INTERVIEW WITH JOE DANTE

Often in your movies there are children, chained to the pictures on their TVs or confined to their rooms by distracted and busy adults; children who react with imagination, freeing themselves from their limits. How was your childhood? Were there attics, basements, spaceships, monsters?

Attics and basements, sure, but all the spaceships and monsters were on the screen. Except for a year (1954) when I was down with polio it was a swell childhood. I drew cartoons and went to the movies every Saturday to see ten cartoons and two features, either older revivals like The Wizard of Oz and Tarzan movies, or new '50s westerns and sci-fi movies.

What kind of function did cinema play in your childhood? 

Perhaps because my grandfather introduced me to B-westerns on TV, I was always into movies. Of all my friends I was the only one who went every weekend. We didn't have a television until later, but I found that hypnotic as well. There were only a few channels but there was a lot of programming for kids, often made up of silent comedies.

Almost always in your movies there is this representation of small-town, suburban America. Why this choice? Maybe because what seems close and familiar can hide greater tensions, more disturbing concerns?

That is the world I grew up in. The fifties was not quite the button-down uptight era it sometimes appears. There were deep undercurrents of fear and disquiet all around us, not least the shadow of the H-Bomb and impending catastrophe. And adult movies like Bigger Than Life and Night of the Hunter actually ran at kiddie matinees and sent a lot of us home quite disturbed, believe me.

In Piranha, a familiar place, the river where children play and where adults tan, becomes the scene of violence. Is it a representation of a mass culture, a "seaside" culture, too carefree, which suddenly is awoken from its reality? 

I always saw Piranha as a movie about the Vietnam war coming home to America.

The 'Burbs is built like a battlefield. A comedy that makes you think. As in a Ozu film, daily life is crossed with war. People control each other, no one lives his own life but, as a vampire, everybody feeds on the life of others. Voyeurism (liabilities) and mutual control: it’s this aspect of commentary on contemporary society that interested you?

Well, that's the first time I ever heard The Burbs compared to Ozu! As it happens I had some weird neighbors when I was a kid, and when I checked around I found many others reported the same thing. So when the producers brought me what they considered a Rear Window parody, I saw different qualities in the material.

You also develop this idea in Matinee, I'm talking about the terrible scene of the bomb drill in the school: to ensure the safety of citizens, the power exerts bodily discipline, controls the students. Do you believe that it’s a more sophisticated form of control?

That "duck and cover" drill is a painstakingly accurate representation of the nonsense we had to put up with from the authorities in those days. There wasn't a single kid who wasn't aware of the frivolity of hiding in the hallway from an atom bomb, but we were forced to submit. It became routine after a while. I remember thinking the school administration very rigid and authoritarian at the time. I wonder what it's like now?

Today it’s a very current topic in America after September 11: the decline of civil rights, to safeguard national security.  

Some feel 9/11 became the excuse to curtail those rights on the part of those who would benefit from greater government control. We already know it was the pretext for starting an illegal war.

As for Matinee, since your first film, as The Movie Orgy and Hollywood Boulevard, you’ve put your love of movies in your work. What kind of relationship do you have with the tradition of comedy or the tradition of horror or science-fiction? Do you consider them a source of inspiration? Are they objects you need to recreate? Signs, quotes?

Movies have formed a basis of a lot of my work simply because that's my passion, and I have lots to say about the subject. If I made westerns I'd probably have my characters reading dime novels. I have been inspired over the years by these genres and others, but particularly by the work of directors and writers whose work has moved me. In comedy, Tashlin, Wilder, Lubitsch, Sturges. In horror/sci fi, Tourneur, Bava, Whale, Browning, Fisher, Corman, Arnold.  In other genres Hitchcock, Welles, Ford, Fellini, Hawks, Kubrick, the usual suspects. But I also value lesser known names like John Farrow, Robert Florey, Roy William Neill, John Sturges, Joseph H. Lewis and others.

