Black Sheep: Jonathan King interview

Jonathan King's Black Sheep was the opening film at the Film4 FrightFest last year, and it was, in a word, fan-fucking-tastic. Funny and scary in just the right amounts, it was clever and fast-paced and silly and probably one of the best cinema experiences I've ever had. If you didn't see it on its (limited) cinema run, you missed out. But it'll be out on DVD soon, so don't worry too much. In the meantime, you can read this - I got my fangirl on talking to Mr King about the movie...

SD: The obvious question - why sheep? Did you have a bad experience with a sheep at any point in your life? D'you think there are any other farmyard animals who are ripe for a horror movie makeover?

JK: Why sheep? Because that's always been pretty much New Zealand's only claim to fame (besides the All Blacks and Lord of the Rings -- and there's already a film of the latter and I certainly wasn't going to make a film about the former!). Wherever you go in the world as a New Zealander people ask you about one of those three things. The day my subconscious put together sheep and the splatter and horror movies I grew up on I smiled, and knew that it was a combination that would work.

SD: People have compared Black Sheep to early Peter Jackson movies; how do you feel about that comparison?

JK: Well, it's fine by me! I liked Bad Taste and Braindead very much when I saw them. I was equally influenced by things like The Evil Dead, Dawn of the Dead and American Werewolf in London ... but I'm inspired by filmmakers like Peter Jackson (and Sam Raimi) who were able to start with fun horrors movies and keep widening the envelope of what they're doing to include some fantastic (and very successful) films.

SD: The special effects in Black Sheep by Weta Workshops are fantastic - do you prefer that kind of style to CGI gore?

JK: For this kind of film, I certainly do. I would by lying if I said budget wasn't a factor in the approach we chose, but having gone the practical route, I do think it's best for the film. Pretty much everything you see in Black Sheep is something that happened in front of the camera rather than on a computer. We had the advantage of digital technology to remove rods, combine elements together or enhance the odd moment -- but I think audiences have responded to an old-fashioned approach to our creatures and gore. Even if you know it's not real, you know it was something we made and really filmed ...

SD: Black Sheep mocks various people fairly equally - from the evil scientist types to the rabid animal-welfare guys - what's your actual feeling on genetic modification etc?

JK: Well, I think kinda where the film ends up sitting on the debate would be something like my own views ... but the film is primarily entertainment, rather than a enviro-political statement. Like you say, the film is pretty even-handed in finding humour in all sides of the debate: I find extremists of all colours funny.

SD: There are some very heated debates going on in the IMDB message boards for the film - do you follow online reviews/forums at all? Isn't it tempting to wade in?

JK: I think anyone who posts to a message board probably has extreme opinions anyway ... and it's a lot easier to say you hate something and that anyone who disagrees with you is a moron than it is to say something real. For everyone of those, someone rebuts it ... and round and round it goes. I don't think I'd be adding anything to join in. Listening to audiences in a dozen different countries laugh, scream and cheer at the film as been a much more direct and real connection with the public for me.

SD: A lot of critics didn't seem to get Black Sheep for one reason or another - d'you think there's some genre snobbery going on there?

JK: Well, I'm amazed how many did get it in exactly the spirit it's intended -- having esteemed journals like The New Yorker, Time Magazine, Salon and Time Out all seeming to enjoy it tremendously was beyond my hopes and expectations for the film. I think if there is genre snobbery, it's from hardcore horror audiences who may not have found it mean or stoopid enough for today's tastes. People who aren't sure if it's their cup of tea or not often seem to come out enjoying it more!

SD: You're obviously a fan of American Werewolf in London; are you a horror fan in general? Will you be making more horror films (or films with horror elements; Black Sheep obviously wasn't a straight horror film) in future? What's your next project going to be?

JK: Yeah, I do love horror films ... but I'm not a fan of the recent spate of torture porn. I would love to make a scarier film than Black Sheep one day; I'd love to make something as eerie and elegant as I Walked With A Zombie, as atmospheric as (the original) The Haunting or as visceral as The Thing. My next film is a scary and dark fantasy adventure called Under the Mountain -- based on a book, it's influenced equally by things like The Thing and Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Amblin films of the 80s like ET and Poltergeist.

Originally published at Den of Geek.

8 things about Cloverfield

Cloverfield finally opens in the UK tonight. Hurrah! If I had my way, everyone I know, and everyone I've ever met in my entire life, would go and see it, and love it as much as I do. I'm definitely going to go and see it again while it's on its theatrical run here; probably more than once. I'm just that obsessive.

Anyway, to mark the occasion, I'm going to sum up some of the more interesting things director Matt Reeves said at the Cloverfield press conference last week:

# Those echoes of 9/11 are intentional

"It's a horror movie of its time in the way that Godzilla was a reaction to the anxieties of that time - post-Hiroshima/Nagasaki. We felt that, in doing a monster movie for our country and our time, it would definitely be reflective of the anxieties we all feel since 9/11 and so that was definitely something we were aware of from the beginning. Although, at the end of the day, we were aware that what we were making was a fantasy. I think that all really interesting genre films tend to reflect the anxieties of the time in which they were made – horror films and sci-fi films reflect our deep-seated fears and are often very reflective of the time in which they were made."

# Cloverfield was the first movie to put out a trailer without a title on it.

"We went to the MPAA, who are the people who rate trailers and determine whether or not it's suitable for an audience, and we said "We want to talk to you about not putting a title on. What are your regulations regarding that?" And they said "Regulations? No-one's ever done a teaser trailer or trailer without a title." They're advertising. It's like putting out a commercial without actually what the thing is."

# It's really more about the characters than the monster.

"The idea was to take something completely outrageous, something that was enormous, but do it from a very intimate point of view, and a very naturalistic point of view. Even though it was a visual effects movie and it had a 350ft tall monster that was going to destroy New York, it was also going to be from the point of view of one of the people who would be running down the street in a Godzilla movie. I mean, in a Godzilla movie, all those screaming people, one of those people would have a Handicam and they'd make this movie. This isn't about the president who puts in the call to the military and says "We're going to take this strike and take out the monster"; it's about people and the experience of it."

# But the monster's fun too. And there are lots of elements of its design that you won't even see in the movie.

"The monster was designed by a man named Neville Page who's a creature designer. He's just amazing. There are actually things that he designed that are part of the monster that we never got to use. He had these feeding tubes which were just wild - he would come up with these crazy ideas that were just amazing and very creepy. Within the course of the movie, we could only reveal certain aspects of it, so that never got released."

# And another thing about the 350ft monster that destroyed New York - it's only a baby...

"The secret that we had was that the monster was a baby. Having just been born it was going through separation anxiety and had no idea where its mother was and was freaking out and was in a completely foreign place, didn't understand a thing and that that would be sending it into a kind of infantile rage."

# ... but it's more frightened of you than you are of it.

"The thing that was also frightening to me was the idea that not only was it going through an infantile rage but, because it was suffering from this separation anxiety, it was spooked. It was really afraid. And as the military started shooting at it, I started thinking, like if you were attacked by a swarm of bees for the first time, it wouldn't necessarily kill you but you'd be terrified, you'd be like, "What are these things doing?!" And for me there's nothing scarier than thinking of something that big that's spooked. Like if you're at the circus and suddenly the elephants are spooked, you don't want to be anywhere near that, you'll be crushed."

# The viral marketing got out of control.

"We never guessed that there would be this level of response so early. In fact, we all turned to each other and said, "This is building so fast, we better shut up. I don't think we should say anything for a while because if we do people will be incredibly sick of us by the time the movie comes out.

"We had people at Bad Robot who had been working on some of the creative side stories that do connect in because they did have the script and they did know all the conversations we had about the sources of things so there is some viral stuff that does connect into us, but a lot of the stuff didn't have anything to do with us, it was just because people were so interested to make any connection they were making connections to things that didn't have anything to do with us. So the thing started to take on a life of its own, much bigger than we had anticipated."

# Finally - it's not a lion.

"In the teaser trailer, we wanted to let people know that it was a creature of some sort. So we put in some references on the roof, somebody saying "What kind of animal sounds like that?" And I jumped up to the mike to put one last one in, and I said "I saw it, it's alive, it's huge!" Apparently, I speak rather quickly and even played slowly I guess it sounded to some people like I was saying "it's a lion". So there was all this speculation that we were making a giant lion movie. And I thought, "there's no way people think we're making a giant lion movie!"

You can read the full transcript of the press conference at Den of Geek.

