Harry Here, here QUINT...
Ahoy, me little squirts! The Big Ol' Crusty Seaman here once more, this time with an interview with screenwriter Steven Katz, the fellow most directly responsible for the phenomenal Shadow of the Vampire. The film has played at a lot of festivals, but will reach the masses in late December. I can't recommend it enough. Go download the trailer if you don't believe me.
I think the interview is a helluva lot of fun. He brings up his working with Tom Hanks, James Cameron and Paul Verhoeven and chats a bunch about Shadow of the Vampire. Enjoy.
QUINT: I GUESS WE SHOULD START AT THE BEGINNING. HOW'D YOU GET INTO SCREENWRITING?
STEVEN KATZ: I was writing plays, experimental theater in New York. I had a little company called Mission Theater and I just had this idea for a vampire movie. This was in 1988, around then. I happened to be in LA and I met an agent at the CAA and I asked her "If I ever write a screenplay, will you read it?" and she said sure. About a year later I wrote Shadow of the Vampire which was my first screenplay and I haven't written a play since.
Q: YEAH, IT'S A GOOD ONE TO START WITH. IT'S ALREADY BEING RECEIVED SO WELL.
SK: Yeah, it's interesting. It took only 13 years to make (laughs). Hopefully the next one won't take quite as long.
Q: IT'S QUITE OBVIOUS THAT YOU'RE A FAN OF NOSFERATU.
SK: Uh-huh.
Q: WHAT DO YOU THINK IT IS ABOUT THAT MOVIE THAT STILL AFFECTS PEOPLE ALMOST 80 YEARS SINCE ITS RELEASE?
SK: I think there's two things. On the one hand I think Nosferatu is the film that defined the vocabulary for horror movies, so you kind of see the blood of Nosferatu pumping through a whole century of spooky movies. You know, the whole vocabulary of the German expressionist horror film that went through from Nosferatu to James Whale's Frankenstein through Alien and Halloween.
On the other hand, I think the film itself is incredibly evocative. Its got the weirdest vampire ever put into a movie. Especially weird considering when the movie was made. The people's image of vampires at that time was this late romantic image of the very erotic, sexy vampire. The vampires you saw in Stoker's Dracula and LeFanu's Carmilla.
He set this incredibly weird vampire against this incredibly realistic backdrop. Murnau was a very architectural director. He used a lot of realistic locations in all of his films. It just created this very strange, kind of infectious quality that I think really stays with you when you see the movie. That's very hard to explain and it certainly inspired me.
Q: WELL, WE'LL GET BACK TO SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE VERY, VERY SOON, BUT I WANT TO HIT ON ONE OR TWO THINGS FIRST.
SK: OK.
Q: I READ THAT YOU WROTE THE FIRST EPISODE OF HBO'S FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON.
SK: Right.
Q: TOM HANKS DIRECTED YOUR SCREENPLAY. HOW DOES THAT FEEL TO HAVE A GUY LIKE TOM HANKS DO ONE OF YOUR SCREENPLAYS?
SK: It was great. He was an encyclopedia of space knowledge. The story meetings, and I'm sure this is true of all the writers on the project, were really hard because you'd sit down and he would start telling you all these stories. He's like, "Why don't we put that in? Why don't we put this in?" You'd go back and rewrite it and he would set you down and tell you a hundred more space stories. He's like the walking NASA history book.
He's also a smart guy and a guy who really knew what he wanted, which is a real pleasure when you're writing screenplays. I had a really good time on that. In fact, I didn't have any great background in any space history. I principally did it just to work with him and that certainly was a pleasure.
Actually, one of my next projects is I'm writing a documentary on the history of the Russian space program for PBS.
Q: YEAH, I GOT A WHOLE LITTLE LIST OF UPCOMING PROJECTS, SO WE'LL COME BACK TO THAT IN A MINUTE.
SK: OK. Anything you want.
Q: LOOK AT THIS! WE'RE COMING BACK TO TOO MANY THINGS! YOU'RE MESSING UP MY ORDER!!!