William Castle is the director who inspired John Goodman’s character? Didn’t you also write something about Castle?

Castle is certainly the prototype, but he never really made monster movies like Mant! so the character is something of an amalgam of Castle, Corman, Arnold and Bert I. Gordon—not to mention earlier gimmick hucksters like David F. Friedman.

What fascinates you in the work of these directors, often considered minor? Their poverty of resources, their wealth of invention?

Look at Ulmer. Look how much he was able to squeeze out of the poverty row resources of Detour and The Man from Planet X. It's a rare gift to deliver good work under impoverished circumstances, and many so-called B directors excelled at it.

Even Jack Arnold has inspired your work?

Certainly. I knew Jack well. His daughter cast The Howling. I was slated to be his younger back-up director on the proposed 1980 remake of Creature from the Black Lagoon (by then he'd lost a leg to amputation), but it never came to pass. The Incredible Shrinking Man is his masterpiece.

Arnold also made some good westerns, you only one. What’s your relationship to the western?

I would love to make westerns, but I was born a bit late for that. It's hard to remember now, but when I was a kid the western was the most popular genre. They were all over the movies and TV, but times change and pretty soon westerns were being made with trucks, cars and motorcycles taking the place of horses. Then Sam and Sergio came along and westerns came to be about the Death of the West and the corruption of America. Some of the greatest were made in the late 60s and 70s, but by the 80s it was all over.

You worked inside Hollywood genres while maintaining your independence. The genres offer conventions and patterns, serve as limits, but they can also be a resource, allowing possibilities for variations. Can you tell us something about this relationship between convention and personal expression, that’s been balanced by so many great Hollywood directors?

Maintaining a directorial personality in the face of studio control is a tightrope act. You have to sneak your quirks between the lines (or frames, if you will). But genre filmmaking can afford greater freedom than conventional subject matter because it does have a distinct shape and identity.

It seems to me that, for different reasons, Corman and Spielberg were both very important for your career (if there are others I didn't mention, you can tell me)—can you say how an why?

If not for Roger I would have had to start as an apprentice editor and work my way up to directing—I might never have gotten that far even by now. I was directing a year after arriving in Hollywood. And if not for Steven's faith in me I would never have had the opportunity to break out of the B picture ghetto into mainstream movies. So I owe them both a lot.

Was it difficult to maintain your identity (and you have a clear identity!), working with Spielberg?

I was initially worried that might be a problem, but it never was. He was extremely collaborative and willing to consider it your movie even though his name was on it as producer.

I think that in the way you edit, there are these sudden collisions between different ideas and genres, to give a punch to the viewer—does that seem right?

The Sam Fuller approach! I imagined I would direct and edit my own movies like Sam did—but I found the studios considered that a bit too much control to give away, so after The Howling I never cut the movies myself. But I've been fortunate in my choice of editors along the way and have always found post-production one of the most creative periods on a film. My current editor, Marshall Harvey, has been with me pretty much non-stop since The Burbs.

You have worked with many writers, but the themes are repeated, these come from you?

The themes end up similar because I try only to do projects that interest me and that I would enjoy if made by someone else. I've been typed in a limited number of genres, but usually manage to personalize things along the way.

Would it be wrong to say that one of the recurring obsessions of your movies is the criticism of the media world? TV and newspapers, transforming reality into an image with the effect of trapping both the child and the adult in a fictitious world that takes the place of the real one?

I wouldn't say it's wrong, but that's not quite the way I look at it. The media has become a much bigger part of daily life than it was when I was growing up, and not necessarily for the best. That idea has crept into a lot of things I've done.

Even the social criticism in The Howling, shown through the television, becomes a show, in which the message of the journalist isn’t credible—or in The Second Civil War, where a humanitarian action is just a self-serving ambition.

In Civil War, the irony is that even with all these technological advances we can't communicate with each other. The war itself is ultimately sparked by a single misunderstood sentence.