The Den of Geek interview: Lloyd Kaufman

Troma Entertainment prides itself on being a truly independent movie studio. Even if you’ve never seen one of their movies, you’ll definitely have seen movies by one of their alumni – people who’ve begun their careers at Troma include James Gunn, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, Eli Roth, and lots and lots of others. Lloyd Kaufman has over thirty movies credited to him as a director, but dozens more that he’s produced, and more than a hundred that he’s appeared in. He’s a busy man, then. I caught up with him briefly in London for Den of Geek:

Your recent MySpace blog mentioned that Troma is about to move into a new building in New York…

Yes, indeed, we have bought a new Troma building; we have renovated it, and it’s going to be a whole new era! It’s in an even crappier neighbourhood and a crappier building, we managed to find an even worse building…

And the neighbours are worse? [The old building was next door to a McDonalds, to which Lloyd attributes the building’s rat infestation]

That’s why we moved! We wanted to get away from McDonalds!

So you’ve checked out the rat situation at the new one?

The area is so unusual, there’s nothing there. Nothing lives. But there is the Museum of the Moving Image, which has rats of a different sort. And there’s two big movie studios very near us, one of which has the name Kaufman, too. So it’d be kind of fun to call our building Kaufman, too. It’d be funny if Robert De Niro was directed to the Kaufman building and it was the Troma building. That’d be great! His first movie was a Troma movie called The Wedding Party directed by Brian De Palma.

Let’s get to why we’re here: you’re one of this year’s Zone Horror Cut competition judges…

Yes, I had the honour of judging last year’s competition and the movies which were submitted were terrific. I’m hoping that this year there will be more sex and violence… er, that the movies will be even better!

What will you be looking for in a winner?

I think, basically, originality. But, you know, horror has traditionally been a way in to a very, very closed and elitist industry. Horror has been the most democratic genre - other than porno, of course, but I have never seen a porno so I wouldn’t know. In terms of the elite and in terms of prestige, horror and comedy ride the back of the bus. But what a great way for young people to break into an industry which is still fairly sexist and racist and elitist! It is an industry controlled by a small number of devil-worshipping international conglomerates. So horror is a way in for young people and if there’s any way I can be a part of democratising our industry, I would like to do it.

For Cut, the movies must be 2 minutes long, or thereabouts, and they must have references to what a warm and sensitive person Lloyd Kaufman is – be sure to put that in the rules, that’s very important!

[At this point, a member of the Groucho’s staff asks us to move into another room.]

So what’s going on with Poultrygeist now?

Poultrygeist had a test screening in Peckham, and since they didn’t burn the theatre down, and because the audience liked it so much, there’s going to be a tour. It’ll start in Northhampton, and then go to, I guess, mostly university towns, and then presumably end up back here, at the Prince Charles. The test was very successful, so the film will be hatching around May, maybe. Something like that.

Do you still feel it’s the best movie Troma’s made?

I would say so, yeah. It’s the most daring, that’s for sure, it’s the most intelligent, too, I think. And it’s got singing and dancing, which is great. The film clearly is not going to be for everybody, but our fans will love it, and I think if intelligent people come and see it, they will find that they learn a lot and have a very entertaining 95 minutes.

Which is what matters, at the end of the day.

Indeed, yeah, it’s about entertainment. But also, it has very provocative themes. I’m not a big fan of fast food, but the satire is not only about fast food, it’s also about the millionaire phoney left-wing people too, it satirises the corporate side as well as the phoney Al Gore types who are using the populist movement to further their own millions of dollars. Even though it’s full of chicken Indian zombies and explosive diarrhoea and people getting their faces grinded off in the meat slicer, the movie has a lot of very, very interesting points to make. And that’s why Troma’s been around for 35 years.

Warner Brothers choosing to go Blu-ray exclusive was just big news, but more importantly – which way is Troma going to go?

Well, we are more homosexual ourselves, but we could be persuaded to go another way… I don’t know, really. You know, I’m just trying to make the movies.

So you don’t have much interest in the high definition formats?

Well, certainly it looks great, but the bigger issue for us is that we are economically blacklisted. The television markets are blacklisting independent movies unless those movies come in through the vassals of the major conglomerates - Disney Miramax or Fox Searchlight, and these feel-good independent movies like Juno, which is of questionable moral theme, but that’s the kind of stuff that will get on TV. The real shit-disturbing independent movie won’t get on TV because it’s not coming in through the strainer of one of the divisions of one of those conglomerates. So that’s really our concern.

I was just elected the Chairman of the Independent Film and Television Alliance, which is the trade association for all the independent movie companies. The reason I got elected is that I ran on a platform of fighting industry consolidation and trying to protect net neutrality on the Internet, because the Internet is the last level playing field. Nobody thought I’d win because it’s a very controversial platform; many of our members live off the crumbs that fall from the table from the cartel that runs the industry. But I won and we’re going to try to see if we can insert ourselves into the process in Washington and, to some extent, here; to see if we can make the media and the public aware of the fact that we are really getting our art through the strainer of five or six giant conglomerates. We are not really getting the information to find the truly independent art, we are being denied access to it - not just Troma, but many many other important artistic creations. That’s a big deal, really, and I’m very serious about that.

Blockbuster has never had a Troma movie, not even the South Park guys’ Cannibal the Musical, which has sold a couple of hundred thousand DVDs with no advertising and yet it’s never been in a Blockbuster. We’re blacklisted, and it has nothing to do with the content, it’s because we’ve committed the sin of being truly independent. We want to own our movies, we want to own our intellectual properties, we don’t want some studio to come along and take the library and start censoring and chopping up the movies for some kind of silly TV thing. It’s a tough world. The Internet is the last way and we have to fight for net neutrality because the phone companies and the big media companies are trying to create big media and they’re already colonising MySpace and Facebook and YouTube.

MySpace has been useful for Troma, though, hasn’t it? There are so many Troma promotional sites out there; the official ones and the fan ones…

There are many, many fan websites. Even my Lloyd Kaufman website is fan-based; it’s fan-driven, it’s fan-created. The fans do it, I don’t do it. The Tromadance website is by fans - the Tromadance festival which is starting next week. Oh, by the way, very important announcement: the winner of this year’s Cut competition will have automatic acceptance into the 10th Anniversary Tromadance festival in Park City, Utah, which takes place at the same time and same place as Sundance. So that’ll be a nice thing in terms of getting exposure for the winner.

Is there any possibility of having a Tromadance festival in the UK?

Well, again, it’s all fan-driven. In Utah, it’s very expensive so Troma and our fans have contributed the money to do it. Here, you could do it easily, you just get a venue somewhere – it’s very simple and it doesn’t cost a lot of money. But unfortunately in this small town where Sundance is, because there are so many perfume companies and jewellery companies and Mercedes Benz, they’ve rented all the space, so it’s like $20,000 for one day to rent a venue to show your movies. It would be wonderful to do something in the UK; actually, there was a Tromadance in Edinburgh for a couple of years called the Troma Fling and it took place during the Edinburgh festival. It took place for two years but I don’t know if they’re doing it again. In the States, there’s Tromadance New Mexico, there’s a Tromadance Canada, Denver… and then there are the Tromapalooza concerts which raise money for the festivals. We had the third year this year of Tromapalooza concerts in Las Vegas, and in Dallas, Texas. Basically, bands donate their time and then they get publicity. And if any money is made, then Tromadance gets it. Because Tromadance is all free – there’s no entry fee, the tickets are free and there’s no VIP policy, so it’s not a very good business model. We need sponsors and we need the fans also donate money to make the budget.

How would you feel about potential remakes of Troma movies?

If Eli Roth or James Gunn wanted to remake The Toxic Avenger, I’d probably give it to them for free. But Brett Ratner wants to remake it, and remake Mother’s Day, and a guy like that has to pay big money.

So it would all depend on who it was that wanted to remake the movies?

Absolutely. You know, I’m an auteur director and it would all depend. It wouldn’t be about money, it would be about making sure it would be interesting. By the way, Poultrygeist is actually a shot for shot remake of another gore slapstick comedy called Schindler’s List.

While we’re on the subject of Toxie, what’s happening with the Toxic Avenger comics?

Devil’s Due Publishing out of Chicago has created a graphic novel and it’s Toxic Stories from Tromaville, and it’s very good. That just came out about a month ago. I’m sure you’ll be able to get it off the Troma website, it shouldn’t be hard to find.

There was a previous Toxic Avenger comic done by Marvel, right?

Yes, Marvel did Toxic Avenger and Toxic Crusaders, they were very successful.

But there was never, like, Toxic Avenger vs Spider-Man?

