Joe Dante has been one of my favorite directors since I was a young man. He is one of the most imaginative filmmakers from the fantastic crop of directors that were popular in my youth. His film Matinee had a profound impact on me as a child and is partially responsible for shaping my taste in film. Along with his short lived and excellent television show Eerie, Indiana, Joe’s films helped to develop my affection for science fiction and horror films while also helping to develop my taste for a certain sense of humor. I was absolutely thrilled when Joe and the wonderful team at Trailers From Hell agreed to let me interview Joe so that I could run an appreciation of the director and his films for my small site.
Joe’s work is well known and includes the films: Piranha, Gremlins, Explorers, Innerspace, Small Soldiers, The Burbs, Gremlins 2, Matinee, Burying The Ex, The Hole, Looney Tunes: Back in Action, and The Howling. I was delighted to talk to one of my childhood heroes and very pleased that he was willing to take the time – especially considering his busy schedule and the fact that this interview took place during the Covid-19 crisis. This interview took place on May 13th and 14th, 2020.
In preparation for the interview I started viewing films from the beginning of his career with Hollywood Boulevard and worked my way through to the recently released anthology film Nightmare Cinema. Despite my best efforts with my research, there were a few mistakes I made along the way which I will note in the interview. The biggest mistake was failing to watch Joe’s films The Second Civil War and Runaway Daughters before the interview. That was a missed opportunity. I have watched The Second Civil War since this interview, and it comes highly recommended.
Art House Cult: First off, I just wanted to thank you for being willing to take the time and do this interview considering everything going on with COVID-19. I really appreciate your time.
Joe Dante: That’s okay.
Art House Cult: I have been researching for the last two weeks, and I had an opportunity to sit back and rewatch all of the films. Is it cool if I sort of start from the early days, and move on?
Joe Dante: It’s your call, it’s whatever way you want.
Art House Cult: You grew up in New Jersey. Did you have any siblings when you were growing up?
Joe Dante: I had a brother who was six years younger.
Art House Cult: I’m sure you were watching out for him throughout that time.
Joe Dante: Well, I was taking him to the movies.
Art House Cult: Oh, I’m sure. With your parents, was it a stable family life? Or…
Joe Dante: Yeah. My father was a golf pro and we moved around quite a bit. So in the winters we would live in Florida, where he would sell insurance, and then he’d be a golf pro in the summer in New Jersey.
Art House Cult: What part of Florida did you end up in?
Joe Dante: All I remember was that there was a drive-in right outside our house that we were staying in. And every night, from my window in my bedroom, I could watch White Christmas. (laughs)
Art House Cult: So growing up you said that you moved around a lot. Aside from New Jersey and Florida, were there any other spots across the country that you lived?
Joe Dante: No, no, it was always in those two places. But if you’re a golf pro and you get a job at a different country club, then you have to go there. And sometimes it’s a long trek to go from one place to another. So eventually he would have to move closer to the place that he was gonna work to avoid the long drive and stuff. That meant I was changing schools which is always kinda disruptive for a kid.
Art House Cult: Absolutely. When I was in 11th grade, halfway through that year, I actually moved to Florida from Arkansas. So I know the feeling of a little bit of a jolt when you from one place to another..
Joe Dante: Well, Florida’s a pretty weird place to move to, so, it’s a jolt, there’s no doubt about it.
Art House Cult: Yeah. (laughs) I lived in the Panhandle for five and a half years. So..
Joe Dante: Did you go to Gatorland?
Art House Cult: You know, I was actually a Seminole. (laughs)
Joe Dante: (laughs)
Art House Cult: (Editorial note: I was wrong on this question. My research had failed me!) So, after growing up between those places you then went on to NYU Film School?
Joe Dante: No, no, no, no.
Art House Cult: No?
Joe Dante: I had friends who went to NYU Film School, and I used to visit them all the time. But I went to Philadelphia College of Art.
Art House Cult: Oh, God, I was way off. (laughs)
Joe Dante: Oh, that’s okay. , I mean, I would have loved to have gone to NYU, but my math grades were so bad I would have never gotten in. I wanted to be a cartoonist, so I went to Philadelphia College of Art, and thought that they would teach me cartooning. And after the first year, they told me, “Well, cartooning isn’t art, you have to take something else.” And so I picked film because it was the closest thing to comic books. You know, you had storyboards, and frames, and, action between it, but this was the early ’60s, so there really weren’t very many cameras. There were a bunch of students, but we all had to use the same two or three cameras at the end of the year to make our pitiful little student films.
Art House Cult: At what point did you bump into Jon Davison?
Joe Dante: That was when I was in I think my last year of college. And Jon lived in Haddonfield, which was very near Philadelphia. And he had been reading my stuff in Castle of Frankenstein magazine. And he basically sought me out. I mean, he knocked on my door, and introduced himself. I mean, he was like in high school. Um, we went to a couple science fiction conventions together and became quite close. Then he went to NYU and when I finally graduated, I ended up staying in Philadelphia to work on a trade magazine as a film reviewer.
Art House Cult: So, the life of a critic…did you enjoy that work all the way back then?
Joe Dante: Well, I enjoyed the movie part of it. I was also doing other things, like financial columns and news columns, and that was really boring. But I did get to see all these screenings of all these new movies that were coming out before anybody else would see them. So I got to see The Wild Bunch before they cut it, I got to see Once Upon a Time in the West before they cut it. I got in on the ground floor of all these movies that I would then write about.
Art House Cult: (Editorial note: I make an even more embarrassing gaffe here.) With the Peckinpah films, that had to be such a pull towards using Jerry Goldsmith later on.
Joe Dante: Well, actually, Peckinpah used Jerry Fielding.
Art House Cult: (I embarrassingly admonish myself for my confusion and Joe is kind enough to help pull me back out of my stupor)
Joe Dante: Yeah. But he did use Goldsmith on The Ballad of Cable Hogue.
Art House Cult: Oh, yeah, I’ve seen that one. Okay. That’s probably where I’m getting my wires crossed.(Editorial note: I really have seen this film and wrote a review for the Warner Archive Blu-ray.) During that time when you’re in Philadelphia, … in your early films, your casting includes Mary Woronov and Paul Bartel. did you have any experiences bumping into any of the Andy Warhol stuff that was going on at that time? Or was that…
Joe Dante: Well, I didn’t meet Mary until I met Paul. I met Paul because he had made a film called Private Parts which I was invited to a screening to which was a very, very strange film, and really good and probably his best film. He and I and another friend of ours – Mike Wakely – decided to write a script together. So we wrote a horror film called Love Kill which we were hoping to make, but you gotta remember, on the East Coast, the chances for getting your movie made were fairly remote, unless it was a porno. So, we pretty much all ended up having to go out to California to actually get into the movie business.
Art House Cult: When you made your way out to California was it already with the intent to go work with Roger Corman at that point?
Joe Dante: Yes. My friend Jon Davison, who I told you I had met at in Philadelphia had gone out there to work for Roger in the advertising department. He asked me to come out and do some work on some trailers, because he and I together had made a film called The Movie Orgy, which was this seven-hour compilation of weird found footage in 16 millimeter which we used to take around to college campuses. The Schlitz Beer Company would pay us money ’cause they would sell their beer and advertise this event. So I had a lot of experience editing this 16 millimeter material together, although I had never edited 35. But I went out to California, and I worked on the editing of a trailer for a picture called The Student Teachers by Jonathan Kaplan, who was a friend of ours, who was also from New York. Roger had used up all the West Coast film school kids, and he was now bringing people from the East Coast on the recommendation of Marty Scorsese, who was a film teacher who had taught many of them at NYU. So we came out and I did this trailer for this one picture, and it did well, and then I was asked to come back and become the trailer department at New World Pictures along with Allan Arkush who was another East Coast plant. We made a lot of trailers for the next several years and while doing it, we of course gained a healthy knowledge of all the footage that was in these various movies. After doing a couple of trailers for pictures that were so primitive…we said, “We could make a movie as good as this.” So we asked Roger if we could make a picture. And he, in his clever way, said, “Yeah, you can make a picture, but you’ve gotta continue to make the trailers, and it’s gotta be the cheapest picture we’ve ever made here.” Jon Davison was producing, and we hit upon the idea of making a movie that’s used up all the action scenes from these various movies that we’ve been doing trailers for. And so we figured if we’d make it about a movie studio, we can say that they’re making all these different kinds of movies, so we can use all these action scenes from these other pictures. So we made Hollywood Boulevard, which was originally called The Starlets, and was the latest in a series of three-girl movies that Roger was doing, where these girls would be either teachers or nurses or whatever, and they would have adventures and take their clothes off. We did one of those and it was sort of a parody of that whole genre. We made it in ten days, for $60,000 and Roger was pleased and actually released it.
Art House Cult: I watched that movie for the first time ever just a few nights ago. I got the Scorpion Releasing Blu-Ray where they had spent something like 25 hours doing color correction. With that film having been shown and then having disappeared, were you amazed to see its resurgence all these years later?
Joe Dante: Well, you know, none of us thought that the films that we were making for Roger were ever gonna stand the test of time. I mean, I was one of the few people who worked there who was familiar with his movies, ’cause I always watched them when I was growing up. I was particularly fond of his very low-budget Film Group pictures. , and I in fact even got a 16 millimeter distributor to release them to colleges, because I thought they were so clever. We really were astonished that anybody would remember these things. Hollywood Boulevard has had a much longer shelf life than anybody ever imagined that it would have. It’s also sort of a documentary of what it was like to really make movies that cheaply at that time in Hollywood. There’s a lot of in-jokes in it that probably people don’t even get anymore, you know, ’cause they’re just referring to things that are long since passed. But yet it seems to have a certain anarchy to it, and people still seem to enjoy it.
Art House Cult: After Hollywood Boulevard you were able to assist in writing the script for Rock ‘n’ Roll High School with co-director Allan Arkush right after that.
Joe Dante: Yeah. There were two projects. One was Piranha and the other was Rock ‘n’ Roll High School. Allan really wanted to do Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, which I thought was a much better idea for a movie. But his background was from the Fillmore East and he was a big music buff. So he did that one and I got the fish movie. Originally, Rock ‘n’ Roll High School began life as a movie called Girls’ Gym that Allan and I dictated into a tape recorder. So we got the story credit for what became Rock ‘n’ Roll High School. Then while we were shooting the movie, Allan got sick for the last couple of days, so I had to come in and finish shooting it. So I had a little credit at the end but it’s really Allan’s movie.
Art House Cult: Absolutely. The scene you got to direct was the big gym scene in the film.