In Howling, the irony is that even when the horror is televised and the story is revealed, it's disbelieved.

Your films also criticize the way the media exploits fantasy for power—did you take your inspiration, for example, from Marshall McLuhan (“the medium is the message”) or Neil Postman, who investigated the effects of television on children's behavior? Or did you take inspiration from other sociologists and philosophers?

I was aware of all that but only as background.

Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote that the last films of Frank Tashlin have an affinity with your movies. They’re a critique of American pop culture—what do you think? That you’re a critic of pop culture (television, images of overdose, confusion between reality and fiction…)?

I'm honored anytime I'm compared to Tashlin, whose work has been very influential, as has Mad Magazine. Tashlin's Artists and Models was a revelation when I was a comic-book-crazy 9 year old.

You see a South Park character in the The Hole, and there are many cartoon characters in your movies, and of course Chuck Jones! And you’ve also been a cartoonist. Has the cartoon changed a lot in recent years? Is it more aggressive, vulgar?

Of course there's an inevitable coarsening of culture that accompanies the pushing of the envelope, and cartoons are no exception. During the WW II era, a brashness borne of the turbulent times set in, primarily at Warner Bros., which lasted through the end of the so-called golden era in the early 60s. Then as society adjusted to yet more wars and discord and censorship eased up, we got underground comics, Ralph Bakshi, Beavis and Butthead, The Simpsons and South Park. Nothing was taboo and many popular cartoons were no longer for children. Even so, most cartoon heroes traditionally thumbed their noses at adversity and the establishment. Much of this attitude goes back to the Marx Brothers and Chaplin.

The monsters of your movies look like men. The beasts of The Howling, repressed by the pre-Columbian civilizations or exploited (by psychiatrists). It seems to me that in your movies, there is this battle for men not let themselves become animals. Especially in Gremlins. Am I wrong, that the monsters spawn the human being’s appetites, to consume, to devour images and goods? We’re all the gremlins?

Obviously there are monsters within all of us, and children seem to recognize this best. Civilization is a thin veneer which we have created laws and religion to sustain. Gremlins are certainly consumers, but so are werewolves, zombies and other creatures: consumers of people. And each other. While the rest of us are content to merely consume the planet.

According Bill Krohn, the solution of your satires, or better the escape, is the apocalypse, which means revelation. That there’s an abyss beneath our every step. Do you like this interpretation? For me is very impressive and effective.

Not getting away from the fact that many of my subjects involve apocalypse—it was never planned that way, but it may be a hangover from my atomic-fear-ridden childhood. In addition to worrying about the Bomb, I also survived measles, scarlet fever and polio! Not to mention programs like Andy's Gang on television! Still, I don't think that the end of the world answers many questions, it only engenders more of them.

If there’s an image that comes back often in your movies, a kind of signature, it’s the sudden interruption of a TV signal or the explosion of the TV. It seems to me a particularly iconoclastic image.

Now that you mention it there's a lot of video static and smashed-in tv sets in my work. "Just like Elvis," as the tv repairman/hitman in Innerspace points out about Martin Short's shot-out tv.

More generally, in your films you represent the degeneration of the balance between man, technology, and nature, even in The Screwfly Solution. In that film, men give up women, but they cannot renounce their TV images, that you’ve turned off or tampered with!

Wow. That is general!

Moreover, the recovery of the soil, the Earth, our environment is always ambiguous. And you show it very well in The Second Civil War. An extraordinary film, ironic and violent. The movie shows that America is no longer a melting pot, but a war zone. People do not understand globalization (migratory flows, etc.), and respond by inventing a fictitious American identity defended by Chinese people!

This was a film I very much wanted to do, and an example of the kind of material I have too seldom had access to.

In The Second Civil War, there is also the subject of immigration, so fundamental in American culture. The riots and unrest in North Africa, in Europe and Italy, have been followed with fear and unease: the Europeans are afraid that the North Africans will arrive in Europe. What do you think? It’s also a problem in America, which is always open to immigrants.

