Hey folks, Harry here... Quint decided to chat with the bastard of a 1000 fathers... Ok, well he isn't one, but he plays one on the big screen! This is Quint at his geekiest... enjoy...
Ahoy there, squirts. 'Tis I, the horribly burnt former child killer, Freddy Krueger, here with an interview I recently conducted with crusty seaman Robert Englund, known to most as Quint... Wait a minute... strike that. Reverse it. 'Tis I, the crusty seaman, Quint, here with an interview I recently conducted with Robert Englund, known to most as Freddy Krueger. There's great stuff in here, squirts! Freddy Vs. Jason takes a giant step forward, it looks like... Robert spills all in this phoner about Freddy Vs. Jason, his work on the previous Nightmare films, V and just about everything else you could want to know about the life and career of Robert Englund. Without any further adieu, check this special Halloween treat out!
QUINT: HOW'RE YOU DOING?
ROBERT ENGLUND: Fine, fine... on a foggy morning here. I mean, I can't even see the street.
QUINT: SO, A NICE CREEPY ATMOSPHERE TO BE DOING THIS INTERVIEW IN.
ROBERT ENGLUND: Yeah, nice and creepy.
QUINT: JUST AS A WARNING... I TRIED NOT TO JUST REHASH ALL THE QUESTIONS YOU'RE ALWAYS ASKED, BUT I DO TREAD OVER SOME FAMILIAR TERRITORY.
ROBERT ENGLUND: Oh, that's OK.
QUINT: STARTING OFF, WHEN DID YOU FIRST HEAR ABOUT THE BOOGEYMEN PROJECT AND HOW DID YOU FIRST GET INVOLVED?
ROBERT ENGLUND: Well, you know, I think they approached my agent or my agent knew somebody over at Universal, who was sorta the umbrella company with FlixMix. There's a guy at FlixMix named Gary Shank who was inspired by compilation CDs from the music industry and he was thinking to himself, "You know... No one's ever mined this field except for a couple of late night video collections of Girls Gone Wild and stuff like that... But no one has really mined the world of gaining the rights from the studios and being thematic." In fact, along with Boogeymen, they're currently working on a great, great compilation DVD right now of just great fight scenes. You know, really accenting the Hong Kong school of fights and they got one of the great Hong Kong fight coordinators doing sorta the same thing I do with Boogeymen, which is to be the audio commentary.
When they approached me, they realized that they kinda wanted to hit a sorta easy to hit, young demographic to start themselves out as a new business and horror is pretty tried and true. So, when they were going through all their focus groups and all their research and narrowing down their field of horror movies... You know, at one point I think they were thinking of doing classic horror with Karloff and Legosi and I think they were thinking of doing great scenes from very diverse kinds of horror and science fiction. I think they decided to narrow their first one down to some of the most successful recent franchises from the '70s, '80s and early '90s, just before the sort of new state of the art effects came in with CGI and digital. So, it's sorta like the golden age of horror from, like, The Exorcist to The Matrix, a hands on, fun, low-budget hardcore horror and they limited it to a lot of the successful franchises because the franchises were sort of a test of success.
So, I'm sittin' there and I got this list in front of me and I'm looking at it and it has all these people on it, like Pinhead, you got Halloween and Candyman and my movie, A Nightmare On Elm Street, and Wishmaster, which I'm in, and Scream, from Wes Craven, and Jason movies and Texas Chainsaw Massacre... I'm looking at this and I realize I know all these people. I know Kane Hodder (Jason), I know Tony Todd from Candyman, I'm a fan of Candyman, I know stories about the making of the original Halloween, because I lived upstairs with the art director. I've done a couple of projects, two or three projects, with Tobe Hooper, so I know all sorts of stuff about Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I know Gunnar Hanson, who plays Leatherface, I know Doug Bradley who plays Pinhead, we did a movie in Spain.
So, when they approached me, I said, "This'll be great! Let me work with your research and your own R and D and then I'll do a pass as I just sorta be the fan. Let me be Robert Englund, the fan, and be imagining myself in sort of an arrested adolescence, you know watching this movie with whoever the viewer is over a cold slice of pizza. It's like giving all this gossip and rumor and things I know over the years from just having friends that work on all those movies, from that era. I was involved almost monthly from '84 until '95 and then I've had a couple of hits since then, like Urban Legend and things like that. So, it was fun for me.