Joe Dante: Yeah. Unfortunately, that was supposed to be the big chance for P.J. Soles to sing the title song and when we looked at Allan’s notes for what he was trying to shoot we couldn’t quite understand what he wanted. I had never choreographed anything so I figured the only way to make it work was to shoot it in little pieces, like a Beatles movie and just, you know, not worry about staging it or choreographing it, but just doing it shot by shot. And so it seemed to work.
Art House Cult: It turned out somehow, right? On Hollywood Boulevard, you have one of the first staples that through the longevity of your career was present, which is Dick Miller in the film as an agent.
Joe Dante: Yeah, I had been a Dick Miller fan, ’cause I used to watch all Roger’s pictures. He used to use Dick very regularly. So I said, “this may be the only movie I ever get to make, and I’d certainly be crazy not to make it with Dick Miller.” So, we hired Dick, and we gave him the same name as his character in A Bucket of Blood. He was perfectly cast and we really hit it off. We really got along quite well. And I thought, “Well, you know, if I make any other movies, I’ll always try to find a part for Dick.” And then it ended up that that really was a promise that turned out, because he was in virtually every movie I ever made. (laughs)
Art House Cult: Yeah. he’s just got one of those amazing faces. My ten year old son, we were sitting down and watching Innerspace a couple nights ago, and then we were watching Small Soldiers and Holden goes, “Hey!” (laughs)
Joe Dante: “That’s the same guy!”
Art House Cult: (laughs) Yeah.
Joe Dante: As a kid I liked to do that too. I used to really enjoy seeing the same faces over and over again, and that’s one of the ways in which kids start to realize who they like – what actors they like, is because they see them in different roles.
Art House Cult: My first introduction to him was through watching Matinee a million times as a kid.
Joe Dante: Oh, well, that’s a good way to start.
Art House Cult: Moving from Hollywood Boulevard, you go straight into Piranha with a budget of about $660,000?
Joe Dante: It was something like that, which is about twice what Roger would ordinarily spend but it was a co-production with United Artists, and so there was more money. And we didn’t shoot it in LA, we shot it in Texas, which was a big plus because the topography was just getting so familiar from these movies all being shot in the Hollywood Hills. Also we were away from everybody. You know, we were really pretty much on our own, because, you know, Roger wasn’t gonna fly out to Texas every weekend. So… We got to make the movie we wanted within the strictures of the fact that we were making up the special effects as we went along, ’cause nobody had really done a convincing piranha attack in a movie. It was always the top of the water, and they would shoot some BBs at it or something, and say, “What a lot of piranhas in there!” And there was some real footage, actual footage, of real piranhas eating a cow, which is one of the few actual pieces of real footage we could find, and we said, “we’ve gotta try to imitate this.” The only way we could figure out to do it was with puppets, and we shot them at different frame rates. Most of it worked pretty good. The only thing we couldn’t really master was the group shots. We just could never figure out a way to make the piranhas look like they were traveling in a group that weren’t all connected with each other.
Art House Cult: Going from $50,000 to thirteen times that amount, was it nerve-wracking having that type of money behind the film?
Joe Dante: Well, I mean, yeah…. I thought the budget of Hollywood Boulevard was nerve-wracking! I felt a tremendous pressure. I was like, oh, my gosh, that’s so much money, you know? Because it wasn’t my money, you know? I… (laughs) I felt I really just had to produce. With Piranha, there was more money. Obviously, we had money for a named cast, and all that, and a real shoot and everything. It was a real movie! We were film-making a real movie. But, you know, there was was the movie we shot in the swimming pool, which was all the underwater stuff, and then there’s the stuff we shot in Texas, which was all of the aboveground stuff. That’s almost two different movies.
Art House Cult: So when the film comes out, it made $16 million. Were you absolutely blown away by the film’s reception at that time?
Joe Dante: Well, it was a little difficult for me to notice that, because it opened during the newspaper strike, and so there were no advertisements for it, and very few reviews. So… It really didn’t feel like it was actually a real movie, because it wasn’t on the radar. But it was making money, and it particularly made money in Europe and South America, where, obviously, they knew what piranhas were. And because it was United Artists, they had a different campaign in Europe, and it was a much better campaign, which Roger stole later for a movie called Up from the Depths. He just took their campaign and put it on his poster. It was a very successful movie, particularly for the amount of money it cost. And I think that’s one of the things that sort of made people perk up a little bit and go, “Wow, who is this guy?” You know? “Who is this kid? This picture made some money, we should keep an eye on him.” And that was the whole thing about working for Corman, was that, you know, everybody knew that there were people coming out of the Corman’s group who were going on to big things. I mean, there had already been Coppola and Scorsese and Bogdanovich, so they knew that there was a lot of nascent talent bubbling under the surface there at Corman’s. So there were people who kept an eye on what was coming out of Corman. That actually got me a lot of offers to do more underwater giant fish movies, which mercifully I didn’t have to make.
Art House Cult: The film also gave John Sayles the start of his career with his first produced screenplay. How closely did you work with him on sort of shaping the film after it had already been written?
Joe Dante: Well, you know, he was rewriting a script that was pretty much unmakeable, and it just wasn’t a good script. We basically threw it out and started over. John likes to put political stuff in his movies, as do I, so we added a sort of a political bent to the undercurrent of it. Also it’s a sort of a spoof, because everybody knows that it’s not Jaws, we didn’t have enough money to make Jaws, but we had to let people know at the beginning of the movie that we know, yes, we know that it’s a Jaws ripoff. So, here’s the leading lady playing a Jaws video game. Get it? Now get over it. It was a great calling card for both of us.
Art House Cult: This also marked the first time that you hired the writer to play a role to keep them on the set so that you could have them around.
Joe Dante: Well, I think it’s always a good idea to have the writer around if you can. What if an actor comes up with an idea that they can’t quite articulate what it is they want? And if you’ve got the guy who actually wrote it there then you can work out the problems and make the scene better. The problem is, of course, that on a movie like Piranha, you can’t put up the writer for the entire shoot, they’re too expensive. So I hired him as an actor so that I could get him on the set, and he was there for two or three days or whatever, and we did a lot of rewriting while he was there, and the movie’s better for it.
Art House Cult: Yeah. He played an MP in that one, didn’t he?
Joe Dante: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Art House Cult: This film once again, you sort of harken back to things that you love. You’ve got character actors like Kevin McCarthy and the great Barbara Steele. Were you sort of cherrypicking the actors that you could get from your sort of childhood memories at that time?
Joe Dante: Of course I wanted to work with actors that I had grown up liking, but the other issue was that there was a thing called the TVQ at the time, and that was the TV rating that certain actors had with the viewing public. So, if you wanted to sell your movie to network TV, which was always a big part of the budget… they would assume that you’re gonna get a network sale… then the network had to approve the actors, and they had to be sellable. So there are a number of people who you might have wanted to use, but they didn’t have a high enough TVQ, so you couldn’t use those people. Everybody who was in that movie, Keenan Wynn and Bradford Dillman, all those people were very familiar television names as well as movie names.So that’s pretty much how that cast was put together.
Art House Cult: In the first third of the film, there is a sequence where they first walk into the lab, and there is this unexplained creature walking around the lab. It’s almost like the rest of the movie is so nuts that you just sorta quickly forget about that creature (laughs) that was walking around. Who decided to throw that in there?
Joe Dante: Well, I love stop motion. I wanted to have some stop motion, and we knew we weren’t gonna be able to have stop motion piranhas, ’cause nobody can do stop motion underwater, it’s really difficult. So we had this creature, which was a mutated something that the doctor was making in his lab. There was even a plan that didn’t work out to have the creature come back at the end of the picture during the car chase, and be, like, 50 feet tall. (laughs) But we couldn’t afford that, so we didn’t do that. But, um, it was basically just to show the audience… this is the kind of movie this is. It’s one of these kinda pictures. (laughs) You know? And if you like this kinda picture, you’ll like this movie.
Art House Cult: I got such a good laugh during that scene, but then I got a harder laugh at the end of the film when it never cycled back to that at all.
Joe Dante: Well, it’s not about that, you know? It’s just… it’s just to show you how crazy the doctor is, and how British. (laughs)
Art House Cult: (laughs) This film also marks your first collaboration with editor Mark Goldblatt.
Joe Dante: Yes. Mark had been one of the Filipino rapists in Hollywood Boulevard. (laughs)
Art House Cult: Oh, really?
Joe Dante: So he was a friend of mine. I would have loved to have edited the whole thing. I mean, I started out as an editor, and my whole goal was to edit my movies like Sam Fuller used to do. But the studios frown on that partly because it gives you too much control, and the other is that they can’t have the movie sitting around being unedited while you’re shooting. So, while I was in Texas, Mark put the picture together as best he could. Then when I came back, I was convinced that it was gonna be an awful movie, and that I had botched it up. So I practically lived in the editing room. I didn’t leave, I didn’t… I didn’t eat, I didn’t bathe. I just did nothing but sit at the Moviola and try out different frame rates for piranhas, and different edits of the different scenes, and put them in different orders. When John Sayles first saw the rough cut, I mean, he was astonished that I had taken scenes from the middle and put them at the beginning and vice versa, but I was operating in a fever haze.
Art House Cult: It turned out to be tremendously successful.
Joe Dante: Yes, it did.
Art House Cult: The next film that you moved onto was The Howling, which has become a cult classic as well. This film paired you again with Roger and John Sayles.
Joe Dante: And that’s another rewrite.
Art House Cult: I actually picked up the novel by Gary Brandner, just trying to get really prepared for this interview… and they’re very different animals.
Joe Dante: Well, they have to be! Because, you know, what works in a supermarket paperback that you’re gonna read quickly, doesn’t really work if you have to think about it on a movie screen. I mean, there’s a girl that gets raped, and she goes to recuperate at this town called Drago, which is all closed up, but it’s on a main highway, you know? People are peering out of windows that are boarded up, and it’s like, “but it’s on a highway!” And- none of it really made any sense at all. So the original script that was written … they tried dutifully to do the story from the book, and it didn’t work at all. So again, John had to throw it all out, and change it all around, and- and modernize it, certainly, ’cause it was very old-fashioned. We departed greatly from the book.The fact that there’s a trauma and she has to go to a place where there are werewolves is about the only thing that we kept. Everything else, you know, we modernized. I mean, the whole EST thing and the stuff about the newscaster, and the serial rapist and all that stuff was all pretty contemporary stuff. I mean, we were… we were working against the fact that werewolf movies were then considered, at the time, kind of old-fashioned. So it wasn’t advertised as a werewolf movie. It was advertised as a slasher movie. At the beginning of the movie, for the first 20 minutes, you’d think it was a slasher movie. That was intentional, because audiences were so skeptical and so ready to not take it seriously that you had to sort of clue them in and sneak in that supernatural element by having the characters in the movie actually know what a werewolf is. Because in most of these pictures, the screenwriter acts as if the audience doesn’t know what they already know. The characters are always dumber than the audience, so you have to sit down while the characters figure out what a werewolf is, and go to the doctor, and have it explained to them and all that. We just thought that’s ridiculous, I mean, all they had to do was turn on the television, and they could watch The Wolfman and they would’ve learned all about it. So this became, I think, one of the early postmodern horror pictures that obviously led the way to Scream and all these other self-reflexive movies. But I mean, this is… this is the one… this is the first one where the characters knew as much as the audience.