The issues we dealt with in this film have not gone away since 1997, in fact I have been amazed at how contemporarily the movie plays when revived at festivals. The immigration topic, of course, has popped since it was made, but there are a host of issues that are still in the process of coming true across the globe. On the set, it seemed that every day we would open the newspaper and see a story about some aspect of the material we were shooting that day.

Political scientists and politicians talk about exporting democracy in the world (Iraq, Afganisthan, North Africa). But perhaps it would be better, first, to reflect on our democracy, on the limits of our democracy?

I think our recent US history is a very poor model for the dissemination of democracy.

And certainly media and TV do not help to comprehend it, do not have the liberties in editing, in storytelling, of cinema, of your movies, for example: that is, rhythm, action, narrative, imagination, freedom. TV puts everything on the same level, invents a reality that increases the alienation and the powerlessness of children and adults. I think that this is one of your battles, against these codes, right?

Um... if you say so.

Often your finals are “ironic”. Gremlins 2 and Small Soldiers, finish with the triumph of capitalism, which uses the occasion to relaunch its activities and its business.

You could call that an ironic outcome to those stories, but the truth is capitalism is here to stay and we're stuck with it.

It’s interesting, because it relates to how we talk about classic cinema, which is made up of conventions that, I think, take a real effort to analyze, because despite the simple linearity of the stories, there’s also a deeper, more concealed structure in classic films. Gremlins 2 and Small Soldiers leave off with happy but ambiguous endings, the bad guys still win.

Look around you and tell me how often the good guys win. It's one of the reasons we keep coming back to the movies, where our fantasies of justice are so often reinforced. There used to be a dictum in Hollywood that the bad guys paid the price and right prevailed. It's a nice ideal, but the realities of actual society eventually intruded starting in the 1960s and from then on, from James Bond to The Man With No Name, disillusioning actualities transformed audience expectations and created the anti-hero archetype we're so familiar with today.

In Looney Tunes you create an irreverent image of the Board of Directors of the Corporation, a power that wants to transform men into apes (consumers), through their control of toys (Small Soldiers), even while children with their imagination, oppose this economy and its laws, as in Explorers.

That is as negative portrayals of businessmen go back to the 1920s. It's pretty much a cliché by now. But like all clichés, it's based on reality.

It seems to me that your cinema is an invitation to the imagination, a journey, an adventure to broaden our landscape, to enrich it and then improve it. It seems like the political lesson of your movies: an invitation to think and believe that the world is not reduced to television images or forbidden by the bans of adults, prohibitions that force us into a corner. Instead an invitation to cross the barriers and fences that humans encounter in their family and in their society.

I wish I'd said that!

The power of the imagination helps us to overcome a reality that’s too ugly, too full of nasty images?

Certainly the appeal of movies is partly escapism into a world we'd like to visit that's in many ways more attractive and rewarding than the one we live in. But when the lights come up, we can only hope that whatever world we've seen can somehow help us cope with the one we actually live in.

We can say that it is also a cathartic and liberating cinema, like in The Hole, an adventure of coming out of one’s lair (ghosts/psychologists, traumas, images that alienate and won't let one grow).

Coming of age stories come in many forms, and I guess I've specialized in them at times.

Can you tell us something about how you made that wonderful scene, expressionist and cartoon-like—the fight between the teenager and the abusive father, in The Hole?

We had very little money to visualize this sequence once we had added 3-D, so what you see is the absolute minimum we could achieve under the circumstances. It owes a lot to dream sequences of the 40s and 50s. The exact extent of the child abuse involved proved a particularly tricky tightrope to walk for a supposedly family-oriented horror movie.

Can you tell us about your future projects or about a specific project you want to complete?