Well, they wanted to do something like that but then they went bankrupt. Ron Perlman bought them – not the actor Ron Perlman but the billionaire, the bald guy with the many rich wives. He bought them and drove Marvel into the ground. So that was the end of that. And they wanted to own Toxie, they want to own everything, so that’s a big problem. I was buddies with Samuel Arkoff, who founded AIP and started Roger Corman and so many others and he told me his biggest mistake was to sell his company to a bigger company because they totally chopped everything up and the whole identity, the whole interesting patina of his library was destroyed. He says that’s his biggest regret, even though he got a lot of money. Except for meeting me, having to have lunch with me was worse. He was a good guy.

Has the WGA strike affected Troma at all? What’s your position on the strike?

Well, it certainly hasn’t affected Troma, we’ve never had any writers. I don’t know how to write. I’m actually on strike against myself because I don’t pay enough, and I don’t even give myself a decent health plan. I did write a blog where I pointed out that the writers do have a gripe, most of the writers are eating dog food and they do need more money and they’re not getting a fair shake and they should not be excluded from internet sales. But the problem is that they are marching side by side with actors that no-one wants to see who are making a million dollars a movie or more. I can understand that Bruce Willis would be profitable, or Tom Cruise, or Tom Hanks, but there’s two hundred other actors and no-one wants to see them in a movie and they’re marching side by side in the picket line so they can get their faces on TV. The writers ought to be picketing these useless actors who are well overpaid and if they weren’t so overpaid then the writers could get more money. So that would be my advice. But the Writers’ Guild has no affect on us. We’re so blacklisted that nothing can affect us.

Do you think that’ll ever change?

The blacklisting? No. Never. If I get hit by a bus then they’ll swoop in and try to buy all our movies for, they’re hoping we’ll go out of business so they can get their hands on Toxic Avenger and have Michael Bay direct the remake. They’d love to have Brett Ratner steal Mothers Day and make it into X-Men.

Doesn’t bear thinking about really, does it?

Well, hey, if he wants to pay us a lot of money, or not even a lot of money, just some money, fine we’re desperate, we need money, but for us to give the rights away? They talk about “nack end”, what’s back end? These guys never pay you, it’s almost an insult to suggest it. But if Eli Roth or James Gunn or Neil Marshall, or someone like that wanted to do a remake, any of those guys, I’d give it to them. It’s just about the only movie of that type that hasn’t been remade. They want to remake Class of Nuke’Em High, Toxic Avenger, Mother’s Day, there’s about four of our movies that they want to remake and it would just be awful. We’ve got a fairly high price just to prevent that. And we need money, so it would be wonderful if someone paid us that.

Do you think the original movies would become more available if they were remade, though? Would it help with getting them on TV and into Blockbuster and all that?

That would be the good thing, yes. All the little nerdy fanboys who’ve never heard of Class of Nuke Em High, when they do Jason vs Class of Nuke Em High then they might say, hey, what was the original…? That’s the one good thing about all these crappy remakes, a lot of young people who didn’t know the original Halloween will go and look at it. Although actually the Halloween remake was pretty good. Did you like it?

I didn’t see it.

It was pretty good! Rob Zombie, good for him. Because Devil’s Rejects was not terribly great and the other one, the first one, was unwatchable.

That was what put me off.

Halloween was good, it was well written, it was very good. So then these Jason vs robots and Jason vs Freddy, whatever, those things are horrible, awful, but if they get young kids to go and look at the old movies, hey, nothing wrong with that.

Had you considered doing that kind of thing with Troma characters? Toxic Avenger vs…

When I was on my book tour for Make Your Own Damn Movie, every time I did a Q and A, someone would ask what would happen if Sgt Kabukiman fought Toxic Avenger? So it’s in Citizen Toxie. Except they’re both good guys, so they would never fight each other, and we had to create the alternate universe with Evil Kabukiman. That allowed us to satirise that whole genre. That was very cool, our fans basically came up with the plot for Citizen Toxie. We do have the Troma universe, so our characters do meet each other but not like that kind of stuff, not Freddy vs Jason.

[At this point, Emily Booth and the Zone Horror crew come in and start setting up cameras on the other side of the room. I’m concerned about time, but they tell me to just carry on…]

I’m about to go to meet with the Minister of Culture right after this, that’s why I have to leave early. I’ve been told not to bring the Toxic Avenger mask, which I do have with me.

What’s the meeting about?

Because I’m chairman of the IFTA, we want to discuss the issues of industry consolidation and net neutrality. The MPAA, which is the trade association of the big studios, state that they are the representatives of the entire movie business. Well, they’re not. Everything they do hurts the independents, they do nothing to help us or the public. Our association is 25 years old and I felt it was time that we present ourselves to the public and the media as representing the independent film industry and we embed ourselves into the process.

We have a lobbyist in the States, the same one that Google has actually, and the lobbyist has set us up with various congressmen, we met with the chairman of the Federal Communications commission to explain to them that Miramax is not an independent movie studio; HBO is not independent, it’s owned by Time Warner, that NBC, Universal, and General Electric are all the same company and they don’t know that and they don’t know that all the regulations against monopoly have been done away with in my country. Because most of them were elected since Clinton and his phoney populist wife and administration did away with all that stuff because they accept massive donations from the Hollywood film studios. As do the senators from California.

If we can create a little bit of noise, maybe we can frighten them – the one thing that the conglomerates fear is the US government, so if we can create hearings or maybe get the attention of the media, and get the story out that independent art and commerce is basically blacklisted in our country and in most of the world, it might embarrass the big boys so that they won’t blacklist independents any more. Troma owns almost a thousand movies, we probably have one of the biggest library of films outside of the majors, and yet ComCast, which is our big cable company, won’t talk to us. We have to go through a middleman, which is owned by the majors. And then if there is any revenue, they will take most of it. That’s the problem.

Are you hoping the situation will be easier to sort out in the UK than in the US?

Well, you guys have better treatment of your independents, because you have the lottery and your government and I think that you encourage more independent – you have movies like This Is England. Did you see that, by the way?

Yeah.

That’s a great film, huh? That kid is great. It’s wonderful, it’s so original. It’s terrific. So in fact I think the United States is the only country that does not subsidise in any way the true independent. They do subsidise the major conglomerates with the tax system and most of the incentive system is for the big, big, big, big guys. And they throw out a few crumbs if you make a movie, you know, about left-handed lesbian mattress workers, you know something that’s politically correct but has no commercial opportunity, then you might get some money.

Speaking of politics, you’re working on a documentary, Splendour and Wisdom, about George Bush?

Yes! How did you know about that?

Well, because I looked it up on the IMDB this morning.

Oh, thank you!

There’s virtually no information about it, though, which is why I wanted to ask you about it today…

It’s about the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, he was a blue blood, a rich guy, who was in the CIA and then he switched around to become…

... And that’s where we ran out of time, and Lloyd had to go and film his stuff with Emily Booth. So – thank you, Lloyd Kaufman, and also huge thanks to George Hills for arranging this interview for us!

Interview originally published at Den of Geek. I also interviewed Lloyd around this time last year, too; you can find that interview here.

Beowulf: interview with Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary

These two don't really need much of an introduction, do they? Didn't think so...

You started writing this movie 10 years ago now…

Gaiman: 10 and a half! May 1997.

So what made you think: hmmm, Beowulf, that'd make a good movie...
Gaiman: I can't remember running into the story and not thinking it would make a good movie. I first ran into Beowulf in a comic called Look and Learn, and I was a 7-year-old, and I remember thinking "that looks cool." And later I found a copy of the Penguin translation and read it and – it was monster-fighting! It was dragon-baiting! It was absolutely Tolkien-esque and amazing!

Avary: I was taught Beowulf in high school. I was given the book and I slogged through the text, and as difficult as it was, the first thing I noticed was - guys with swords, monsters, dragons, demons... and as a guy who grew up playing Dungeons and Dragons - Excalibur was one of my favourite films - I couldn't believe that a movie at that time hadn't been made from the material.

We had study aids, like the Peter Brook movie of Lord of the Flies, and that was being shown to us when we were studying the Golding novel, but why was there no Beowulf? I couldn't understand it. So I kept sticking with it - you know, this was 25 years ago - and sitting and reading it but there were certain suspicious deficiencies in the text that were really bothering me. Questions about the motivations of the characters; questions about Grendel's motivations in particular. Why does Beowulf emerge from the cave after the fight with the mother with the head of Grendel and not the head of the mother, after battling her for eight days? - which is an awful long time to be battling…

These things were plaguing me, so cut to about 10 years ago in May, I had just walked off the Sandman movie because I had had a disagreement with John Peters, the producer of the film, on whether Dream should be throwing punches and beating up the Corinthian, and I didn't want to be the guy to ruin Sandman, I didn't want to be vilified for the rest of my life. So I walked off the movie after working on it for a year and a half and so I'm sitting at home thinking, "what am I going to do next?" and I started going over my Beowulf notes, and then the phone rang.

