Meltdown Memories

Hi, I'm Leah Thompson. You're listening to Movie Meltdown. Hello, I'm Brian, the host of Movie Meltdown. And these are just a few snippets of interviews we've done with some amazing guests over the years. like Nick Offerman talking about one of his lesser-known roles. I think my work on Cursed by the great Wes Craven, I was the dog catcher in a werewolf movie.

And if memory serves, the leads, Jesse Eisenberg, I remain friends with. I just saw him perform in a play he wrote in London. He's one of those annoying talents that we mentioned earlier. Damn kids. Smart son of a bitch uh but he um he and that's where we met we became buddies and i think was it him christina ricci yeah playing siblings yeah so i think my role came about uh in reshoots i think they had finished the movie then they decided you know what this part isn't working let's reshoot part of the ending or something and and i just came up i think i just did one scene yeah And it was on the Universal backlot on a hillside with, like, an animal control wagon.

And it's, I mean, that's the funny thing about the business. That reminds me of, you just never know. Sean Gunn discussing his immersion into film through the Troma World, which is kind of where we lead to, I guess, because you're, I mean, doing tons of theater study at that point, and then feature-wise you get thrown into the Troma World. Yeah. What.

I guess what is your reaction to that? Cause it's its own little world. Well, I was in acting school when, when my brother James was, uh, was brought on to write Tromeo and Juliet and he contacted me. Um, and, and one of my, my good friends, um, Valentine Mealy is still a good friend and, um, you know, has, uh, he's a great actor and has, uh, has some like small, but really good roles. And, uh, and, subsequent movies of my brothers.

Um, and, uh, and he and I just went to New York to, to do that movie. And we just thought it was the coolest thing in the world because we were just acting students, you know, and we're just like trying to not get cut from our theater conservatory. Cause they do that because I went to a school where they, you have to be asked back. They like actually make cuts at the end of each of the first two years. They don't do that anymore, but they did when I was there.

Um, and, uh, And yeah, so we just took the summer and went up and shot Tromeo and it was a trip. I mean, uh, and then, you know, it was a movie that people actually saw, like it had a screening in Chicago for a long time. And, uh, while he lived in Chicago, uh, but, um, Yeah, I don't know. I think it was cool. It's nice having a trauma movie be your first movie.

It definitely gets you ready for the business. It is. You don't have this shock of like, oh my god, I've stepped into the big time. It's almost like you're still pretending that you're making movies, even though you actually made one. It was just Lloyd and whoever he could sucker into doing things.

For the most part, yeah. Basically, you and your friends go shoot a movie, only Lloyd got a little bit more money. Well, Lloyd certainly is a mad scientist of sorts. He's one of the brighter guys I've probably ever met. And he's a great guy.

But it was a heck of a thing making that movie. There's a scene in that movie where I get punched in the face. And if you listen, the sound that it makes when I get punched is the actual sound of my nose breaking when I was getting punched in the face. Because the fight choreography was not quite on point. And so.

And it was Val, my very, very close friend, who turned and just popped me. And apparently, they almost didn't use the real sound because it sounded too fake. It sounds like a balloon popping. It was just the actual sound of my nose breaking. So yeah, that happened.

That was fun. I thought the hairstyle was going to be the worst thing. Which I volunteered for. I don't know why. Did they already have that in mind?

No. No, we were just like, what kind of? crazy hairstyle can can we have because my because my brother knew i would do it because i'm like i don't know what it is i uh i have no problem humiliating myself for that's a rough hairstyle or at least i didn't used to when i was younger i don't know that i would do it quite so much anymore i. Was and again the car scene i assume that's where they were going to kill you but no they'd already broken your nose oh. Yeah right no My death scene in, sorry for the spoilers. By now, let's hope.

You only have 23 years to see it. And it's a classical piece of literature. But my death scene in Tromeo and Juliet is, I've often said, the greatest scene in the history of American cinema. It's drama. That's empirically true.

There's a group of students at MIT who proved that. Director Mick Garris talking about working with Stephen King on the overwhelming task that was making the stand. I was totally intimidated by it. You know, the good news though, was that it was one of my favorite books of all time. Yeah.

