Interviews
Gabriel Luna Explains Why It Was Important to Honor Robert Patrick’s Iconic T-1000 Run [Interview]
Audiences may not be flocking to Terminator: Dark Fate, but they’re missing out on a great sci-fi sequel that smartly updates the Terminator mythos to the present day, while honoring the original James Cameron classics. Some of the homages are obvious, but some might only be visible to eagle-eyed super fans.
For example, did you notice that the new killer robot, the Rev-9, brings back Robert Patrick’s trademark run from Terminator 2? Last week Bloody-Disgusting talked to actor Gabriel Luna about why it was important, as a new part-liquid metal, part old school Terminator villain, to take Patrick’s performance, combine it with Schwarzenegger’s, and make it all his own.
“I wanted to honor [Robert Patrick’s] performance. There were obvious similarities in the characters, so there should be obvious threads that interweave in all of our performances. It should run through all of us,” Gabriel Luna said.
“It starts with Arnold, this T-800, this big tank of a man, this incredible physical presence. I wanted to grow my body to be strong and imposing, to be able to stand there with him and to be a formidable opponent,” Luna continued. “And then I would be running in this film, and I would, as a fan, try to size up what I look like in a dead sprint and what Robert looks like.”
“So I was very focused on that. It should be a sprinter’s run. It should be very efficient and very tight. The hands open, the way sprinters run. The head tilted in pursuit. All of that was there with Robert, so if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, man. Just incorporate that and weave it into what you’re doing,” Luna added.
“And then on top of that, I had my own particular skill set, to not quote Liam Neeson. ‘I have a very particular set of skills,’” Luna said, mimicking the scene from Taken.”
“And you know, I just wanted to be in attack mode, just be a fucking runaway train. That’s what he is when I run that gauntlet in the detention facility, when I’m running after the chopper, when I’m underwater attacking the Humvee. Everything is forward, everything is sharp,” Luna added.
“But also… it should be sharp and efficient like the T-1000, just beefier and heavier like the T-800, and then just wrap all that together and then layer myself on top of it. Layer my natural human behaviors in all the encounters, human encounters, because I think that’s an important element of him. His ability to ingratiate himself with the Texas Rangers, to charm that woman with the laundry, to smile at her father when he sees him for the first time and try to put him, try to get the information he needs. That was the cherry on top of the whole thing,” Luna said, harkening back to an earlier part of our interview, in which he called the Rev-9 “the Ted Bundy of Terminators.”
If you haven’t seen Gabriel Luna’s performance in Terminator: Dark Fate, you might want to consider it now, before the underperforming but well-reviewed film leaves theaters, and your chance to see it on the big screen is gone… possibly forever.
Interviews
‘Rubberhead’ Director Nick Taylor on FX Maverick Steve Johnson, Practical Effects, and Seven-Year Journey
Horror journalist, producer, and podcast host Nick Taylor moves into the director’s seat for his feature debut with illuminating documentary Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson.
It chronicles the wild life and career of SFX maverick Steve Johnson, based on the multi-volume book series Rubberhead: Sex, Drugs and Special FX, and those familiar likely already know Rubberhead isn’t your standard horror documentary.
Johnson is responsible for so many memorable movie monsters, having worked on Fright Night, Poltergeist II, An American Werewolf in London, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Night of the Demons, to name a few. He’s also extremely candid in ways that feel atypical in this industry, open about his failures as much as his successes.
“It was a natural progression for sure,” Nick Taylor tells Bloody Disgusting of his transition into filmmaking ahead of Rubberhead‘s world premiere next week at the Fantasia Film Festival on July 23. “I think with my podcast, I got adept at interviewing people and pulling creative lessons out of them, which was the point of my podcast. I wanted this movie to be sort of a creativity pill for artists where if they’re starting a project or feel creatively stuck, they could watch this movie and be inspired and get actual practical creative lessons.”
Taylor’s background in PR and marketing also organically led him down this path.
He charts the course from book promo to documentary director: “But also Bloody Disgusting had a lot to do with this movie because in the very beginning when I first met Steve, I was helping him promote his book and I said, ‘Hey, I got a marketing background and a journalism background. Let me help you promote this book. I’ll just pitch stories from your life to the media, and we’ll see what happens.’ And John Squires wrote an article about Steve making Slimer under the influence of tons and tons of cocaine, and that went fairly viral.”
“For a week, it was story time with Steve,” Taylor continues. “He would tell me a story from his life, and every story was about a major movie, a major director, lots of drugs and alcohol and insanity. I would write them up, and I think John published about three or four of them. So huge shout out to John Squires because that was really great. So yeah, there were definitely a lot of outgrowths of my journalism background that definitely contributed to this movie.”
Rubberhead condenses the multi-book series into a cohesive feature film with a breezy runtime, sparking the obvious question as to how Taylor approached condensing Johnson’s life down to an under 2-hour documentary film.
“That was one of the more difficult parts of all of this, because we had enough for a series or an epically long six-hour fan documentary,” he answers. “But from day one, I did not want to make a fan documentary. I love them. They’re a lot of fun, but I did want the movie to stand on its own two feet as a character-driven portrait of an artist and a time period and a technology, that being practical effects. I did want to be objective. I didn’t want to make this too long. I wanted to make it re-watchable. So I think we just really had to focus on what the narratives were that we wanted to tell. So there were some basically almost cliché archetypical mythic narratives present in Steve’s life. We could have made this way longer, but we wanted to keep it short. But luckily that’s why you have special features.”
Johnson quickly proves to be an engaging subject thanks to his self-effacing wit and frank self-reflections; expect no shortage of stories about how drugs factored into the height of his career or the failures it wrought.
That rare quality was an asset for Rubberhead, Taylor confirms. “He does not shy away from anything about the drugs, the addiction, the bridges burned, the mistakes made, the lessons learned. He just is honest about all of it. He’s had a lot of time for reflection, and he’s done a lot of reflection, so he doesn’t shy away from any of it, which is huge because it’s very refreshing. I don’t think a lot of people are that way, at least in this industry from what I can see. So I think it was hugely beneficial. We wanted to lean into that, and we wanted to make this sort of a gonzo Hunter S. Thompson sort of wild tale through Steve’s overall life.“
Condensing his life into this doc was a slow and steady process for Taylor, too. “It’s been almost seven years. It’s been a labor of love. We’ve been as indie as it gets. We would shoot what we could when we could, and then we would edit when we could. Then after a while it all came together.”
In a way, making Rubberhead brings Taylor’s horror fandom full circle. It turns out that the very film that sparked his interest in the genre and practical effects also comes with an amusing Steve Johnson anecdote.
Taylor explains, “My gateway for sure was Beetlejuice. I saw that at a very young age; I think I was four or five. I felt somebody had shown me, my soul. I get a little emotional thinking about it. There was something about that movie that felt so strange and unusual, but also felt so familiar. It was spooky, but it was fun, and it was lighthearted, and it had humor, but it also had this macabre celebration to it that I just really got into as a kid. I felt somebody had shown me my own soul. And funny story, Steve got fired from Beetlejuice because Tim Burton gave him his hand-drawn designs and Steve’s like, ‘Oh my God, these look like kids did them. This is not what you want. I know what you want. I’m going to redesign these for you.’ And Tim Burton was like, ‘Yeah, no, you’re not.’ So yeah, funny story.”
You must be logged in to post a comment.