Gaiman: And it was me.

As if by magic.

Avary: He was glad that I wasn't going to ruin his baby and he asked me what I was up to and I started explaining to him these theories that I had about Beowulf, all these, what I felt were, some radical ideas that I hadn't seen addressed in academia, in all the books that I had read on the subject, and Neil said, "well, Roger, if what you say is true, if this, this and this are true, then so too must this be true..." and he came up with a revelation that was not insignificant at all. It was something that cohesively unified the fractured two halves of the Beowulf epic in a way that made it possible to utilise a traditional three-act structure for a movie. And so with that, I jumped up and I said, "when are you available?"

Gaiman: And I was available in May, so we went off and wrote it.

Avary: We flew down to Mexico…

Gaiman: And did two weeks of mad writing.

When you originally wrote the movie, how were you envisioning it? As an animated feature, or live-action…
Gaiman: We were thinking live action, something along the lines of Terry Gilliam's Jabberwocky. Very, very low budget with a lot of shit thrown everywhere.

Avary: A very dirty film. That's one thing Gilliam does so well, he shows the medieval times as they likely were.

Gaiman: And that was really the plan.

Avary: But for one reason or another, the movie never actually came together. I mean, I had only done a small movie, Killing Zoe, that cost like $1.4 million to make and we were looking - even for a small Gilliam-esque type live action film - we were looking for $20-30 million and it was just not possible, so the project eventually kind of died on the vine. The option reverted back to us at a certain point, and I just figured I would do it in the future. And I went off and did Rules of Attraction and Neil went off and wrote several books, and one day the phone rang and it was Zemeckis and Company calling and he was impressed with our script and our specific take on it and these ideas that we had come up with, and simply had to make the movie himself.

He wanted to direct it himself, and he started to explain to us what he was going to be able to do, and how far digitally enhanced live-action, the process, had come, and how he was going to be able to make the movie in 3D, and in IMAX, and how it was going to be able to reach the entire world, and, you know, it would be seen in schools by people. And so we made the movie.

That must have given you a licence to add in all sorts of things that you couldn't previously have done…

Avary: Sure! Because originally when I was going to direct it, it was a much more talky ending, I think. We had all sorts of dialogue.

Gaiman: Also, we had all sorts of long conversations between the dragon and Beowulf…

[Neil Gaiman's phone rings - his ringtone is the theme from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly - he apologises, and the PR wraps things up. Bah, and indeed humbug.]

Originally published at Den of Geek.

Beowulf: interview with Steve Starkey, producer

Even if you don't recognise his name, you'll know plenty of the movies Steve Starkey has produced - Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Back to the Future Part II and Part III, Forrest Gump, Cast Away ... and now, Beowulf. I caught up with him at the Dorchester Hotel this week to talk about motion capture and working with Robert Zemeckis...

How did you first get involved in Beowulf?

Well, I’ve worked with Bob Zemeckis for the last 20 years, and our company - Jack Rapke, Bob Zemeckis and I - acquired the screenplay for Beowulf that Roger and Neil wrote and we’ve been trying to make it into a movie these last ten years. Finally, Bob was making Polar Express and realised the potential of performance capture and decided to move ahead and make the movie. It gave him the ability of realising the characters that he saw, and, at the same time, getting the great actors to bring the characters to life.

Will Robert Zemeckis be predominantly using this technique in future, then? You’re making A Christmas Carol next, will that also be done using the motion capture technology?

You know, Bob’s committed himself to this art form and to seeing where it can go. As a director I think he likes the idea that he’s able to separate the performance, which is working with his actors, and not have to worry about, "well, is the camera right? Did they get the wardrobe, and the makeup right - is there a boom in the shot?" All that stuff goes away and he can just get the performance. Then he gets to go and do the perfect camera move later. So, I think, as a director, there’s less compromise. You know, he really gets the image and he gets the performance that he’s looking for all in one. So I think that’s why he loves the art form.

That form of filmmaking must throw up some different challenges and difficulties than traditional filmmaking, though?

The biggest challenge in making a movie of this style is that you can do anything, but the bad news is that you can do anything. So what that means is that, you know, you don’t go on a location scout and find the perfect mead hall, and then go shoot your movie there - every detail in the mead hall has to be constructed and designed in the computer. So if you see a sky, you see a sunset, or you see the lighting in a certain way, it’s not like, you know, there’s a gaffer and everybody shows up and it’s perfectly lit and you shoot it and you’re done. You have to light every scene. All the detail that you see like this, it all came from some artistic vision. And it had to be depicted in the film. So that is a hard unseen aspect of making a movie this way, it’s all a part of the vision of some filmmaker, or a group of artists.

How did you get all the cast together? It’s really an all-star cast...

Casting on a Bob Zemeckis film becomes a much simpler process because a lot of people want to work with him. But even with Monster House, with Gil Kenan, we got everybody that we wanted to work on the film.

Bob just usually starts with “so, in a perfect world,” - those are the words he uses - “in a perfect world, if I were going to have King Hrothgar, I think it would be Anthony Hopkins. Well, let’s call him and see if he wants to do it, send him the script!” You go down the list and each of your favourite actors, you know, for each part, said, "yeah, okay, when do we start?" And usually there can be some kind of scheduling conflicts that might prevent actors from coming in and doing a role, but the beauty of this process is that there’s no sets and there’s no facial hair, so it’s not like “oh my God, if I’m doing that movie I can’t grow a beard because I have to cut it for that one.” You just come and act any day you’re available. So with Angelina, I could just say, "look, Angelina, here’s a four month block, just pick the best four or five days in your life and we will make it work for you." Right away, that amount of flexibility that opens up the possibility for someone like her to say, "you know what, I think I would like to go and play that character, and now it’s possible in my life schedule."

Robert Zemeckis is known for being experimental – what’s it like to work with him?

It seems like when Bob makes movies he’s exploring a lot of different things, but he’s usually looking for a new type of story to tell, and also a new form of filmmaking. Like the making of [Who Framed] Roger Rabbit, that was the challenge of bringing a cartoon character to life in the real world. In this particular case, it was advancing this new form of cinema. It’s made it possible for him to make movies that he otherwise didn’t think that he could make. It’s almost like the chicken and the egg – is it Bob’s idea that’s driving the new technology, or is it the technology that’s catching up with his ideas? But I think that since he pioneers so many types of technologies and explores new styles of film that they’re both kind of working hand in hand with one another. It keeps you young, working with a filmmaker like Bob Zemeckis.

Originally published at Den of Geek.

Interview with James Eaves

You might remember that, a while ago, I reviewed a British horror movie called The Witches Hammer. Well, it's being released on DVD in the UK on Monday, and to mark the occasion, here's an interview with director James Eaves for your reading pleasure.

So, tell me a bit about The Witches Hammer.

The Witches Hammer is an action/horror film that tells the story of Rebecca, a woman who is changed into a genetically engineered vampire in order to fight and kill other vampires, witches and demons. It's our attempt to make a low budget film that looks and feels as high budget and glossy as possible. I wasn't thinking about the budget when I wrote the script; just what I wanted to see on screen. I think, for the most part, we have achieved what the script set out.

You wrote and directed The Witches Hammer; where did the idea come from, initially?

I'm a big Buffy/Angel/Blade fan and I always wanted to do a vampire movie.

Did you feel it was important to have that much control?

Yes! Having worked in a partnership before, I realised early on the importance of having one vision behind the film. It makes things so much easier; you save so much time that you normally would spend 'negotiating' your ideas and you can be creatively free. I'm very lucky in that I have a good base of people working on the films who wouldn't be afraid to say something if they felt it wasn't working/looked tacky etc. But they also have faith in my ideas.

There are a lot of flashbacks in the movie to different eras, to explain the backstory of various characters; did you feel that was necessary? How much planning went into the backgrounds of each character? (It was quite disappointing that we didn't get more info on Oscar!)

Due to the cost of 35mm film stock the film was shot over a long period of time (three years). That had its disadvantages, but its one major advantage was that it meant we were able to spend time getting the flashbacks just right.

