on the fly. It was just a guy.

It was like an accident or something. The matter transmitter is not quite perfected. Yeah. And so anything that gets in with you, obviously, you use up its atoms. Now, why the atoms would cause a tiny human head on a fly and a giant fly head on a guy, well, that's never really actually been explained. Now, when you see something like Cronenberg's remake or something like that, do you think

he did an amazing job? Well, it's a remake in the sense that he went back to the book, the story, the original story. So not the movie at all? No, I think he thought the movie was kid stuff and he wanted to do something different. And I think when you do remakes, frankly, the way to approach them is to not remake the movie that was made from them, but if it's based on the literary conceit, you go back to the original book. And I did that on my Twilight Zone episode for the Twilight Zone movie. They wanted to remake old episodes of Twilight Zone as movies.

And I thought, well, this is a bad idea because all the Twilight Zone episodes are based on twist endings. Yeah. And plus they were beloved. People knew them by heart. Right. So the idea of paying and seeing it reenacted in color didn't really seem that exciting to me. But that was the deal. They said you have to do remakes.

Was that the first time you worked with Spielberg? Yeah. Yeah. And so I picked a story that had been done really well on the show, but I went back to the original short story and changed the location, made it about cartoons instead of about farmhouse. And the kid still had the magic powers,

but he'd taken all the adults in his life and he'd trapped them in this cartoon world. And so the idea being that hopefully the audience won't realize exactly which episode this is until they get halfway through it right and i was and that worked out great for me because george miller and i who were the newcomers uh in that group were we got a lot of great press it was it's that one yours is the one i remember there was something terrifying about it you know with uh I remember the sister being stuck in that chasing with the walls of horror. Right, in the cartoon.

And then the uncle, just having to be, everyone was so terrified. Yeah, yeah. It was great. That was a lot of fun. I had a lot of good actors. I tried to use actors who'd been on the show, because I'm very sentimental about this stuff. And so I tried to be- On the Twilight Zone.

I was the only director who used actors, almost the entire cast were people who had been on the except for when Len and the kids. Yes Yeah, well now how did that like where did you so you got away from? Wanting to be a cartoonist like it got away from me. I mean I don't know what you studied in in Philly Well, no, you can't study it. I found I went to art schools the Philadelphia College of Art They said this is all well and good but cartooning is not an art, and this is an art school. So you have to take something else. Now, they had a film course, a burgeoning film course with 30 students and two cameras. And I took that. But that's not really where I learned about movies. Where I really learned about movies at that period was going to the movies in Philadelphia. There were

a whole lot of grindhouses still operating on Market Street. Right. And one of them was called the News Theater. And it had a square screen and a long hall. And it was originally built to run newsreels 24 hours a day for people who were working in the war plant. Yeah.

Now it had been changed over into a grindhouse and they would run the CinemaScope movies, but they don't see the middle of the picture because the rest of it would be on the wall. But they ran a lot of old movies, a lot of 30s pictures, Freaks and things like that. Really? Yeah. But not as a revival house, has it?

It was a, well, no, it was a grindhouse. What is the definition? Which was a revival house. Right. The definition of a grindhouse. A grindhouse never, the lights never come on. The movie grinds on over and over and over and they never clean it. And there was another one across the street, the inaptly named Family Theater,

which never, ever turned the lights on. And even when people would get knifed in the theater, the police would come. The movie would never stop. I was there when it happened. And the movie just continued. The cops came and did their stuff and left. That was policy or was it a projection? I don't think they wanted to turn on the lights because what would scurry on the floor?

Right. And how many bodies they might have, you know. But it was, nonetheless, it was a great opportunity. I couldn't go to the Museum of Modern Art to see these movies. And most of them were kinds of movies that didn't play the Museum of Modern Art. Well, you mentioned Todd Browning's Freaks.

Freaks and all the 50s horror all the all the 50s horror pictures all the 40s horror pictures uh in valutin pictures but this wasn't done out of respect or irony it was just booking it was just filling time and it was triple features yeah so you'd get three right um and the prints were not the best sometimes they were completely faded but it didn't matter it was like it was exciting it just smelled bad and you couldn't go to the bathroom that was the bad thing you're in a triple feature and you can't go to the bathroom because you don't want to go down those stairs really that place oh yes who knows people have not come back hey it changes people so where's that movie joe where's the movie where the kid goes to the grindhouse

bathroom and enters another world unfortunately unfortunately it's too late for that movie because no one has a point around grindhouse out, the movie, which was two movies, right? The people left after the first movie because they were so unfamiliar with the concept of Grindhouses. They didn't know it was a double feature. And the idea of Grindhouse didn't mean anything to them. Yeah. And so, even though it was a very noble attempt to try to replicate that experience, they didn't do enough homework of explaining to people what grindhouses were in order to be able to make it work.

It's interesting, you know, you talk about nostalgia and I feel like you have a lot of it still, yes? Yeah, sure. I mean, in the sense that, you know, I just, I went and poked around the new website, the Trailers from Hell website and you have, that's your thing, right? Well, that, you know, I didn't know to expect, but it's very interesting to have these directors and screenwriters and people reflect about these films and the business and about directors just based on these trailers. Well, they talk about movies that affected them. And sometimes they'll talk about a movie that was very instrumental in their style or a movie that changed their life or a movie that they didn't even really very much like,

but they think you should see. And the nicest thing, nicest compliment for me is when people come up and say, you know, I had never heard of this movie before. I saw it on your site. So-and-so was talking about the trailer, so I went out and found the movie

and I really liked it and I want to see more movies by this guy. And it's because our current society moves so fast now you know we got to remember I was hooked by these movies in a world where there were only three tv channels oh yeah and there was and there were no video games there's nothing to do if you you couldn't have a movie in your own home there was actually space to to sort of decide what movie you're going to see next weekend exactly and now there are so many things impinging on people's ability to fill their day that the old things kind of get lost

and they're going to get forgotten. And this was just sort of an attempt to try to bring the past back to life for people whose lives may be moving so fast that they just, you know, skip it. Sure. And, you know, I was on there for two minutes and I saw cutter and bone

was featured cutter's way and uh that movie was a life-changing thing for me when i was a kid because i saw it i think at a revival house or maybe it might even been first run because it wasn't a big movie no but it's a great movie and i remember it it compelled me to read the book yeah by newton thornburg because I wanted to know more about those characters. Well, that's the way movies affect you. Yeah. And there are so many movies like that. So many pictures that are really good but didn't exactly crack the zeitgeist at the

That's right. And this is happening with records too now. Yeah. Because now I'm in this world of vinyl and there's all these second and third string rock bands that made masterpieces that never really even saw the light of mainstream radio play. Yeah. So it becomes fascinating that like, oh, my God, what happened to these guys? And that's the same with movies, right?