We were learning while we were doing it. I mean, I know now that if we do Boogeymen 2, I'm going to be able to do a kinda airiadite trivia pass for the audio commentary, if they ask me to do it, and then I can do more like a standup comic kinda thing, you know make jokes about Jamie Lee Curtis' cleavage or something pass at the same time. It took me a while to figure that out, 'cause I was trying to get everything out at the same time and match it to image. So, now I know they can do 2 or 3 passes and they can kind of mix and match and drop stuff in with the image where they want it. But it was a lot of fun for me and I think it came out really good. I think it's sort of a must for horror fans both from that generation and some of the new kids who sorta need to go back and study their history.
I'm old school and I know people that don't go to black and white movies and I know people that refuse to see anything that's not in color and I know people that think that movies began with Jaws and haven't seen anything pre-Spielberg. It's kinda disheartening 'cause there's a lot of great stuff out there and there's a lot of stuff you need to see so you don't think that somebody invented it in 1990, that somebody was doing that in 1949 or 1959 or 1969. I also kinda want young kids to realize that there's a lot of stuff that they may have missed, whether it's a scene from the original Hellraiser, which is pretty hardcore stuff, and they might kinda go back and see that and rediscover a really lowbudget, punk-rock Clive Barker working with a skeleton budget and look what he came up with! I think that's important in the history of horror.
Also, we had this great premiere party here in LA in early October. We were still pretty shell shocked from the attack at the World Trade Center. We had all turned down talkshows and gigs like that and we decided, well this is for the horror/science fiction/fantasy press and the rock and roll, DVD and CD press, so they got this old mansion, which is, like, old, old Hollywood, where the original Hollywood began, you know... Mary Pickford, Eric Von Stroheim and Charlie Chaplin. They got this great old scandal-ridden mansion and they got it all decorated and had monks walking around with shaved heads and hooded habits, trained falcons, candles floating in the pool and they had a giant séance for everybody. It was really great. They also had an open bar, I might add. Yes, yes, let's hear it for the open bar...
We rocked out the Boogeymen DVD, brought it out and introduced it to everybody. We had kinda gotten over that moment in time of worrying about whether we were stepping on other people's toes and the tragedy of the World Trade Center. As we did it, we projected all these great clips on the walls. It was interesting because I could see the caterers and some of the young kids who were volunteering as waiters and waitresses or they were pretending to be the monks, being part of the interactive experience of the party, you could tell they hadn't seen the original Hellraiser or they hadn't seen the scene where I drag Tina all over the ceiling from Nightmare on Elm Street or they hadn't seen a couple great sequences from Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I literally watched one of the caterers with a full tray of hors douvers almost fall into the pool watching this scene where Andy Robinson, the actor who menaces Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry, where he gets pulled apart by hooks from Hellraiser.
I mean, this kid was really freaked out. He had grown up on that kinda softer, animated look you get from a lot of computer animated images and digital, you know. So you kinda know what you're watching isn't real. I know a couple of months ago I went to go see a movie, Final Destination, which I heard was good and I went to see it at a local theater here down where I live and I could tell the audience was watching it differently than most movies because all the stunts in that movie... they really did them. They really tore guys out of an airplane, even though it's on the ground... they really tore walls away and they timed it so stuntmen would be ripped out of his seat, snatched across the room and blew out a section of the wall. That was all real. It's called Practical Effects.
And I noticed the audience that was watching this movie with me watched it very differently than an audience that watches, let's say, The Matrix or one of these films because they knew they were watching something real, so it was really done in front of their eyes. There was a very athletic response. It was like watching Michael Jordan play live. You watch it a little differently because you can hear him breathing, you can hear the percussion of their feet, the basketball players, on the hardwood floors. There's just a little difference to it. This was the same thing that was going on to that kid up at the Paramour Mansion up in the Hollywood Hills. I think it's one of the values with the Boogeymen DVD is that there's a different generation that can at least access these clips and have them in their DVD/Video library.
QUINT: YEAH, I WAS THERE AT THE PARAMOUR. YOU'RE RIGHT, IT WAS AN AWESOME EXPERIENCE.
ROBERT ENGLUND: Oh, you were there. It was exciting. You know, they hid me upstairs for a while and we were sniffin' around upstairs and I looked down and it was weird to see some of the young people that were helpin' out down below... Not the journalists, just the bartenders and the guys walkin' around with hors douvers. Ever since then I've been pimping Boogeymen (laughs). It's a great party DVD or party video to have goin' during the Halloween party. It's just a great continuous loop of great images.
QUINT: I SAW IT A COUPLE MONTHS PREVIOUS TO THE PARTY AND THE THING THAT STRUCK ME WAS I THOUGHT IT WAS AN AWESOME WAY FOR HORROR FANS TO TEST WHAT FILMS THEIR FRIENDS HAVE OR HAVEN'T SEEN.