Apologies for no Oscar flashback, I really enjoyed making the flashbacks and would have loved to do an Oscar one, but I was always conscious of how these little episodes away from the main narrative would affect the viewer. I never wanted to put the audience in a position where they were thinking "groan… here he goes again with another story." All the flashbacks were shot on S16mm stock, which meant I had a higher shot ratio so shooting the flashbacks was always less stressful than the main shoot. (A 400ft roll of S16mm stock lasts about 8 minutes and costs around £50, a 400ft roll of 35mm film stock costs over double and lasts only 4 minutes)

I think the flashbacks help the fact we have so many character. They make the film bigger than it is and give a nod to the past events that lead to the main story. Even though we were on an extremely limited budget, I wanted the film to feel like it had a larger scope and I think the flashbacks provide this.

A lot of the flashbacks seemed to be trying to create a mythology unique to the film, but you included (and indeed based the plot around) the Malleus Maleficarum; how much was based on fact and how much did you fictionalise?

Pretty much everything is fiction and not based on the book. I loved the title of the book, and the fact that there was actually a book written that had instructions to kill witches and vampires. I then started to think about where two monks got all their ideas and methods from; so I created the witch, Kitanya, to explain the existence of the book.

The comedy in the film is absolutely brilliant; anything featuring Oscar is great, and the scene with Edward in the kitchen looking for knives is hilarious, too. Why did you go for that approach instead of just making a straight horror movie?

Thanks! I think the comedy moments came from the characters. The scenes with Charlotte and Oscar just leant themselves to comedy so it was easy to put them in situations where you could tease a few laughs out. I think as the film progresses it gets more light-hearted and humorous, especially with the introduction of Charlotte and Oscar.

How did Stephanie Beacham come to be involved?

I was talking to Stephanie about another film and then started writing The Witches Hammer and wrote the part of Madeline for her. I always liked her in The Colby's and wanted to make sure we had a recognizable face in the film, I also loved the fact that she had been in Dracula A.D. 1972…

You filmed on film, rather than video or digital; why was that?

At the time we started shooting The Witches Hammer, digital hadn't made such a large impact and there was an amount of snobbery with the sales agents/distributors in Cannes when it came to digital vs film projects. Back then, digital usually meant that the film had a lot lower production values due to the ease of shooting on tape. With film they were at least guaranteed you had lit the film properly and spent time and budget on the production. Also, I wanted to make the move from 16mm to 35mm. Even though I am shooting the next film on HD, film is still without doubt the superior format. I'm glad we shot on 35mm, as we've all learnt a lot from the discipline involved in shooting on a 1 to 1 shot ratio. Nothing is wasted.

Also, I heard a rumour that the 35mm Panavision cameras we shot The Witches Hammer on were originally used on Tim Burton's Batman, which was awesome as I love that film and would cite it as one of the reasons I wanted to become a director.

There are several impressive-looking locations used in the movie, where did you film those? (Particularly the medieval village and the castle at the end.)

The medieval village is a re-enactment society place in the South, you can walk round and people are dressed in medieval costumes talking in ye olde speak. The location was perfect as the sets were all there, and we shot on the hottest day of the year so lighting was also taken care of. I think it's regarded by most of the crew as the best memory of shooting. The castle is actually a series of vaults beneath Southampton, very dusty and musty but excellent fakes for the inside of a castle. I really have to thank Southampton Council for that, they bent over backwards for us.

You co-wrote and co-directed Hellbreeder with Johannes Roberts; what was that like? Will you be working with him again in future?

Hellbreeder was hell! A really hard film to make for many many reasons; also, Hellbreeder has a bitter taste as it's not the film we originally made. Our intention was to make an art house horror movie about a woman coping with the death of her child but when we'd finished it, no one wanted to distribute the film we made. We were forced to do a re-cut and now have the bastard child that is Hellbreeder on our filmographies! Hopefully Alice, the original version, will be released one day and people can see what we were trying to do.

Your next project, Bane, is going to be a horror movie too, right? Tell me a bit about that.

Bane is very different to The Witches Hammer. The Witches Hammer was all about the spectacle and the set pieces, a fun movie; Bane is a character based horror with elements of classic science fiction. We put a lot of time into casting the movie and as a result we have four very good lead actresses who have put a lot of work into their performances to make them as believable as possible, this is vital as the whole film is set in a very alien environment.

What attracts you to horror over any other genre? Are you a fan of horror? The Witches Hammer is pretty radically different from most of the "torture porn" that's in fashion at the moment.

I like horror films but wouldn't class myself as a huge horror fan, more of a genre fan, I like sci-fi/action/martial arts/horror/musicals etc. On a low budget, horror is what sells. You can make a horror film relatively cheaply and make sure you get the film released. With something like a drama, the audience (and, more importantly, the distributors) expects to see named cast.

What's it like being an indie filmmaker in the UK at the moment?

It's tough. The hardest part is that you can't just be a director,: you have to learn all of these other things: distribution, sales, marketing, etc, so that your film reaches its audience. Things can move slowly and you need a lot of stamina to keep it rolling.

Finally -- why "The Witches Hammer" instead of "The Witch's Hammer" or "The Witches' Hammer"?

I get asked this a lot, so I have three fully prepared reasons for you:

1. It's a direct translation of the title of the book
2. The Hammer is for killing the Witches (It doesn't belong to them) e.g. 'I'll go and get my Badgers Hammer'…
3. (The real reason!) The apostrophe weakens the title… I just think it looks cooler!

I still think he's wrong about that second point -- and, while I'm on the subject, the third reason, too; but we'll just have to agree to disagree.

The Witches Hammer hits shelves on 26th March; click here to go and buy it.

Poultrygeist: A Lloyd Kaufman Interview

I expected that meeting Lloyd Kaufman, president of Troma Entertainment, would be a particularly interesting experience. However, I hadn't anticipated that within ten minutes of meeting him, I'd be standing outside the Soho offices of the British Board of Film Classification, taking part in an impromptu photoshoot.

Thanks to some bizarre mix up over the time the interview was supposed to take place, Lloyd was on his way out of the door when I arrived to meet him at the Groucho, so I was lucky to meet him at all. Because the new offering from Troma, Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead, is getting a theatrical release in the UK, it's going to be rated by the BBFC; given Troma's difficult history with film classification boards, the fact that Poultrygeist is going to be given an official sanction feels almost like a victory. And hence the photographs. Joining Lloyd is Julia Sandberg-Hansson, a veteran Tromette who bears a striking resemblance to Milla Jovovich, an illusion which is enhanced by the fact that she's currently sporting a bright orange wig. A self-confessed fan of bad movies, she sought out the industry's most hated director, Uwe Boll, and managed to get herself a role as Verne Troyer's girlfriend in his politically incorrect comedy, Postal; so, obviously, I instantly warm to her. A chicken-loving, Apple-hating Fine Arts student, Julia's a long-standing Troma fan, and one of the many who attend Cannes Film Festival to promote the company, making street theatre by dressing up and generally looking like they have more fun than anyone else. Standing outside the BBFC is, however, markedly less glamorous.

The official photographer has about six rolls of film with him, which would seem superfluous for a start, but I've also been given permission to take some pictures with the digital camera I've brought along, and Lloyd asks if I'd mind snapping a few for him on his digital camera. (Which has "L.K" written on it in permanent marker.) Lloyd and Julia pose, gamely, in a variety of different attitudes; including, notably, one where Lloyd sits on the damp floor beneath the Poultrygeist poster and looks dead. Several passersby peer curiously at us but don't comment (or linger for very long); when the door to the building suddenly opens, I wonder if we're going to be told to leave, but it's just a workman popping outside for a smoke. Crisis averted.

Walking back towards the Groucho Club afterwards, Lloyd falls into step beside me. "So, Sarah, what's your lifetime ambition? I'll interview you, instead."

That isn't quite how things panned out in the end: back at the Groucho, we settle into armchairs and Lloyd asks if I want to go and conduct the interview elsewhere, or if it's okay to just sit and chat. The bar is deserted apart from the Troma entourage --Lloyd; Julia; Nick, the photographer; Ernest Henry of Oink News Corp, and Thea Martin, founder of the German Troma festival Tromanale. She claims she's too old to be a Tromette any more, though from looking at her, this is patently untrue. She, too, is clearly extremely passionate about Troma -- as you'd have to be, really, to set up a festival -- and chips in regularly to correct Lloyd, or expand on his comments about the behind-the-scenes atmosphere.

Ernest sits back in his chair, smoking an enormous cigar; once the coffee arrives, everyone joins in the discussion of Poultrygeist, Troma, and film in general -- and absolutely, positively no bestiality whatsoever. The conversation has a tendency to veer wildly off course, but Lloyd, a consummate professional, always manages to steer it back to the original question without ever interrupting anyone, which is an impressive kind of authority.

(It's easier to just transcribe the interview here; you'll see what I mean.)

---

Lloyd, you've said that Poultrygeist is Troma's best film ever; why is that?

