Editorials
They Said It: Memorable Quotes from 2010!
Hollywood is a town built on 99% bullshit. If you’re looking for evidence, just try sifting back through the thousands upon thousands of interviews from the last year, where you’ll inevitably keep coming across the same basic quotes over and over again. Things like “He’s an absolutely brilliant director” or “The CGI is minimal” or “We were like one big happy family on set” or “The studio was very hands off during production” or – perhaps the line that best sums up 2010 – “We wouldn’t have post-converted to 3-D if we didn’t think it made sense for the film“. Nevertheless, there are always those juicy moments (a journalist’s dream) where you actually hear something authentic coming from an actor/director/producer/writer’s mouth during an interview, and to commemorate the end of another year B-D reporter Chris Eggertsen has sifted through hours and hours of quotes to recap the most memorable candid statements uttered by horror talent in 2010. Enjoy!
“Two months of work on the copy at a lab and they came to us and said they weren’t sure if they could print some of the stuff in the film and they had to call the police and consult lawyers. We asked why and they said that some of the content was questionable. The cops talked to us…like some of the scenes in the movie were real, like it was a snuff film. It’s ridiculous; what kind of maniac would bring a snuff film to be printed on 35mm?” – A Serbian Film screenwriter Aleksandar Radivojevic, talking about the German lab that refused to print portions of the film
“The studio got cold feet when we couldn’t cast A-List talent quickly over the course of the summer of 2009. They liked the script which I wrote with Guillermo del Toro and they couldn’t see why Hollywood’s top actresses weren’t signing up. They decided it was me.” – Director Larry Fessenden on why he’s no longer directing The Orphanage remake
“Normally you’d have to go to the studio and then have to get their head casting people through. Then you need to [go to] all the junior executives to approve. Then the co-president, who has to go to the chairman. It’s just fucking amazing how many assholes it takes to get a single decision made.” – Skyline co-director Colin Strause on why they chose to make the film independently
“At first I was very skeptical. But they asked me to just look at what was being done, and I visited the post-production house…that ended up doing it. And interestingly enough they had done ‘Clash of the Titans’, which I’d read a lot about how bad it was. And I saw it there in their projection room and it looked really quite fantastic.” – Director Wes Craven on his reaction to the studio wanting to do a 3-D post-conversion on My Soul to Take
“I refrain from…defending my movie. So if you think that the movie is, for example, misogynistic, good for you. You feel it is pro-male? Pro-female?…I would never stand to defend it. Let other people defend it.” – Original I Spit on Your Grave director Meir Zarchi on the film’s controversial nature
“It’s funny, because when you start to make a film people say, ‘Why is your film different? We’re not gonna give you money unless you tell us why it’s different.’ So you make something different, and at the end of making the film they say, ‘Oh my god, what have you done? You’ve made something different. How can we sell this?’” – Monsters director Gareth Edwards
“There are a lot of jump scares in this, which some people may not like…But tough shit.” – John Carpenter, talking about his latest film The Ward
“Wait a second, guys! I don’t like this framing, man. This is like…this is neither this nor that. Cut! I don’t like this lens…you said he was gonna be a cowboy!” – Michael Biehn, overheard while directing The Victim
“The only real hard part that I was not looking forward to was when I had to pretend I was eating Aki’s poo. That was maybe the grossest thing that I could just NOT deal with!” – Ashley C. Williams, the “middle piece” in The Human Centipede
“‘Part 2’ will be ‘My Little Pony’ compared to ‘Part 1’.” – The Human Centipede director Tom Six on the sequel
“When you really get into 3D, you find out guys who love 3D, they HATE that ‘Comin’ at ya’ bullshit. The crap where they make shit come at you, it’s gimmicky and it’s bad 3D.” – Dark Country director Thomas Jane
“I think it was wise to convert our film into 3D. The studio and [director] Louis [Leterrier] set the bar high for the tests. If it wasn’t going to look great they weren’t going to pull the trigger. In many ways, I think it’s perfect for a movie like ‘Clash’.” – Clash of the Titans screenwriter Phil Hay