ROBERT ENGLUND: Also, it's not the whole movie so you can have somebody hangin' over and say, "Oh, oh! You never saw... Hellraiser! Look at this!" It's like having your own instant preview to show them. I know everybody's different. The whole Boogeymen concept is great. This new one they're doing right now is great for all the guys who like the Hong Kong movies going all the way back to Bruce Lee.
QUINT: YEAH, THE ULTIMATE FIGHTS STUFF LOOKS AMAZING. THEY'VE SHOWN ME A LITTLE BIT AND IT BLEW MY SOCKS OFF.
ROBERT ENGLUND: Oh, you've seen some of that. Yeah, I just saw some artwork on it that looks great. And I know who the guy is that they got who is the audio commentator. I know this guy...
QUINT: YEAH! TSUI HARK, ISN'T IT?
ROBERT ENGLUND: Yeah. I did a movie with him in Mexico. He just came on for, like, a week. It's a little martial arts action film called Perfect Target. They sent my wife and I to Puerto Viarta for, like, 6 weeks. I wasn't about to say no. But I met him and this guy is great.
QUINT: YOU MENTIONED YOU WERE OLD SCHOOL...
ROBERT ENGLUND: Well, I just say that... I have real various tastes. I'll go see Jeepers Creepers the day it comes out, but I also like the source material for The Others, which I believe to be The Innocents starring Deborah Karr. So, I'm all over the map with that stuff because I really believe in source, in influence and I also think you have to judge something for its context. You know, for when it came out, what its competition was... I think you also have to judge something for what it says it's supposed to be. I hate it when they send someone who likes Ingmar Bergman movies to review a Wes Craven film and vica-versa. I don't want some guy with no attention span to go watch a Bertalucci film that takes 4 hours to unreel, either. But a project is what it says it is. You gotta review it and critique it on those terms. Everybody kinda now is criticizing from their own hip pocket and that sort of not the way it should be done. There's rules to criticism like there's rules to driving.
QUINT: WHAT ARE SOME OF YOUR FAVORITE OF THE CLASSIC HORROR FLICKS?
ROBERT ENGLUND: My whole experience with the classics stage... I was very, very young and I saw them all on TV first, but this was when TV was black and white. I mean, that's how old I am. This is black and white television in the late '50s, I'm probably 7 or 8 years old and there was only 3 networks then. ABC, NBC and CBS. The late night television... the movies were unedited because they needed to fill this huge block of time to sell washing machines and used cars, right? So, we would have these things called Million Dollar Movie. I'm sure every town had 'em. I'm sure they had it in Austin. I'm sure they had it Dallas and Houston, these old movies on late at night or in the afternoon.
Of course, in 1959 a 1939 movie is only 20 years old. It would be like us seeing a movie made in the '70s now. I remember staying up, talking my mother into it... All the boys in my 3rd grade class had decided we had to see this movie... We heard it was going to be on and we thought it was going to be so cool. We had these dog-eared copies of Famous Monsters Magazine, by Forey Ackerman, and our old copy of MAD Magazine and our Life in Pictures History of WW2 with the Holocaust photos. My friend spent the night at my house and my mother let us go in the den at 11 o'clock at night and turn in CBS and we watched Frankenstein. It was the unedited Frankenstein and it freaked me out. I mean, it really captivated me.
I also saw King Kong around the same time and I remember being obsessed with the sequence where King Kong was shaking the sailors off the log over the crevasse, where they're falling and screaming. They catch the giant cobwebs and they scream down. They were very blood-curdling screams and I was a 3rd grader and this was a 3rd grader back in the late '50s, much less jaded than a 3rd grader today who watches Rs. Those images really stuck with me. I just remember over and over and over again trying to draw Frankenstein. I was obsessed on the sequence where he hangs the hunchback on that hook. And I used to draw those stairs coming down into the doctor's lab. I loved that.
There was also just the great kinda matinee movies of back then. Films like Forbidden Planet and the hardcore horror that would sneak in then. I remember Horrors of the Black Museum. It was a great little gem. We all went to somebody's birthday party and the mothers would drop us off in a big, giant station wagon to see a matinee and we'd go in and get our Chico's Bon-Bons and Peanut Butter Cups and sit there and watch Horrors of the Black Museum, which was sort of a precursor to the saturated color Hammer films.
So, I loved all that stuff and then at some point right after high school, in the University I became sort of a hippie classical theatre snob. So, I sublimated and buried all that stuff way down deep and I started falling in love with Alan Bates and Peter O'Toole and the English New Wave and the French New Wave and I became a bit of a snob. The rest were sort suppressed for a while. It didn't really activate itself until after V and early Nightmare where I thought it was incumbent on myself to refamiliarize myself with the current horror scene and what was going on.