It is. And it's an archival thing. And the interesting thing is that there are more movies available to see today than ever in my lifetime. Movies from the early 30s that haven't been seen in 70 years are now finally coming back and you can see them on video. The problem I found was that nobody knows who these actors are anymore. Nobody relates to the period because it's so distant from them. I mean, certainly as distant as silent movies were to me when I was a kid.

That you needed a sort of a way of looking at them which is why there were film courses sure school courses yeah you would want a film and you analyze it and the kid talk about it right and i miss that i miss going to the movies and coming home and having a drink and arguing about it sure you know fighting with people about this movie and that movie right like this and i think movies have become so throwaway now that people don't do that they don't they don't really they see a movie it washes over them they've by the time they put their car keys in the car they've forgotten what they saw right they don't challenge people anymore no but no for you now you know being we talked about a random bunch of movies and where you started to

learn how to to put movies together how how did where you started to learn how to put movies together. How did you, in essence, learn how to make movies by going to the grindhouse? I can't really answer that except to say that I would be on a set and I would see a way of shooting a picture. And then I would shoot it. And then I'd later see the movie that I stole the idea from and realize that I had that image in my head all the time. It programs your brain. I'm programmed. I carry this stuff around with me and it becomes instinctual. You find a way to, and there's a million ways to do it. I mean, Hitchcock used to storyboard everything very

carefully and then profess that he was kind of bored illustrating his storyboards with actors, but not many people can do that. And he did it awfully well. But for the most part, it's the excitement of new things happening on the set that gets you going. Working with actors and having somebody come up with a way of approaching a scene that you hadn't even thought of. That's actually better than what you were going to do. Or some guy in the makeup department comes up and says, I have an idea. What if you did this? It's anything that makes the movie better.

Collaboration. Yeah, exactly. It is a collaborative medium. It's not, I mean, it's not a one man, one film medium anymore. I'm not sure it ever really was because it takes so many people to make a film. Yeah. But, and there does need to be somebody in charge and there does, and it's great being a director where you get to say, yes, I like that idea or no, I'm not going to use that idea. So what were you remember as being some of the more powerful templates in your mind as a kid that you see resurface in your work, the movies that really blew your mind early on, where you're like, this movie has the answers to many of the mysteries? Well, you know, I do believe that movies often do have the answers to life's great mysteries. But I think they're different for everybody.

And the interesting thing about movies is that regardless of what was intended by the filmmaker, it's what you take away from the movie that counts. And that's real for you. And it may or may not be what the filmmaker had in mind. You may have interpreted it completely differently. And the guy next to you may be interpreting it yet differently again. But that's why it's such an exciting art form for me and and there's a certain amount of instinct that is involved in in in the way you see something it's an emotional response to a page or to an actor or to a scene and the way that you present it and which may change by the

way between the time that you read it the time that you stage it and the time that you edit it right you may have a completely different take right on what it was that you were trying to do. Because you've lived it. And also, when you're making a movie, you have to perfect the movie that you're making. And if it's getting a little bit off the page of what you intended, you have to go with the best thing about it.

And if the best thing about it is taking a minor character who should be in the background and moving up to the front and giving him the business that's going to make the audience interested and maybe for this scene, not paying as much attention to the leading lady or whatever, then that's what's right for the movie. Yeah. And if it's right for the scene, it's right for the movie.

Then you come to the problem where, okay, now my movie is two hours long. I got a rough cut. It's two hours and it's really pretty slow. I know directors that will just release it like that. I got it. No, you can't do that. Movies are very, even what you used to call

program movies today are really long. Yeah. And I like long movies. I love Once Upon a Time in the West. I love Lawrence of Arabia. I love movies that are long for a reason.

You have to go with the movie that is the best movie that you can do and if it turns out that your movie is too long then you have to take that wonderful scene

that you sweated yeah and that you worked on so hard and you got it just right and you discover Jesus

it's in the wrong place this scene is killing the momentum of the movie it shouldn't be in the movie you gotta take it out yeah it's very hard to do that.

Yeah. It's like pulling arms off your kid. It's really tough. But once you screen it without that scene and it plays better, you know it was the right thing to do. Well, so when you graduate from college in 1968, you were doing 16 millimeter films in college? Is that what you were doing? I was doing 16 millimeter shorts. In is that what you were doing i was doing 16 millimeter shorts in college in black and white often with no sound now what like how did like you changed as a person you know creatively politically uh the whole culture was changing between 1964

and 1968 so when you walked in to college you're walking out into a entirely different world really as i believe probably most college students do. Yeah, in general, but at that time... This was a particularly volatile period. Where do you go? How does it... Where I went was to work on a motion picture trade magazine called Film Bulletin, which was for exhibitors.

And it was in Philadelphia, where I had been. Yeah. And it was a very venerable magazine run by a guy named Mo Wax, who'd been in the business for years. And it was also on its last legs because that aspect of the business was kind of being phased out. But I did get to see lots of movies, like Once Upon a Time in the West. I got to see the original uncut versions of The Wild Bunch, all the things that later got chopped up. But I was there at the beginning, and that was great. That was a perk. But I'm not satisfied. So my friend John Davison goes to college,

goes to NYU, he leaves, he goes to the West Coast and works for Roger Corman as an advertising person. And he says, why don't you come out to California and make a trailer for this movie called The Student Teachers, which another friend of ours, Jonathan Kaplan, had directed. And it was part of the three-girl formula that Roger was doing at the time.

There would be three pretty girls, and they would get involved in leftist causes, and they would take off their clothes and sometimes get raped and whatever. It was a series of things. And there were nurses and teachers. That was the template. So I came out and did this trailer. And the movie came out and made money.