We had just done sleepwalkers together. And the reason he came to me with it was because he really liked what we had done with sleepwalkers, especially before. The MPAA got old. Yeah. Yeah.

Um, And even more intimidating than that book is when a 460-page script shows up on your doorstep. I mean, you are essentially making four or more movies. Edited down, you're making four movies. It was four movies, but you still have to shoot it like one. You shoot out all the location in one place, then you move to the next place.

A movie isn't shot in order. And especially something this lumbering. Picking up all those shots in that location from... Yeah. Four hours from now.

Yeah, exactly. In the running time. So yeah, that's huge. So not only was the page count really intimidating, but also the scope of it. I had only done things on a small scale.

You know, Critters 2 was the biggest scope of anything I'd done before that. Yeah, I'd say Epic is probably an understatement. Understatement to be sure. And here we're doing like 600 extras on the streets of downtown Las Vegas. Yeah.

You know, the end of the world, basically. And I'd never done anything approaching that scale. And even though it was a healthy budget for a television miniseries in 1994, it's still a very demanding. Project. And, you know, CGI had just started being used.

We used a little bit of it there, and it was still pretty primitive and all. But The only way you can make a movie is to do it one day at a time. It's like being a recovering alcoholic. You take it one day at a time. Actually, something like that, yeah.

I guess that's the only way to not be overwhelmed by it. To not be overwhelmed by it is to have a script that you know is great, and you break it down into what the shooting schedule is going to be, and you chip away at it. Literally, there was no light at the end of the tunnel. All I saw was tunnels. Billy Dee Williams talking about his side career as a singer.

Back in those days, I worked with George Corey and Douglas Cross who wrote I Left My Heart in San Francisco. They were good friends of mine and they were sort of gearing me up to become a chic east side nightclub singer. A chanteur. And that was the period of when there was People were really into lyrics and phrasing and all that sort of stuff. Director Monty Hellman on making Tulane Blacktop.

Because that was a very specific movement in cinema at that point was the car movie. Was it something that you were interested in before that or is it. Something that just happened? It was just something that was offered to me and it was a really kind of saccharine obnoxious screenplay. Well, I like the idea.

I like the idea. I think what would appeal to me was the gambling aspect. My father had been a gambler, and I felt an interest in that, just kind of like born into it. And then we just, as I did many times subsequently, we just took that idea and made it into something completely different. Kathleen Turner discussing when she realized she could make a living academically.

From what little I know, your family was a little different? Was the arts not encouraged for you? No, no one in my family had ever been in liberal arts, or shall I say performing arts, yes. Yeah. Yeah.

No, Heaven Sibethi, when I went, I was at high school in London, and I moved there, we all moved there from Caracas, Venezuela, and it was already in my mind that, you know, I wanted to act, but Of course, when I got to London and saw the theater there. Yeah. That was it. I was a goner, you know. I think the first night I was in London, I snuck out of the hotel and got a really cheap ticket, you know, up in the Gods.

In the theater. And it just hit me, well, I could make my. Living doing this. I guess it never... It never quite occurred to me that way before.

I think that's, yeah, that's a defining moment for everybody. We knew that we all had to make our way. We didn't have any money or anything, so we were all going to have to pay our rent. Yeah. But thinking, oh, my God, I can pay my rent this way.

It's better than most jobs out there, I suppose. I love it. So were you initially drawn to just, like, theater? Oh, yes. Or was it, like, growing up, were you into film as well?

It was all theater? No, I grew up mostly in Venezuela and everything, so... There was very little in English. And I took a couple of years to speak Spanish well enough to really be able to watch films. No, I've always been a reader, honestly.

But then I moved to New York, you know, right after I finished college. Well, hell, my car was packed already. You know, they gave me the diploma. I said, send it to my mother. Thank you.

You're ready to go. I was ready. And then, I don't know, in the first year, It took about six months to get an off-Broadway play, or rather I should say off-off, and then about 10 months to get a soap opera. Yeah. And then 11 months I was on Broadway in Gemini.