I also had accidentally discovered Dario Argento and people like that. I'm an Anglo-phile because of my time studying in England, I also have this kind of a hard-on for the Hammer films because I just loved all those actors like Michael Gough, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and everyone that was running around in all those movies. I sorta had a background in that. There was a huge gap for a while. I kinda remember when I first got back into it... At some point in the '70s I lived in Hollywood and there were some great bargain matinees and I remember seeing Asylum. I went to see it for Patrick Magee, who was in A Clockwork Orange and also a film from my snob days that I loved called The Assassination and Persecution of Jean-Paul Marat which we called Marat/Sade, the Peter Brook film. So, I went to go see it for the actor and it was just a great little horror movie that I loved.
QUINT: HOW CREEPY IS THAT FLICK? THE MOVING BODY PARTS WRAPPED IN PAPER BAGS STILL FREAK ME OUT!
ROBERT ENGLUND: Oh yeah! Really good stuff! So, my heart kinda opened up to it again and it was always easy to access out here. I don't know if they did this where you were, but the ad campaign for Rosemary's Baby was phenomenally slick and clever. It was stenciled baby carriages all over the sidewalks of LA and underneath it, in graffiti typeface it said, "Pray for Rosemary's Baby." It just said pray for the baby or pray for Rosemary. This was like months before the movie came out. So, that was sorta the time I rediscovered my horror roots and took it seriously again and gave it the respect that it deserves. By then my mother had thrown out all my issues of Famous Monsters Magazine.
QUINT: YEAH, THAT'D COST YOU A SMALL FORTUNE TO RECOLLECT TODAY.
ROBERT ENGLUND: Aw yeah, if I had them back... And my MAD Magazines... Oh my God! And my Blackhawk Magazines, Blackhawk Comic Books... There's a movie that should be made! John Travolta in Blackhawk! Let's go for it! Some rich bitch in Austin will do it! (laughs)
QUINT: GOTTA BACKTRACK A BIT... WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST BIG BREAK INTO THE BUSINESS? YOU SAID YOU DID SOME THEATER, DID THAT...
ROBERT ENGLUND: My big movie break... I was a successful stage actor... What happened was I was such a pure artist when I was a theater actor I was so good at it... I had been doing theater off and on since I was 12 years old and I get it. I mean, every time I do a movie I still learn something and I still can't watch myself on film because I just want to change it. It's there forever, but that's also what's fun about it. You know... just the little things, too... Like you'll see a scene and you may not like yourself, but you realize you saved the director $100,000 that day 'cause you got a huge scene right and they were rushing you and you got a scene right and you did it perfect and there were 5 elements in the shot and they imposed these elements at the last minute, blah-blah-blah.
So, you have that in your heart and you know that's part of the fun of it or the challenge of just constantly learning about film acting. For a long time you were afraid to do any acting in film, you just behaved. Now, in the tradition of guys like Gary Oldman and guys like Tim Roth... I like to act again on film, you know. I think it's time to start acting on film again in the tradition of Dennis Hopper and not be afraid to act. I'm getting kind of bored with naturalism. Now it's becoming more like soap opera acting. What people call real now, which is everybody whispering and not interrupting each other is not real at all, it's just a style we call real or a substitution for being naturalistic, but it's not. I think Gary Oldman and Tim Roth and Dennis Hopper are more real than a lot of the guys sitting around and talking real whispery and slow now. I see people in real life interrupting each other and yelling and talking over each other and I think that's probably more what reality is like... What is the question again, because I'm digressing...
QUINT: THIS IS GOOD, TOO, SO YOU DON'T HAVE TO STOP, BUT IT WAS ABOUT YOUR FIRST...
ROBERT ENGLUND: There was something I was going to tell you... Oh, my first break after the theater... What happened was I was pure artist at theater and I got my feelings hurt one year doing some theater in the mid-west, in Detroit, I had done a whole season and I was promised a role and I didn't get it and there was sexual politics involved... So, I was watching TV one night, getting drunk on wine, and I realized that all my buddies from California were working for Roger Corman. The movie I was watching just happened to be Boxcar Bertha, which happened to be directed by Martin Scorsese. I had friends that knew Barbara Hershey and I had friends that worked on that movie as assistant directors and actors.