And so somehow that made me look good. Yeah. And so then it was like, well, hey. Well, the trailer's the way in, right? The trailer is a way in. And it's also a great way to learn about film editing. Yeah. Because you have to take scenes and cut them down to their basic part.

It's cinematic haiku. Yeah. And so you learn what you, oh, you don't need this scene. Which later helps you when you're on the set because you know you don't need to do this angle. You don't need to pull that wall because there's a way to go from here to here. Right. Anyway, the trailer made money. The picture made money.

I got to do another trailer for a picture that made money. Jonathan Demme's. A lot of Jonathans working for Roger. Jonathan Demme's Caged Heat a picture that made money. Jonathan Demme's, a lot of Jonathan's working for Roger. Jonathan Demme's Caged Heat, that made money. And so I became the trailer department for New World Pictures, where Roger had been hiring people piecemeal and trying to explain to them how to make these exploitation trailers. That was his company? Yes, that was his new company that he had just started. And Alan Arkish, another friend of ours from New York, came out and joined me. And we became the New World Pictures trailer department. We did all the trailers for the exploitation pictures like Death Race 2000 that Roger was making.

And what do you like when you start working for this man who has had such a profound influence on so many filmmakers? No, on me. I was probably the biggest fan. John and I were probably the biggest fans that Roger ever hired. So you knew his movies? Oh, we knew his movies, yeah. You liked that world of movies? Yes.

He made those Edgar Allan Poe movies with Vincent Price, and he made The Wild Angels. He made The Trip. I mean, these were movies that were au courant at the time. Uh-huh. But not blockbusters, not mainstream movies. No, they were successful movies, but they were still considered niche. Uh-huh. So when you met him, what was, you know, were you in awe or were you?

Well, when I met him, I was supposed to deliver my rough cut of Caged Heat to the. The trailer. The rough cut of the trailer. Yeah. To the screening room at Sunset Boulevard, Nossack's screening room, where there was more oil than there is anywhere else in California. And on my way, I didn't drive. On my way on the bus, I got off the bus and dropped my reel, which started to unroll on

Santa Monica Boulevard and ended up in a manhole. Come on. A serious, true story. It was cartoon. Anyway, I managed to somehow cobble it together and get to the screening about 15 minutes late. Yeah. And Roger's first words to me were,

young man, if I were you, I'd get to these things on time. I figured, my career is over. This is it. Yeah. And I ran what must have been a hodgepodge of terrible editing. And he had some notes and stuff. And I fixed it. And the picture made money.

And he didn't fire me. You didn't tell him the manhole story? No, I didn't. I didn't tell a guy a story like that. I mean, talk about desperate sounding. He wouldn't have believed it. He wouldn't have believed it. I didn't believe it.

Yeah. Anyway, after a while, Alan and I were doing all these trailers. Alan Arkish? Alan Arkish and I were doing trailers for these pictures, and we decided that we wanted to make one, and that some of them were fairly artless, and that we could probably do a picture just as badly. And, you know, he had made a very long student film,

which was very fancy and sophisticated. Mine were not. But we managed to convince Roger to let us make a movie, provided we could still provide trailers at night. But we could shoot the movie during the day. But it had to be the cheapest picture that he'd made at the studio. And we had 10 days to do it. Oh, my God. And John Davis was going to play it.

Did he have a studio? He didn't have a studio. He had an office. The movies were made around town on various locations. With no permits, usually? Often no permits. They were SAG, but that's about it. Right.

And so we figured there was no way on that kind of schedule and budget that we were going to be able to make anything decent, and that kind of schedule and budget that we were going to be able to make anything decent, especially for the drive-in market, except that we did have some knowledge of the contents of all the movies that we've been doing the trailers for. So we figured, well, let's make a movie. We'll make a three-girl movie, but it'll be instead of nurses or teachers, it'll be actresses, and they'll be working for a cheap movie company, and they're making all these different kinds of movies.

And we can use the action scenes for all the pictures that we've been doing and dress our actors up like the people in the in the clips and now those will be our action scenes which we could never afford to shoot on our own and uh it'll be murder in a movie studio and we stole the plot from a bella lugosi movie called the death kiss and um basically uh the girls uh take their clothes off and shoot machine guns and then guys fall out of trees in the philippines that were shot you know five years before yeah uh and we managed to cobble together this movie that is kind of a spoof of movie making and is also a a kind of an actual documentary about what it was like to make this kind of exploitation movie in California in 1975. With Roger Corman.

With Roger Corman. Yeah. It was originally called The Starlets. Uh-huh. And we held out for a more classy title, Hollywood Boulevard. Uh-huh. The street where starlets are made. Uh-huh.

And it didn't exactly set the world on fire, but Roger thought it was funny. And- He must have thought you guys were clever in terms of production. He admired that. He admired how we had been economical and how we had a product that you could actually watch, which is quite an

achievement. And although the movie didn't exactly set the world on fire, it was good for us. And we went back to making trailers. Only now, we were making trailers for pictures directed by people like Federico Fellini and Francois Truffaut and Ingmar Bergman, because Roger, in the interim, had taken on the distribution of the foreign films

that the major studios had decided were not making money for them anymore. Really? And Roger had been able to say to these filmmakers, I can get you seen in places that you've never been seen before. Uh-huh. You know, by people who are not just arthouse audiences. By dubbing the movies and running them and playing them in drive-ins.

Yeah. In drive-ins. In drive-ins. Fellini. Fellini at the drive-in. Cries and Whispers at the drive-in. And so we were doing trailers for those kind of movies which is great because we got to meet these guys and um and fellini thought that the trailer that we made for amercord was better than the italian trailer because we put you know we're doing it for rogers

we put lots of rear hands in it we put lots of breasts in it yeah and lots of cars you know and he thought this is better you know um and so that was all that was all swell and then finally we got a chance to alan got a chance to Alan got a chance to make a picture called Rock and Roll High School and there was another project called Piranha

which I thought was a little shopworn because this was like several years after Jaws and he got Rock and Roll High School and I got Piranha yeah

and we went Rock and Roll High School were the Ramones in that? the Ramones yes that's right I remember the Ramones make the movie. Yeah.