So I was racing to the studio at 6 o'clock in the morning and then racing to the theater at 6 o'clock at night. And when you're 22, you know, you can do that stuff. Yeah. It was great. It was absolutely great.

Again, there's not as much going on with that anymore, but that is such a training ground for actors. It was good training for camera. I'd never done any camera work. Director John Waters on restoring and re-releasing his films, as well as learning to shoot on those early cameras. I know Criterion is doing a re-release on Multiple Maniacs.

Yep. Guess how has it been dealing with them? And then, I guess just. Oh, they've been great. Are you kidding?

I mean, you know, they... you know, the very fact that Janice films distributed theatrically and Criterion's doing the DVD Blu-ray releases is so phoronic and where I've been a lifetime that's drowned in irony because when I was really young in high school I would go see the early Bergman movies and they would always be Janice films presented and we would sip espresso coffee in the art theaters and watch Bergman and Criterion, you know, have such classy products. So they completely understood the irony and restored Multiple Maniacs with great respect in its ineptitude and in its teenage anger. And they were, in the beginning, just wanted to make sure that I wanted to restore it the way we did it, which was to make it look as best as we could, not keep every stretch, every dirt piece, every square 16 millimeter splice that showed.

Because I didn't ever want it to look like that. That was just the best I could do at the time on $ 5, 000 when I was learning how to make movies where nobody taught me except one teamster guy that got us the equipment. So I was learning how to do that completely. I mean, I had never shot a lip-sync sound film in my life, except the Diane Linklater story that wasn't a movie at all. It was just...

We rented the camera, but they had to test it, and that's what we shot to test the camera, basically. So I look back on it, and I think, God, no wonder my parents were uptight. By the time you got to that movie, was that your camera? Had you gotten your own 16mm? No, that was a camera.

I never... I still don't own a camera. I, um. No, we rented. I'm somehow from the film lab where I got my black and white film developed always from under trash.

There was only one place in town called Quality Film Labs. And he taught me kind of how to do stuff. And he knew somebody that I believed worked at a TV station that somehow I never asked, got the equipment they used to shoot the news out of there because this was before for videotape or anything it was and so they used 16mm with magnetic stripe sound on it to shoot the news every day so it was a big camera with those two big like Mickey Mouse ears and a big brace you wore on your shoulder you were like I a Steadicam before Steadicam and um He would rent us the equipment. I don't know if the TV station knew that the camera was missing, but I didn't care. He taught me how to do it, really.

It was really nice. It was just me and that other person. And then all the scenes in Multiple Maniacs that have voiceover or just music or shot silent with a bow and held a kind of camera you have to wind up. And they would just, that was the same camera I shot Mondo Trash on, but I did own that camera, yes. So sitting in my office right now, I'm working on it.

This is Peter Weller on probably his best known role. I mean, as far as RoboCop, I mean, when you read through that the first time, was the satire already there or was it straightforward? No, that was already there. It was a brilliant script. And, you know, I got a call from my agent Great guy Rick Nesita said, hey, there's a film about a robot.

Maybe you want to do it, maybe not. Go meet the director, Paul Verhoeven. He's a Dutch guy. He said, you don't have to tell me who he is. I knew who Paul Verhoeven was.

I was a big fan of him. Read the script. It was brilliant. And just told Paul Verhoeven right up front, I want to do this movie. And I know your movies.

You wanted me to test. I didn't test. And I conned him and I kind of browbeat him into me doing it. How much of it did you add as far as character-wise? Well, I added a lot with the help of Moni Akin.

M-O-N-I-Y-A-K-I-N, who's head of the movement department at Juilliard, who essentially worked all that movement out. So six months of preparation for that thing. The legendary Roger Corman on choosing talent and moving into his role as producer. You picked some of the greatest actors and directors and writers. Did you just feel like you had a knack for finding that, or is it something that you had a whole structure set up as to bringing in new talent?

It was a combination of both. I felt having been a director... I was better equipped to judge new directors than producers, other producers who had not been directors. But also we had a structure at our studio where people would start and work up and eventually become a director. When you switched over from director to focusing more on producing, was that an artistic decision or was it more just a business?