I saw all their names right after Dick Cavett one night, on the late show, with my glass of wine and my marijuana joint and I said I'm gonna go back to LA and knock this snob stuff off. What I did was I came out and I rediscovered the American cinema for a year. I tried to save my marriage, I lived down on the beach, by the Santa Monica pier, and I went to all the free movies I could at the Universities and at film festivals. At the film schools I saw everything by Ernst Neubach and I saw everything by Preston Sturges and Howard Hawks and John Ford and I just sorta caught up with American cinema, so I could learn to love it as much as I loved theater. Shakespeare, Peter Brook, Ingmar Bergman, Sam Shepard and Jean Jeunet... I wanted to love movies and the history of movies as much as I loved theater and the history of theater.
Then I went on my first audition. I had been doing The Matchmaker back east, which is Hello Dolly! without music and the lady that had been playing Dolly brought her agent from Hollywood to see the production and he signed me on the spot. I was sorta stealing the show. So, when I came out to Hollywood, I had this agent and he sent me on my first interview, then I had my first starring role in Buster and Billie, which was a big success. It was a Jan-Michael Vincent movie. People forget, but he was huge then. He had just done a movie, I think called The World's Greatest Athlete and he had just done a real famous TV movie called Tribes where they shaved his head on camera. It was about bootcamp and going to Vietnam with Darren McGavin.
So, he was a huge, huge star and this movie was a hit. Wonderful little movie by Dan Petrie shot by one of Fellini's cameramen and they made it for nothing with the crew of Sugarland Express. They had just finished working with Spielberg and then they came and did our movie in Georgia from Texas. They shot Sugarland right near where you are, then they all jumped in their cars with all their equipment and drove to Statesboro, Georgia, which is where the Almond Brothers lived, and we shot out movie there.
Our movie became a big hit. It made a lot of money and they bought all of the Fox Theaters... they did this by a guy named Ted Mann and if you come to California, you see Mann theaters everywhere... that was bought by profits from Buster and Billie, which was my first starring role. That was 1973. That was the Spring of 1973 and I've been working ever since. I'm gonna go to Europe in about 3 or 4 weeks and do my 60th feature film. Number 60. It's fun. It beats workin', let me tell ya'.
QUINT: THERE'S AN AWESOME THEATER IN AUSTIN CALLED THE ALAMO DRAFTHOUSE CINEMA WHERE THEY'LL SERVE FOOD AND BEER WHILE YOU WATCH MOVIES. THEY'VE HAD THIS FREE MIDNIGHT FILM SERIES (SEAMAN SIDENOTE: EVERY WEDNESDAY NIGHT!) WHERE THEY SHOW A SUPER CULTY OR FORGOTTEN FILM AND WE JUST SAW ONE YOU DID CALLED THE GREAT SMOKEY ROAD BLOCK...
ROBERT ENGLUND: Oh, God! Yeah! There's one of my drive-in movies! Geez... When did that movie it was called Last of the Cowboys. It was a chance to work with Henry Fonda, so of course I said yes!
QUINT: IT WAS REALLY SURPRISING, MY REGULAR GROUP OF BUDDIES AND I SITTING AND WATCHING THE FILM UNFOLD AND WHISPERING TO EACH OTHER, "HEY... ISN'T THAT... FREDDY? IS THAT ROBERT ENGLUND... AS A HITCH-HIKING PREACHER!!!!!"
ROBERT ENGLUND: Yeah. That's my Flannery O'Connor role. You know, I'm kinda proud of that because shortly after that there was a movie made called Wise Blood, a John Huston film and Brad Dourif, who was the original Billy Bibbit in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest with Jack Nicholson. He sorta... He's wonderful in Wise Blood, but I kinda did that character first in Great Smokey Road Block. Looking for Flannery O'Connor, Southern eccentric. And how cute is Susan Sarandon in that movie?
QUINT: SHE'S AWESOME IN IT! I DID SOME DIGGING ON THAT MOVIE AFTER I SAW IT AND FOUND OUT IT'S HER FOLLOW-UP TO ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW.
ROBERT ENGLAND: Yeah. Before her nose job.
QUINT: I WAS NOTICING IN A LOT OF YOUR PRE-NIGHTMARE STUFF, ESPECIALLY WITH STUFF LIKE V, YOU PLAYED MORE OF A GOOD NATURED CHARACTER.
ROBERT ENGLAND: Well, I was also typed as a Southerner for several years in the '70s, then I got typed as a sidekick or a best friend. That would even get, I'd say, nerdy parts. When people worry about me getting typed as Freddy or in horror, I say, "You know, this isn't the first time I've been typecast." It's part of every career. You go through phases. Now, I'm playing kind of like scientists and doctors and professors and things like that. I'm playing academics that are a little creepy or tainted or a little mad. Any actor is typed at some point or another.