They are the movie. Yeah. We're talking about making it with cheap trick, but it just wouldn't be as well remembered today. Because the Ramones were almost a satire of- They were everything your parents had warned you against. Right. Right. And plus they were-

All wrapped into one thing. They were gleefully inarticulate, which made them just perfect. And comedic. And very funny and sweet guys. And it was really, it was just such a great experience knowing those guys. And Piranha, that turned out to be a pretty big movie, right? Piranha turned out to make a lot of money, which was very surprising to me because I thought it was a disaster.

And going in. Well, I was making it in Texas, which is a right to work state. The unions were sending speedboats out to blow their horns so that we could not use our tracks and stuff. It was a very contentious shoot. And we didn't have any money. And we did a lot of tests at the Olympic swimming pool downtown at USC, trying to figure out how to shoot our piranhas and make them look real. And we put a lot of caro syrup in the water. And we created a fungus that started to eat away,

along with the flora and fauna that we put in the pool, started to eat away at the pool. And so when the picture was over, we had to empty the pool and sandblast it. Because people from Sacramento came down and said that a new kind of fungus had been created for our movie. And we had to get rid of it. So that drove up the budget a bit. That should have been the next movie.

I think Larry Cohen already had made that movie. But it was good for me because the picture was successful and more so because it was a co-production with United Artists and they distributed it overseas where it made lots of money because you didn't have to explain what a piranha was to people in South America and places like that. And what do you think made the movie? What do you think was, you know, why did it make? Well, it was a Jaws ripoff. I mean, and it was a gleefully ironic and obvious Jaws ripoff, and we copped to it right away.

It was sort of a spoof, but it had social stuff in it because John Sayles did the script. Was that his first big script? It was his first commercial script. And it has a certain Vietnam era overlay. That's funny that this style of movie did ride that line of spoof a lot. That there was an element of satire a lot. But that was often because these kind of pictures had been done and redone to a point where the audience

was catching on to the cliches. Right. And that if you didn't give them a little nudge that, yes, you know what you're doing. Yes, you know, we know that this has been done before, but just stay with us

and we think you'll have a good time. Uh-huh. And so it was an entertaining picture, apparently. And it was good for me because I got offered a lot more underwater movies. Even though I had an entertaining picture, apparently. And it was good for me because I got offered a lot more underwater movies. Even though I had an earache from being in the pool. And boy, let me tell you, putting on a wetsuit is one thing.

Taking off a wetsuit. You could lose five pounds just taking it off. I mean, it's really hard. Anyway, I didn't really want to make another underwater picture. But I was offered Orca 2 by Dino De Laurentiis. Did you have to go sit with Dino? Oh I talk to Dino a lot Joey, Joey you have to work for me, we make a picture together

great picture with Orca, he's a kill everybody he's a come out of the water, he's a kill anyway I talked him out of making that So this relationship with the Piranha opened the doors at United Artists? It just opened the doors in general. The rubric at New World was that

if you made a picture that wasn't terrible, you were probably worth looking at. Okay. Because it was generally expected. By the big business. Yeah, it was expected the movies wouldn't be any good. Right. And so if somebody showed any glimmer of talent,

and they knew that you could make it cheaply because you had to already. So they would get interested. And Roger knew that. And Roger knew that you could make it cheaply because you had to already. So they would get interested. And Roger knew that. And Roger knew that. And Roger would say, if you make two pictures for me and they're successful,

you never have to work for me again. Which he said to Ron Howard, I think, while he was making Grand Theft Auto. And that worked out. It's true, yes. It worked out for Ron. A couple Academy Awards later. He produced a movie.

What movie did he produce of yours? Did he? The Burbs. Oh, The Burbs. Right, right. So then this leads you to The Howling? Yes, I did The Howling. First, I was briefly on Jaws 3, People Zero,

which was a National Lampoon co-production with Zanuck and Brown. But the problem was that the two entities could never agree on whether they were making an R-rated comedy or a PG-rated comedy and so it was started to fall apart and my friend mike finnell had worked with me at new world was working on a werewolf picture called the howling where they were letting go the director and he said maybe you want might want to come over here and make this picture and i i took a leap i i assumed that my movie was going to fall apart and so i

left it and it did fall apart yeah so I went off and made The Howling, which was another low-budget movie for Avco Embassy, which was a company. They had released The Graduate, but they were now taken over by, it was Joe Levine's company, and it was taken over by the Avco people, and they were making a series of prom night kind of horror films.

Scanners was theirs. Scanners. That movie was haunting. And so during this period, it was run by a guy named Bob Ramey, who later became president of the Academy. And this was one of their horror pictures. And it was based on a book. The screenplay wasn't very good. I tried to fix it with a writer named Terry Winklis, a friend of mine, but we couldn't quite lick it. And so I asked John Sayles to come in again. And he put a whole sort of an est attitude about the werewolves and made it into a pretty hip movie.

And we had Rob Bottin, who did some great special effects for us. And so we got a lot of attention for that. And the picture was a much bigger hit than Piranha had been. And that really did start to put me on the map to the point that that spielberg sent me um a script for gremlins yeah and that in that that genre of modern horror was sort of coming into its own at that time too right yeah this was the escape from new york period this was you know there were a whole bunch of pictures made mostly by that one company um

during the early 80s yeah and that that and we're still reaping the rewards of that now in a way. Well, that's because they're all getting remade over and over. All right. So here you are. It's like, what is it? So it's 1981 and Spielberg sends you a script. That must have been a big day. I thought I'd gone to the wrong address.

I figured this has got to be a mistake. You mean no one alerted you? No agent said this is coming? No, it came in the mail. It came in the mail from Spielberg to my crappy little office where I shared with a lot of other people. And where down the hall, Orson Welles was helping Gary Graver edit his porno film, 3 AM. Really? Yeah.

Because Gary and Orson were together at that point. And they were doing The Other Side of the Wind. And Orson would come in every so often and help Gary out with the editing. Of a porno movie. Of a porno movie. Anyway, it was a fun time. And as much as I didn't want to leave that world, the idea of making a picture for Spielberg was enticing. Because it was a studio picture.