Lloyd: I’d say it’s our most ambitious, and daring film, probably; it’s a very unusual film. And it’s not my opinion – well, it is my opinion, but people on the film who have worked on a number of Troma movies really believe that it’s the best film that Troma has made. Which is not saying much.

So where did the inspiration for an all-singing, all-dancing chicken zombie movie come from?

Lloyd: Troma has a building in New York, and one day McDonalds opened up next door to us. They were very rude and did some unfriendly things, but the worst of it was that our basement became the weekend residence for rats from McDonalds. All of a sudden, these rats the size of raccoons were weekending in the Troma basement. Nobody would go down there, there were so many of them and it was so disgusting that even RatBusters wouldn't touch it. I opened my second book, Make Your Own Damn Movie, with fighting these rats and cleaning up rat shit, just to show what an independent filmmaker has to be prepared to do. And Julia has had chickens all her life – she has raised chickens, she loves chickens. We made a movie called Stuck On You years ago –

Julia: You had trained chickens in that. Why didn’t you have a chicken wrangler?

Lloyd: I don’t want to hurt animals or upset them… In Stuck On You, we had 50,000 egg-laying chickens and we had a lot of different kinds of chickens, special chickens and chickens wearing clothing… Julia is a chicken aficionado, you had pet chickens?

Julia: Yes, yes.

Lloyd: And I went after one of her chickens in a sexual way and she never forgave me.

Julia: The chicken recovered… And then he died.

Thea: And then he had to write Poultrygeist in penance for the death of the chicken.

Lloyd: Yup, so I figured I’d wing it. It’s a very fowl movie. No, we don’t like the fast food industry; that was the inspiration. And the McDonalds thing kicked it off, but then I read Fast Food Nation, which is a great entertaining book, from which they made a very shitty pretentious movie that is not going to appeal to anyone except the people that made it and a few yuppies who want to go to sleep. So Poultrygeist has a very strong message. And the singing and dancing, well, my lifelong ambition has been to remake Rodgers and Hart's Pal Joey, but I obviously can't do that. So this was at least an opportunity to put a few songs in; Poultrygeist isn't a musical, but it does have singing and dancing in it. As a kid, I went to see a lot of Broadway musicals in New York, and I love showtunes. Probably I am a gay married man; I do have a strange penchant for Judy Garland and Liza Minelli. And Takashi Miike made a movie called The Happiness of the Katakuris, which gave me the courage to throw in a few random songs because he did it.

You posted a sort of call to arms on the Troma website, asking fans to get involved with promotion of Poultrygeist; how's that going?

Lloyd: We've never had any money for advertising, so the fans are really the only reason we're still in business. They take a very active role, and they've done that for 34 years; we wouldn't be around if it wasn't for them, because the mainstream media totally ignores us. I've written three books and made movies in New York for 40 years, we own a building there, but the New York Times never said a word about us.

So why do you think Troma has endured?

Lloyd: I think that our fans are the weapon of mass destruction that we have…

Julia: And the Lloyd, he won’t stop.

Lloyd: I’m the herpes of film directors, I won’t go away! The VD of film directors, that’s not a bad quote. I think, also, the fact that we make movies that we believe in. The people on each of our movies, if you see the behind the scenes movie, Farts of Darkness: The Making of Terror Firmer, you can see that we're a very dysfunctional, disorganised family, but everyone was very devoted to the movie.

Ernest: When these people get married, they won’t have children they’ll have giblets.

Lloyd: Ernest, by the way, is developing a sequel to Poultrygeist, it’s a Shakespearian adapatation, Omelette. It took me a while to get it…

Ernest: I don’t smash the eggs, I smash the chickens.

Lloyd: No, no, we don’t do that, I don’t eat meat, I don’t want to hurt the chickens or scare them…

Thea: "Is this a chicken I see before me?"

Lloyd: We’re anti-fast food, every issue is taken care of in Poultrygeist: they make people fat, the food is horrible, they pollute the ground with all the animal waste, they torture the animals, the people who work there don’t get any health care or don’t get proper treatment, there’s nothing good about the fast food industry, absolutely nothing. And there’s no reason why they can’t have good food, or why they have to have such ugly places, if you go to a typical American town there’s just one after another, it’s horrible to look at.

Did you think it was important to make a comedy, or a satire, about that, rather than something more serious?

Lloyd: Everything I've done is satire. Which is worse than comedy, it's less commercial. This movie, Poultrygeist, is extremely entertaining, it's well acted, it's a good film, but we are a very small company and we are economically blacklisted by the media.

Did you never want to get involved with the whole conglomerate, big studio, big money scene?

Lloyd: The nice thing is that I've had 40 years of filmmaking with nobody telling me what to do. I've had total freedom; the Cinemateque Francais has done two retrospectives of films that I've directed, saying that I'm one of the true auteur American filmmakers. So that's cool, but it wouldn't be so terrible to have a little recognition. We had more mainstream coverage of our films 20 years ago, before the conglomerates got so powerful.

Do you think things will change? Because there's a trend now where cinema attendance is decreasing, and digital filmmaking is making the industry more accessible to more people now...

Lloyd: That's the tsunami that's coming. It's going to be young people who're going to make these wonderful films using digital video. We just presented a movie in Sweden, a British film called The Evolved, and it cost £1,000 to make a feature-length movie, which Troma is distributing. And there's Giuseppe Andrews, who you'll know from Cabin Fever, who played the sheriff. I produced his latest movie, it's called Okie Dokie, and it cost $800. We're distributing it; we haven't made money, but we will, because it's brilliant, he's a genius. So that's the tsunami that'll come.

Ernest: I think what's important is that Troma is truly one of the last independents. I called one of the people I know, when I was arranging the theatrical release of Poultrygeist in the UK, and he said, this is fantastic, we'll put showbiz back into theatrical cinema. You get premieres in Leicester Square, with all the stars, but that's not showbiz. It's just press, glitz, it comes and it's gone, but this is something else.

Lloyd: Troma's kind of a movement now. We've been putting on the Tromadance festival in Utah during the Sundance festival; there's no entry fee, you can submit your movie free, and you don't have to pay to see the movies, there's no VIP policy. The problem with so many big film festivals is that filmmakers have to pay -- why should they have to pay between $100 and $300 just to submit a movie? Tromadance is completely free.

So back to Poultrygeist and the photos we took this morning -- it's being rated by the BBFC?

Lloyd: Yes, and there's nothing objectionable in Poultrygeist. It's a Monty Python kind of thing. Certainly, if Hostel went through totally okay, we have nothing.

What's your opinion on this kind of ultraviolence movement in horror movies at the moment?

Lloyd: I'm not a fan of the torture movies, I don't see what the appeal is. But Hostel's kind of funny, Eli Roth is brilliant. He's genuinely talented.

He's a Troma alumni, and there are some other pretty big names who've been involved with Troma, too -- James Gunn, for starters...

Lloyd: James Gunn has been very loyal, he talks about Troma in every interview he does. They can't shut him up about Tromeo and Juliet, but the media don't like it, they don't want to talk about Troma. New Yorker magazine did a piece on Hayao Miyazaki and how he was discovered by Harvey Weinstein, but we introduced his first movie, My Neighbour Totoro, and we lost our asses on it. There was not one peep about it. As far as the public goes, Harvey Weinstein discovered Miyazaki in the States; even when we were releasing it, and it was in 50 theatres, the critics refused to review it, because it was a Troma movie.

I can't think of a movie that's less "Troma" than My Neighbour Totoro!

Lloyd: I agree! But that's the way they think.

There's a quote on the Troma site that says if it weren't for you, movies like There's Something About Mary and Deuce Bigalow would never have existed. Do you agree with that?

Lloyd: That was from the Times Picayne in New Orleans. I don't know, but there's no question that things like South Park were influenced by watching Troma movies...

Didn't Troma distribute Cannibal: The Musical? (A movie by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, creators of South Park.)

Lloyd: Yeah, yeah.

What do you think the legacy of Troma is, or will be?

Thea: Herpes?

Julia: It will never go away!

Lloyd: We've given an arm and a legacy to our fans... I think the legacy of Troma is, that if idiots like us can make movies for 35 years, then anyone can do it.

---

Ultimately, it's impossible not to like Lloyd Kaufman. There are innumerable stories on the Internet of awed fans being introduced to him and then finding that he remembers their names; while I'm with him in the Groucho Club, he addresses two different members of staff by their names, saying hello and asking how they are. It's not quite the behaviour you'd expect from the founder and president of a film distribution and production company, but then Troma isn't exactly your average entertainment company.

Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead will be screened in Peckham on April 27th.

