[Q&A from an interview with Clive Barker, originally written for Barnes & Noble.com]

DG: Did you dream of making films early on in your career?

Clive Barker: It’s not as important to me as writing and painting; they were my first loves. I got into movies almost as an act of self-defense. That’s the joke I always make, but it’s sort of true. The first couple of movies that were made from my material were just terrible, and I was cut out of the process completely. I wasn’t even allowed to go on the set. They just flew off and shot the darn thing. So I thought, Screw this! There’s got to be a better way. My solution was that, even if I didn’t have the proper training, I couldn’t do much worse than they had. So, I went off and made Hellraiser.

DG: Did your background in theater prove to be a help to you?

CB: Oh, immeasurably. I was very lucky because I had done some theater, and so I had experience: working with actors, working with scripts, making changes when an actor would say, “This doesn’t work,” and so on. The same things, of course, come up when you’re making cinema. The theater also taught me about knowing when a moment works and when it doesn’t — when something’s truthful and when it isn’t. One of the reasons Hellraiser still works for audiences is because, in addition to Pinhead and all the horror trappings, the story at its center is still pretty solid. And as the sequels prove, if you don’t get the character stuff right, then it doesn’t matter how great the guy with the pins in his head is. And that’s true not just of the Hellraiser movies, but also of the Halloween movies, the Candyman movies, and on and on. Sequels are hard, and they’re harder still if you decide you’re going to put all the focus on the monster and take away the humanity of the other characters. One of the things I tried to do repeatedly in my theater work was to mingle the fantastic and the realistic. And I carried that into the making of the first Hellraiser movie. You try to get the audience to buy into the characters and the world they live in; if you succeed, the horror will then affect them more deeply.

DG: Can you talk a little bit about the novella that Hellraiser is based on?

CB: It’s based on a book I wrote called The Hellbound Heart. The writing of that story introduced me to an interesting mythology: a guy with pins in his head, the cenobites, the idea of raising hell by solving a puzzle box. All of those elements that appear in the movie – including the family relationship stuff, even though that got changed a bit – are there in embryonic form in the book.

DG: What was the inspiration behind certain symbols in the story – such as the puzzle, the labyrinth, the Eastern images?

CB: They come from my personal life. My grandfather was a ship’s cook who traveled to the Far East. When he came back — which was irregularly, he wasn’t a great fan of my grandmother [laughs] — he would bring gifts to the kids, and one of the gifts that got stuck in my memory was a puzzle box. When I was thinking about the scene where the characters open the door to hell, I wondered, how do I avoid the clichés — all those images we’ve seen in a thousand Dennis Wheatley novels or cheap horror movies. I wanted to present the whole idea of the Faustian pact, and its imagery and attendant demons, in a fresh way. That meant, especially for the movie, that we had to reinvent the idea of the demonic. I had done some sketches and even drew a likeness of Pinhead, so he arrived pretty much on the screen as I’d imagined him, thanks to the genius of a couple of special-effects guys. And then, and this is not to be minimized, the make-up was inhabited extraordinarily well. Doug Bradley, who plays Pinhead, is an actor I’ve worked with many, many times. I’ve known Doug since I was 14 or 15 years old. And he does a brilliant job in the movie.

DG: He carries himself with a stillness that commands attention.

CB: He just has this tremendous presence on screen. I did, at one point, give him the note that he should think about Andy Warhol’s personality. I know, that sounds weird, but, actually, Warhol was this curiously absent presence. I only met him once, but it was like meeting someone who wasn’t there. And Doug took that note very strongly, and I think there’s a wonderfully absented quality to what he does in the film.

DG: You once referred to Pinhead as “the Noel Coward of the lower depths.” Can you elaborate?

CB: Well, you see, Coward was the quintessential Englishman who sort of downplayed everything. He spoke in this very clipped style; everything just seemed to come out through clenched teeth. Doug and I used to do parodies of it constantly. It was that rather bored tone that Coward had — you know, terribly, terribly bored with everything — that Doug was bringing sub-textually to Pinhead. And that was our little joke, that he was the Noel Coward of the lower depths.

DG: How does your approach to filmmaking differ from your approach to writing?

CB: Well, in the simplest terms, writing you do alone. Filmmaking is done surrounded by an army of other people who, if they’re good, give you ideas that are invaluable. Writing can be a pretty lonely business. When you’re making a movie you’re dealing with the flipside of that – a feeling of constantly being besieged, not only by people you like, like the costume person who wants to know whether the jacket should be black or gray, but also often by people you don’t like: producers who have an “opinion” about a scene, or so on. It never stops. Then you finish the movie, and they say it’s at the MPAA, and now you have to speak to [MPAA president] Jack Valenti. I was once told by the MPAA, that I was allowed two consecutive buttock thrusts during a sex scene, but a third would be deemed obscene. [laughs] So you get the picture.