And that was 80. So what had he done? That was 80. Well, he had just done E.T. E.T., right. Now, you get this script from Steven. No phone call, and I guess he wants to talk to you. Well, it turns out that I did go to meet him, and during the meeting, he was actually talking with John Landis about the Twilight Zone movie, which they were going to do together.

And it just sort of, I was there, and it was like, well, he could do one. And then later, there was another meeting, and George Miller walked in talking about something. Oh, well, he could do one. And then later there was another meeting and George Miller walked in talking about something. Oh, George, he can do one too. And I thought, boy, this picture's going to have every director in Hollywood if they just keep letting people in the door. And it was a different concept. Originally it was going to be the characters from

one story were going to appear in the other story. So it was like more of a continuum. But then because John was going to go off and do another film so he needed to do his episode first and then they had this horrible accident and they shut down the project and there was lawsuits flew and I didn't think the movie was ever going to happen but uh we're talking about Vic Morrow's death yeah and I and I and so months later they they reactivated it because I think the studio wanted a Spielberg movie.

And he was the producer and was going to direct one of them. And so I think they just sort of closed their eyes and said, let's go ahead and finish the movie. So we got to shoot the rest of the movie. But George and I were left completely alone. It was episodic, too. Instead of connecting the stories, they had to sort of – No, they were all separate. They're kind of hosted, right?

And we brought Burgess Meredith in to do voiceovers because he had been on the stories. No, they're all separate. They're kind of hosted, right? We brought Burgess Meredith in to do voiceovers because he had been on the show. Right, and wasn't there some weird almost comedy bit with Dan Aykroyd? There was a Dan Aykroyd opening. Albert Brooks, too? With Albert Brooks, yeah.

Right, right, right. And that was also a tag at the end. Right, right, right. And so it was a great experience for George and I because it was our first studio movie. And here we are in these huge sets with these big studio backing

and all these technicians and you're getting to do exactly what you want and it's really kind of offbeat and you're thinking, wow, this is really great. You have all this studio stuff and they leave you completely alone. This is a great way to make movies.

Well, we discovered later on our next pictures that that really wasn't the way it worked at all. It's a unique situation. But it was an exciting period because, you know, I remember standing on the top of the set for The Twilight Zone, which was all sort of a twisty, out of focus house with strange sight lines and things. And I was looking over at the corner of the set and a grip came up to me and he says, hey, kid, you see that corner there? I said, yeah. He said, Errol Flynn pissed in that corner. And I thought, wow, I've arrived.

Yeah, this is Hollywood. Yeah, yeah. That's beautiful. So now, all right, so then you get, so Gremlins comes into reality. Like, what does Stephen tell you about that? Well, it wasn't, it came into reality

because Stephen wanted to make a low-budget horror film like the ones I had been making. And this was his first project for Amblin, his new company. Sure. And I think he figured, well, you know, let's play it safe. Let's make a low-budget film. He thought of making it in Oregon at the Osmond Studios, non-union. But when I read the script, it seemed apparent

that it was going to be pretty difficult to make some of these things happen these these little creatures running around all over yeah how are we gonna do that yeah and it also occurred to me that once we decided that you can't put a gremlin head on a monkey and have it play the part you had to try that we tried it and he took it off you know he went berserk and ran all over the editing room and pooped on everything. And it was obvious that was not the way we were going to do it. That was not going to be the gizmo that kids love.

So, obviously, there was going to be some sort of puppetry around electronics. And my feeling was that the more realistic the movie looked, the less realistic the puppets would look. And so, I said, we got to do this on the back lot. We got to make it look like a Capra movie. We got to make it look like an old movie. more realistic the movie looked the less realistic the the puppets would look and so i said let's we got to do this on the back lot we got to make it look like a capra movie you got to make it look like an old movie uh and so the people will be automatically familiar with the world that when we introduce this weird stuff in it it'll seem more like it belongs there yeah and so um there had never really outside of the muppets there had really never been uh any kind of puppet movie on this scale before because we had lots and lots of puppets and because of the animuppets, there had really never been any kind of puppet movie on this scale before

because we had lots and lots of puppets. And because of the animatronics, it takes several people to operate any one puppet. They have all these wires and stuff coming out of them and they have monitors

that they have to look in and the monitors are reversed because the way people react to monitors is as if they're looking in a mirror. But you have to hide the puppeteers.

And so we had to build the sets up on stilts and put the puppeteers underneath. We had to build the walls and put puppeteers behind furniture and just contrive shots to not show the gimmick of how it was done. It was a hell of a learning experience. And we were inventing the technology as we went on. And we tried a lot of stuff that didn't work. We tried marionettes. They didn't work. There's some in the movie, but you can see they don't work um and so we were we were sort of learning by doing and uh it finally got down to the point where um the studio said you

know go ahead here's here's the money 11 million dollars uh 11 million 11 million dollars go ahead and make the movie. Yeah. And, but they really didn't have any faith in it. They really kind of thought, well, it's Steven. Let's give him the movie. It's a movie he wants to do.

It doesn't cost that much. Let him do it. Right. Hopefully it won't be terrible. Yeah. And to everyone's surprise, certainly including mine, we went to this preview in San Diego,

I think it was, and there was, nobody had ever heard of the movie. I mean, the only publicity had been some bad publicity from Siskel and Ebert

who had gotten a hold of an early draft of the script which was much more gruesome where the Gremlins ate the dog and killed the mother and cut her head off

and they were on their anti-horror kick at the time. right. And so, because it was good for business. And so the only notice had been this one bad notice. And so we went to this preview

and nobody knew what they were going to see. And it was a phenomenon. I mean, the audience was, they had no idea what they were going to see. They bought it. They bought the rules. They bought all the stuff that we were worried about. Yeah.

What if they don't buy it? Don't get them wet. Don't get them wet. What if that's just worried about. What if they don't buy it? Don't get them wet. Don't get them wet. What if that's just so arbitrary? What if they don't buy it? Well, I learned audiences want to buy it. They spent their money or not, but they're sitting down and they want your movie to be good. And also there was something about the animation.

