Writer-director Don Coscarelli has been a longtime friend of Ain’t It Cool for as long as I can remember, and I’ve been fortunate enough to have multiple encounters with him over the years between convention appearances and special movie screenings. But if I’m not mistaken, this might be the first time he and I have sat down for a proper interview, and it seems only fitting that it be about the stunning restoration of his most legendary work, 1979’s PHANTASM. When this 4K digital restoration (supervised by J.J. Abrams) first played in front of an audience at last year’s Butt-Numb-a-Thon, I was sitting right next to Coscarelli, and I occasionally snuck a peak at him during the event, and he was positively beaming at the flawless picture and sound quality, right down to the perfectly re-created AVCO Embassy Film logo at the beginning of the film.
Of course, we also know Coscarelli from his work on such films as BEASTMASTER, BUBBA HO-TEP, JOHN DIES AT THE END, and three PHANTASM sequels, as well as being the co-writer (with director David Hartman) of the soon-to-debut-at-Fantastic Fest PHANTASM: RAVAGER, which is said to be the last of the PHANTASM films (and the final film appearance of the The Tall Man himself, the great Angus Scrimm). In many locations around the country, the remastered PHANTASM was part of today’s Art House Theater Day. The screening will also include a never-before-seen sneak peek behind the scenes of PHANTASM: RAVAGER, including a tribute to Angus Scrimm. And then, the weekend of October 7, RAVAGER will play in select cities, often on a double-bill with the remastered PHANTASM, so you should have chances to catch both films.
This particular interview with Coscarelli focuses entirely on the remastering origins and process and was conducted at the SXSW Film Festival the day before the film’s official premiere screening. It’s always great to sit down with Don, whom I just saw again a little over a month ago in Chicago in August for the Flashback Weekend Horror Convention. The story of the PHANTASM restoration is one of the great ones, if only because it’s a great example of a super-fan of a film reaching out to a filmmaker and offering his services and resources to restore a movie in desperate need of it. I’ll let Don tell the rest. Please enjoy my talk with Don Coscarelli…
Capone: Between the time I saw you at BNAT and today, we lost Angus. And hearing that he passed made me all the more grateful that I got to see the film in such beautiful condition and really appreciate his performance. I genuinely didn’t know how to express that loss for such a sweet man.
Don Coscarelli: Listen, I don’t know how to express it myself. When you have a lifelong friend like that, it keeps coming back. He used to love to call and talk on the telephone, and I don’t get those calls anymore from him. It’s a really sad thing. But, he was 89 years old, and, knock on wood, we both live to that ripe old age. And people loved him everywhere he went—the result of living a good, clean life and treating people right.
Capone: So with this restoration, I’m dying to know the story behind how this thing got rolling.
Don Coscarelli: Well, it started when I first met J.J., which I think it was in the summer of 2001. I got a phone call out of the blue from this guy who was a TV producer.
Capone: I was going to say, who was he at that point? Wasn’t he doing “Felicity” then?
DC: Yes, I think he was just finishing “Felicity” then, and he just called up and said he was a self-professed PHANTASM fan, and he wanted to reach out and talk about it. Super nice, friendly guy. So I talked with him, it was a really nice chat. At the time, I was editing BUBBA HO-TEP, and I had this little trailer in my backyard because my wife didn’t want me to have people traipsing into the house, so I had this little construction trailer in the driveway. It was really nice because I would go out there and was editing BUBBA, but I was at that point when I didn’t know what I was doing, which was a lot of the time in this filmmaking stuff, and I was on the phone with J.J. and said, “You seem like a really sharp guy. Would you like to come over and watch this cut that I’m doing of this new movie?” He said, “Oh yeah. Sure.”
So he gave me some notes on editorial, some of them were good and I incorporated them, and then he started working on the “Alias” TV show, but while he was working on “Alias,” and I introduced him to Angus. They got to be friends and then he invited Angus to give a recurring role on “Alias” as this interrogator. For Angus, he loved going from the independent world to working on a big Hollywood TV show, and he and Angus had a friendship. He was so warm and people from the genre became his friends. This past August, J.J. sent him a really nice birthday gift, and it was such a nice thing.