SK: That's OK. I hate those movies that are really linear. We'll do it Tarantino style.
Q: DAMN RIGHT. I READ THAT YOU ALSO WROTE AN EARLY DRAFT OF INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE. HOW'D YOU GET THAT GIG?
SK: That was actually the first assignment I ever got. I sold a spec script and my first spec script I sold was called Morningside Heights and I sold it to Scott Rudin. It had, through a complicated series of things, come to the attention of the Geffen Company which owned the rights to the first three Ann Rice novels.
They sat down with me and they read all my other scripts, including Shadow. I met with the head of their development department and she said, "By the way, we have this book called Interview with a Vampire. We've been trying to set it up with a director. Would you like to take a pass at it?" I think I was the 13th writer to do a draft of it.
My draft is the one that brought in Neil Jordan and he ended up using an older Ann Rice draft that he rewrote. So, technically, I think they went through 14 or 15 before the movie got made.
I didn't get a credit for that, by the way. On some of the internet sites I got a credit for that film, but I didn't. There's only one miniscule scene in the finished film that was actually mine. That was when Claudia is playing the piano and you watch her as a little girl get progressively better on the piano as the years go by.
Q: I GUESS WE'RE UP TO SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE ONCE MORE. IT'S NOT LIKE YOU'VE BEEN HEARING ENOUGH ABOUT THAT ONE RECENTLY, BUT THAT'S ALRIGHT. YOU MENTIONED BRIEFLY THAT THIS IDEA JUST STRUCK YOU FOR A VAMPIRE MOVIE, DO YOU REMEMBER THE PRECISE EVENT THAT MADE YOU GO, "WOW I SHOULD MAKE THIS THING AND PUT IT IN THE CONTEXT OF THE MAKING OF NOSFERATU."?
SK: It percolated in my brain for a couple of years. I had always loved the movie. As I said, I was always struck by the oddness of the vampire set against this very realistic backdrop. I mean, it's much more realistic in a lot of ways than any horror film since, including very naturalistic horror movies like Scream, or the movies that are set in regular surroundings.
The idea that the vampire was really a vampire just came to me and the rest took a while to nail down.
Q: SO YOU WROTE THE SCRIPT, THEN WHAT HAPPENED?
SK: Well, I got an agent through it and they just started sending it out. Over time, I think everyone in Hollywood had seen the script and passed on it. Vampire movies have a very weird sort of relationship with Hollywood studios. They only like to make one every decade, pretty much, and I guess mine was just ill-timed. They decided not to make it. They also love making really bad vampire movies.
So, a few other directors had been attached to it and nothing had happened with it. Finally, my agent at the time was Nic Cage's agent and Nic had founded his own production company, Saturn Films. My agent gave Nic this script, knowing, as I do now, Nic's incredible love for the movie Nosferatu. Nic told me Max Schrek was one of his principle inspirations for actually becoming an actor. If you remember his movie Vampire's Kiss, he did an homage to Schrek in it.
Q: SCORE!
SK: (laughs) That was the first script that went into Nic's company and he agreed to do it. It took several years because it was an independent film to raise the money and get it all set up. That was basically the process.
Q: WORD IS YOU HAD WILLEM DAFOE IN MIND TO PLAY SCHREK AS YOU WERE WRITING.
SK: Yeah. When I first moved to New York, which was nearly 20 years ago, I used to go down to the Performing Garage and there was this actor who a very intense actor. It was before he had been in any movies. I think it was before he was in any movies. It was before I had seen any. He had this incredible stage presence. He was this extremely beautiful man, but a very menacing man, too. He was obviously an incredible risk taker as an actor.
When I started thinking about writing this, I was like... You know, if I actually sell this movie to somebody, I should tell them about this actor downtown on Wister St. When the film was finally picked up, Jeff Levine, the producer, came up to me and said, "Do you have any casting ideas." I said the only casting idea I had was Willem Dafoe as Schreck.