Was it more work to do and you found more creative in the producing? I had directed. I think 58, 59, almost 60 pictures in about 13, 14 years, and I was just tired. I switched from directing to producing, and I thought I will do this for a year and then go back to directing, but I started my own company, New World, and it became successful right from the beginning, and I just stayed with producing. Now this one is interesting because Yafet Kodo wasn't really doing a lot of interviews in his later years.

And in fact, he even mentioned while we were talking to him that he was planning on moving out of the country. And shortly after that, he did. And then just a few years later, he passed away where he was living in the Philippines. Now, I've only come across one other print interview that was done around this time. So this may very well have been his last audio interview.

What turned it for you that you really wanted to get into that? When it wasn't something you were raised around, you know, being in the industry or anything, what made you want to pursue at least acting in general? A series of events that started with someone who was born here, James Dean. I went to see a picture when I was 15 years old entitled The Rebels Out of Course and left the movie set of Blown into Another Country. And then later on, as I was older, looking for a job in Manhattan, during my time looking for a job, on Times Square they used to have these daters that you could do anything, go see anything.

And one afternoon, looking for a job, I couldn't find one. I went to see a movie called On the Waterfront. And then when I saw that, that sealed it for me. I said, I'm going to become an actor. I want to be able to do what these guys did.

Little did I know, both of them are from Indiana. Marlon Brando and James Dean, which is like a blessing to the state to have such geniuses come from this one state. They always reference that era of when acting changed. At the time, I guess, did you feel like this was something new and different? It's that Marlon Brando, James Dean, that whole new wave of a different style of acting that came about.

I wasn't aware of the style. I only was aware of the word, the active studio. And then I became a member of the active studio. Didn't even realize I'd become a member of the active studio. I became aware of the style now that the system that created the style is gone.

The system is no longer here anymore. But I became aware of the actor's studio, and it became something that the quest of every young actor then was to say, I am a member of the actor's studio. Here we have Ghost star Rose McGyver talking about her acting choices. On that identity crisis, I mean, going in, you knew the premise, but how prepared were you for how much you were going to have to throw at... I mean, every week, it's... kind of a dream for an actress but at the same time there's a lot throwing at you were you prepared and how wrong were you by the end.

Of that i had absolutely no idea which was probably very lucky because it could be very intimidating um yes it is a dream it's like you know going into the sort of tickle trunk or whatever you call it do you guys know that word where it's like costumes i think you do yeah i think it's a canadian thing that's what they used to say out there a lot but um But being able to go in and, like, pull out a different costume each week and play this different thing, it's really fun, but it is definitely an intimidating prospect. So I was quite happy that we moved so quickly. I didn't have time to think, really, or get too intimidated by it. And, yeah, I don't think they knew either going into it quite how much because it wasn't something from the comic that was very heavily focused on and it just became a device that worked so well for the show.

Yeah. And one other thing I would say is that we have been so supported by Chris Robertson and Michael Allred who created iZombie the comic. And that has been just the biggest blessing because when the person of the original property gets behind all the departures you've made from their material as well and recognizes that it needs to work differently in order to work as a TV show but still have the heart or some of the concepts from the thing, it's just been like such a blessing and kind of rare by the sounds of things that it's championed by those people. So I'm very grateful to them. This is Malcolm McDowell talking about director Lindsay Anderson.

The fact is, they're all Lindsay Anderson movies. And he is the star, he is the motivator, and he is the manipulator, if you like, in all of them. But of course, the great thing about Lindsay Anderson was that he was also a poet. So they have this majestic feel, this picaresque quality, which you It's so hard to do, you know. It's such a beautiful style that he had.

And funny, amusing, and just really beautiful. And, you know, I'm so lucky that I was part of his movies. He also made a movie before, called This Sporting Life, which is one of the great films based in a sport environment. that's ever made. It stars Richard Harris. It's Richard's greatest performance, in my opinion.

That's a really beautiful film. And, you know, we were very lucky, really, to have worked with such a great man. Here we have makeup artist and director Greg Nicotero talking about getting involved in the business and meeting Tom Savini. So that's kind of how we became friends, was that I was just like, George Romero needs this movie. I have to make it for him immediately.