Art House Cult: When I was opening up the novel, it jumped directly into a graphic rape scene. I was like, “Wait? What is going on?” (laughs) That’s pretty unadaptable, you know?
Joe Dante: Yeah. It was not not an easy adaptation.
Art House Cult: Were there any favorite memories that stuck out from working on that film?
Joe Dante: Embassy Pictures was a nice company to work for because they were pretty supportive, and they let me have the cast I wanted. I was very happy with the cast. I got to work with John Carradine and Slim Pickens, and all these other guys that I had always liked. Rob Bottin did a great job on the visual effects, which Rick Baker originally was supposed to do, but then John Landis said, “Wait a minute, wait a minute! You’re supposed to do my werewolf movie!” And so Rick had to go off and do John’s picture. Considering the fact that our budget was a fraction of what John had to work with, I thought it turned out pretty well.
Art House Cult: Yeah. I totally agree. It also was your second collaboration with Pino Donaggio. Did that come out of a love of watching gialli?
Joe Dante: No, it came out of watching Don’t Look Now, which was the score that had most impressed me. And.. when it was suggested that we could get him for Piranha, I was amazed. I went, “Are you kidding? Why would… why would he do Piranha?” And it turned out that he was trying to put an American face on his on his work. He wanted to get into the American market. And so that was one of the reasons that he took on this rather lurid movie. Then we got a long great, even though he didn’t speak English very well. Then he did a great job also on The Howling. The problem with Pino was that we could never afford to go to Italy to hear the score being recorded. We would do the spotting, and then he would go Italy, and he’d send us the music, and that would… that would be it, you know? We wouldn’t see him again.
Art House Cult: So right after The Howling you directed two of the six episodes of Police Squad. What was it like working with the Zuckers?
Joe Dante: Well, I’d known the Zuckers through Jon Davison. In fact, I’m one of the idiots in town who turned down Airplane, because I just didn’t get it, frankly. I just didn’t get it. In 10 months, I saw the movie and I understood completely what they were doing. The fact that it’s based on another movie called Zero Hour, which is essentially the same movie and even scene for scene is the same movie, and character for character… and yet all the scenes in Airplane are the same scenes but exaggerated and extended to absurdity. It’s really quite clever. So when that was a big hit, and they got to do their TV series, I was very happy to do an episode or two of Police Squad, because I got the joke. Again, that’s based on a show called M-Squad, with Lee Marvin. All of the schtick in that show, the gimmicks and stuff, are all taken from real programs. The problem with that show, and the reason it wasn’t a success, was that it was intentionally made to look like a ’60s cop show. It had no laugh track and it starred Leslie Nielsen, who was up to then known for dramatic roles. So people would watch it, and they’d click the channel, and it was like, “Oh, there’s Leslie Nielsen in an old cop show,” and they would click it off, because they wouldn’t get the fact that it’s a comedy, because there was nobody laughing. You had to pay attention to that show in order to get the jokes, and it was brilliant. And I thought it worked much better as a TV show than it did when they made the movies, because in the TV show, not only do you not have to sustain an entire 90 minutes, but also you can make fun of all the conventions – all of the titles and the freeze-frames at the end, and the commercial breaks and all that stuff. It was such a fun show to do and it was the first time I ever worked on a studio lot, ’cause it was Paramount. I had never worked on a studio lot before. In fact, it also got me into the Director’s Guild, ’cause it was the first union job I ever did.
Art House Cult: Oh, wow. So even with the success of Piranha and The Howling, it hadn’t unionized you at that point.
Joe Dante: No, no, no. You couldn’t work for Roger and be a member of the union. The costs would be just too much. I mean, he could pay you $1.98 and that’d be okay. We needed the money and then we were happy to get it, but his whole business was based on the idea that he could get people to work for much lower than for instance his competitors at American International Pictures who would find a union agreement. All of their movies were more expensive than Roger’s, because they were all union, and they had people sitting in trucks, and they had union guys and teamsters and all that sorta thing. We didn’t have any of that.
Art House Cult: So after Police Squad, were you tapped by Spielberg to do the segment in Twilight Zone: The Movie? Or did you petition for that?
Joe Dante: No. I was handed that, because I was already working on Gremlins. …
Art House Cult: Oh, wow. Okay.
Joe Dante: Which had come to my office unsolicited, and I was sure it had come to the wrong address, ’cause I couldn’t imagine that Steven Spielberg would know who I was. It turned out that he had seen Piranha, he had seen The Howling, and in fact he hired Dee Wallace to play E.T.’s mom from watching The Howling. So I was in pre-production on Gremlins, doing storyboards and planning what the gremlins were gonna look like, and that’s when the Twilight Zone movie came up. He and John asked me if I would do an episode. I said, “Absolutely, of course.” I was always working on the pre-production of Gremlins while I was doing The Twilight Zone. The mistake I thought they made was that Warner Bros insisted on remaking shows from the program, instead of doing new stories, like Rod Serling would do. And I said, “you know everybody knows these stories. They’re like fairy tales. I mean, everybody knows the gimmicks. They know the twists! So why shouldn’t we do stories that they don’t know how they’re gonna end?” And they said, “No, no, this is what we want.” So… I picked a story that had been done very well on television, but I went back to the original short story, which is quite a bit different. That became the episode that I did, “It’s a Good Life” and I changed the locale, I changed the gimmicks, I changed the aesthetic. I mean, it was all different, but it was the same story. The movie was an uneven movie. Some things worked and some things didn’t. George Miller’s episode was, I thought, amazing, and it was also amazing to watch being shot, ’cause it was pretty thrilling, watching that gigantic airplane hanging in a sound stage with all the wind and water and lightning and monster on a wing and stuff. It was great! But the movie was tarred by the fact that there was this accident which happened early early on. It never really recovered from that.
Art House Cult: Gremlins is one of my favorite comedies from the Eighties. It’s just one of my feel-good movies that I can put on, and my ten year old loves it and, I probably shouldn’t say this, but my five year old loves it. (laughs) I just love that movie so much. That film was Chris Columbus’ first produced screenplay.
Joe Dante: Well, he wrote it as a spec script, he didn’t write it to be made. He wrote it to show people what he could do. He wasn’t really thinking that it would be produced. Then when Spielberg got ahold of it, he thought, “This is the perfect movie to start my new company, ’cause it’s a horror film, and they always make money, and I can make it, really cheap by doing it in Oregon as a non-union movie. And I’ll get that non-union guy Joe Dante to do it.” (laughs) And, of course it turned out that the demands of the story were such that it was gonna have to cost more money than that. And that’s when he hooked up with Warner Brothers, and that’s when I got involved with the Twilight Zone.
Art House Cult: So that project came as a spec script to Spielberg, and then he got it over to you. What was it like working with all those technicalities with the puppets?
Joe Dante: Well, it was very difficult, because there were a lot of things in the script that were planned that just couldn’t be done. We just didn’t have the technology to do them. I mean, there had been The Dark Crystal, and there had been some other large-scale puppet movies, but never anything quite like this. We had to invent the technology as we were going along. There were just things that they couldn’t do. And Steven really handed us a curveball about a month before we started shooting when he decided that instead of Gizmo turning into Stripe the bad gremlin, that he wanted Gizmo to stick around for the whole movie and be the hero’s pal. There was no way that we were prepared, technically to do that. I mean, we thought we were lucky to get away with him for 20 minutes, and now he was gonna be the star of the movie. So, we had to frantically figure out a way to shoot giant head versions of him, and try to find ways to get more gears into the body. It was really quite a challenge to do. We were constantly making mistakes and going to the lab and looking at it, and “Nope, that doesn’t work,” and go back and try it again. There was a lot of R and D on that movie, trying to figure out just how to make it work for a movie. Even on set, there were just things we just tried – we tried marionettes, we couldn’t make Gizmo walk, because we didn’t have the technology, so we had to put him in a backpack, otherwise he couldn’t go anywhere. The movie kind of evolved based on the limits of technology.
Art House Cult: What did you think of the video games that were produced out of it?
Joe Dante: There were probably several, but I wasn’t a big video game guy, I was too busy with the movie, I didn’t know anything about that. I mean, the merchandising didn’t even kick in on that movie until they saw the dailies of Gizmo. And then suddenly they realized, “Oh, you know, we could sell this.” ‘Cause Warner Bros wasn’t especially enthusiastic about the movie to begin with. They thought, “Oh, okay, this is something Steven wants to do, it’s not gonna cost a lot of money, it’ll make him happy, it’ll be his Amblin company, which we wanna have at our studio, and so let’s make him happy and make this movie.” But they never really understood it, and they didn’t even like it when they saw it. So the merchandising kicked in when they discovered that, “Oh my gosh, this character’s merchandisable.” They put on a full-court press in record time, putting out all these toys and games and stuff to be able to be bought when the picture was released in the summer.
Art House Cult: Gremlins is definitely a Christmas film, but it doesn’t seem to sort of be brought up in the same breath as like a film like Die Hard. Why do you think that is?
Joe Dante: Actually, that’s not been my experience. It’s at least in Europe at Christmas, and it is considered a Christmas movie there. Um, It’s often paired with Die Hard when people say, “What are the two Christmas movies that aren’t really Christmas movies?” And it’s like, Die Hard and Gremlins.
Art House Cult: Oh, great. Okay.
Joe Dante: So it’s fine with me. I think it’s definitely a plus that it’s set at Christmas. I think that really gives it an edge there it wouldn’t have otherwise.
Art House Cult: Speaking of an edge to the film, my big brother Tommy, he was at a young age taken to the movie and my mom had to pull him out after the microwave scene. (laughs)
Joe Dante: (laughs)
Art House Cult: I was curious, it’s said the film helped to spawn the PG-13 rating at the MPAA a few months later. Was it sort of one of the catalysts of that?
Joe Dante: Well, it wasn’t alone, it was also Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom with the ripped-out heart which is also a PG. There was some criticism, there was some complaints, but my view always was that people underestimate children immensely. I’d never met a kid who put his poodle in the microwave after seeing that movie. The kids are not that stupid, but adults like to think that kids are stupid. And so they are constantly trying to overprotect ’em. Listen, there probably was a need for a new rating, and it’s fine that there’s a new rating. But I don’t believe they ever went back and re-rated Gremlins. I think it’s still rated PG.