There was something about that puppet that was not unlike E.T. that you developed an almost immediate emotional relationship with that. Well, because in Chris Columbus's original script, the idea was that the cute, cuddly, gizmo, mogwai character would turn into the bad, evil, stripe character. The idea was that you wanted to get people interested in the character and then surprise them by having, oh, no, look, he's got a bad side. Well, about three weeks before we started shooting,

Stephen had an idea which sent everyone into a panic because we were just about to shoot. And he said, I don't think that Gizmo should turn into Stripe.

I think Gizmo should be the hero's pal and stick around for the whole movie. And the reason we were so horrified was because the puppet was so small

and there was so little room to stick gears into it that we had basically engineered it so that it would be good for a couple of reels and then we wouldn't have to see it again.

Right. But now, it was a major character. It was going to have close-ups. It was going to have emotions. It was going to be another character. So we had to think how are we going to do

this we had to rebuild him and we had to build a giant gizmo head yeah that we would photograph because it was the only thing that could express any kind of subtlety because the other ones were just it was just too small yeah in there and we managed to pull it off and and at the preview the audience fell in love with gizmo and then they believed the gremlins and they put they bought it all and they had never seen anything like it and they were on the ceiling it was just a raucous great preview of the type that some filmmakers never get it was exciting it was great and and also stripe in the whole like i think at that time you know with with punk rock and rock and roll where it was that

and and also that they were these puppets that the the comedy of of the the bad gremlins was was so like you know people could see themselves in it well and we that we found as we were shooting that the interesting thing about the gremlins was that the more you put clothes on them and the more you made them look like people yeah the funnier they were and the more interesting they were and the more character they would have because they're basically all the same design yeah but if you just dressed them a different way and had them do something different then they would be different characters imagine like a flasher gremlin yeah nothing to flash but he flashed anyway well that was that amazing moment in that movie where you know i realized that you

know your uh sort of um intellectual capacity as a director was like you made a movie that worked on a lot of levels. There was a moment there where, you know, we're seeing the reflection of the movie theater, right? Where the bad gremlins are all in the audience of the movie theater. And they're watching Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Right. But that moment where you see the movie theater, you're like, that's us. Yeah, exactly. Right.

Exactly. And that's, I think, one of the reasons that the audiences loved it because they saw themselves. Yeah. You know, in- In the bad ones. In the bad ones. But also the bad ones are so cute, the way they liked it. Sure, sure.

Everybody likes Snow White. It's a great time. Yeah. That's- So, it was an unexpected hit and it was, it put me on the map and got me studio jobs for good or ill. And you know, it was the most successful movie I ever made. To this day.

And when I go, it'll say, Gremlin's director hit by bus, or whatever. But did you, does it hold up? I've seen it recently. With kids, actually, in France last year, they ran it for an audience of, I think it was like a thousand children in this huge auditorium and um dubbed in French

and they had the same reactions as the audience in 1984. That's that's amazing and here's now this must have been around the time now I got a weird story my producer and business partner who produces this show uh Brendan MacDonald uh told me a secret that he had about you, which is that he went in when he was eight years old on a general casting for Little Man Tate. Oh. That he said you were involved, and he auditioned for you. He got into the final mix. You were looking for regular kids, not actor kids,

and he auditioned for you and did all right. And it was down to like five kids, and then it went away. You know why it went away? What year was that? Was that like? 87? Oh, it was way, yeah. Maybe.

Okay. It went away. It was a great script by Scott Frank. And I location scouted. We were going to shoot it in Georgia, in Atlanta, on one of the few blocks that hadn't been destroyed,

which now it is. And we had found kids that we liked, but the lead character is a mother in her 20s who has a genius child and doesn't know how to handle it and makes some bad decisions. And there's another character who's sort of a child psychologist. And so the studio said, well, we want Cher to play the mother.

Yeah. And I said, well, you don't understand. A character who is 40 and makes the same decisions as a person who's 20 is a stupid character and an unsympathetic one. And the movie won't work with an older character, older actors playing the mother. So... That was it?

That was it. Goodbye. The whole thing folded. And Ethan Hawke was actually going to be in it too as the guy who gets killed. Who you sort of discovered, right? With Explorers. I just had him in here. He mentioned it.

Yeah, he's great. And who else? Was River Phoenix too with Explorers. Yeah. I just had him in here. He mentioned it. Yeah, he's great. And who else? Was River Phoenix, too, in Explorers? River was in it. Yes, River Phoenix was in Explorers. I was good at finding kids. Yeah. And then Jodie Foster went on to make-

And Jodie Foster, who I wanted to play the psychiatrist. Uh-huh. And I think I'd even asked her to play the mother, and she said, no, I want to play the psychiatrist. Then she knew about it, so the picture eventually got made without your friend. Brendan. So you don't remember Brendan. It wasn't that old.

No, I do. He was one of several kids. Yeah, right. And they were, but the kid that they used, I didn't think was as good as the kids that we found. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I can't remember if that movie did all right or not.

I think it just did okay. But by that point, you'd done Explorers, you'd done The Twilight Zone, you'd done the- I'd done Interspace, I think. Interspace. How'd that movie do? I kind of remember it. It didn't do well. And what was the premise?

You were in a ship inside, was it based on an old sci-fi thing? The premise was what would happen if you shrunk Dean Martin down and injected him inside Jerry Lewis. That was the premise we were working from, which had originally started as a straight spy movie and then became a comedy when Jeff Boehm rewrote it. And it was a very funny movie, and the cast was hilarious, and people love it today, but it just crashed and burned when it came out,

partly because of the title. Well, this is funny because what's happening with a lot of your movies is not unlike what was happening with you in some of the undiscovered movies that became more cult movies and more appreciated. Well, I'm a firm believer that movies do not yield up all their secrets the first day you see them. And I think that movies play a different way. They're sort of like wine in the sense that they age. But a lot of movies that I made like the burbs as an example uh were roundly denounced critically and it was a dark comedy right and it was and it did okay

because it had tom hanks in right it was it was fairly popular right but it was nothing like the kind of popularity that it has today it's now a cult movie people have parties they they speak back to the screen there's a There's a Burbs trivia book. It's like a touchstone. And yet those things don't happen overnight. They don't happen like a day. You're lucky if they happen at all. Right, right.