IMDB link

Guy N. Smith Interview

There aren't many people who can claim they've created a genre all of their own. But cult 70s horror writer Guy N. Smith is definitely one of those few: his own peculiar brand of pulp novels -- including Night of the Crabs and its sequels, Alligators, Snakes, The Sucking Pit, and many, many more -- shaped the imagination of an entire generation of horror-lovers. More recently, his werewolf novel Blackout won rave reviews and proved Smith still knows what he's doing.

I tracked him down for a chat about the state of the horror genre, offending journalists, and why the countryside is much safer than big, scary London...

It’s a really painfully obvious question, but what was it that got you into horror in the first place?

Well, it was available. I mean, I’d got a lot of friends who’ve become full time writers and at that time I was trying to get into Westerns, because Westerns are my big thing. But out of the blue, Laurence James, who was formerly an editor at the New English Library, said they were looking for a werewolf book, and I should send them a synopsis. So I typed up an outline, no sample chapter or anything, and they commissioned it and it went from there.

That sounds very straightforward.

Oh, you’d never get that any more. I used to go down to London in the old days, maybe once a month or so, and I met with the editors and they said “well, what do you want to do?” and I said, oh, a two-book contract, and they said “how’s four?” So I came home on the train with a four-book deal. Those were the days!

Yeah, you were really prolific.

Sometimes I was writing 10 books a year.

Wow.

Yeah, because there were lots of spin-offs, you see. And I did some Disney novelisations, because this chap at NEL mentioned that they were pushing around the Disney books, and I said I’d like to have a go. And they said, well, feel free! So I went down on the train to a little screening room in Soho, watched the film, they gave me the script, I got back on the train, and wrote the book in a week. They said, that’s great. I said I’d like to do another. "Yeah, feel free," they said, "do you want to see the film?" "Well, not really," I said. So they just sent me the script. And then I did a third, and a fourth! Just working from the scripts…

You mentioned travelling to London; you don’t live anywhere near a city any more, and a lot of your books seem to feature people moving from the city to the countryside where nasty things happen to them…

I’ve always lived in the countryside. But nasty things do happen to people who move out into the country… A man’s just bought a tumbledown cottage up the road and there were ambulances up there the other day, he’d chopped three of his fingers off with a buzzsaw.

Ouch.

Yes, I mean, the countryside is not what people imagine. They think it’s this idyllic place to live in, it’s not.

So you’re not keen on lots of people moving out there?

Well, I don’t mind so long as they don’t bring their prejudices and views with them. A lot of them do, I’ll tell you this. They move out of the city and get cottages and then, what they like to do is to worm their way onto the local council. Then their aim is to turn the countryside into the kind of lifestyle they had in the city. I mean that happened recently, not just here, but all over the country.

Was there some real inspiration behind some of your books, then; like Mania, for example?

Well, put it this way, there was a hotel with people who lived there and the couple that owned it were mad as hatters. They really were. And what went on there was incredible. There was one old woman who stayed there and they used to let her sleep under the counter and they’d take her pension book off her!

Does it not ever scare you, living somewhere so isolated?

No, because it’s safe. Here, at night, it’s dark. There’s no street lights, it’s just dark. And I’m quite happy to go out at night because it’s far safer than walking down the street in the city where you might get mugged, stabbed, shot… you know?

Thanks for that!

Hahahahahahaha.

So do you keep up with other horror literature?

I’ve read one or two in the past, but I’ve never really felt the need to read my so-called rivals. Really, I concentrate on what I’m writing. The thing is, I don’t like big books. Not just horror, but any book. Because if you ironed it out, the storyline could be told in 60,000 or 70,000 words rather than 100,000. I’ve always said that what the reader wants is action. See, the horror market changed back in the 80s, when every publisher thought they were going to make a fortune by writing, like, Spiders, and so on but they really saturated the market. I mean, it’s been said that I am a genre on my own but it all changed, and they decided to go for more psychological horror. I remember once I was talking to an editor and he said “can you make it more complicated?” and I said “Complicated? What the hell for?” But there we are.

Do you think that horror literature maybe isn’t so popular any more?

I wouldn’t say that, I mean, this kind of thing is cyclical. As you know, it all fell apart in the late 80s really, it fell apart because basically they could make a lot more money out of something else. But like any genre, it will be back. I mean, my new novel Blackout, that’s doing well in America…

That’s set in America, isn’t it? Was that deliberate, to appeal to the audience over there?

Basically, yeah. You’ve got to look at marketing. A novel set in the States will sell in the States and in the UK. Provided you get the background right, you can get away with it. It’s like with the Westerns, I could write those because I knew the background. My editor at the time said that my great strength is my knowledge of firearms. Which a lot of the Westerns didn’t have. And I could make it really authentic.

Westerns are your great love, but you're known for horror -- what do you want to be writing now?

Well, I’ll tell you this, you know Night of the Crabs had five, six spin-offs? A guy who’s in his 60s read it recently and he said, you know what, it hasn’t aged. It’s unique, it’s got everything in it. Crabs was great fun, it really was. I wouldn’t mind doing a few of what I call 'the oldies.' I mean, I could do now what I did, what was Night of the Crabs, 1976? 30 years ago.

Speaking of Crabs, though, you know that Crabs was filmed? A man was talking to me about making another film of it; he rang me up and said he wants to film it, because, he said, when they made that other Crabs film, you only saw one crab because they had to build one. Nowadays they’d do it with computers. And it’d be cheap.

They'd all be CGI, I guess.

I have a hatred of computers. Well, I am obviously online, but I hate the computer. I haven’t touched a computer for three months now, and my quality of life is better. I’ve taken on a full-time secretary/PA and she is absolutely marvellous, she takes care of everything. She prints out emails for me and I tell her, write this to him and this to him… Most of my early books were written longhand. I mean, I wrote The Slimebeast entirely on Midland Bank’s time. And I did it deliberately, I got a kick out of it. I used to write it on loose-leaf paper, I’d drop it off to this girl on the way home and she’d type it up. I suppose you’re very computer-oriented…

I actually work at a computer magazine, yeah.

So I’ve really put the boot in then! Hahahaha! It’s like somebody rang up -- you know I wrote a book about big cats? Well, I sort of became the big cat expert. Anyway, one of the local papers rang me up to ask if there had been any sightings and I told them no. If anybody comes to me I keep it confidential, they don’t want it to get out. So then I got another phone call from a woman about big cats. And she said, "you said in the paper there hadn’t been any sightings! It isn’t true! I know there have been!" She said, "I think you ought to tell me, it’s very selfish of you." And I said, "Well, that’s the way I work."

And she said, "In the paper they said that you recorded sightings," and I said "Yes, but they shouldn’t have put my contact details in, I asked them not to. And also, you see, whenever you read in the paper about big cat sightings, it means that there isn’t any real news around." She slammed the phone down on me. It turned out she was from the newspaper, the other newspaper, and I’d told her that they only write about big cats when there isn’t any news! But you know, I’m a journalist. I actually find it more demanding than writing fiction.

You never have writer's block?

No. What is writer's block? I’ve read about this writer's block, but I don’t understand it. I really don’t, because I mean I was first published when I was 12, I’ve never had a problem. Nowadays I write from 9 till lunchtime. But I know what I’m going to write, I don’t have writer’s block. What is it? Is it that they can’t find the words, or can’t find the ideas, or what is it? I suppose… I don’t know, do they sit down and don’t write anything or what? Or do they… they don’t feel like it today?

More information about Guy N. Smith can be found on his website. Autographed copies of his books can be ordered via the website through Black Hill Books.

Interview with James Moran

There's nothing like a team-building trip to the great outdoors with your work colleagues to make you hate your job. Really, really hate your job. Quite whose sadistic idea it was to make employees suffer one another's company outside of the office is unclear, but the group of reluctant pen-pushers in Severance find they have more to worry about than just playing paintball in the woods. Their trip to Hungary starts off badly -- the bus breaks down, the driver abandons them in the middle of nowhere, and the luxury lodge is nowhere to be found -- and gets progressively much, much worse. Unseen hunters lurking in the forest start picking them off, one by one, and suddenly there's far more at stake than just the annual salary review.

Director Chris Smith has already made a name for himself with his 2004 debut Creep, a nasty little story of a monster on the London Underground. Severance, though, is different: despite all the gore and severed limbs, it's also uproariously funny. The cast is comprised of several recognisable faces from British comedy -- Tim McInnerny of Blackadder fame, and Mean Machine's Danny Dyer, for example -- and relative unknowns, as well as Dead Like Me's Laura Harris, the token non-Brit. It's clever, but not above the odd gleefully stupid moment, and several scenes that go far beyond the bounds of good taste.