That was kind of a dream come true. It was really funky to have the writing experience where you sit in a room and concoct an idea out of whole cloth and then see it happen. Then, like actually walk onto set and there's the actor you always imagined playing the part getting the rubber ears put on. It's the closest thing on earth to having a dream come true.
Q: SO, WAS IT THEN YOUR DREAM COME TRUE SEEING WILLEM DAFOE IN MAKE-UP FOR THE FIRST TIME?
SK: Yeah. I've had 3 things filmed for television and this. Everytime I've had that experience. You know, you sit in your room, listen to the voices in your head for days in and days out and you go somewhere and there's the set! And you made it up!! And the people are saying your words!
The next step, of course, is the day when I actually walk up to the set and it's my sexual fantasy and I'm starring in it. I guess my dream come true hasn't happened yet. Nearly, but not all the way.
You want to hear a funny story? This is an aside. You don't have to put it in the interview.
Q: I DON'T HAVE TO OR I CAN'T? (LAUGH)
SK: You can or not, but I had this really adolescent sexual fantasy when I was 16 that all the men would die on earth and I would be the only man left and I would have to repopulate the world by screwing all the beautiful women. You probably had a fantasy like that at some point.
I actually went into a meeting once and somebody pitched it to me. That was really surreal. Somebody was pitching my sexual fantasy to me.
Q: IT'S CALLED HELL COMES TO FROGTOWN, BUDDY.
SK: Huh?!?!
Q: HAVEN'T YOU SEEN THAT? HELL COMES TO FROGTOWN?
SK: No, what is that?
Q: IT'S "ROWDY" RODDY PIPER AND SANDAHL BERGMAN, YOU KNOW, FROM CONAN, IT'S BASICALLY THAT STORY. "ROWDY" RODDY IS THE ONLY FERTILE MALE LEFT AFTER SOME NUCLEAR DISASTER. HE'S HELD IN HIGH REGARD AND TRANSPORTED, HEAVILY GUARDED, TO IMPREGNATE THE FERTILE WOMEN.
SK: What's it called again?
Q: IT'S CALLED HELL COMES TO FROGTOWN.
SK: I am renting that tonight!
Q: IF YOU CAN FIND IT! THEY ALSO PUT THIS HUGE, SELF DESTRUCT THING ON HIS CROTCH THAT'LL BLOW UP IF "ROWDY" RODDY TRIES TO RUN AWAY. HE WASN'T VERY WILLING TO GO. GOD KNOWS WHY.
SK: Yeah, that's not part of my fantasy.
Q: YEAH, BUT THEY GET TO FIGHT MUTANT MUPPET-LOOKING FROGS AND STUFF, WHICH IS PRETTY COOL.
SK: It sounds a little bit like A Boy and His Dog, with Don Johnson. It's roughly the same plot. Everybody's sterile in the future. It must be a lot of men's sexual fantasies. Now that I think about it, the movie Zardoz with Sean Connery is basically that plot, too.
Anyway, but this is all off the point of your question (laughs).
Q: SO, IT'LL BE SAFE TO SAY YOU WERE JUST AS IN AWE OF WILLEM DAFOE WHEN HE WAS MADE UP AND IN CHARACTER AS THE VAMPIRE AS EVERYBODY ELSE IS WHO HAS SEEN THE MOVIE.
SK: You mean on the set?
Q: SURE.
SK: I was partially in awe of Dafoe just because he's such an incredible and professional actor. He's just so bloody good natured. That guy had to sit in a make-up chair for 4 or 5 hours and he would trot out onto the set. He'd wait around, then they'd haul him out, then film him for 15 minutes and then the day was over and he would have trot back into the chair and spend an hour and half as they peeled the crap off. And he was just so nice about it! He was always in such good spirits. It kinda deconstructs all the bad stuff you always hear about actors because he was just fantastic through the whole thing.
As far as I can tell, everyone on the cast was like that, though. They all really believed in the project and they pulled together.