But they happen over prolonged exposure. And I think the home video market is responsible for probably the current existence of many directors who are still working, whose movies were not especially successful theatrically, but were very well seen on home video and on HBO. Because when HBO started, they just kept running the same movies over and over. Interspace was one of them. They just kept running them over and over and over. And as people bought into the system, that's what they would end up seeing. And so a movie like Interspace is much more popular from being seen on television

than it ever was in the theater. And yet, if you see it in the theater, it works great with an audience. It's a really funny movie, and there's lots of laughs. And it's sort of a shame about the current system where most movies go directly to VOD. And comedies especially suffer by being seen on your computer with you and your friend Al. Right.

You know, the Marx Brothers used to take their movies out on the road. They used to do the bits before they put them in their movies. They do the bits in front of an audience. Right. They'd see what worked and what didn't. Right. So, when they made the movies, they'd do the joke and then there's a pause right and the pause is where the laughs were oh no you got him yeah but now you see the movies on tv and it's not a pause it's a wait there's a there's a

stage wait there and it's like what's happening nothing happening well there was something happening where people laughing there yeah and so to watch those movies on television is a far cry from the actual experience of seeing them with an audience. With an audience. Absolutely. But even when you cut comedy, I just have minimal experience with this and doing my own TV show, is that you got to let the thing land. You got to be aware of that in your head.

You got to know enough that that's where it's supposed to happen. Yeah. Even, it doesn't have to be a long pause. It's like you're waiting for a theater of people. Well, but the advantage that the Marxists had was that they knew exactly where the house was sure down oh that's a big and it was the only outlet exactly so they you know they weren't thinking about what about netflix yeah yeah but but matinee is the same way that movie you're that you know that that's another movie that was discovered on video but it's about it's about that era it's about going to the movies though

yeah yeah ironically sure now there's a couple more things i want to talk about now gremlins too you sort of like you were riffing on the it was almost a satire of the original gremlins we were riffing on it on everything but basically they came to me and wanted me to make another gremlins right away and because it made money because it made a lot of money yeah it didn't just make money on the investment it made a lot of money. Yeah. It didn't just make money on the investment. It made a lot of money. And so they, well, let's have another one. Yeah. You know, that's what they all think. That's what we do.

And so I was pretty much grumbled out at the time. And I just, I said, no. You had enough of those fucking puppets. I can't do it. I can't do the puppets. Because we shot three months of just puppets. I mean, it's, your brain falls out your ears. So I said, no.

And so they went away and they hired a lot of writers and did a lot of scripts and none of them worked. And the reason they didn't work is they didn't really understand what was successful about the first picture. So they came back and said, if you make us a sequel, we will let you do whatever you want. And that's not an offer you often hear. And so it was like, okay, fine. So Mike Fennell, the producer,

and got Charlie Haas, who'd written Matinee, together with me. Actually hadn't written it yet, but he was a friend of ours. And we came up with a take on what would be Gremlins 2. And the idea was, what can we do with Gremlins 2 to make sure there's never a Gremlins 3? Right. And so we made fun of the movie. We made fun of the fact that it was a sequel. We made fun of sequels in general.

We made fun of Donald Trump, which has now come back to make the movie even more popular. It all took place in a Trump building, right? It all took place in a Trump building. It was a combination of Trump and Ted Turner because we wanted to have him have a cable network as well. Sure, sure. And he was supposed to be the villain. Then we hired John Glover to play him. And he played it so boyishly gosh wow that he went from being a villain to actually being very likable. And it sort of threw the entire movie off a little bit. But that was actually perfect because that was the kind of movie it was. It was like whatever your expectation is, this isn't what it is.

And so it's filled with jokes from Hell's a Poppin', which is one of my favorite movies, which is unfortunately very obscure today because of a rights problem. But I like Breaking the Fourth Wall. I like all that Hope and Crosby stuff. And so we made this wacky kind of movie that got great reviews

and had the screenings I went to. People were having a great time. But they had just waited too long. And the same thing was true of Ghostbusters, too. Because both our pictures came out the same day, Ghostbusters and Grumman's. And they were both very popular.

And yet they waited all this time to make the sequel. And I think there's a... A window? There's a statute of limitations on sequels. I mean, there's another school of thought that says it's better to make Jurassic World after your last Jurassic Park movie was seven years ago. Yeah. Because now there's a whole new audience for it.

Right. But back then, there wasn't the kind of penetration for older movies that there is now. Right. And so it wasn't like they got to see it on Starz video like every week. Oh, of course. Sure. Like it just happened last week. Right.

So it was a disappointment financially. It also cost a lot. It cost three times as much for the first picture. But we had made such strides in terms of technology that now we could have the gremlins fly, we could have them talk. In Tony Randall's voice, their mouths could move. I mean, it was liberating.

And it's one of my favorite things I've ever done because it's so me. And has that found an audience now? Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's very, there are many people who like it more than the first picture. Yeah, you're like a cult movie hero in a way. Yeah. That wasn't the plan, but that's how it worked out.

But was there, but, you know, in deciding, like, you know, making the decision to stand up for the material on something like Little Man Tate, which is more of a mainstream movie. Well, no, I wanted to make mainstream movies. That was why I initially made Interspace, which was originally supposed to be a serious movie. Yeah. But then by the time I was through with it, it was all wacky and crazy.

Help yourself. Yeah, it's true. So are you disappointed? No, in my career? No, no, just in that that didn't manifest. No, I was sorry not to make the movie, but that's not the only movie I haven't made. Right.

I was sorry I didn't make it. But that now you're revered for these amazing movies that were signature movies for you and have grown to be appreciated. Do you feel like there was a type of movie that you'd still like to make that you didn't get to make? Well, I loved Westerns, but I only got to make one, which was a short western for Showtime with Brian Keith called Lightning, based on a Zane Grey story. It was part of a series called Picture Windows, which didn't last very long.

It was all adaptations of paintings. That was fun. But, you know, they just, I'm out of my time. I mean, you know, they don't make western make westerns and if they do they usually don't make them very well right and you've been you've done a lot of work

in TV too now well that's where a lot of us have gone you know the mainstream movies that we've been talking about would never be made

for theaters today they would be made for television and also you know the rise of long form and the fact that you now don't have to compress

Pride and Prejudice into 90 minutes. You can do it as a five, six, seven hour show. It's good for storytelling. And I think that's why you see so many top level directors are now getting into television. I think Steven Soderbergh enjoys the Nick more than he enjoyed making features. Sure. Well, there's a lot of amazingly cinematic things being done with people that have the ability to do it.

