Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
Obi-Swan sent me this just before my computer went down, and I’m such a dink that I forgot to put it up when I got my service back on Saturday. So now, after much unneeded delay, here’s the second part of his three-part interview with Rob Zombie. Good stuff, so dig in!
If you read my first interview with Rob Zombie, you might get the idea I’m a fan. I love HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES, and I’m an even bigger fan of THE DEVIL’S REJECTS, which easily exceeded any expectations I had going in. Basically, if Rob Zombie’s handing out the Kool-Aid, I’m drinkin’.
REJECTS is an uncompromising horror film or sorts, a gritty account of some very bad people who find themselves against the wall and in the clutches of man who might just be more psychotic than they are. As shockingly sadistic and violent it is, it’s also honest and real. There’s a sadness to REJECTS that haunts me weeks after my initial viewing.
A month after the screening, Rob graciously took time out from post production to indulge me in another round of geek speak. We talked movie music, vigilante justice, and real life “monsters,” among other things. As the discussion continued, we covered subjects including THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, Lee Marvin, and good old-fashioned filmmaking. Has it really gone out of style?
Here’s the second of three parts our conversation:
“OBI” SWAN: I was reading an interview you did, I think it was well before principal photography on REJECTS. In it you said you intended to explain everything about the characters with this next film. If I’m not mistaken, aside from a few new bits and details about the characters, you really haven’t gone out of your way this time to make an answer movie. What lead you away from your original intentions?
ROB ZOMBIE: Well, I mean, I think I answered some things... maybe. Or maybe for some people I didn’t answer anything. But I really don’t think it matters. My favorite types of movies are slice-of-life movies. That’s almost how I see this movie. You just kinda plunk down and, I forget exactly, but I think it takes place over the course of forty-eight hours or something, and you just get this one piece. I hate endless explaining about who everyone is and... it’s just kind of... who cares? It’s boring. You just kind of get caught up in that moment of the story and there it is.
OS: One of the answers I think I got from the movie is that Dr. Satan is just a legend. The events and tone of REJECTS tells me that the final sequences of CORPSES were just in the mind of the character Denise Willis [Erin Daniels].
RZ: The way I look at it, if you go back and watch the end of the movie, once everybody goes underground, we never go back to reality. For me, everything that’s going on after that is just her own insanity. There’s no monster living underground.
OS: Well, without THE DEVIL’S REJECTS, if you had never gone back to the material, it would have been wide open to interpret in any different way.
RZ: Right. Of course. I’m not going to pull a George Lucas here and pretend like, oh yeah, I mapped out this huge mythology twenty-five years ago. When it came time to make this movie I had to make some decisions on what would be what. And in order to make what I felt would be the most effective movie I wanted to ground the entire thing in total reality. So anything that didn’t fit into total reality, I got rid of.
OS: I also liked how you felt free to play around with some of the elements of the first film. And you didn’t feel the need to present them in exactly the same way. For example, the house. The actual “House of 1000 Corpses.” It’s not even the same type of façade as the one in the first film, is it?
RZ: It’s a totally different house in a totally different location. The first house in the first film is kind of a cooler looking house. This house is a much more ordinary looking farmhouse, but the location of the other house is terrible for shooting at. There’s not enough land around it and I wanted to shoot this big scene with all these police cars coming in. I knew that the other location wouldn’t work at all. So that’s why I had to find a new place to shoot it.
OS: I love the freedom you chose to embrace with aspects of the film like that. It seemed you were willing to say, if I feel like changing something, I will.
RZ: I just figured they were two separate films. There’s no sense nit-picking and sticking to a point just for continuity sake. I usually made choices based on what would made the film better. The character that probably mutated the most from the first film is Otis. And I just thought that, given the way I wanted to shoot this film and the vibe of it, the character from the first film would just look... stupid and be laughable. He had to be changed in order to fit into the new world I was creating.
OS: Otis’s t-shirt from CORPSES... “Burn this flag”... given the time and place, what are Otis’s politics?
RZ: Oh! It’s kind of funny, because that’s a pro-American shirt, but the wardrobe person fucked it up. It’s supposed to say, “Try burning this flag,” but they printed a shirt that just said, “Burn this flag.” So it came across kind of backwards.
OS: I don’t think the message was lost. But what do you suppose Otis’s politics are?
RZ: I would say his politics are pretty sketchy.
OS: Does he vote? Did he go to Vietnam?
RZ: I never really thought about that, but he definitely seems like he’s seen some action. He obviously stole his M-16 from active duty and took it home with him.
OS: Is Captain Spaulding Baby’s father?
RZ: Yeah.
OS: Is he also then the same character that’s referred to in CORPSES as Earl, the guy that tried to set fire to the house and burned Tiny?
RZ: No, no, no (Laughs). This is a funny thing. This is sort of how I made up for the fact that you can only put so much into one movie. On the website I wrote these detailed biographies of each character explaining everything. Because I figured the only people really that concerned with the information would go to the website.
OS: Not that I’ve lost any sleep over this one particular question. It’s just that I was watching it last night and that question was rolling around in my brain.
RZ: Captain Spaulding is... let me try and remember... is only Baby’s father, but not Tiny’s father. Tiny was burned by another one of Mother Firefly’s boyfriends before Spaulding came into the picture.
OS: And Otis is..?
RZ: Otis is like a drifter that just came in. He isn’t related to anybody.
OS: Were these biographies just for the HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES website?
RZ: No, they’re on THE DEVIL’S REJECTS website.
OS: Oh, okay. I guess I should have done a more thorough job researching the REJECTS site.
RZ: (Laughs) I mean, it’s just some crazy... detailed... insanity.
