Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
Capone sent us the first half of this enjoyable piece a few days ago, and now, as promised, here’s part two.
Hey, Harry. Capone in Chicago here with the second part of my interview with the lovely and talented Robert Englund, who has lots to say on many a subject. And as you may have noticed, his statements in the first part of my interview with him last week concerning NBC doing a follow-up to its landmark V mini series appear to be right on the money. One last reminder that Englund will be appearing, along with many other horror and sci-fi legends, at Flashback Weekend taking place in the Chicago area (near O’Hare) June 13 to 15. Go to www.FlashbackWeekend.com for all the details on special guests, buying tickets, etc. I’ll be emceeing parts of the event, including the Q&A with Robert Englund before a screening of NEW NIGHTMARE. But now, here’s Mr. Englund, Part 2.
Capone: You mentioned Chuck Russell and Renny Harlin earlier. The NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET sequels were something of a launch pad for directors and screenwriters, actors, special effects teams.
Robert Englund: Even the cameramen, some of whom are the guys shooting CSI. We had special effects guys that worked for us for almost no money. Then they’d go and work for ILM or on a Stanley Kubrick film for 10 times the money. Up until the sixth film (FREDDY’S DEAD: THE FINAL NIGHTMARE), I’d worked with the same crew. I remember guys who were gofers that became assistant cameramen. We also had directors like Stephen Hopkins, who went on to direct GHOST AND THE DARKNESS and PREDATOR 2 [and is currently filming THE LIFE AND DEATH OF PETER SELLARS]. Chuck Russell went on to do THE MASK [and THE SCORPION KING]. Wes Craven changed horror twice in my lifetime, completely. Renny Harlin went on to become one of the premiere action directors [DIE HARD 2, CLIFFHANGER].
Capone: A lot of fans hold the third film - NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 3: THE DREAM WARRIORS - in a special place in their hearts.
R.E.: I’ve noticed that too. Three and four make a great drive-in, get-a-pizza-and-a-six-pack double feature. Chuck really put a lot of bang for the buck in that one. It’s a great cast and some seminal moments. I realize that Part 2 violated some of the Freddy rules, but it was huge in Europe because it had this sort of gay subplot to it, and they picked up on that and really liked that for some reason.
Horror, like action, is a universal language. A couple years ago I made a film called URBAN LEGEND with an incredible cast, including Alicia Witt, Jared Leto, Rebecca Gayheart, Tara Reid, John Neville, [also, Tara Reid, Joshua Jackson, Michael Rosenbaum, Natasha Gregson Wagner, Loretta Levine] but nobody knew who those people were in Europe, so I had to go over there to do publicity. And URBAN LEGEND was huge in Europe, even though I’m only a featured player in it. It was right about the time the SCREAM phenomenon started, so it was all about timing.
Capone: People I’ve spoken to about NIGHTMARE 3 say they like it because the young people in the film figure out how Freddy’s world works and were able to use that to defeat Freddy.
R.E.: And all the kids in that film are damaged, they have circles under their eyes, almost like heroin chic. Brittney Murphy would have been in that film if she’d been old enough. They’re all strung out and it added a subliminal tension.
Capone: What did Renny Harlin add to that film?
R.E.: Renny’s NIGHTMARE 4 was considered sort of the MTV entry in the series, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. It brought it into the 21st century with all of the bells and whistles. Renny was great. He’s a big giant guy, and he could beat you up with the action scenes - not as bad as Ronny Yu did in FREDDY VS. JASON - but he could go anywhere you could go. When he does these movies, you have to commit yourself because he’ll take it to the limit. He’ll get in the mud, the gutter, the sewer, or he’s hanging upside down with you. I remember one night when I was exhausted. I had just finished another movie, and I went right into NIGHTMARE 4. It wasn’t even at a good fighting weight. We were way out deep in the Valley and it was summer, but it was like 42 degrees at night. I was aching, cold to the bone. And Renny got into the director’s chair next to me, threw a blanket over me, and about week into the movie, he showed me a rough cut of a sequence we’d worked on - the junk yard sequence - and by seeing his MTV-style rough cut, I literally got my second wind. I remember seeing it and coming up with 10 more ideas for takes, because I saw how good he was. His work released my imagination.
Capone: The ELM STREET films continued an a fairly steady pace until a three-year break that ended in 1994 with Wes Craven returning as director in NEW NIGHTMARE. Who instigated Wes’s return and that great storyline that seemed to be the inspiration for the self-referential humor of SCREAM?
R.E.: Wes and New Line had had some falling out or contractual differences or something, but they kissed and made up. But the self-referential stuff was pre-SCREAM and it addressed in a lot of ways what had happen to the horror movie genre. He came up the concept. It wasn’t a big hit when it first came out, but people have rediscovered it in recent years, post-SCREAM, and many people consider it the best of all of them. It’s really fun to watch Part 1 and then watch NEW NIGHTMARE together. We got back a lot of the cast. It’s really fun. [With an introduction and Q&A with Robert preceding, NEW NIGHTMARE will actually be screened at Flashback Weekend at his request.]