The landscape has changed considerably since I started out in the business in 1974. My last picture didn't even get released in North America. I notice that John Carpenter's latest is going out on VOD (Video on Demand), and Peter Weir's latest sat on the shelf some time before landing distribution. So sure, I have projects, several of them, but will any of them get funded? Who knows?

What kind of cinema do you like nowadays?

For the first time in my life I find it's hard to find a weekend with a new opening that I'm looking forward to. An overabundance of sequels, unearned remakes and superhero clones has left me cold. These days I'm not as attracted to studio releases as I am to indies and the dwindling supply of foreign imports. In the 60s and 70s we were inundated with imports of both art and genre films and were much more familiar with European stars and directors. Today few foreign films are theatrically released. More often they're bought to be remade.

Your latest film is in 3D. As you can see the future of cinema in relation with new technologies? Risks and potential?

I think 3D can be a great storytelling tool, just as color, widescreen and stereo sound became. But there are drawbacks, particularly in poor presentation, which has killed off every previous iteration of 3D. And the preponderance of 2-D movies sloppily "converted" after the fact flies in the face of the very idea of 3D. You plan, shoot, design and think in 3D while you're making the movie, not as an afterthought. I used to think 3D had a big future; lately I'm not so sure.

In The Howling, at one point as John Carradine’s sad, he complains that no one takes better care of him—were you alluding to classic cinema (represented by Carradine) that maybe today few people know?

Even then few people knew it.  It's certainly true that at this point in his career no one was looking out for Carradine but himself. After discovering him in Universal horror films I had come to admire his greatest performance in The Grapes of Wrath. By that time he had been taking pretty much any job that came down the pike, but I was still honored that he agreed to mine. I did try to make a connection in that film between classic Hollywood and what it had become by the 80s. I remember some kids on location asking who was in the picture and I rattled off what I thought was a pretty cool list of names. Naturally they hadn't heard of a single one of them.

Great critics have praised your cinema: McBride, Krohn, Rosenbaum. Do they make you satisfied? Did some of the negative opinions hurt you?

Nobody likes bad reviews, but you have to consider the source and the fact that no matter what anyone says about it, the work has to stand on its own. It may or may not be appreciated in its own time, but history will have the final say as it has on so many revered films that were dismissed and/or shunned in their time. I have been very fortunate that a number of passionate cineastes have taken an interest in my stuff and sometimes find meaning and merit in it. Still, those really bad reviews can be memorable. (Vincent Canby on The Burbs: "As empty as a movie can be without actually creating a vacuum.")

You have also worked as a film critic, can you tell us something about your way of reading the films and your writing? What did you look for in a movie to give it a positive reaction?

When I started writing movie reviews at 13 I looked at movies in a very different way. I have revisited some of my old letters and published reviews and sometimes they make me wince.

Once you've actually made a movie, your whole perspective changes, and I never would have been so glib and dismissive of some of them if I'd had any idea what it takes to even finish one, let alone make it stand out from the pack. I have gone back and revisited filmmakers and films I undervalued only to discover merits I was too immature to appreciate at the time. Andrew Sarris's groundbreaking American Cinema ranked many filmmakers in ways he has since reconsidered. We change as we grow. Watch Fellini's 8 1/2 as a teenager, then revisit it every decade to see how much your own situation has to do with how a film affects you. Then add the idea of having become a filmmaker yourself and you can see how time can change perception.

Some words about your next movie?

I hope there will be some!

Last but not least. Dick Miller: why is he (it's fantastic!) always in your films?

I enjoyed Dick in numerous Corman films of the 50s and 60s, so when I finally got a chance to make one of my own, Dick was pretty much the biggest name in the picture for me. We hit it off and he has become sort of a talisman for me over the years as well as a friend. Whenever I'd read a script I'd look for a part for Dick. Luckily he's the sort of actor's actor who can take a big part or a simple cameo and make the most out of it. He's pretty much retired now but has always risen to the occasion when I ask him to show up on the set. And besides, he loves it!

Edited by Toni D’Angela