OS: Last night I had a friend over and we watched a double-feature of HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES and THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE PART 2. The first two CHAIN SAW films are a specific example of a filmmaker who felt totally free to do quite a bit of reinvention the second time out. There are some elements of CORPSES that are reminiscent of CHAIN SAW 2, and I wonder what feelings you have about Tobe Hooper’s choices with his sequel. He really went out there in reinvented much of the SAW mythology.
RZ: (Long pause) It’s funny. He did sort of kind the exact opposite of what I did. His first film is very real and his second film becomes more cartoonish. My first film is more cartoonish and my second film became real. They’re exactly the opposite. I know as a fan it can be upsetting because when CHAIN SAW 2 came out and I went to see it the day it opened, I went expecting to pick up where I left off with the other film. And I was kind of shocked to see that the tone was lighter and a lot goofier... campier than the first film.
OS: I hadn’t put that together, that you guys are doing the exact same thing but reversed.
RZ: I never thought of it until the second you said it, either. It wasn’t like a conscious thing. I just, in general, think that sequels are a tricky game. And for me to even want to do this movie, I didn’t want to make the same movie again at all. So that’s why in order for me to even be inspired to make another movie with these characters, I had to dig deeper and make them real people you’d want to watch. Not just walking catch-phrases. That’s why Captain Spaulding... there’s a brief moment of him with the clown makeup, and I was like, we gotta get rid of that, because he’s never gonna be a real character in any moment of this movie if he’s the horror icon that’s on t-shirts and Bobbleheads.
OS: You’re referring to the sequence with P.J. Soles?
RZ: Yeah.
OS: That’s a great scene, and you do really walk a fine line with the character.
RZ: That scene is right on the edge. And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that there’s a guy in clown makeup. It’s tricky. There’s also two sort of Spauldings when you watch the movies. In the first film, he’s only ever being phony for people. You never see him interact with anyone as his real person. He’s always this clown guy who’s trying to trick people or fuck with people. And that’s the character that interacts with P.J. Soles. But then any other time when he’s with Baby or Otis he’s the real guy. He’s not the caricature of himself.
OS: I saw my quote on THE DEVIL’S REJECTS site. I thought the interview was good considering I did no preparation. I’m sure you were prepared, though. You’ve probably answered a million questions about the movie by now.
RZ: At that point I hadn’t because no one had seen the movie. So I really hadn’t talked about the movie at all.
OS: In the piece I compared you to Sam Peckinpah. A few days later I finally watched BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA on DVD. And even though they’re not the same movie, I felt that you and Peckinpah were after a lot of the same things. I also just watched a great movie called LADY IN A CAGE. Have you seen it?
RZ: No, I haven’t.
OS: It’s from 1963 and it’s about a woman, played by Olivia de Havilland, who is trapped in an elevator in her house and gets terrorized by a couple homeless people and a gang of drug-addicted, violent juvenile delinquents lead by James Caan. There’s a lot of that movie that I thought might have influenced you.
RZ: I’ve never seen it, but it sounds pretty amazing.
OS: You should check it out. There’s even a sequence in which Caan has a speech that reminds me a lot of Otis’ “I am the devil...” speech in REJECTS.
RZ: That’s interesting. I gotta see that. It’s funny when that happens because people will say, you were obviously influenced by this. And I’ll be like, I’ve never seen that. I don’t even know what you’re talking about.
OS: Some of the other influences I’m picking up, intentional or not, with the Wydell character are guys like Warren Oats, Lee Marvin, Steve McQueen...
RZ: Totally, yeah. Lee Marvin was the point William [Forsythe] and I would always talk about.
OS: I can absolutely see that, but what’s great is Forsythe gives a totally original performance. Not once during the film did I think he was just riffing on Lee Marvin.
RZ: We sort of bonded over our love for Lee Marvin and Robert Mitchum and Robert Shaw. Those rough character actors in a sense, but they were also leading men. You just don’t see that anymore. If you’re a leading man, you’re kind of a pretty boy. You don’t get any more of these rough, bizarre looking characters as leads. Sometimes I wonder if it’s what the audience wants or if it’s what the studios have deemed it’s what the audience wants.
OS: I never got the sense it was just one film you guys were in love with.
RZ: There was never any one particular movie where we were like, oh we want to be that. It’s just that time period, the sense we got from all those movies. Like even if you watch ALICE DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE... it’s the way things play out sometimes. Like when Harvey Keitel kicks in her door. Or like when they’re driving in the car to the Elton John song. There’s just a way that movies used to play out and you don’t see that anymore. And when it came down to shooting or editing I didn’t want to do anything that wouldn’t have been done back then... no tricks, no technology. I wanted to keep it really simple and organic.
OS: This is a movie that could have easily been made in the 70’s... before CG, before the Avid.
RZ: Oh, totally.
OS: I mean, there were a couple tricks with the knife and the truck. If it had been actually made in the 70’s, you would have had to figure out a different way...
RZ: We could have easily done it without that. Most of the CG we did was not really because I wanted to use CG, ‘cause I really didn’t, at all. It was more because it was a time saver. The shooting schedule was so tight that I didn’t have the time to rig practical effects on set, have them not work, and clean up the actors and try it again. That was my biggest problem.
OS: I promise not to harp on your influences any longer during this interview.
RZ: (Laughs). Here are my influences... everything that took place in the 70’s. That’s the best way to put it.
Thanks again to Mr. Zombie for spending his time with me. THE DEVIL’S REJECTS is set for release on July 22. Look for the final installment of my interview coming soon.
Photography: jimevans/dl3
Thanks, man. They’re starting to screen it more and more now, so I’m hoping I’ll get a chance to peek at it soon.
"Moriarty" out.