Severance was released on DVD in the UK this week, so it seemed like a good time to interview screenwriter James Moran. Especially since this is the 100th post on this blog...

What was it like first seeing the film come alive - did you visit the set while it was filming?

I was on set once, for about a week. It was my first big film set, and it was incredible. I did actually kind of – I’ve said this several times but no one believes me – I did get quite emotional. I had to go and have a little cry to myself because I was so excited! The first thing I saw when I arrived on set was that people had just been cast that I didn’t know about. I looked at the monitor and I’d never seen these people before, and it was like, that’s Gordon! And that’s Jill! And they’re saying the things Gordon and Jill say! I had to sit down for a minute; it was quite weird. I just couldn’t quite believe it was really happening.

You have a blog (http://jamesmoran.blogspot.com) – which may or may not be the first British screenwriting blog…

It is! That I know of, anyway. To my knowledge, it is the first.

Did you start writing that as a record for yourself, or as a guide for other people, or was it a bit of both?

Yeah, it was partly both. I started when I was halfway through the writing of Severance. It was 2003 and I thought I had a good shot at making a go of something. So I thought if I keep a journal of it, it’ll be for myself, and also, I found nothing online about people from the UK who’d had something made and were talking through the process. I thought, if anyone’s interested, they could read about my struggles to become a writer. And then it got sold, and I thought, that’s even better, now I can document the whole process! It was more about me at the start and then it became more for other people. Now, people are emailing and saying like it’s inspiring to read about someone who’s made it!

Do you give them advice?

I try not to give writing advice because, well, what do I know? If I do give advice, I’ll say ‘this is what I do and it works for me’ but it is by no means ‘this is how you write.’ But if people ask me, you know, ‘what was this like?’ or ‘what was that like?’ then I’ll answer anything people ask, to shed some light on the whole process. [The industry] is kind of all closed off before you get into it; if you’re not in it it’s like a concrete wall, so I thought I could demystify it.

Had you met Chris Smith before he signed on to direct?

Well, no; he was already in talks to direct. I met him after the Creep screening [at FrightFest 2005] and he really wanted to do it. I liked Creep, it was good fun; it was just a nasty little shocker that did what it wanted to do. So I came out all set to tell him I liked his movie and he just came over, opened his mouth and [makes hand gesture to illustrate an outpouring from the mouth]. You know, you don’t talk to Chris, you just sort of stand there, he shouts for five minutes and disappears! He was all “I really like the script and I wanna do this and I wanna do that and blah blah blah anyway, see you later!” I was like, ‘okay, yeah, nice one.‘ I didn’t get to say a word! Just stood there like an idiot.

Speaking of FrightFest, you’ve been going for years and years; you’re obviously a horror fan, did you always want to write a horror script?

I did want to do horror, but it was just kind of chance that it happened to be the first one I did. I’d been trying to get my writing career going, I had a few ideas and that was one of them, and my agent said it was the best idea. Also, I thought, for my first film I want to do something quickly, and I thought, I know horror inside out, so it’ll be easy. Famous last bloody words!

What was it like going from being in the audience at FrightFest to going up on stage and doing the Q&A and being ‘the talent’?

It was the weirdest thing I’ve ever done in my life. I was sitting there watching this thing I wrote, with people clapping and cheering, but I was still an audience member. Then when they did the Q&A at the end, I didn’t want to get up because I was scared. Partly because there were six hundred people looking at me, and partly because I was thinking, I’m not going to be the audience member any more, I’m going to be someone else. As though I’d suddenly be famous and wouldn’t be able to go to FrightFest any more, because I’d be mobbed! They’d all be asking for my autograph… Not that they’d remember, because I’m not an actor.

Yeah, people tend to only recognise the people they’ve been watching on screen for the past two hours…

Which is good! So, in that moment where Chris got the microphone and called my name, I just looked at my friends, and they were like ‘go on!’ so I stood up… and it was like I was still in my seat, I stood up like I was in a dream, walking to the stage, and I could see people in the audience clapping and looking like ‘isn’t that some nobody?’ So it was weird, I was trying to tell people afterwards about that moment, but I was drunk; that moment when I went from being an audience member to being a filmmaker, and when I was on stage I could feel myself sort of in the audience watching. It was very strange. So, ‘very strange’, is what you’ll edit all that down into.

‘Very strange, full stop!’ Anyway, on your blog you said that a first-time writer shouldn’t direct, and a first-time director shouldn’t write. Was that comment made about something in particular?

I knew that would bite me on the arse! It’s more of a guideline; it was that year where there’d been a lot of indie, digital, low-budget films from first time writer-directors. And half of them were like, your script’s alright, but you can’t direct, and the other half were like, your script is shit but you’re quite a good director…

You know, anyone can make a film now. It’s great because I’ve seen a lot of cool stuff that I’d never have seen otherwise, but it’s like when the Internet first came out and suddenly anyone can have a website. Now anyone can be a director, and there’s no quality control. So, just show the script to your mate, you know, your sarcastic friend who doesn’t like anything, and then just give it another draft…

Did you ever have ambitions to direct?

I did have ambitions to direct, at one stage. But having seen the two-year process, from beginning to end, with Severance I just kind of thought, fuck that. I’ve never worked so hard in my life as I did on the script for Severance, but when I finished writing it and they started making the film, it was like my job was finished. And then they had to do all the pre-production, they had to do all the casting, they had to do all the location scouting, to go on set, all the arguments, this works, this doesn’t work, editing and effects and the sound mix wasn’t working… I turned up to the sound mix because I’m really into sound effects and sound editing, so I was dying to see it. I lasted about an hour before I was like ‘you know what, I’ve got to shoot off now…’ because, Jesus, they were doing the same bit over and over and over again! It’s not that I don’t want to put the work in or anything, but it’s two years when you can’t do anything else. You can’t even watch telly! It’s just like that’s it. I like to be able to do something and then to go and do something else. But I’m not ruling it out!

The title of the movie changed several times; how did you finally come up with Severance?

I’m useless with titles. Originally, it was called Mountain Man, because there was a big mountain man in it, but that was rubbish. So I took him out, and then I had to call it something else. P45 was my agent’s idea, which is a good title, non-specific, but it wouldn’t work in America. I knew the title would have to change, but nobody said anything until quite late in the process, so I said to them, ‘you’re going to change the title, aren’t you?’ And they said they were trying to think of one. Titles and character names, I’m no good at, I can’t think of them. We had about two months of everybody, including the temps and runners thinking of titles for it. Everything I came up with sounded like Stephen Seagal films, like Extreme Prejudice! Eventually, I don’t know who it was, someone in the office suggested Severance. It was the best one there was, so we went with it. It took about a week for us to realise it meant two different things, and that it was clever.

Severance is funny as well as being scary and gory; black humour is kind of your thing, isn’t it? Was any of it suggested by other people along the way? Did they want it made funnier?

Originally, the draft I sold was pretty much half and half. The first half was all jokes, the second half was all horror – with some jokes. But it actually became less funny over the process, it was actually more about toning it down and keeping it as low-key as possible. I did two rewrites for the film company, and I did a rewrite based on Chris’s notes, and then after that Chris and I started working on it together, sending it back and forth and just kind of thrashing it out. After that part, I’d call him up or he’d call me up; there are lots of things in it that one of us thought of one night, some of it’s in there and some of it isn’t.

Things that only seemed like a good idea at the time?

Yeah, there was a whole bit we got halfway through writing which was when Steve’s tripping in the woods, and there was a sequence where he sits down and watches this weird thing that’s like someone’s staging a musical in the woods. We thought it was hilarious and I started writing it, and then I got halfway through and realised it was shit. So I phoned Chris and before I said anything he said ‘it’s bollocks, isn’t it?’ and it was like, yeah, so it was just like that, coming up with random stuff and seeing if it works.

So what are you working on now? Something called Curfew, right?

Yeah; Curfew, I am doing revisions on the first draft and I’m hoping to have it done by mid-December because that’s when the director, Paul Andrew Williams, is free to have a look at it. He’s working on something else from the end of December to March, and he’ll be incommunicado. Then in March he’s ours. They want to shoot it in winter though, because it’s all set in one long night, and it’s set in London. It’s really expensive to shoot in London so you want to make as much of the time as you can. I can’t go into the plot details, but it’s a horror, and it’s not a comedy horror, it’s a really nasty, shocking horror. I keep calling it my 70s John Carpenter movie; it’s that kind of vibe, dark and moody and gritty with lots of death and lots of gore.

IMDB link; Severance at Play.com.