“What really made a lasting impression on me was that I could go around the corner from one of our 42nd Street cinemas in New York City’s Times Square and receive fellatio from Gladys, who was known as the foremost transsexual hooker on the grindhouse circuit. Around 1970, it only cost $15.00 for a 42nd Street hooker to come back to my home.” – Troma co-founder Lloyd Kaufman, remembering the 42nd Street cinema scene in the 1970s
“You never earn a platinum card in this business. You have to always convince people and do the pitches and all of that, and I’m no good at that.” – Director George A. Romero on still having to prove himself after all these years
“Every day we’d shoot all day and, at midnight, David would have to get on the phone and defend shooting the next day’s work.” – Sigourney Weaver, reflecting on David Fincher’s clashes with the studio while filming Alien 3
“I never intended [for] it to be a cult film. I wanted to make a serious movie.” – Birdemic director James Nguyen
“With a very little amount of money, for little resources, I think we’ve gone very far with those eagles and vultures. I can say that from a distance, those eagles and vultures look pretty shocking and terrifying, but realistic. It looks like it was done Hollywood-style from a distance. But when you do that movie close-up, you know, that Hollywood movie close-up or even an indie movie close-up, hey, it’s something unique, it’s something different. It’s something you’ve never seen before. Hey, maybe it’s art.” – Birdemic director James Nguyen on the film’s special effects
“Whitney’s gifted, in many ways. But especially in the acting part of it. When I saw her, she did one or two takes, [and] I say, ‘Whitney’s it. She’s it.’” – Birdemic director James Nguyen on casting lead actress Whitney Moore
“He came and slept with us and we thought we had gotten past that years ago. He said that he had a few nightmares,” said Dolph Rau, an upset father. “gain, all that I would like to see come out of this is that it’s not going to happen again.” – Massachusetts father Dolph Rau about the trauma suffered by his young son after Saw 3-D was accidentally played in place of Megamind
“No matter what you do, somebody is going to come after you. You say ‘The Thing Begins’ and they go, ‘John Carpenter’s is the beginning, asshole. Yours is like ‘The Thing Bullshit’. Why don’t you call it that?’” – Producer Marc Abraham on possible fanboy reactions to a new title for The Thing prequel
“When we first cooked up ‘Saw’ we actually had three ideas…One of them was an idea about two guys stuck in a room, and there’s a dead body lying on the floor…so that eventually became ‘Saw’. A second idea I had was about a guy who goes to bed at night, and wakes up in the morning to find that he has all these scratch marks on his body. And he doesn’t know what happened, and he starts to realize something’s happening to him at night when he sleeps. So he starts setting up all these cameras at night to film himself when he sleeps. Guess what movie that became?” – Director James Wan on how he thought of ‘Paranormal Activity’ before Oren Peli did
“They were very excited about the idea of doing a zombie show until I handed them a zombie script where zombies were actually doing zombie shit…It’s one of those things where the network says, ‘Oh yeah, we want to stretch the envelope’ until they realize that they’re actually looking at a stretched envelope and they go, ‘Woah, no, let’s do ‘CSI’ some more.’” – The Walking Dead director/producer Frank Darabont, talking about when the show was originally being developed at NBC
“Yeah, well I read the script and they said that…when I read it my eye was going to be shot out and I remember on a movie called ‘Season of the Witch’ I wanted them to shoot my eye out with an arrow. And the producers didn’t go for that, so when it was handed to me in this movie that they were going to shoot my eye out with a gun I thought, ‘yeah, I’m going to make that movie.” – Nicolas Cage, on one of his reasons for taking the role in Drive Angry 3-D
“For some reason Robert [Rodriguez] always gives me these sharp objects. I was Navajas in ‘Desperado’, I was Razor Charlie in ‘From Dusk ‘Til Dawn’, I was Cuchillo in this. And then I was Machete.” – Actor Danny Trejo on the set of Predators