At any rate, from time to time we’d talk or email, I’d submit him a script or two. He’s always been really helpful. He actually tried to help with some distribution of BUBBA HO-TEP at the time, I remember. About a year and a half ago, I get an email. “Don, I wanna screen PHANTASM over at Bad Robot because a lot of people haven't seen it over there, and maybe you could come over and do a Q&A afterwards?” I said, “Okay, that’s good. The only problem is, I’ve got a 35mm print that’s kind of messed up, and I got the standard-def DVD. I don’t have any high-def version of it.” He says, “That’s not right. We have to fix that. I’m going to have my post-production guy call you.”
So he has this guy, his name is Ben Rosenblatt. Ben is just the coolest guy there is, really smart, entrepreneurial. He figured out a way to get it done, which was essentially getting the original camera negative laser scanned to get a really high resolution, brought it over to their work station at Bad Robot, and then every month I would get a phone call, “Come on over. We’re not working on STAR TREK or STAR WARS tonight. We’re going to get to work.” So I would go over and sit with a couple technicians who worked on it, and this just took place over like a year-long period. But consequentially, the usual movie you go in and you get like two or three days to do color correction. Oh my god, we probably got 20 days for color correction. It’s just like, you go in and “Look at all those spots; we’ve got to get rid of those.” And the guy would go back and get rid of them. And then when that was finished, I’m walking through one day and J.J. comes out and goes, “Don, what are you doing about the audio? It needs to be restored.” Fuck, okay. Then he had a guy who was a PHANTASM fan named Robbie who took it into his work station. When he wasn’t working on the big projects, he was working on PHANTASM. When we were at that [BNAT] screening, I was most blown away by how nice the audio was.
Capone: I completely agree. The way the music sounded music was blowing me away, and the soundscape was amazing.
DC: Yeah, the separation.
Capone: I remember looking at you a couple of times, and you were just smiling so big. Talk about that experience.
DC: Well, the thing is for me it is a joy because, like many other filmmakers I’ve talked to, when I watch my movies, all I see are the flaws. There’s good things going all over the screen, but my eye just goes right to the flaw. Now, many of those flaws have been erased [laughs]. So I don’t have bad things to look at.
Capone: Didn’t you say you re-framed some things too?
DC: Yeah, that’s the best part about it. Being a low budget movie, we had to sometimes repurpose footage. For instance, there’s a sequence where Mike leaps over the pit, and the Tall Man falls into the pit, and when he lands on the ground, we cut to a closeup of him. That closeup comes from a completely different scene somewhere. So since it’s a leftover shot, it might not actually be centered up. So now you can blow it up a little and center it and just get every shot composed exactly right with just little tweaks, just a little more Kubrick-esque, centered up. Because for years, I might have a perfectly well-acted close up, but maybe the kids chin is at the bottom of the frame, and now I can go in an adjust that. For me, that’s like a joy.
Capone: In your conversations with J.J. about the film, what did he say specifically that he loved so much about it?
DC: The thing is, I can’t really necessarily remember back to the 2001 conversations. What I do remember more recently is we did have like a progress screening, where we were showing clips from the movie, which is great, because the colorist took the time to go through the old version versus the new version, so you could really see it back and forth. It was pretty stunning. So I just randomly selected a couple of scenes. I just remember him saying “Don, this is a really strange, weird movie.”
Capone: That’s just it, even people who love it, worship it, they don’t understand it at all. Are you okay with that? You have had to have heard that a few times.
DC: Of course. There are sequences I’m still grappling with myself.
Capone: That’s what I was going to ask you. Do you understand it all?
DC: I’m not sure I do, truthfully. You know, living and working in the genre that we inhabit, there are a lot of smart, intelligent, creative people in the greater fanbase, and you know the kind of conversations you get into.
Capone: People explaining your movie to you?
DC: I’m telling you, I’ve just seen people pull these interpretations out of thin air, and I’m going “Yeeeeeah, sure.” Sometimes I’m thinking “God, I wish I could have thought about that before, and I really would have gone in that direction.”
Capone: To me, what I always thought watching it was, you have decided to in some cases forgo logic and plot for the visual. The visual is clearly the most important thing to you, and that’s what movies are. Movies are allowed to be more visually interesting.