Q: YOU CAN TELL THAT WHEN WATCHING THE FILM...
SK: Yeah. You know, it was an independent film. It wasn't an expensive film. It took about a month to shoot. There was no reason to get involved in it if you're very into the whole premadonna stuff. This is a true labor of love.
Q: AND HOW FORTUNATE YOU ARE TO GET YOURS TO THE BIG SCREEN.
SK: That's right! (laughs)
Q: HOW INVOLVED WERE YOU THROUGHOUT THE WHOLE FILMMAKING PROCESS ON THIS ONE?
SK: Since it was my idea, I was pretty heavily involved up to the actual shooting. I just visited the set for a few days, but at that point it really was out of my hands and it became all about the artistry of the director. I would have loved to stick around and been a pest and got in the way with everything. Since that wasn't gonna happen, I just had to trust everybody else's instincts. I would have to say that my involvement came to an end when the camera went on.
Q: SO, ANY GOOD WILLEM DAFOE OR JOHN MALKOVICH STORIES FROM PRODUCTION?
SK: Um... Stories... Not really... I had a long conversation with Dafoe about how hard it was to take a leak with those long fingernails, but... (laughs)
Q: AWESOME!
SK: Also, I drank Cognac with Carey Elwes in his trailer and Carey Elwes does the best Michael Caine imitation on earth.
Q: THAT'S COOL. HE WAS AT THE SCREENING HERE IN AUSTIN DURING THE AUSTIN FILM FESTIVAL. I MISSED IT, UNFORTUNATELY. I WOULD HAVE LOVED TO HAVE SEEN DRED PIRATE ROBERTS IN PERSON.
SK: Well, you should hear him do Michael Caine in the Man Who Would Be King.
Q: WELL, IF I EVER GET THE OPPORTUNITY, I'LL ASK HIM.
SK: (laughs)
Q: I SAY, YOU'RE GOING TO HAVE A FEW WEIRD FANS WHEN THIS COMES OUT.
SK: See, I'm waiting for the goth chicks to come out of the closet and start following me around. I was at this screening up in Williamstown, it was for Halloween so I thought, "Oh great! All these goth chicks from William's College and around the area were going to be there, but no. It was a good crowd, but it was, like, all guys in down vests, New England types. They all looked like Norm Abrams.
Q: WELL, ONCE THIS FILM GETS OUT THERE, I'M SURE YOU'LL GET YOUR GROUPIES. THE RELEASE DATE IS DECEMBER 29TH, RIGHT?
SK: Yeah. I guess that's just in New York and LA and I assume it'll get wider after that.
Q: WELL, THAT'S A GOOD SIGN. IT MEANS THEY'RE GOING FOR THE GOLD, PULLING FOR SOME OSCARS.
SK: I'm not going to say anything because I don't want to jinx it, but the director said an interesting thing. I wanted it to be released on Halloween, but he says that by releasing it in December people won't think it's just a horror movie and that's why he wanted it released at such an odd time, so people will go to it with not that limited expectations.
It's a funky movie. It's not quite the movie I envisioned. I told the director I had envisioned writing the Godfather of vampire movies. What I ended up getting was the Apocalypse Now of vampire movies.
Q: I READ YOU'RE CURRENTLY WORKING ON PAUL VERHOEVEN'S NEXT FILM.
SK: I don't know if it's going to be his next film, but it's a big film and it's going to take some time. I'm adapting a book called Other Powers by Barbara Goldsmith that's about the 19th Century suffragist/spiritualist Victoria Woodhull. She was also the first woman to run for president in 1872. She was a real extraordinary larger than life character.
Q: IF IT MEANS ANYTHING, I SAW VERHOEVEN SPEAK IN SAN DIEGO AT THE COMIC CON THIS YEAR AND HE SAID THAT WAS GOING TO BE HIS NEXT MOVIE.