“You can see a mark here that has healed up, I hit the steady-cam and I was bleeding. My face was bleeding and I didn’t want to stop, we continued because I had blood all over so we kept filming. It was a really great moment. When I get this moment, ugly motherfucker with a Predator, honestly I would probably choke him in real life. Because I could reach for his neck and it would be over. Predator or human it doesn’t matter.” – Russian actor Oleg Taktarov on the set of Predators
“I wouldn’t have a career if it wasn’t for the horror fans…You know, I fought being a ‘genre’ actress for so many years…and then I kinda went, ‘You know, I actually know this really well, and I really like it’. And the fans are kinda my family, and it’s such a tight-knit community. And I don’t need to be on a TV show. You know, I don’t desire to be on the cover of ‘US Weekly’. I’m here to do a good job, and to work.” – Actress Danielle Harris on being a scream queen
“I don’t want to insult anybody, but I’ve been watching these westerns recently and they don’t have any cojones anymore…[‘Jonah Hex’ is] going to bring back sort of this hybrid of the spaghetti western genre, you know the balls of westerns.” – Josh Brolin on the set of critically-panned summer flop Jonah Hex
“You wanna go see fairy vampire movies and pretty boys, fine – there’s an audience for it…It’s not what I wanna do. I like my vamps snarly and mean…and fucking ugly.” – Stake Land writer/actor Nick Damici, commenting on the Twilight phenomenon
“I look at the old movies and I think the dream sequences aren’t that interesting…I think they feel like bad Broadway musicals or something, like with steam and smoke and they’re not scary, they’re not beautiful, they’re not interesting. I’ve looked at everything from German expressionistic film to Tim Burton movies to all kinds of disparate influences and the one thing this movie is going to have [is] a vision when it comes to the dream sequences. And I think they’re beautiful and macabre and scary.” – Director Samuel Bayer, on why the dream sequences in his Nightmare on Elm Street remake will be better than those in the original series
“One man’s magic is another man’s gluey torture session.” – “New Freddy” Jackie Earle Haley on the arduous makeup process
“I tend almost never to throw other films under the bus, but that is exactly an example of what we should not be doing in 3-D. Because it just cheapens the medium and reminds you of the bad 3-D horror films from the 70s and 80s, like Friday the 13th 3-D. When movies got to the bottom of the barrel of their creativity and at the last gasp of their financial lifespan, they did a 3-D version to get the last few drops of blood out of the turnip.” – James Cameron, commenting on the post-converted 3-D in Piranha
“Mr. Cameron, who singles himself out to be a visionary of movie-making, seems to have a small vision regarding any motion pictures that are not his own. It is amazing that in the movie-making process – which is certainly a team sport – that Cameron consistently celebrates himself out as though he is a team of one. His comments are ridiculous, self-serving and insulting to those of us who are not caught up in serving his ego and his rhetoric.” – Piranha 3-D producer Mark Canton, responding to James Cameron’s comments
The great Ernest Dickerson turns seventy-five years old this month, so we’re looking back at his most memorable contribution to the horror genre – 1995’s Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight!
The film hit screens while the Tales from the Crypt series was winding down its run on television, and it stands apart with a story that feels a step or two removed from the franchise norm. That was the smart play, though, as the show’s stories – and those from the original EC comics – work best in short bites. The result is a film that holds up beautifully as a gory good time.
Now keep reading to see what I heard on the commentary for…
Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight (1995)
Commentator: Ernest Dickerson (director), Michael Felsher (moderator)
1. Dickerson was in post-production on Surviving the Game when he got a call from his agent saying that producer Gil Adler wanted to meet about a Tales from the Crypt feature film. It went well, so Dickerson met with Joel Silver next and secured the job.
2. The original screenplay for the film came to the producers as a spec script wholly detached from the Tales from the Crypt brand. They added the Crypt Keeper (voiced by John Kassir) bookends to make it fit.
3. Dickerson was more familiar with the original EC comic books having read them as a kid, but he had watched a few episodes of the HBO series, so he knew what the current vibe was for the project.