Capone: There was a time during the ELM STREET series when you squeezed in two films that I remember well: a Jack the Ripper-style PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (1989) and the film you directed 976-EVIL.
R.E.: I knew Dwight Little, the director, who was an interesting director, and [lead actress] Jill Schoelen had just done THE STEPFATHER. Dwight Little and I wanted to do that film as sort of an homage to the Hammer films with real saturated color. I think a lot of people were thinking of PHANTOM in a Michael Crawford singing and dancing way, but we wanted some real horror, down and dirty. To make it more acceptable, we turned it into that Jack the Ripper thing in the opera. We shot it in Budapest, and Dwight was terrific. We had budget constraints because of studio problems, so we ended up using a lot of the sets from the Roger Daltry/Raul Julia THREE PENNY OPERA. Our make-up guy was Kevin Yagher, who was a genius; he’s gone on to do the special effects for SLEEPY HOLLOW.
Capone: I remember it primarily because of how bloody it was.
R.E.: Oh yeah, it’s real Hammer. And our version has a few scenes in it that are in the original novel. There’s a scene with rats. And the idea of him sewing of his face on. In the original story, he really does have to do that to take care of himself. In the book, he uses thread and make up.
Capone: And it was around that same time that you directed 976-EVIL.
R.E.: Yeah, my partner Rhet Topham was hanging out with a kid named Brian Helgeland. I have fond memories of making that movie, but it was taken away from me in post-production. I turned in my cut my rough cut, and the distributor mistook it for my director’s cut. I just wanted to assemble everything I shot and whittle it down from there. They panicked and thought I’d turned in a huge, long version. I made the argument that a horror movie didn’t need to have the same length as an action film or a comedy. I had a great producer on that film who got very ill during post-production, and I inherited another producer who was working on another project and just wanted to get mine done, and he wound up cutting a lot. There’s still some terrific, over-the-top moments with Sandy Dennis. Again we used Kevin Yagher for make-up on Stephen Geoffrey’s character. I think it’s a very creepy, weird film. There are still some sequences that stay in my mind, like the scene with spiders, but a lot of what I was proud of while making the film fell by the way side in post-production. I choreographed a great love scene to a song by Simply Red called “Holding Back the Years,” what I thought was a really hot love scene with a girl on top wearing nothing but her boyfriend’s motorcycle jacket. And they could have had that song for nothing at the time. Soon after, it became the Number 1 song in the world. Stories missed opportunities like that are all over Hollywood, but when you’re a part of them, it bothers you more.
Capone: Being an old theatre actor, you must have been excited to work with Sandy Dennis on one of her last films.
R.E.: And I’m also a big fan of Mike Nichols’s WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? And I’m also a big fan of another movie she did called UP THE DOWN STAIRCASE. It was such an honor to work with her, and she really encouraged me to have fun with the film and her character. I wanted her to be a little bit Vivian Leigh with it, and she got onboard. I didn’t know at the time that she was ill. I wanted to work with Sandy or Lois Smith, who was just in MINORITY REPORT as the gardener woman. Lois had a conflict, so we used Sandy, and I’m so glad we did. It was such an honor to know her. There’s a scene where I had to throw dead fish at her from a ladder to get the effect I was looking for, and it was unbelievable to me that I was doing this to such an Oscar-winning actress. She’s a link to a past that I loved so much. She coined a certain type of neurotic, damaged woman role. Today, damaged is cute, although I like the way Brittney Murphy does it sometimes.
Capone: You mentioned URBAN LEGEND earlier. Let’s talk about your work in the 1990s. NEW NIGHTMARE was released in 1994. What was your plan of attack after Freddy apparently really was dead?
R.E.: I worked under Wes Craven’s production arm again in WISHMASTER. Those are my old makeup guys who worked on all of the NIGHTMARE OF ELM STREET movies in some capacity, including [WISHMASTER director] Robert Kurtzman. They are a crack team of effects artists and they do everything. They’re all smart and funny. I did that movie more for them than for Wes. It’s almost always fun working with friends on such an original project like that.
Capone: On that film, you worked with Kane Hodder, who played Jason in the most recent batch of FRIDAY THE 13TH films. Some fans are vocally bothered by the fact that he did not participate in FREDDY VS. JASON. I don’t want to dwell on this, but you’ve talked about it before.
R.E.: Here’s what I know, and it should be clear that it was nothing personal about Kane. [FREDDY VS. JASON director] Ronny Yu met with Kane as a courtesy and respect. I met Ronny way before any of this happened. I’ve been attached to this project for quite a while. What I believe happened is that Ronny had seen a graphic comic book or illustration or storyboard of a huge, oversized Jason, exaggerated height. And this was in his brain when he thought of Jason, this larger than life thing. And Kane is big, but he’s real size. But directors are like kids with new train set, they want the set up to be a certain way, and Ronny probably had shot ideas of shots with the camera way way up in the air and being able to still see Jason. There’s a scene of a rave in a corn field that is exactly what I’m talking about. It’s a classic NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET ingredient: take something from the youth culture [in Freddy voice] “and jam it down their little cocksucking throats!” We’ve already taken sex away from you, now we’ll take away your raves. It’s my favorite sequence in the film, and I’m not even in it.