Art House Cult: Yeah. Still PG – you know, which makes me feel better about showing it to my five year old.
Joe Dante: (laughs) Well, make sure you fast-forward through the Santa Claus scene.
Art House Cult: Oh, yeah. (laughs) They both love it. So after that film you moved onto Explorers.
Joe Dante: This picture had been a gigantic hit, and I was suddenly on the A-list and nobody expected it, including me. And so I was offered all of these, you know, big movies – they wanted me to do a Batman movie – there was all this stuff that they wanted me to do which I ultimately felt I wasn’t right for. When the Explorers script came by it was a hand-me-down from Wolfgang Petersen who was supposed to do it in Bavaria. And I guess the studio didn’t wanna do it in Bavaria for whatever reason and they sent it to me. This was the era when they would hand you a script, and you would read it and there would be code numbers all over it so it couldn’t be duplicated. Then somebody would sit in the room while you read it, and then they would take it with them when they left, so that you couldn’t sneak a copy of it ’cause it was that supposedly secret. The problem was that there was no third act. I mean, it was like fine, and then they got to outer space, and they meet some kids who are aliens, and they play baseball, and they go home. And it was like, that’s- that’s how you’re gonna end the movie? (laughs) And they said, “Well, you know, we’re still working on it. But, you know, we really want you to do this, and we really want it out at this particular date, and, we think it’d be great, and…” blah, blah, blah, blah.” I liked the idea of doing it, ’cause to me, I’d just come off as a giant special effects movie, which was exhausting. And this is a movie about, like, it was like a Huey, Dewey, and Louie movie. It was like they were gonna build a spaceship in their backyard and fly around in Duckburg, you know? So I thought, “Well, I can relate to that. That sounds like it’s a small movie.” Well, I was completely wrong, of course. It was not a small movie. It was three times the cost of Gremlins…and it was kids. So when you work with kids, half the day is spent, they’re in school, so you don’t get to shoot as much as you would ordinarily. And… It was a rush job. I mean, they really wanted it out at a certain point. It was October, and they wanted it out in I think Memorial Day or something like that. It was just like, “No. I don’t think you can do that.” So, “Oh, but come on. Try.” So, okay, so, I tried and we didn’t make the date. In the meantime, the studio changed ownership. The new people looked at the movies that were ready to release, all of which they despised because they didn’t make them, and they said, “Well, let’s just put all this stuff out, and call it a day, and do our new slate.” So they didn’t let me finish the movie. They just said, “Stop working.” So I stopped working on the movie, and it’s the rough cut, they released the rough cut, which was very annoying for me, and also a disaster. So, it was not a happy experience in the end, although I really enjoyed working with the kids, and I really enjoyed making the movie, and I think there are a lot of nice things in it. But it’s a mess, it’s just not a finished movie.
Art House Cult: I hate that they hamstrung you like that. A buddy of mine had sent in a question on that film. He wanted to know – why a Tilt-A-Whirl?
Joe Dante: It was a Tilt-A-Whirl because it was actually a real ride that kids used to go on. It was a capsule, and it looked like Sputnik. And so we thought, “Well, you know, this, we could adapt this into something that looks, you know, like a kids’ version of a spaceship with the TV screen on it and all that stuff.” I thought that the art direction was really good about that.
Art House Cult: In Innerspace, you’ve got an amazing villain with the robot arm. It’s so much fun to watch a film where you have a villain with a robot arm. Was that the initial attraction to the script?
Joe Dante: No. He was an adjunct to the script. The original script that I was offered right after Gremlins had the same title. It was by a guy named Chip Proser, and it was not a comedy. It was a straight spy movie with that plot. And I said to the producers, “This is ridiculous. People are gonna laugh at this.” I said, “I’m not gonna do this. Forget it.” So they went away, and I did Explorers, and they came back, and they had gotten a new writer, Jeffrey Boam, who eventually did the third Indiana Jones movie and he was a terrific writer. His concept was, “what if we change this around, some of this, like, what would happen if Dean Martin was shrunken down and injected into Jerry Lewis?” That, I could understand. And so with that in mind, I said, “this is the movie I wanna do next.” It was a really fun movie to make. We had a lot of support from the studio and it had a great preview, and the studio was so excited about how well it was gonna do that they forgot to have a decent ad. The ad was like this giant thumb with a tiny little pod on it and no pictures of the actors, and no indication that it was a comedy.
Art House Cult: Oh, no.
Joe Dante: And plus it had the title of a Monsanto ride from Disneyland. So, it was like, “what?” Of course, you know, it came out and it died, but the studio really liked the movie. They even put out a different campaign a couple of months later with different artwork and stuff, but it still bombed. However, it soon went to home video at which time it became a big hit. And most people think that, when they think of Innerspace, “Oh, that’s the movie that was a big hit in the Eighties.” No, it wasn’t a big hit in the Eighties. It was a big hit in the late Eighties when it went on video. But luckily for me and many other directors from my generation most people don’t remember what the box office performance was on some of these movies that are now considered classics.
Art House Cult: There’s one stunt in the film that while I was watching it I could not for the life of me figure out how it was done. Martin Short stands on top of the car, and it’s not the stuntman that you can see flying around hanging on the door. It’s when Martin Short is actually standing up on the window of the car that Meg Ryan is driving – how did you pull that off?
Joe Dante: Well, he’s really doing it, but there’s a metal rod under the legs of his pants that connects to the windshield. So there was no way he could have fallen, unless he decided to disengage. We had a very good stunt guy on that production, Glenn Randall. He’s the guy who gets clobbered in the balls when when Igoe takes Martin Short into the ice truck. He’s the guy who was running the ice truck who gets clobbered. He was a really good stunt guy, and I was gonna use him again when I did The Phantom, which is a picture I didn’t end up doing. He had a lot of really incredible stunts planned for that movie that obviously didn’t get done.
Art House Cult: The film also just features an outlandish, hilarious performance by Robert Picardo as the Cowboy. That guy is a chameleon.
Joe Dante: Yeah, Bob is wonderful. I’ve worked with him many, many times. He’s always great. He always makes any part he’s in better and he’s not afraid to improvise and say his lines. I mean half the lines he says as the Cowboy are lines that he just made up. However, I don’t think in today’s PC culture that you probably have that part written the way it is and played by a non-ethnic person.
Art House Cult: After that you made The ‘Burbs for Universal – which is very evident from the opening shot. That film did relatively well when it came out, but were you surprised that the film has continued to garner so much cult fame over the years?
Joe Dante: Well, considering how awful the reviews were, yeah. I mean, it just got the worst reviews since Mein Kampf. I mean, they just hated it. However, the audience liked it. And I would go to the dentist, and they would have the technician, and he would say, “Oh, you made The ‘Burbs! Oh, I loved that picture.” And, you know, every- everywhere I’d go people would be very happy about The ‘Burbs. Now it’s such a cult item, it’s got its own website, it’s got a trivia book, people have parties where they talk back to the movie. It’s really become a sort of a Rocky Horror Picture Show kind of phenomenon. Which is, you know, very gratifying but certainly most unexpected.
Art House Cult:It features my favorite comedic performance for Tom Hanks, and just a great performance from Bruce Dern who you’ve used on several pictures. What specific memories come to mind when you look back on your work on that film?
Joe Dante: Well, the nice thing about that film was that it was the only film shooting that summer, because there was a writer’s strike and nobody was shooting. We had the top of the Universal back lot to ourselves which is an area that consisted mainly of houses from what used to be the lower back lot, which then became Amblin. They took those houses and moved them all up on the hill together, and they’re all from different eras of filmmaking. You know, the House of the Seven Gables is next to the house from the Munsters is next to the house of Harvey and that’s all dumped into this polyglot neighborhood. So I thought, you know, instead of making it on location, which was what they originally had wanted to do… I pointed out that if you go to a location, it’s very difficult to get somebody to let you blow up their house, so it probably’d be better to do it on the back lot. And I wanted it to look like a movie, I wanted it to look like a back lot, so that it was that idealized neighborhood… the kind people are used to from sitcoms. It was just wonderful. I mean, there was nobody to bother us, except for the tour, which would come by all the time. We’d have to stop for the tour at Universal, ’cause that makes more money than the movies…
Art House Cult:(laughs)
Joe Dante: The cast was great, and we decided to shoot it in sequence. Since we didn’t have the writer’s on the movie, – sort of briefly, as an actor, but he wasn’t allowed to actually do any writing – we said, “Well, we’re all in one location, let’s shoot it in sequence, and then we can improvise, and we won’t be improvising ourself into something we can’t get out of,” as happens when you improvise on movies that are not shot in sequence. Suddenly you discover your improvisation doesn’t match something that you’ve already shot that’s gonna happen later. So we came up with backstories for characters, and different ways to go, and there were a lot of things that didn’t make it into the movie. If you get the Arrow version of the DVD, there’s a rough cut in there which is one of the early rough cuts of the movie, in which there’s a subplot about Tom Hanks. The reason he stayed home is because he’s lost his job, and he’s afraid to tell his wife. And, , at one point during the dream segment, his boss, played by Kevin McCarthy, shows up by the giant spit and refers to the fact that he doesn’t have his job anymore. Anyway, all that’s obviously not in the movie anymore, but it was very useful and interesting to be able to develop these characters that way. And I think a lot of the funniest stuff in the movie is actually stuff that just people came up with on the fly.
Art House Cult: So Bruce Dern improvised the “Hey, Pinocchio!” line…
Joe Dante: Yep. Yep. He improvised that. He also improvised, “A nine on a tension scale.” He’s not even on camera when he says that, and it’s really funny. (laughs)
Art House Cult: The original ending has the Klopeks presumably killing Ray Peterson.
Joe Dante: Well, that went away when they hired Tom Hanks. They said, “We can’t kill Tom Hanks.” And that was just fine with me, except for that now we have the problem of explaining what they’ve been doing in the basement. Because it was never written what they were doing, it was just a lot of weird stuff. So we had to come up with an excuse for what they were doing. That was when we had to add the scene with the skulls in the trunk of the car. We had a different version of that where the garbage men were in the car. We had a different version of that where cheerleaders were in the car, because there had been a lot of cheerleader kidnappings around that period. We just decided to go with the skulls, because it was simple.
Art House Cult: Yeah. They love those skulls. On the original ending, my question there was would you have preferred the original ending, or did you like how it turned out with the explanation?