SK: I would love it if it was. It's a huge project. It's an epic of American history. It's set all across America from Ohio to San Francisco and with most of it in New York from about the 1830s to the 1870s. It seems like a rather large project to pull off, especially with the looming strike.
I would love it if it's his next project. It's definitely a very cool project. It's a chunk of American history that's really incredible and really sick and most Americans don't have a clue about it.
Actually, there was a question on Who Wants to Be A Millionaire about Victoria Woodhull and the guy backed out and took the money and ran because he didn't know who she was.
Q: "HEY, I KNOW THAT ONE! I WROTE A SCREENPLAY ON HER LIFE, I KNOW THAT ONE!"
SK: (laughs) Yeah. He should have called me with the lifeline.
Q: YOU ALSO WROTE A SCREENPLAY ADAPTATION OF RAMSES THE DAMNED AT ONE POINT.
SK: I did an adaptation... I may have done the only adaptation of that book for James Cameron. It got kind of swamped because, I don't know if you know the book, it's very similar to Stephen Summers' Mummy, which in turn is very similar in plot to the Boris Karloff/Karl Freund film. Karl Freund by the way was the photographer on Murnau's The Last Laugh. The big circle that is filmmaking.
So, it kind of got swamped. That's a hard book to crack. It's mostly an erotic love story as opposed to an action or a real balls to the wall horror movie. I don't know where that project is now.
Q: HOW COOL IS IT TO HAVE SOMETHING THAT COULD HAVE POTENTIALLY BECOME A JAMES CAMERON PROJECT?
SK: I think Cameron is the greatest action/horror film, action and horror or action or horror film director in history. Anything he'll do... He could direct the phone book and you'd be curled up in a fetal ball.
I'll tell you a little Ain't It Cool News factoid that James Cameron told me.
Q: UH... SURE.
SK: Remember when they were filming Titanic, that everybody was expecting it to be the biggest bomb of all time. Variety actually had a little Titanic Clock about how over-budget and over-schedule it was. Cameron told me that one of the major things that turned around the public's perception of the film was Ain't It Cool News because somebody snuck in and saw a screening of it and posted a really positive review of it on your site. He said that attitudes stopped on a dime and suddenly people thought it was going to be a really good movie and was going to be a success.
Q: WOW. YEAH, I REMEMBER THAT. IT WAS THE FIRST TEST SCREENING OF THE FILM AND JOE HALLENBECK WROTE THAT REVIEW, I THINK. AS I RECALL, HARRY GOT IN A FEW MORE REVIEWS THAT WERE ALL GLOWING.
SK: It was amazing how attitudes changed so quickly about it.
Q: YEAH, THEN HOW ATTITUDES CHANGED BACK ONCE IT BECAME A SUCCESS.
SK: There's always backlash, you know.
Q: I WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL WHEN THAT CAME OUT. I SAW IT TWICE, TAKING A FEW PEOPLE EACH TIME. I THOUGHT IT WAS A GREAT, EPIC FILM. A MONTH AFTER IT CAME OUT, TO SAY THAT I LIKED TITANIC AT SCHOOL AUTOMATICALLY MEANT I WAS GAY. I GUESS BECAUSE LEONARDO DICAPRIO IS IN IT.
Q: (laughs) Yeah, I was in high school when Saturday Nigh Fever came out! (laughs) I didn't think it was a great movie, but I saw it a couple times and I'm embarrassed to say I actually had the soundtrack. Actually, I guess if I had the soundtrack now, it would seem kinda retro and cool.
Q: I READ ABOUT A PROJECT OF YOURS THAT REALLY INTRIGUED ME. IT WAS CALLED THE JUST...
SK: The Just. Yeah, The Just is a spec script of mine that's set up at Universal. Unfortunately, I don't know what's happening with that either. Sometimes it's like you write these things and throw them into a black hole. It's a cult thriller about a little known piece of Jewish mysticism called the lamed vov, which means 36.