Well, it's also partly a function of the fact that the delivery system is better. People have better screens. They have good sound. Now they have big screens. And there's not that much difference between the way you would shoot a movie and the way you would shoot a TV show. When I first started doing TV in the 80s, it was a pretty consistent thought that you had to have a lot of close-ups because people had small screens. Yeah. And so there wasn't a lot of wide shots. There weren't a lot of cinematic camera moves.

It was all pretty basic. Sure. And then as things went on, I mean, people like Spielberg showed with Duel that you could make a cinematic movie for television and the screen be damned. I mean, it was just the movie. What was that? That was with Dennis Weaver? Was that Dennis Weaver?

Yeah, that was 75? Right, right. Four? Yeah, yeah. And what do you look forward to doing now? What are you working on now? Well, I've gotten into some producing. I've just produced a picture called,

or executive produced a picture called Dark, which is directed by Nick Basile in New York with Whitney Abel. And it's a story about a girl who's sort of losing her mind during the blackout in New York. And it's played some festivals, and I think it's opening

in June. And that's fun because anytime you can use your clout to get somebody to make a picture is rewarding. I've been doing, I've been doing episodes of Salem.

I do a lot of Hawaii Five-O's. Is that still on? Yeah, it's still on. And it's coming back. Yeah? And I'll never get rid of it. Do you shoot down in Hawaii? Sure.

It's all in Honolulu. And that's nice. And it's, it's, you know, better than a sharp stick in the eye. And,

and that's, and what's good about television is it's fast, which is the way I started. When you made a picture for Corman, you knew that this is the first day of shooting. And four weeks from there, it was going to be playing on Southern Drive in the screens. So you could be topical. In features, it's not the case anymore. When I did Looney Tunes, it was a year and a half. That was a big movie. That was a passion project, right?

It wasn't so much a passion project. It was a movie that I felt I had to make because Chuck Jones had been a friend of mine and he had not been that fond of their last

big studio cartoon movie Space Jam. How old was he when you made Looney Tunes? He had just passed away. And I didn't want it to be Space Jam 2, so I signed on hoping to try to preserve the characters. Right.

And it was, I don't know how successful that was. But it turned out that in the interim, the cartoons had not been shown on TV for years. And so when the picture opened, the characters were less familiar than My Little Pony to the audience. And so there wasn't really a big groundswell of interest in going to see another picture with

those characters on a big screen. The characters that you grew up with. Characters that I grew up with on a big screen, on big screen and small. Because most of the kids, they stopped running theatrical cartoons in the early 60s. So most people didn't see those cartoons on screen.

They saw them on television. And you had a relationship with Chuck? Chuck was a good friend of mine. He was a great guy. He was the closest to a Mark Twain that I ever met. Really? Yeah. Because there was definitely an undercurrent of very sophisticated humor.

No, he was a very, very bright guy. What are your favorite ones? Because I'd like to watch some. Like if I wanted to go watch some Chuck Jones. Duck Amok is very good. That's a cartoon where Daffy Duck is, it's a fourth wall cartoon where he's constantly being erased. Oh yeah, I remember that.

You know, it's weird. You see these when you're a kid. Of course you do. And the thing about being a kid is you don't know the titles. Of course not. It's just, there's the one where he did. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a great cartoon.

What's Opera Doc, obviously? The parody of opera. Oh, and that's where Bugs sings, right? Yeah, Bugs sings. And that's a late one. The really great ones are from the late 40s, early 50s. It was a great period. And they're all out on these Golden Jubilee Warner

Brothers discs. And the funny thing about cartoons, as I discovered when I went to a Tex Avery retrospective at the museum is that hilarious as they are, you can't watch

like 12 of them in a row. Right. And they were never meant to be watched 12 in a row. Well, you get worn out. Some of the jokes

are repeated. Uh-huh. But they're so exhausting to watch because they're so intense that after like about the fifth or sixth cartoon, I mean, you find you're just, you're not laughing, you're just staring.

And this ethos has moved on to the superhero genre. Sure, exhausting. Where what you get is you get 12 endings, each one with bigger special effects than the last. And by the time you get to the fifth one, it doesn't mean anything anymore. Right. And it doesn't matter how much money they've spent or how great photography is or how big

the stunts look. It's just too much. It's like, it's almost like some sort of like very mild form of PTSD. Yeah. At a cost of, God knows, no man can say. So wait, was Elmer Fudd and Porky Pig part of that pantheon? Elmer and the whole gang yes elmer was definitely he used to he used to have he went through a number of different

personalities but and what was it was the other one suck it was sam uh so yosemite sam he was one too he's well he's got the sort of the same voice as sylvester the cat right right right right um and tasmanian devil tasmanian devil of course which is you know pretty great yeah yeah yeah yeah, yeah, yeah. People don't know them anymore. They don't know them as they should. No, they don't. Because they're just not exposed to them as getting back to what we were saying.

I mean, there is just so much stimuli out there that you have to compartmentalize your life now. Do you want to spend some time watching cartoons? Who's got eight minutes to watch a cartoon? And it's all competing. All that content is competing for your attention. Right. And we only have so many times. Exactly.

So much time. Exactly. And which is why, if you have kids, you can channel their interests by showing them things that you think they should know about. Yeah. It's on you. If you just leave it for them to find on their own on YouTube, who knows what they're going to find.

They're going to be watching the Antony Aardvark. It might not be good. Yeah. And how is that? Does the Looney Tunes movie, is there a following for it now? I don't think so. Oh.

Damn. I don't think so. Give it time, Joe. Yeah, exactly. You never know. It was great talking to you. You too. That was me and the amazing Joe Dante.

And before that, John Carpenter. So, yeah, WTFpod.com for my stuff and the show stuff and posters and tour dates and whatnot. The app, the Howl app. Brian Jones mugs coming out today. I'm a little tired today. Going to have to forego, forego the, forego, see I can't even talk, forego the guitar. All right? Boomer lives! Calgary is a city built by innovators.

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