Joe Dante: I never shot the original ending. You know – it always ended with Tom Hanks surviving. There’s another version on the DVD where you see Henry Gibson getting arrested, and there’s some dialogue and stuff, that’s different than what’s in the movie, ’cause we didn’t have that little car chase then. But – I’m happy with the way it is. I think it turned out well.
Art House Cult: Yeah, I agree. I love that movie. Our family watches it every year. The kids, my wife and I, that’s one we typically save for spring break, take it down there with us, and just watch it on the Shout!Factory Blu-Ray. We just love it.
Art House Cult: So – Gremlins 2: The New Batch. That film is absolutely bonkers. What was the production history of that like?
Joe Dante: After the first picture was a hit they immediately wanted a sequel as soon as it opened. Because it was making more money every weekend it was like, “Oh god, we’ve got to make another one right away.” And, frankly, it was really exhausting to make the first picture and really complicated, and I just couldn’t face another year with the gremlins. So I said, “No, I have to detox. I can’t do this. So you guys go ahead and do whatever you want.“ So, I went off and did my stuff and then they basically kept trying for a number of years to make a sequel to a movie they didn’t really understand in the first place. Everything they tried was a dead end and it didn’t work and they spent, I think, quite a bit of money on various scripts and sometimes maybe even directors. Finally, in 1989, they came back to me and said, “Well, we haven’t figured out how to do this and obviously you must have had something to do with the success of the first picture. So, if you’ll do another one of these for next summer, we’ll let you do whatever you want.” And that’s not an offer that you often hear in Hollywood and it had been a while, so I figured, “Okay. You know, I guess I can jump back into this.” So, of course I went back to Chris Walas who had designed the original gremlins, but he had in the meantime become a director and he didn’t want to take on another effects job. So, I went to my friend Rick Baker who I’ve known for years, and his point was, “Well, I’d love to work with you but what is there for me to do? I mean, the gremlins are already Chris’s designs. How am I going to contribute?” So that’s when we came up with the idea of the laboratory and the genetic experiments, and the idea that there could be different kinds of gremlins that Rick could then design and throw himself into. In addition to sort of sprucing up the designs of the originals and adding characters and characteristics, we were able to make Gizmo into a much more rounded character because he wasn’t being carried around all the time. So, that’s kind of the genesis of it, and then they let us alone. Charlie Hill, Charlie Haas, Mike Finnell and I sat in a room and we just put out the cards and did the boards and said, “What, but what if they did this?” Or, “What if they did that?” And one of my favorite movies is Hellzapoppin‘ which is a movie that unfortunately people don’t really know about any more because of a rights problem. It was based on a stage play where it literally was different every night and anything could happen. In the movie version, they compensated for that by making it a movie that breaks the fourth wall constantly and reminds you you’re watching a movie. There’s a lot of jokes about the movie being projected, and the framers being out of frame, and all that stuff. So, we said, “Well, let’s use some of that stuff.” Plus, I was a big Warner Brothers cartoon fan, so the Warner Brothers cartoons are predicated on you knowing that you’re watching a cartoon ’cause they’re constantly talking to the audience. We sort of ingested all that, and we came up with the idea of not setting it back in the small town because that’s what people expect. Let’s go to the big city and ramp it up. People go to sequels because they want to get more of what they saw before but they don’t want it to be exactly the same and they’re disappointed. So our task was to give them something different than they expected and more gremlins than they expected, which we did. It was a very happy movie to make. I mean, it was very creative. It was lots of fun and everybody was having a good time. We had a wonderful cast and they let me make the movie I wanted to make, even though when they saw it they just sort of put their heads on their foreheads and said, “What has he done now with this?” You know, “who are we supposed to like in this picture? And what’s the plot?” And it’s like, that’s not the kind of movie it is. It was a struggle sometimes to talk them into things like the idea of the film breaking, and the audience thinking that the gremlins are in the projection booth, and all that, which they really didn’t like. But they were true to their word, and I said, “Let’s have a preview and see if it works.” It was a big hit at the preview. So all that stuff they were worried about was stuff the audience liked. So the movie went out pretty much as it was intended. But even then they really didn’t quite get it. They didn’t get the first one, they didn’t get the second one.
Art House Cult: (laughs) So it was a true sequel then if they were confused about both.
Joe Dante: Yeah. Yeah. But it’s a studio movie. It’s a very unusual studio movie because studio movies don’t usually break the rules to that extent.
Art House Cult: Yeah. It is really unique because most sequels basically just redo all of the same plot points of the first film. This one is so divergent. You’ve got everything from the technological building with Clamp, Christopher Lee’s amazing character that is just hilarious, and so much else going on. There’s just a lot of character to the movie.
Joe Dante: There is, but also there’s a lot of points that are somewhat similar in that, you know, we had in the first movie the microwave scene and in the second movie we have the shredder scene.
Art House Cult: Yes.
Joe Dante: There’s always a touchstone that fills up the same needs as a plot point in the earlier movie. But in this movie obviously the danger was that the gremlins were gonna get out in New York and they’re gonna overwhelm the city and we’ll never be able to get rid of them. In the original pass of the script we were gonna bury the building in concrete. That really didn’t seem very cinematic, so when we came up with the idea of the electrical gremlin we thought, “well, we could fry them.” That led to the idea of the musical number. Since we had now invented this machine which was called a Gilderfluke, which I’m sure now is completely obsolete, to make the puppets’ lips move to prerecorded dialogue. We got Tony Randall to do the brain gremlin character. We then synced that up into the puppet. And if you watch the outtakes on the DVD you’ll see there are actually some bits where he flubs a line and has to start over, but it’s all programed into the gremlin so it looks like the gremlin is flubbing his lines and starting over.
Art House Cult: Love it. So my buddy had one more question he had, which was regarding the Rambo montage sequence which is a lot of fun. How did you all first decide that would be Rambo throwback via First Blood– well, it’s not First Blood… it’s Rambo III, he’s watching, right?
Joe Dante: I think it’s Rambo II. The gimmick was to give Gizmo again, much like the bit in the first movie where he watches the Clark Gable car racing movie, and then at the end he recalls it while he’s in this little car – this performs the same function. This is something he sees early in the movie, and it imprints on him and then later when he has to go to battle that’s the character he chooses to play.
Art House Cult: Yeah. So much fun. Out of all the new batch, did you have a particular favorite gremlin?
Joe Dante: My favorite gremlin was always the one that didn’t break down. (laughs) But there really weren’t very many of those. So I’m really not sure what I would say. I mean, the brain gremlin was pretty cool because he could actually say what he thinks. You know, some of the other gremlins are pretty mute. I also thought the vegetable gremlin was pretty cool. (laughs)
Art House Cult: One of the things that’s striking watching the movie in this post Trump world is the character Clamp. The book covers are just like The Art of the Deal. Was he the primary influence for that character?
Joe Dante: Well, we wanted to have a villain obviously and we wanted him to be a developer. So we figured, “who’s the famous developer in New York?” It’s Donald Trump. And he’s got his own building and he’s got his own bio book and everything. So we said, “Well, let’s base him on that, but we also want him to own a cable network. So, let’s also base him on Ted Turner.” There’s a whole lot of Ted Turner jokes, and there’s a whole bunch of Trump jokes. But, of course, we had no idea when we were creating that character what a vindictive madman that the guy would actually end up becoming when he got a chance to go into politics. So, our Clamp is much nicer, because when John Glover came in to play the character he was so boyishly enthusiastic that you started to kinda like the character. So it’s a completely different take on what we imagined he would be. We thought the guy would just be the standard villain like Mrs. Deagle. Instead he’s like a character that you can empathize with and he’s very funny in his enthusiasm for what he’s doing… until he loses interest. (laughs)
Art House Cult: So after Gremlins 2 you did a show that was a big influence on my early life and that was Eerie, Indiana.
Joe Dante: Oh yeah.
Art House Cult: I mean – I loved that show. I remember being so sad when suddenly it wasn’t in my programing anymore.
Joe Dante: Well, it wasn’t in your programming because even though NBC was very high on it when they saw the pilot, they were excited, they thought of it as a kids’ show, which it really wasn’t. It was a family show, but it wasn’t a kids’ show. It had kids in it. They put it up against 60 Minutes, which was the dominant Sunday night giant, and it just died. I mean, nobody, nobody saw it. The lead in was very weak also so, I mean, it just never really got a chance. But what happened with Eerie was that after it was off the air, a couple years later, they picked it up for Saturday morning reruns on Fox, and it became popular again. Then they said, “but we only have one season of these things. So, we gotta have more.” So they decided they would make a cheap version in Canada. They would rebuild the sets, they would hire different kids, and then they would use footage from the old show to show that the old kids have gone through some sort of time warp, or something strange, and they look different. Now they’re played by different kids. They did another Eerie, Indiana second season, and I can’t remember what it was called. But it was so cheaply done, and it wasn’t any of the original creators. It, of course, was awful, and it’s completely disappeared. At least the original Eerie, Indiana is still vaguely accessible on Amazon Prime, and there was a DVD set. But the sadness of it is, even though the show was shot on film, it was edited on video and they junked all the film. So, all that exists are these D1 masters, which you can’t bump them up to Blu-ray. They look very fuzzy now. That’s unfortunately all we have.
Art House Cult: Ah, that is such a shame. Speaking of Blu-rays and the industry in general, you’ve had an incredible run on Blu-ray between Shout! Factory picking up so many of your releases and Warner putting out a new Ultra HD of Gremlins. Have you been pleased to see so many of your titles go through that restoration process?
Joe Dante: Well, yeah – because you know, on the one hand the movies that are made for studios are in good hands, because Warner Brothers particularly is very diligent about preserving things, remastering, and doing all that kind of thing. So, I have no doubt that those will outlive me by 100 years. The independent movies that I’ve done, which have largely been shot on digital, I sometimes wonder whether they have any future at all because most of the things that are shot on digital become obsolete when the new processes show up. Often there’s not a lot of money to do new transfers or anything. A couple of movies I’ve made literally have been owned by so many different companies that even I don’t know who owns them. So, you know, you birth the baby and you throw it up in the air and you hope somebody catches it, because once you finish the movie it’s a no man’s land out there and you just never know how they’re gonna end up.
Art House Cult: Yeah. I was watching Small Soldiers just a couple nights ago and I had to watch it using Starz to be able to see it in high def. It just seems ripe for the picking for somebody to get it out on Blu-ray.
Joe Dante: Well, I think there’s an overseas Blu-ray, but I don’t think there’s a domestic Blu-ray yet. There will be eventually.
Art House Cult: Yeah, they’ll come around to it, right?
Joe Dante: Because it’s been transferred to high def. All it has to do is be released.