The idea is that there are 36 good people in the world, and they don't know who they are, but they're the tentpoles of reality. They're the reason God lets the world exists. If they're all killed, then the world ends. The movie is about this guy who figures out how to identify them and is going about killing them to bring the world to an end. There's an ATF Agent who discovers the conspiracy and has to stop it. It's a pretty cool script.
I mean, I'm sorry it got caught up. There were so many occult thrillers in the last couple of years, people got a little tired. There's a kind of subconcious mass hysteria when it comes to projects. It's like Hollywood will belch out all the same subject projects all at the same time in a very strange, coincidental way.
Q: LIKE THE YEAR THAT ARMAGEDDON, DEEP IMPACT AND ALL THAT DIRECT TO VIDEO SHIT CAME OUT.
SK: Yeah, or a couple years ago when there were all those movies about men changing bodies with young boys. I mean, what in our collective consciousness or unconsciousness caused that to happen?
Agencies put out these lists called The Open Writing Assignment List for writers. They're lists of projects that studios are looking for screenwriters on. I see them every couple of months. Everytime I see them, it's incredible how there's, like, themes that emerge in the studios. I remember one year every studio seemed to be doing a movie about elephants. One year, every studio was doing movies about people who turn into their pets. I have no explanation for this. Just our minds and how the studio system seems to work.
Q: ALL RIGHT. NOW BACK TO THE DOCUMENTARY ON THE RUSSIAN SPACE PROGRAM YOU MENTIONED EARLIER. SPILL IT.
SK: It's a two part, one hour each part, documentary on the Russian Space Program for PBS documenting the history from Sputnik in '57 all the way up to the international space station.
Q: HOW DOES THAT COMPARE WITH DOING AT LEAST THE BEGINNINGS OF THE US SPACE PROGRAM IN FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON?
SK: Well, I don't have to do any dramatization, I'm just writing the voice over for this, but I've always been interested in it. A lot of the work I do is period work and historical work and work that takes research, so I really enjoy doing stuff like that.
My whole thing about Hollywood movies, or just movies in general, I'd like to see things I've never seen before and the Russian Space Program is a really, really amazing story and most people don't have a clue about it. I mean, I didn't really know that much about. For instance, I thought the Russians weren't even close to getting on the moon, but while I was in Moscow, I actually saw their lunar lander. They had already built the thing. It was ready to go, which is, I think, an incredible fact. That's why I got into writing movies, to see and talk about and explore stuff nobody's ever thought about or seen before.
Q: I GOTTA ASK MY STAPLE QUESTION. WHAT'S YOUR FAVORITE DIRTY JOKE?
SK: My favorite dirty film?!?
Q: NOT DIRTY FILM, DIRTY JOKE. DIRTY JOKE!
SK: Oh, dirty joke...
Q: YOU CAN DO THE DIRTY FILM AFTER IF YOU LIKE...
SK: (laughs) Oh shit... let me think for a sec.
Q: IT TAKES MOST PEOPLE A FEW SECONDS TO THINK ABOUT IT, FIND THE RIGHT ONE.
SK: I know a million jokes, but as soon as you said it, my brain just blanked. (pause) This is really your signature?
Q: OH YEAH. IT IN ALL MY INTERVIEWS. I'VE ASKED EVERYBODY FROM ELIJAH WOOD TO QUENTIN TARANTINO. THE RESPONSES ARE MORE OFTEN THAN NOT HILARIOUS.
SK: I'll tell you, the one that comes to mind, and it's not my favorite, but it's the only one that's bubbling up right now.
A city slicker buys a farm and he buys all the animals and he buys some chickens. He goes out in the morning and his chicken hasn't laid any eggs. So, he goes over to his neighbor and says, "What's going on here? My chicken won't lay any eggs."
The farmer says, "Well, what kinda rooster do you have?"
The guy says, "Rooster? I don't have a rooster."
The farmer goes, "You can't have eggs unless you have a rooster. Here, I'll sell you a rooster for $1000."