4. Adler directed the film’s wraparound segments, meaning Dickerson never actually got to work with the creepy puppet. “Gil and the Crypt Keeper had a great relationship,” he adds, “they worked together for years.”
5. While he was new to the Tales from the Crypt family, Dickerson had previously worked as a director of photography on the Tales from the Darkside anthology series. That show is underappreciated in my humble opinion, and I will go to bat for both it and the equally underloved Monsters.
6. A big appeal of the horror genre for Dickerson is the idea of dark mysteries that challenge our imagination. For this film, that came down to the mythology being created between the characters.
7. Five executive producers are listed in the opening credits, but Dickerson says the only two he had dealings with were Silver and Richard Donner. The other three were Walter Hill, Robert Zemeckis, and David Giler.
8. Dickerson had only ever seen Billy Zane in movies with a full head of hair, so he was surprised when Zane showed up on the first day with a bald head. “He had this case, and he opened up the case that he had all these hair pieces in, and he says, ‘So which one of these do you think I should use?’” Dickerson looked at him and suggested he just go bald for the character.
9. While the bulk of the opening exteriors were filmed in a desert just outside Los Angeles, the shot of the old church at 11:26 was created on a warehouse hangar soundstage where the film’s interiors were shot.
10. When he had read the script, Dickerson pictured the character of Jeryline (Jada Pinkett Smith) “as a little, tough lady.” He had recently seen Smith in Menace II Society, and while the producers had someone else in mind for the role, he fought to get her instead.
11. Just as Zane surprised Dickerson with his hair (or lack thereof), Smith arrived on the first day with her hair dyed platinum white. He “liked the idea” but asked her to please get it tweaked so it looked more yellowish blond. “It’s definitely a statement.”
12. He had seen Brenda Bakke in the 1989 sci-fi/action film from Japan, Gunhed, and thought she’d be great here as Cordelia. The rest of us might recognize her from Death Spa or Trucks.
13. Felsher comments that the film’s setup does a good job not telegraphing who’s going to live or die, and he uses the “nice guy” (Charles Fleischer) and “the kid” (Ryan O’Donohue) as examples. “You don’t play by those rules here,” he says, and Dickerson replies that he wanted to subvert those rules. That extends to Smith as well because she’s Black, “and usually in movies like this they’re the first folks to die.”
14. Dickerson says they had forty days of filming, “which, the way I’m used to working, was a very generous schedule.” It was budgeted at around $10 million.
15. This probably won’t surprise you, but Zane improvised the bit at 26:25 after he jumps out the window and says, “Fuck this cowboy shit! You fuckin’, hodunk Podunk, well, then, motherfuckers!”
16. In the original script, the demons that The Collector (Zane) raises from the dirt actually looked more like the people they used to be. “They were more human,” but the very smart decision was made in pre-production to make them look far more unique instead.
17. The demons are killed by shooting their eyes, but Dickerson felt there should be one more element to it. “Shoot out their eyes, you gotta duck because the souls come shooting out, and if it hits ya, boom, it can kill ya.” This is a fun touch.
18. He’s been asked more than once if these demons are where Peter Jackson got the idea for how the orcs would look in his Lord of the Rings movies. “They do look like orcs.”
19. He recalls having seen Ronny Yu’s The Bride with White Hair shortly before going to work on Demon Knight, and he hoped to bring some of that staged style into his own film. An example of that in practice is Brayker’s (William Sadler) brief flashbacks to Christ on the cross.
20. Character deaths were mostly based on the idea that “each person’s downfall was going to be predicated by their weakness.” The Collector discovers someone’s weakness and then uses it against them. Cordelia wants to be loved, Jeryline wants to travel, Uncle Willy (Dick Miller) is a horndog for both liquor and ladies, Danny loves horror comics, etc.
21. Dickerson says that plenty of genre classics were in the back of his head while making the film, including Assault on Precinct 13, Alien, Aliens, and more.
22. Cordelia is possessed into a demonic form, and Dickerson’s idea for how she’d look was originally a bit different. “Since Cordelia was a prostitute, I thought that her mouth should actually be a vertical slit that was in her stomach… which would open up with teeth and a tongue.” It was nixed, he says, when “the wife of one of the producers read that and said ‘no way you’re putting that in the movie.’”