Art House Cult: I’m torn between Matinee and The Burbs as to which is my favorite of your films. Matinee had the most influence on me as a kid because there was a little movie shop that I would ride my bike to and I just rented Matinee a million times. I was not allowed to see R rated movies, or PG-13 even. So it was like, Matinee was very PG rated. It’s not risque at all, but for me it had all those sci-fi elements that were fascinating, the historical elements, but it influenced my taste so much, because I didn’t know there was this world out there, you know, the science fiction world or whatever. It just exposed me to all of that at a young age.
Joe Dante: Well, then it was, it was a good influence.
Art House Cult: Absolutely, yes. There aren’t that many movies that I can say actually had a profound impact on my life, and that would probably be one of five. You know? That, that really sort of charted my course.
Joe Dante: So it made you want to become a exploitations film maker? Or a theater owner? (laughs)
Art House Cult: (laughs) Yeah. Well, you know, it’s funny. It did make me start building some sets at that age with my other friends and buying blood capsules and shooting on JVC. (laughs)
Joe Dante: (Laughs) Well, my generation did that. We just did it on eight millimeter.
Art House Cult: Yeah. You know, tinfoil hats and all that. I mean- you watch Mant and then you find yourself grabbing your buddy John Mallory from down the block. It’s like, “Alright, get your little sister, she’s the villain..”
Joe Dante: (laughs)
Art House Cult: So, yeah. It definitely put creative urges into kids that were sort of in tune to that. You know the kids like me that didn’t quite fit into a set mold. I sure as hell am not a jock, you know? (Laughs) I think for us, seeing that there were these other kids out there…
Joe Dante: Yeah, well that’s a grand tradition, believe me – because when Famous Monsters magazine came out in 1958 it united an entire hitherto unknown group of kids who thought that they were the only ones like themselves -that there was nobody else in school who was like them and liked the kind of movies they did. And then suddenly you discovered that there was this little community of people who had bought this magazine and it was kind of like a fraternity. We were all in it together. That’s where the whole monster kid phrase came up ’cause they were all kids who were united by their love for monster movies. And very few of them were jocks.
Art House Cult: John Goodman’s character of Lawrence Woolsey, obviously based on William Castle who was sort of the poor man’s Hitchcock. Growing up did you go catch all of the Castle features that hit the local cinema?
Joe Dante: Oh yeah, sure. I didn’t see Macabre in the theater ’cause it was too obscure and didn’t play in my area. But starting with House on Haunted Hill, obviously we saw all of them. Then when Castle realized that he had a youthful fan base he started playing to that. In fact, he briefly had a column in Famous Monsters, in which he relentlessly talked down to the kids. (laughs) He was kind of insulting actually. But he was such a showman. He had been in the business for a long time. He had been making many, many, many movies before he hit on with the horror movie thing. That gave him an identity and he did take away from Hitchcock the idea that if you can merchandise yourself into a personality your movies are gonna have a lot more resonance. Hitchcock’s TV series had just come out around that time. That was when people started to realize who he was. Previously it was only like people like Cecil B. DeMille who used to appear on the trailers of his own movies that people would have a sense of who the people were making the movies. But Hitchcock became a celebrity, much like Rod Sterling did when he started hosting The Twilight Zone. They become a brand. So, William Castle became his own brand.
Art House Cult: House on Haunted Hill, I love that movie. My little sister and I used to watch it every time it came on AMC or TCM, anything like that. Great late night movie.
Joe Dante: It’s a lot of fun.
Art House Cult: Matinee pairs you once again with Charlie Haas from Gremlins 2. The production history of the film – Universal sort of picked up the tab after some independent financing fell through?
Joe Dante: Pretty much, yeah. We were just about ready to shoot in Florida, and we had built the sets and everything. Then all of a sudden the money that was supposed to be coming in every week didn’t come in. And Universal would pick up the tab, and then finally it became apparent there was no money. Universal already had a bunch of money into it, so we had a meeting with them and they agreed to go ahead and take on the whole movie which was very nice of them. It wasn’t the world’s greatest business decision for them because it wasn’t their kind of picture. I mean, they didn’t really know how to sell a movie like that. In those days, that would have been more of a Miramax movie where you open it in a small group of theaters and try to get some attention, and some reviews and stuff, and then you go wide. But Universal, their modus operandi was just dump it. You know, just put it out. I think it was in late January, early February that it just opened really really wide. John Goodman was well known, but he wasn’t the world’s biggest star. So it didn’t perform, but people did go. What I found heartwarming was, I would go to theaters and I would see that people had brought their kids to show them the way mom and dad used to go to the movies when there was only one screen. (laughs)
Art House Cult: One of the things that is so interesting about them putting that film out in January is to me that film is synonymous with summertime, springtime…I mean, it’s set in Key West. It’s a warm setting film.
Joe Dante: Well maybe they thought it would be a tonic for cold weather or something.
Art House Cult: One of my favorite scenes in the film involves the ridiculous bomb drill. That scene in itself helped sort of instill in me a pure distrust of authority.
Joe Dante: Well, that’s exactly where it came from, because that’s what it did for us. I mean, I was the age of the lead kid in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis and we all knew it was bogus. Every kid in the world knew that. They knew enough about the atomic bomb to know that if you sat in the hallway with your head in your hands, the wall was gonna collapse on you, and you’re gonna die. (laughs) So the idea that this was supposed to be some sort of way to deal with it…they were just telling us a bunch of lies. A healthy distrust in authority is what created the beatniks in the Fifties and the hippies, and then what ultimately led to the unrest of America in the late Sixties.
Art House Cult: Absolutely. Then Nixon and Watergate just kill it all off.
Joe Dante: Yeah. (laughs)
Art House Cult: Moving on from Matinee, two nights ago I had the great opportunity to re-watch Small Soldiers, which I had not seen in a long time. Revisiting it as an adult is a lot different than as a child. I picked up on so much more, it was so much more funny to me than as a kid. One of the things I love about the film is you have Chip Hazard voiced by Tommy Lee Jones, and he just continuously says sort of fascist sounding nonsense. It’s so nonsensical it just gave me a tremendous laugh.
Joe Dante: It’s all programmed. It’s all programmed in there.
Art House Cult: (laughs) One of the things I saw when I was watching the movie is, you have a GloboTech ad that begins the film, and it’s hilarious. It sort of reminded me a little bit of Jon Davison’s ads in RoboCop.
Joe Dante: Yeah. Yeah.
Art House Cult: But the big crossover there is, you’ve got David Cross, who on Mr. Show did the sketch involving GloboCorp, and Pit Pat.
Joe Dante: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Art House Cult: Was that a little bit of the thought process that led to David Cross being added on to the project?
Joe Dante: You know, I wish I could remember. I honestly don’t remember how Jay and David were cast at all. Like… it’s a blur. (laughs)
Art House Cult: Was this the very first production from DreamWorks?
Joe Dante: No. It was not their first production, ’cause I think it was a George Clooney movie that was their first production.
Art House Cult: Oh, The Peacemaker?
Joe Dante: Yeah, I think that was their first production. This was an early one, and I don’t know if it was their first for Universal or not, but it was early on. It was different because DreamWorks wasn’t Amblin. Amblin had been a completely different kind of atmosphere, because it was basically Steven Spielberg and he was very nurturing to all the filmmakers. It was a filmmaker friendly place. DreamWorks was a little more corporate, and a little less filmmaker friendly. You still had the relationship, but Steven was off doing his own stuff, and the company was run by Katzenberg and Geffen with an eye toward the bottom line. When they had a deal with Universal there was also a lot that the Universal people also had to have their say on. So there were a lot of masters – a lot of people that you had to make happy. Often, they would not agree on what kind of movie they thought they were making. In the case of this movie, I kept being told by DreamWorks to make it edgy so that it wouldn’t look like a kids’ movie, and that teenagers would like it. So I made it edgy, but every time I’d make it edgy the Universal people would come in and say, “No, no, no, no that’s too much. You can’t have that. We gotta make deals with Burger King. We gotta have happy toys and stuff.” So, there was a tremendous tension, between the movie that I wanted to make and the movie that they wanted to make. To the point where at the end of the picture, if you watch the trailer you see the house blow up. But if you watch the movie you don’t see the house blow up, because they said, “You have to take it out, it’s too intense.”
Art House Cult: Oh, wow.
Joe Dante: So, it’s a pretty good movie up to the last couple of reels. What I wanted to have happen, and where I wanted to go, I didn’t want to go back to the house again, ’cause we’d already been there. I wanted to go to the toy factory, and I wanted all the Chip Hazards – the hundreds of Chip Hazards – to be activated. You’d have to deal with this army of small soldiers. They didn’t want to do that. They just said, “we want to go back to the house. We don’t want it to be too violent.” So, we had to fight for every small soldier that got an arrow in him. In fact – there’s a bunch of shots that we had to go back and redo the CGI so that they just fall down and they don’t get hit with arrows, and their heads don’t blow up and all that stuff because they just kept saying, “It’s too violent, it’s too violent.”
Art House Cult: Yeah. That’s a shame.
Joe Dante: That’s what they said they wanted in the beginning!
Art House Cult: I mean, they’re plastic soldiers, who cares? You know?
Joe Dante: That’s how I looked at it! Yeah, it’s not even like they’re gremlins where they’re like… lifeforms. These are animatronics, but nonetheless they have their own ideas of what they think is right for kids.
Art House Cult: My guess is they’ve never tied a bottle rocket to a toy and watched it explode.
Joe Dante: No. No. But they are the kind of people who would pull out a magnifying glass and put it over a caterpillar though. (laughs)
Art House Cult: Yeah. (laughs) That film also paired you with Stan Winston. His work was always incredible. As I was watching the film, I felt like because of the mixture between practical and CGI it still works. It didn’t age the film as much as I thought it would.
Joe Dante: Well, there’s actually more CGI in the movie than we intended, because the original idea was that Stan built all of these puppets, and they all could be operated. But they were difficult to operate and hide the operator. It was a complicated process and very time consuming. What we discovered was that if the puppet didn’t have to move very far, only take one or two steps, then we could really use the puppet. But anytime they had to do anything active it was much easier to just shoot the plate and put in the CGI later. And the CGI was okay, because puppets weren’t supposed to move smoothly. It wasn’t like in Jumanji where they were trying to make animals look real, which is very hard to do and only recently has been accomplished. Since these guys are moving jerkily anyway, there was very little difference between the way the toys moved and the way the CGI would move. So, we got away with murder – using so much more CGI than was planned much, I think, to Stan’s chagrin.
Art House Cult: So your next film after Small Soldiers, you finally got to direct all of your favorites in Looney Tunes: Back in Action. This was a passion project you’d been wanting to do for your entire career?