He goes and gets a cage and in the cage is the scrawniest little bird you've ever seen. It has no feathers. It's really skinny. It looks sickly.
The guy goes, "I'm not gonna pay a thousand bucks for that!"
The farmer goes, "No, no. Believe me. This is a super rooster. You buy this and you will have no complaints."
The guy goes, "Oh... OK."
The city slicker forks over a thousand and brings the rooster back, puts it in the barn, then goes in and makes coffee. Five minutes later he hears screaming from the barn. He goes out and there's the super rooster fucking every chicken in sight. He grabs it and throws it in the cage and says, "You keep this up, you're going to get killed."
He takes the cage and he puts it in another part of the farm and he goes in to make more coffee. Five minutes later, he hears a ruckus from the cow pen. He goes out and there's the rooster fucking all the cows. He grabs it and he puts it into the cage and says, "You keep this up and you're going to kill yourself."
This goes on all day with the pigs and so on. Finally night comes and the guy goes to sleep. He wakes up the next morning and he goes out and there, lying in the middle of the farm, is the super rooster, dead. Up in the sky there's vultures circling. He goes up to the super rooster and says, "I told you if you kept this up you were going to kill yourself."
Then the rooster looks up at him and says, "Shhh! They're about to land."
Just for the record, that's not my favorite. That was just the only one I could think of.
Q: IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE I HAVEN'T BROUGHT UP THAT YOU'D WANT TO TALK ABOUT? MAYBE MORE SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE STUFF OR ANYTHING ELSE YOU WANT TO TALK ABOUT?
SK: I don't know. Do you want to talk more about Vampires or vampire movies or horror movies... any questions?
Q: SURE! HORROR MOVIES! ONE OF MY ALL TIME FAVORITE SUBJECTS!
SK: What are your favorite horror movies?
Q: MY FAVORITE HORROR MOVIES? WELL, MY FAVORITE MOVIE OF ALL TIME IS JAWS, WHICH MOST PEOPLE CONSIDER A HORROR FILM, BUT I TEND TO SEE IT MORE AS AN ADVENTURE FLICK. YOURS?
SK: Well, my favorite horror movie is Alien, although you can argue that's not a horror movie, too. I love Rosemary's Baby. It's so funny and creepy. The way he mixes those things is amazing. What else? Freaks. I love The Omen. I've been watching The Omen lately, it's been on TV.
When I was a real little kid, this dates me, but I really loved Dark Shadows. I love the Universal horror movies like The Mummy and Frankenstein, The Bride of Frankenstein and Dracula. I was a big Lon Chaney fan when I was a kid, too. Some of his weirder movies are really great.
I think Vampire movies are really... the interesting thing about Vampires is they really grew up in the movies. It was a myth that was kind of unfocused until Hollywood discovered it. Now we know it inside and out and it's because of the movies.
For instance, on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, they never have the Van Helsing character where they have to trot him out and have him say, "It was the vampire!" because we know what it is now because of the movies. So many vampire movies are so godawful. You can count the good ones on one hand, I think. I'm happy I hopefully contributed to the good ones. I've got a couple ideas for a few more before I die, too.
I heard there's a Dracula Vs. Sherlock Holmes in the works.
Q: YEAH, IF YOU TALK TO HARRY ABOUT THAT, YOU WON'T GET HIM TO SHUT UP. HE'S ADAMENT ABOUT THAT SCRIPT.
SK: Pro or con?
Q: PRO. HE THINKS ITS A GREAT SCRIPT.
SK: That sounds like a pretty cool project.
Q: THE HORROR MOVIES YOU MENTIONED ALL SEEM TO BE IN THE REALM OF CLASSIC HORROR. DO YOU LIKE THE CHEESY 80s SLASHER FLICKS, TOO?