23. The key makes an appearance in the followup, Tales from the Crypt: Bordello of Blood, but it wasn’t originally meant to. Apparently, early test audiences expected it to be a more connected sequel to Demon Knight, so the filmmakers added it in to appease them. This is where I go on record saying that Bordello of Blood is a fun time. Can’t touch Demon Knight, obviously, but it’s more entertaining than its reputation suggests.
24. They had to film Uncle Willy’s bar scene “dream” twice, once with the women topless and once with them in bikinis, to have versions for both theaters and television broadcast. “Dick’s a pro.” (To be fair, Dickerson says this in regard to Miller having to endure the makeup application, but the sentiment fits both situations, so…)
25. Dickerson says he’s “always amazed at the love that people show this film,” and adds that fans bring it up to him incredibly often. This is great to hear, as we should always be telling artists how much their work means to us while they’re still alive and able to hear it.
26. Zane also suggested the gag at 1:08:21 with the sponge coming out of his mouth. The beat reminds Dickerson to praise the actor even more, adding that he was an “ally” to the director when “bad ideas” came down from the studio suits.
27. He didn’t get any pushback on killing little Danny. He did insist on one added element, though, as he wanted to immediately follow the boy exploding in the air with a shot of his bloody and torn sneaker hitting the ground below. “And the sneaker had to be a hightop.”
28. Dickerson says there’s “something kinky sexy about” Smith being covered in blood, and then the two commentators go quiet for almost two minutes out of respect for the scene. It’s a good opportunity to reflect on how Dickerson had previously mentioned Alien and Aliens as films being in the back of his head during filming, and how two scenes here reflect that – Jeryline stripping down to her underwear for the final confrontation feels like a nod to Ridley Scott’s film, while an earlier scene with Irene (CCH Pounder) and Dep. Bob (Gary Farmer) realizing they’re surrounded and choosing to blow themselves up alongside some of the demons is something of a callback to the air vent sacrifice in James Cameron’s film.
29. Asked about the film’s critical reception at the time of release, Dickerson says it received good reviews from horror-loving critics and then talks about the importance of horror in general. “Horror has always been a great way of putting out ideas, of talking about some of the things that affect us as people. Some of the best horror, like the best science fiction, talks about what it’s like to be human. Some of the best horror gets very political.”
30. The original ending would have featured The Collector showing “his true self, which is a demon made of fire.” They spent a lot of time trying to make it work, but it was “extremely difficult… back in the day of analog effects.” It was rewritten into the faceoff between him and Jeryline featuring the dancing, the crotch fire, Zane’s attempts at saying “love,” and his eventual demise from her bloody spit.
31. They both agree that a direct sequel to Demon Knight could be a lot of fun, but Dickerson says he’s unaware of any talk on the possibility.
32. Dickerson was super excited about this new Scream Factory Blu-ray in 2015, and he mentions that before its release, he had imported a Blu-ray from Germany presumably to enjoy the film in HD. He’s just like us! (Or am I the only one here who’s imported a German Blu-ray of the much maligned werewolf flick Big Bad Wolf…)
Quotes Without Context
“I was so happy to get Dick Miller for this movie.”
“There was a time when guys used to put ketchup on everything.”
“I’m a big student of Hitchcock, and the best way to make a moment of horror work is to lull the audience into a false sense of security.”
“A villain should always be the most interesting person in a movie.”
“They were a really great bunch of performers who were performing on these little leg-extension stilts wearing a diaper that had a radio-controlled tail that was being manipulated by a special effects tech right out of the frame.”
“It’s hard to direct air; it doesn’t do what you want.”
“The only censorship problem came from the producer’s wife, who didn’t want the vagina dentalis [sic] in the movie.”
“One of the executives wanted to know why the devil didn’t try to have sex with Jada.”
“It always starts with the script.”
Keep up with more horror commentary breakdowns here.
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