Joe Dante: Well, no, not exactly. I had a script. Chuck Jones was a friend of mine. We had a script about his early days at Warner Brothers called Termite Terrace that Charlie Haas had written. It was about Chuck, and Tex Avery, and Bob Clampett, Friz Freleng, and those people -all with different names of course – and their activities at Warner Brothers during the early Thirties when they were making cartoons on the same lot as they were making movies. It was a wonderful script, very funny, and Spielberg thought it was, he said, “This is a great script, you should make this.” Unfortunately, when we went to Warner Brothers with it, and we said “This is what we want to do,” They said, “Well, this is set in the past. This is not what we want to do. It’s not what we want to do with our characters. We want to rebrand them. We want to make Space Jam.” So, they make Space Jam and they didn’t make Termite Terrace, and I learned my lesson, which is, you never write a script that’s based on characters you don’t own. Because it has like with the creatives of Bugs Bunny and all that in it you couldn’t just rewrite it for Woody Woodpecker and take it to Universal. It didn’t work that way. So, they made their picture, which Chuck Jones hated. Then, after Chuck passed, there was this other script that was floating around, and they asked me if I wanted to do it. Frankly, I didn’t think it was a very good script, but I thought, if I don’t do this picture they’re gonna have Bugs Bunny doing hiphop and they’re gonna not be the characters, they’re not gonna do the kind of fealty to the characters that they deserve. So, I signed on, kind of in memory of Chuck and tried to make it as good as possible, and made a lot of changes. Unfortunately, the people behind the movie, which were the marketing people, wanted to make the movie because they wanted to be able to revive the characters, which is a great idea. The company itself, the creative people, didn’t really like the movie. They didn’t like movies with cartoons in them and they kept telling me what to do, and I kept pointing out, “You wouldn’t even go see this movie, why are you telling me what to do?” And they said, “Because that’s what we do. We tell you what to do.” It was a very unpleasant fraught experience with lots of arguing and lots of behind-the-scenes chicanery and it was the most expensive movie I ever made. It took longer than any other movie I ever made, and I was going to work in the morning knowing I was gonna have arguments with people. I’m making a Bugs Bunny movie, and I’m gonna have arguments with people. So it was really a very unpleasant experience.
Art House Cult: So sorry.
Joe Dante: I think in the end we did manage to save the idea of the characters, and we did manage to have them be themselves. But the movie as released has a different beginning, a different middle and a different end than what we had started out to make.
Art House Cult: You definitely took one for the team there and saved your childhood onscreen heroes. At least, like you said, they’re not out there doing hiphop.
Joe Dante: (laughs) No, they will be in the next one.
Art House Cult: So after Looney Toons was Masters of Horror.
Joe Dante: It was right after my unfortunate experience with The Phantom, which is a movie I was supposed to make in Australia. It was eventually made, by other people. It was written by Jeff Boam, who had written Innerspace and it was a spoof of the idea of The Phantom ’cause the Phantom… the guy wears purple tights and he’s in the jungle. It’s not a great camouflage… so we explained all that in the movie. The movie fell apart for various reasons and eventually they went back and made it with other people, and I get a credit on it, which I was stupid enough to insist on instead of taking money. A mistake I’ll never make again. It was a year out of my life, and I went back and forth to Australia several times, which is a really fucking long flight. That was another bad studio experience with Paramount. I have nothing but bad experiences with Paramount except for Police Squad. Then we did Masters of Horror because Mick Garris wanted to make this series of films, which he originally envisioned as an international series where he got directors from different countries to do it. It ended up being two seasons shot in Canada with name directors. They were allowed to do whatever they wanted as long as they didn’t spend a lot of money, cause there were very strict rules about how much you could spend, but there was no censorship in the sense that you could pretty much do anything. You know… you could have nudity. You could have violence. There were certain things you couldn’t do, but not many. The Japanese director Takashi Miike managed to do all of them, and they wouldn’t run his episode on Showtime. You can still get it, but they said, “No, we’re just not running it. Forget it. There’s no way to cut it.”
I was kind of pissed off about the Iraq war and how badly it was managed, and how we shouldn’t be there in the first place. I had the chance to do a screed about it that I never could have gotten done in any other venue. I mean, nobody else would have ever given me the money to make it. But it was okay, because when you’re doing a series like that you don’t have to be the standout. It’s a whole series. You’re just one brick in the wall. You don’t have to hold the wall up. So, I got away with doing what I wanted, which was angry, and pretty much expressed what I wanted to express. Then the next season, we came back and I did another one called The Screwfly Solution, which I had originally wanted to do in the first season, but we couldn’t get the rights. It’s a sort of an end of the world, it’s another plague. It’s very topical. It’s a plague, but it’s a plague that makes men want to kill women. It was based on a famous short story. That one is probably the least funny thing I ever did. It’s really brutally grim and dark. And I realized, ’cause I wanted to make it as a feature when I was at New World, having finally made it as a Masters of Horror episode, I realized what a mistake it would have been to make it a feature ’cause it was so fucking depressing that no one would have wanted to pay money to see it. But nonetheless I thought it turned out well.
Art House Cult: So – Masters of Horror, before the series, were you already all dining together as a group?
Joe Dante: Well, Mick Garris had put together this little sort of soiree over the weekend, but I think Guillermo Del Toro ended up naming it the Masters of Horror. It was a bunch of people who directed horror movies, and they would get together at a restaurant a couple times a year depending on who was in town and swap horror stories about the things they were doing and the people they were dealing with and tell stories. It was very collegial and very nice. We all got to know each other quite well. Then he drew on that list of people for the group that he asked to do episodes in Masters of Horror. We all pretty much had a good time except for the fact that we were stuck in Canada.
Art House Cult: Your next film was The Hole, which I had the opportunity to watch last week. The film gave you a chance to shoot the film using 3D technology. It unfortunately is not available in 3D on Blu-ray.
Joe Dante: I understand from people who know about these things that it looks great on a 3D monitor. We won a prize in Nevada Film Festival for the first time they had ever done a 3D prize. It was voted the best 3D because the guys that I hired were real 3D buffs who went back a long way. They were very meticulous about making it look good. There’s parallax issues. There’s all sorts of things that you can do wrong that even old 3D movies did wrong that have to be created. It was an experience because I really did believe, and still do, that 3D can be used as a storytelling tool and not just a way of throwing things out at the audience. When this movie was proposed to me, and it was gonna basically take place in a basement, I said, “Well you know, it’s gonna get kinda claustrophobic. What if we make it in 3D?” They said, “Okay fine,” and added a little money to the budget, but not that much. It was a very satisfying creative experience when you could see it in 3D. Even in 2D it’s okay, but it really was designed to be seen in 3D.
Art House Cult: Roger Ebert said, “It was the best use of 3D technology ever.”
Joe Dante: Well, that’s very flattering. The problem with that movie was that by the time we were finished and ready to put it out, this new technology had emerged, which allowed people to turn flat movies into 3D on the computer. So all these big blockbuster movies like the Clash of the Titans remake were now being released widely in 3D. There are only so many theaters equipped to play 3D in America, and they were all filled up with these studio movies, which had phony 3D. So, we really didn’t get much of a theatrical release at all. I mean, hardly any. In Europe, yes. It did quite well in Europe, but in America, it hardly ever got seen anywhere in 3D. It was a shame, because it was really a fun 3D experience. As you know, these movies are much more fun when they’re seen with an audience than they are if you watch them on TV at home. The few screenings I went to in 3D were very raucous and very well attended, and people really liked it, but it was just sort of a shame that that experience got away.
Art House Cult: As I was watching it, I thought to myself that it was a little too scary to show my 10-year-old, but probably will show it to him when he’s about 12.
Joe Dante: Yeah, there’s the whole thing about the abusive father. It’s actually pretty heavy. There’s even hints that it might have even been sexual abuse. We don’t push it, but it’s there. I think it’s a movie for older kids and that was always the intention.
Art House Cult: It still has a lot of those fun elements in it that still make it feel like a Joe Dante movie. Your next picture was Burying the Ex. When you made it was it originally made for Image Entertainment, which is also called RLJE now?
Joe Dante: Uh, no. It was based on a short that the writer Alan Trezza had made, which I never got to see. It was the same story, but it was a short subject. He wanted to make it into a feature, so he wrote a feature script version, and that’s all I ever read. We tried for quite a while to get it made. It had been around for quite a while by the time we actually got the money. Some fluke happened where there was some company that needed to spend a certain amount of money by the end of the year, and they needed a movie that could go right away. And because our script was ready we were able to do that.
The whole thing came together faster than any movie I’ve even been involved with. It was cast, like, in a week. The main locale, once again was a borrowed set, as it was in The Hole. That house the kid’s living in in The Hole is the set that was built for a lesbian sitcom in Canada and all we did was repaint it. In the case of Burying the Ex, there was a little hole in the wall studio downtown that had a raised set that was used for some comedy, I have no idea what, and we just used it. We just took their set, changed it around a little bit, and moved in. Because it was such a cheap movie, we had to consolidate all of our scenes into a three block area because we didn’t want to have to pay for teamsters to move things. So, we found a place downtown in Echo Park where we could get all the storefronts and all the interiors that we needed, and we would just – you would see some people walking around pushing clothing racks from street to street, you know, to try to take advantage of the fact that we’re trying to make this movie really quickly. (Laughs) And it was indeed, very quick, and very cheap, but for me, the thing that’s good about the movie is the cast. I think the leads are very winning, and Anton Yelchin, who’s since passed away tragically, we got very close. I mean, he was a real film buff. There’s a documentary about him that his parents made that’s quite illuminating. I learned things about him that I didn’t know, because he had been guarding a secret that he had this illness that he was hoping nobody would ever find out about because he thought it would keep him from getting jobs.
It was a very fun set. It’s a very nice group of people. And, you know, the movie’s kind of a trifle, but I thought it was fun. I got to meet some great people.
Art House Cult: The part of the film that had me laughing the most, just involved the thought process of casting this vegan as this diabolical villain.
Joe Dante: (laughs)
Art House Cult: That really cracked me up because- full disclosure, I’m in the restaurant industry. (laughs) My family, we own restaurants and so, it, it was very funny, because we accommodate a lot of guests.
Joe Dante: And vegans are the bane of your existence?
Art House Cult: (laughs) Hey, you know, they-
Joe Dante: Well they don’t make it any easier, obviously. She’s sort of the girlfriend from hell. The science fiction aspect of the movie is that film nerds don’t get girlfriends who look like that. (laughs)
Art House Cult: (laughs) I had to sort of hide my film nerdiness until I was already married.
Joe Dante: Yeah, I would think… or else you wouldn’t get married.
Art House Cult: It was too late for her at that point.