And then, of course, just one thing led to another. And I stayed in touch with him. And then when they started shooting Creepshow, they called. And they're like, hey, we're doing this movie. Do you want a PA job?

And I was like, well, this is 1981. And I said, well, the only issue is that I'm graduating from high school. And I'm going to. Go to college. But thank you.

And they said, well, you should come visit. Maybe it was 1980 actually it. Wasn't 81 it was 1980 and they said you should come visit so I went okay so the first time I went to visit I it was they were shooting at an old abandoned factory in Monroeville like 10 minutes from the Monroeville mall yeah and I pull up and I walk into this giant warehouse and they had built all the sets for the crate remember the episode where they go in the basement of the university and the crate's under the steps So they built all that. It was all a set that was built in a warehouse. So I remember walking in and I walked through.

I walked onto the set. There were no security guards or anything. It was just this kid like, hey, well. It's Monroeville. And I turned around and walked back out and in the corner of that warehouse was Tom Savini's lab.

And that's when I met Tom. And we got to be friends. Very, very good friends. So much so that we spent a lot of time just hanging out and I would go and visit and, and he would let me. Come and watch while they were building everything.

I would just hang out. And so of course, a couple of years go by, I stay in touch with George and Tom and I stay in touch and. Day of the dead comes up. So it's now July of 1984. And I go to visit George for lunch and he's like, Hey, we just got a green light on the day of the dead.

Do you want a job? And I was like, okay. I already made this fucking mistake once. I'm not going to make it again. So I said, yes.

And at this point, I had been in college for three years because it was three years. Yeah, it was three years between four years between the two. And I was pre-med and I had one more year to go before I was going to graduate and go off to college. And I went to my folks and I said, hey, so funny story. I'm going to take a semester off school.

I'm going to work on this movie. And then I'm going to go back and finish. I'm going to be a doctor, so I don't have anything to worry about. And then I called Savini, and I said, listen, I just got hired on Day of the Dead. I want to be your assistant.

I want to be your apprentice. And George and the producers loved that idea because that allowed me to order all the supplies, sift through the resumes, break down the scripts, sort of kind of coordinate the department. And it left Tom sort of free to just be Tom Savini, which at that time he was really fucking good at. He's still good at it. He's still Tom Savini.

So that's how I got hired. It was kind of a complete sort of fluke that it happened. And, you know, the rest, I never went back to school. Your parents are still upset. My parents were never upset, which is interesting because my parents were more like, listen, he's a smart kid.

He's got a good head on his shoulders. whatever he does. I ended up dating a script supervisor who was 10 years older than me. I moved to New York when we wrapped Day of the Dead and then within a year I was in Los Angeles. So my parents were never like, oh my God, we've lost him. My parents were like, he's a smart kid.

He's got a good head on his shoulders. He'll be fine. And finally, director Alex Cox talking about finding movies that he responded to. I guess at what point did you start like, seeking out different films and like from that point on where you're already looking for stuff that was sort of not the norm maybe I mean we all kind of find our weird little sub-genres and everything as. Soon as I could as soon as I could pass for 16 I started going to see like adult films you know because I was hoping to see naked girls of course that's how all kids get started I'm pretty sure and but instead I found myself like going to see like Dr.

Terror's House of Horrors and Dementia 13 and endless Italian westerns. And even occasionally, weirdly enough, sometimes a quality foreign film would somehow get distribution in England. Accidentally. Melville's The Samurai with Alain Delon, dubbed in English in our local cinema. That's weird.

I don't know how that managed to sneak through. But yeah, so that was it really. So it was sort of. gradual, you know, immersion in films. And I really, I loved films. I thought they were just marvelous.

It was the most fun I could imagine was like watching a film or going to a film or being part of a film somehow. But I never expected I would. Films. They were the most fun I could imagine. That kind of says it all.

And that's what we. Usually come back to here on Movie Meltdown. A genuine love of filmmaking and the way that we all connect through the movies that we love. Thank you for listening.