Capone: I’ve seen stills of Jason in the corn field.
R.E.: It’s classic.
Capone: I was excited to see Ronnie Yu’s name attached to the project. He breathed some much-needed life into the CHILD’S PLAY franchise with BRIDE OF CHUCKY.
R.E.: I loved it too. I also really liked his THE BRIDE WITH WHITE HAIR. Ronny is terrific. For a while, I think Guillermo del Toro was attached to FREDDY VS. JASON but he went on to do BLADE 2 instead, which has some of greatest make-up effects I’ve ever seen. Those unhinged jaws are phenomenal.
Capone: What did it take for you to get back into another Freddy movie?
R.E.: It was rough in the late 80s. I was acting, I was directing, I had a Freddy T.V. series for a while. So I was pretty beat up, but I’m always beat up after doing an ELM STREET film. In FREDDY VS. JASON, we have an actress, Kelly Rowland, who had two Number 1 songs when we were filming, and she had a schedule that forced us to change our schedule several times. We were shooting in Vancouver and it got real cold up there, and we did a month of nights, including three 24-hour days. So I was pretty beat up during the shoot. I did all my own underwater stuff, some of the flying, some fire stuff. And what’s really hard is the repetition. The first two or three times is fine, but when they don’t get what they need, you have to do it five or six times. I had a great double for a lot of the Hong Kong wire work, but I still did so much of it.
The makeup was also different. Usually it takes me only about 45 minutes to get it off, but the makeup is different for the underwater work and it took 2 or more hours to it off. It takes 4 hours to put it on, working 12 to 14 hours; it adds up.
Capone: Weren’t there a lot of drafts of the FREDDY VS. JASON script?
R.E.: There were, but I wasn’t privy to many of them. I know about one with sort of a double ending.
Capone: So when did you actually get your script?
R.E.: The start of 2002. I was signed, sealed, and delivered to the project since about 2000. It was supposed to be a summer 2000 film originally - FREDDY 2000!! or something like that. The delays weren’t with the script though; it was locking down a director. When Michael DeLuca left New Line, I think people wanted to put their own personal stamp on the script; they wanted to win a fight on it that they’d lost before. You have to have certain standard elements from both film series in this one as well as whatever new things you want to add, especially in the field of technology.
Capone: I’ve heard the film begins in hell. Is that still true?
R.E.: It used to end in hell, but it doesn’t anymore. Of course, I wanted us to run into Hitler and Osama Bin Laden in hell. But that was actually the ending until we got on location in September 2002. Now there’s a great one-two-three punch ending. It’s kind of credible and it fakes you out again and again. We don’t have the budgets that some of the films coming out this summer have, but we are fun, we are popcorn in the best sense of a summer. For all of the fans of Freddy and Jason and of that kind of fun, you will love it. We get into the backstories a bit of both characters. We want to remind the old fans why they fell for these series in the first place, maybe so some things we couldn’t show when they began their run.
Capone: There have already been some test-screening reviews that were very positive.
R.E.: You know, I’m still looping the film, and when I hit certain scenes there’s a big message on the screen that says “Special Effects Go Here,” so I’m not exactly sure what’s being reviewed. But I’m glad to hear the word is good. One thing you might want to mention is that Katharine Isabelle from GINGER SNAPS and INSOMNIA is in this film. GINGER SNAPS is a great film. It’s got a lot of what made BUFFY great in it.
Capone: Is it true you’ve made a remake of Herschell Gordon Lewis’s 2000 MANIACS?
R.E.: That’s not done yet actually. It’s a bunch of great people involved. The first time I was available to do it, they had a terrible fire and it burned the back lot where we were going to shoot. So by the time, they were ready to shoot again, I was doing FREDDY VS. JASON. Now I guess we have to find a time when we can all do it. It’s by far the most politically incorrect film I’ve ever read. It’s like LI’L ABNER meets JACKASS. No one survives the movie. And I play this kind of psychotic Col. Sanders from Hell. It’s a fun part for me.
Capone: Is it a remake, though?
R.E.: It’s more of a continuation of the same concept, that Brigadoon concept. Kids are going on summer break, they get lost, and they hit this southern town that was burned to the ground by Gen. Sherman during the Civil War, but once every 10 years or so, it comes back the way it was. And the inhabitants trap people like sacrificial lambs. It’s going to be so much cheesy fun, southern red neck classic over-the-top fun. Almost cartoony. I told the maker they should get a little more money and hire a really great stunt guy, because most of the deaths are by these Jackass-esque stunts.
Capone: What’s the last film you saw that really scared you?
R.E.: I really liked the first hour of JEEPERS CREEPERS. I loved all that stuff in the car and the first time you see the monster. I didn’t want it to become as populated as it became. There came a point when the brother and sister ended up in that diner, and it became too many people. I loved it when it was the two of them. They also might have shown too much of the creature too soon, but I’m hardly one to talk, right?
That’s all, folks. I’ll give you my report on the Flashback Weekend event next week hopefully.
Capone
Is it just me, or does Robert England seem like he’s reeeeeeeeeeally into Brittany Murphy?
As always, great work, Capone. Thanks.
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