Joe Dante: Well this guy- he’s got a girlfriend from hell who’s gorgeous. And then he meets another girl who not only is gorgeous, but likes all the same stuff he does. I mean, that’s what I mean, when I say it’s a fantasy.(laughs)
Art House Cult: I thought Ashley Greene was really great in the film. Very funny in it. Alexandra Daddario has gone on to have a pretty substantial career since that point.
Joe Dante: Yes, in fact she and Alan Trezza, the writer, just did a picture called We Summon the Darkness, which she is very good in, and I’m a little surprised that she hasn’t become bigger faster, because her scene in True Detective on TV was memorable for many reasons. But I saw her in the Dwayne Johnson the Rock movie, and I thought, this girl’s gonna go places. I was surprised that she ended up in things like the Baywatch movie and stuff. I thought that she was gonna be having movies tailored around her, which I guess maybe this new one is.
Art House Cult: The film also makes a brief mention that I caught of Val Newton films, which I love those.
Joe Dante: Well, they’re very melancholy. They’re all movies about death. For those of us on the melancholy bench, many of whom watched horror movies because of it, they’re very poetic.
Art House Cult: Yeah, they’re beautiful. The Leopard Man has one of the saddest sequences ever where the person can’t get through the door.
Joe Dante: Oh, yeah that’s a great scene.
Art House Cult: That one always gives me chills. It’s just so much more frightening than most horror films.
Joe Dante: And that’s because you don’t see anything. That’s what’s so great about it. You know, you hear it. You know what it is. You know what’s going on, and you know what’s going on outside that door, and all you see is the puddle under the door of a lot of blood. It’s great.
Art House Cult: Yeah, it’s minimalism at its finest. And, we’ve made it all the way to Nightmare Cinema.
Joe Dante: Oh, that’s right. I forgot about that. Well, that’s another Mick Garris special. You know, that’s a sort of a harbinger of what was left of Masters of Horror and his idea that he wanted to have international directors. And so, when he tried to pitch Nightmare Cinema it was to be a TV series. And it was gonna have all these different directors. What he ended up managing to finally get financed was this theatrical movie with different directors from different places. We all shot our episodes without knowing what the frame of the story was gonna be. So, that’s why there’s so many hospitals in the movie. I mean, we didn’t really know that at the time that everybody was gonna be doing stories with hospitals in them. We didn’t really cross pollinate very well. I mean, we met each other and we hung around, but we weren’t on everybody’s sets. It wasn’t the kind of cross organization that we had earlier in the episodes. Then Mick went off and shot the framing story and brought some of the actors back, and turned it into a movie.
Art House Cult: As I was watching your segment, it obviously reminds me of Twilight Zone‘s episode “Eye of the Beholder.”
Joe Dante: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Art House Cult: The film currently is streaming exclusively on Shudder. What do you foresee as the future for those type of low budget horror projects?
Joe Dante: Well, you know, at this current moment, there’s no theatrical way to play them. So, you’re gonna see a lot of movies, like Alexandra’s movie we just talked about. That was supposed to be a theatrical film, it’s shot in Cinemascope, it’s supposed to be seen by a bunch of people who are gonna get jump scared, and now they’re not. So these movies have no other venue to be seen but on streaming. And I worry that some people are gonna get out of the habit of wanting to go to the movies – partly out of fear of being among other people, and also because they’re just gonna get in the habit of streaming it at home. Now I know that there’s a definite need to get out, particularly after this pandemic. People are already breaking the law practically to get to infect each other. But then there’s a large portion of us who are smarter than that, and don’t want to get sick and don’t want to get their grandparents fatally ill. So they’re following the rules and staying at home. And you know, the whole idea of opening things up is you can’t open up a store or a restaurant if you don’t have customers. And no matter how many feet away they’re seated, or how may barriers there are between you and the server, there are just a lot of people who are gonna say, “You know, this is a lot of trouble to go to and I’m not having the experience that I remember,” which they may never get to have again, because everything is gonna be different when this is over.
How movies weather it is a question mark. As is the actual production of movies themselves, which cannot be made the way they used to be made. There’s no way you’re gonna get that many people together in one place for that length of time without some kind of protocols from keeping them from all being infected. And what’s gonna happen when one of your actors gets sick and has to leave? Or the DP gets sick and has to leave? You can’t have constant people sitting in the wings in quarantine waiting to replace people. And with the characters established, you just have to have them die off screen. And it’s very, very complicated. People watch movies and they’re not cognizant of how complicated the system is. They don’t realize how many cogs there are in the machine to go along. And right now, there’s no fool proof way to get back to the kind of production that we were used to, and what it’s gonna be like in the future is anybody’s guess. You know, Tyler Perry’s got his own studio in, I guess, Georgia, and his whole thing is, you bring in the crew and you lock them down for two weeks and make sure that nobody’s sick. You have them and nobody gets to leave. They have to shoot the movie within the sets, and the backlot of what he’s got, and nobody gets to leave until the picture’s finished. Well, you know, I don’t think you’re gonna find a lot of people who are gonna want to do that. (laughs)
Art House Cult: One of my big questions I wanted to know was who your favorite director is and why?
Joe Dante: Well, that’s impossible.
Art House Cult: Yeah. (laughs)
Joe Dante: My favorite director. I mean, there are directors I love who made movies I didn’t like. And there are directors I don’t particularly like, who have made movies I love. So if you just want to go by sheer output you’d have to go with somebody like Hitchcock or somebody who’s got this tremendous, you know, backlog of stuff that’s so inspiring to so many people for so many years that it’s influenced the way that people even think. I mean, that’s certainly a safe choice. But I also am a huge fan of John Ford, and I’m a huge fan of Kurosawa, and Sergio Leone – and I mean, there’s just any number of… Ida Lupino is a great director. There’s just so many directors and so little time. I mean, that’s the whole idea behind Trailers from Hell. It’s like, people don’t have time anymore to be introduced to these movies from the past because there’s so much going on at such a rapid pace in the future. And this is a way to say, “Well you may not relate to these movies, but here’s the contemporary filmmaker talking about them, and if you can relate to their work, then they can explain to you why this movie relates to their work, and your work. And you should be familiar with this.” Now we’ve brought that up to the podcast, which we kind of do the same thing with. I mean, we bring people on who are in the business to talk about not their movies, but the movies that made them want to make movies. And now during the pandemic, we’ve been doing a pandemic series where there are little short twenty minute bits where people will come in and talk about what they have been watching in lockdown. And there have been a lot of interesting movies that I think a lot of our listeners were not familiar with, and that’s kind of a goal. Since I’m not making anything, and I’m not gonna be making anything for a while, nor is anyone else, it seems like the best thing we can do is to mush all of our sources and try to point people towards things that have already been made.
Art House Cult: What films out of the new crop do you admire?
Joe Dante: Well, I mean I admire classics like Scorsese and all that. I have to tell you that the greatest movie of the past 20 years I think is Mad Max:Fury Road. I’m happy to say that I know George, or I knew George well back in the old days. That movie, which there’s currently a New York Times magazine article about the making of the movie, which was a nightmare apparently to make. Closed down three times, everybody hated each other, it was like a nightmare. But there is no filmmaker I know that doesn’t think that that is one of the most astonishing movies that they have ever seen. And uh, so I would have to defer to that one.
Art House Cult: Are there any composers that you find to be at the top of your list that you love listening to?
Joe Dante:That aren’t dead? (laughs)
Art House Cult: Hey, dead or alive, I’ll take it both.
Joe Dante: Well, if I hadn’t worked with Jerry Goldsmith so often I probably would have tried to work with John Barry, who I thought was great. Elmer Bernstein has done some amazing work. I’m watching a show called Outlander where a guy named Bear McCreary does the music for it, and he did Battlestar Galactica, he’s terrific. He’s somebody I would like to work with someday. I mean there’s no shortage of really good composers. The trick is to try to get jobs for one thing and when you find a composer that you really like, and I really liked Pino Donnagio, and I would have worked with him again except that I was working with Jerry. You want to work with him again. You want to, you find people that you’re idiopathic with and you want to keep it going. But unfortunately, there’s only so many projects, and only so many slots. And we just can’t work with everybody at every moment, you know, unless I own your own studio.
Art House Cult: Well, I, I gotta say it has been such a unique pleasure getting to talk with you, Joe. And I’m so thankful that you were willing to give me so much of your time. (As mentioned above – I had accidentally skipped Runaway Daughters and Second Civil War. This was a missed opportunity for me that was regrettable.)
Joe Dante: Well you skipped two movies. You skipped Runaway Daughters. Which is the movie I did for Showtime, which is part of a series called Dragon Classics, but then it was called Rebel Highway. And that was partly created by Sam Arkoff’s son. The idea was to remake all the AIP JV (juvenile violence) pictures from existence. I think there were 10 or 12 of them and some of my friends did them. And they would give you the press book for the movie, and they’d say “Here. Write a script based on this idea.” Runaway Daughters is the only one that actually has the same plot as the original movie. And that movie has everybody in it . My entire stock company is in that picture. And it was made, you know, for a dollar ninety eight. But it’s a fun movie. The other one you missed is The Second Civil War, which is the one that I made for HBO, which is the movie that I’m constantly reviving at festivals because everything in it has come true. And is still coming true. And, it’s probably maybe the best movie I ever made. But nobody’s really heard of it. I think it’s on Amazon prime. And for a while it was on YouTube actually. HBO movies are very difficult to find because that whole period that they had of doing political movies, it was a brief period, but they made a bunch of them, and now they’re almost all hard to – I mean, you can’t get them from HBO.
Art House Cult: Why is it that they’re not releasing films like A Bright Shining Lie?
Joe Dante: I don’t know why. I don’t think it’s a rights problem, because all these movies were released overseas in theaters. That was the whole idea. And that’s why I have a 35 millimeter print of the movies because they actually made prints, and it didn’t disappear into the video ether like so many things that were put out only on video. I don’t know why it is, but I mean, you could find it if you look it up on IMDB. There’s a lot of people that have seen it. That’s a movie that I particularly like. And it’s probably the dated, it’s dated least of all the movies that I can think of that I’ve made, especially because so much of it is, continues to still happen.
Art House Cult: It has been such a distinct pleasure. Thank you so much, Joe.
Joe Dante: Okay. My pleasure. Bye.
Once again – thanks to Joe Dante for generously giving his time to our small site. It was one of the personal highlights for me in a very strange year!
- Jake Keet – Art House Cult- July 19, 2020
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Just a couple of typos I noticed. TERMITE TERRORIST should be TERMITE TERRACE (though the typo has possibilities!), and Sam Marcoff should be Sam Arkoff. Terrific interview!
Thanks for the heads up and kind words! Corrected!