SK: Yeah, but you know... My feeling is there are two kinds of horror movies. There's the kind where the ancient horror turns up in the contemporary world like Halloween or Scream where this spook from the past, or a representative of the spook from the past, turns up in a high school or a college or something. Then there's the flip side where the modern man or woman goes on a journey and ends up in a strange place where the ancient horror lives. Like Dracula. Jonathan Hartford goes into the forests of Transylvania and has the vampire waiting for him. Although, in the second part, the vampire comes back to modern London, so you get both versions in Dracula.
My own favorite is the kind like Alien, where the modern people go into this strange environment and had a horrible thing waiting for them. It's not that I don't like movies like Scream, 'cause I like them a lot, but my own tendency as far as writing things is to do the more gothic, kind of creepshowy stuff.
Q: I LOVE THE CLASSICS THAT HAVE LITTLE TO NO GORE ANYWHERE. WOLFMAN IS MY PERSONAL FAVORITE, BUT I HAVE SUCH A SOFT SPOT IN MY HEART FOR THOSE BLOODY, CHEESY, GORY, MAKE-ME-WINCE FLICKS...
SK: I have no objections to those. I guess there are two kinds of people in the world. One likes the one kind of horror film, the others like the other one. Actually, that would be a good question for, like, the presidential debates.
Q: (LAUGHS) "WHAT KIND OF HORROR FILM DO YOU LIKE?" HEHE
SK: Do you prefer Dracula or Scream? I think George Bush would be a Scream fan and Al Gore would be a Dracula fan. I could be wrong, though.
Q: POSSIBLY. BUT SINCE THEY'RE BOTH BASICALLY PRO-CENSORSHIP TICKETS, THEY'D PROBABLY SAY NEITHER.
SK: Yeah, I know. Don't even get me started on that. It's insidious. I've been talking to people about projects lately and everytime we start talking about a horror aspect or a gore aspect, I mean gore not meaning Al Gore, everybody's already self-censoring themselves. They're like, "Oh, maybe we shouldn't start talking about that right now..."
It's funny that the candidates names are Gore and Bush because it sounds like things you put into a movie to get an R rating. (laughs)
Q: TO SHOW YOU HOW SERIOUS WE'RE TAKING THIS ELECTION IN AUSTIN, ON THE WEEKEND AFTER, AT THE ALAMO DRAFTHOUSE CINEMA, A LOCAL BAND CALLED FLAMETRICK SUBS AND THE SATAN'S CHEERLEADERS ARE PUTTING ON AN EVENT WHERE THE AUDIENCE VOTES FOR BUSH OR GORE. BUSH BEING A '70S CHEERLEADER FLICK AND GORE BEING SOME SORT OF '70 OR '80S HORROR.
SK: (laughs) When I was a young teenager, everybody had a bumper sticker that said, "Lick Dick in '72" when Nixon was running and now I actually saw one that said, "Lick Bush in 2000." (laughs) That's pretty much been my experience with American politics. From Dick to Bush.
Q: SO, THERE REALLY IS A SCRAMBLE IN HOLLYWOOD NOW...
SK: I think it's sort of unspoken. It's just been my experience in talking about projects. I was talking to somebody about doing a fictional version of Son of Sam and they were like, "Oh, no! It's too gory and scary... Satan stuff..."
The thing about Hollywood movies is they're in the pipeline so long that it's sort of hard to predict when they're going to pop out. That's why when you try to do the psychological interpretation, it's really not accurate. Like all those movies where men took over boy's bodies. Some of those may have been under development for a month and some may have been under development for 25 years and it just by total coincidence they come out at the same time.
But my guess is, if they actually have some control of this, in the next year or two I think Hollywood will be backing away from violence, maybe not so much so explicit sex. There's not that much sex in movies, you know! Whenever I hear congressmen talk about how much sex there is in movies, I keep wondering if... I keep wishing they would bring me with them to the movies because I'm not seeing it! Maybe it's in the Congressional Cloak room.
THAT'S THE END OF THIS ONE. KEEP AN EYE OUT FOR MY NEXT INTERVIEW WITH THE COOLEST QUAD-SHOTGUN WEILDING, DWARF AND BALL HUNTER AROUND.