DC: And thank god, Steve. I know. But it still worries me because those leaps of faith are scary sometimes, but there might be a moment of inspiration. I always tell this story of when I was working on the first PHANTASM, I was stuck. I didn’t know where I was going and I had one of those foam cups. I finished my drink and I stuck my finger through, and I’m seeing my finger at the bottom of the cup and I’m going, “Oh, severed finger. How can I fit a severed finger into this? And what can it change into?” I lay out a little template. But you’re right, there are those leaps to get to the severed finger, then to get the severed finger to turn into some kind of flying creature. Are people ever going to accept that? And yet I like that imagery, and I just took the risk and went for it. Thank god, people rolled with it.
Capone: Talk about the music for a second. I know there was just a vinyl reissue of the soundtrack. Was that connected to the remastering?
DC: No, not at all. It isn’t. But the score to the movie is so important because the score is not only unsettling, and there was a lot of really strange and interesting instrumentation they would use. The composers at the time, Fred Myrow and Malcolm Seagrave, were super highly classically trained. I mean they were orchestra conductors, but both of them at the time in the ’70s had migrated into producing rock bands. So they were working in both worlds, so when they came to compose the score, there are moments where it’s very orchestral in terms of choral voices and things like that, yet at the same time, there’s a lot of Pink Floyd in it to. So it’s like Vangelis. There were these weird, head trippy bands that we were listening to at the time, so it just gives the movie a thrust and it also unifies it. They were so good at taking those themes and slowly teaching them to the audience as they listened, so at the very end when you want to take that sad turn when Mike’s parents are dead and it can get real sentimental, but it’s still kind of the same theme. Both of them are long deceased, but it was very exciting to be able to give that vinyl to their children. They really were quite happy to see that.
Capone: So bringing it all around, when did you find out that J.J. had a character [Captain Phasma] in THE FORCE AWAKENS whose look was based on something you created?
DC: Somebody sent me a link to the article. It was the first time I ever heard about it.
Capone: So you didn’t hear it from him?
DC: No, no. There was a big gap. I think we started working on it, and then they said, “Oh, it’s going to be great. They’re all going over to England for six months. You can come in whenever you want.” So they all disappeared for a long, long period. Even when they came back, he was working so hard on that movie I rarely saw him.
Capone: What did you think when you saw it? When you found out and finally saw it?
DC: The thing that I though was so bizarre about it is that we had this strange relationship with STAR WARS, because we were halfway shot on PHANTASM when somebody told me they saw some of our characters in a trailer for this new sci-fi movie. What? We had shot an extended sequences with our little brown-headed guys running around. So we went and saw the movie and it was like “Are we going to go back and reshoot all of those? No, we can’t do that.”
And then suddenly I’m remastering the movie and I’m sitting in their screening room and they just finished—they didn’t show it to me—and they’re showing STAR WARS footage on the same screen and now we’re remastering PHANTASM, and now there’s a character from PHANTASM in STAR WARS. It’s a weirdly bizarre synchronicity.
Capone: Talk about watching it with us that first time in December, which I’m sure was heightened only by the fact that you were sitting next to me.
DC: Of course! Actually, that was a great source of comfort because I knew I had one friend here who, no matter what he thought of it, would say something nice to me because he’s a good guy. I’ll tell you a couple of observations. When I walked into the theater, the smell was very interesting, and we’re thinking “That’s why they cycle people out every two hours.”
Capone: It was only about midnight, right?
DC: It had only been about eight hours. But it was different when I got in there. The thing that was so cool was I came around the corner, and Tim [League] had commissioned those drones [with the flying sphere mounted to them, which flew around the theater]. So anyway, Tim and the Alamo staff—and I don’t know if we should even talk about this—wereflying drones indoors right over people’s heads. All I was thinking was liability. Especially when they lost control of one of the drones, and it went into the curtain. It was struggling over there. But the thing that was so weird about it was, somebody had once said to me you should try and make a drone sphere and I’m thinking “Oh, no. I’d never get it to fly. How would it work?” And they lookED really good. They lookED great. But I wouldn’t have the balls.
Capone: Did they give you one?
DC: They said they were going to give me one, but then I heard it had gotten damaged, so I never got it. But one day when I can’t get any more funding for a movie, I’m going to build myself a real drone and just fly it around my backyard.
Capone: Don, always a pleasure
DC: Same here. I’ll probably see you in Chicago soon.