DG: Are you at all interested in the gothic horror tradition or are you trying to create your own variation?

CB: I am interested in horror movies of every kind: gothic horror, supernatural horror. Though I will say, horror that is touched by the demonic is much more interesting to me than stalk-and-slash. Movies made about the serial killing of Californian kids are just not interesting to me.

DG: In Hellraiser, the things that are frightening have very little to do with standard slasher shocks.

CB: No, it’s much more about atmosphere. I think it has a kinship with some Italian pictures like those made by Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci, as well as a little bit with the Hammer movies made here in England. The Hammer movies were a huge influence on me when I was a young man.

DG: Do you consciously avoid the comedy imperative that plagues much of contemporary screen horror?

CB: It’s so destructive. For me a lot of that is simply about not having faith in your underlying material. And that’s disappointing to me as a viewer. I want to be scared! I don’t want everything to be tongue-in-cheek, with the filmmakers basically saying, “This is a bunch of silly crap.” I get very irritated by that, and I think audiences are starting to feel the same way. How else do you interpret the success of a movie like The Sixth Sense? It takes itself very seriously – and quite rightly, it’s a superbly made movie, scary as hell – and audiences flocked to it. Whereas, the self-mocking Scream 3 didn’t make as much money as Scream 2. At a certain point these things cannibalize themselves.

DG: Much of Hellraiser plays like a family melodrama.

CB: You’re right. Actually, Craig Sheffer, who starred in a later movie I made called Nightbreed, said that my pictures were “Bergman with gore.” I’ve always liked that; thought it was very witty. Even if it overstates the case, the point still stands that there was a lot of human stuff going on in the first Hellraiser, in Candyman, Lord of Illusions, and also in a more recent picture I produced called Gods and Monsters, which was a very human movie but nevertheless touched upon what it is to be monstrous.

DG: There are a lot of S&M overtones in the Hellraiser films, especially the first one. Are they connected to feelings about the repressed era in which it was made?

CB: It was certainly about repression and the ways we respond to it. S&M is a world I’ve found very attractive to explore. It’s a world I feel I personally understand, a world I’ve played in and hope I will continue to play in for many years to come, because I enjoy it immensely. Hellraiser came out in a slightly more conservative time, before body piercings were so ubiquitous. We were a little bit ahead of the game there. The S&M relationship plays out not just in terms of the way that Frank and Julia interact, but also in the way that the cenobites are dressed, which is very fetishistic with piercings and so on; and in the way that the beaten-up, dominated brother, Larry, responds to his wife. He’s completely under her heel.

DG: And these characters attempt to flee their frustrations by escaping into a private world of pain and pleasure?

CB: It’s true, like our own lives. Isn’t that what this is all about? It’s certainly what fantasy and horror do constantly. That is, they liberate us into a world in which our frustrations and our repressions can take an exoticized form, rendering them more safe and also, if we dare, more approachable.

October, 2000

[Q&A from an interview with George Romero, originally written for Barnes & Noble.com]

DG: Martin isn’t a typical horror movie. Where did the idea come from?

George Romero: I just wanted to do a vampire thing; it’s a long story. I started with the idea of how difficult a time a vampire would have today, you know, having to update his credit cards and his passport and all of that [laughs]. But I decided that was too frivolous. I didn’t want to do something funny, so I continued to develop the idea. Eventually it became a film more about the monsters inside of us.

DG: It gave you the opportunity to drop an ancient myth into the modern world of junkyards, beat-up station wagons and drab suburban houses. Was that one of the attractions?

GR: Yeah, that was definitely part of it — the idea of a crumbling myth in a crumbling town.

DG: Was it in any way a response to other vampire movies you’d seen?

GR: No, not really. When I made the zombie films, I didn’t go with the usual kind of zombie. I guess I’m always looking for a different twist, trying to update something or reinvent it.

DG: With Martin was that twist the ambiguity of the situation?

GR: Yeah, I really wanted to preserve the ambiguity. I mean, a stake in the heart will kill you whether you’re a vampire or just a mixed up kid. So I wanted to leave it up in the air. I don’t personally believe he’s a vampire. I just went about it trying to make sure I didn’t violate possibilities on either side.

DG: You made Martin with mostly local talent in Pennsylvania, where you live. Did the notoriety and success of Night of the Living Dead help attract a larger community of artists to the area?

GR: I’m sure that it did. In fact, I know it did. But I can’t take credit for all of it; QED [the local PBS station] was doing a lot of production and Fred Rogers from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. That was actually the first film job that I ever had.

DG: What did you do for Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood?

GR: Well he used to have a segment called “Picture Picture” where he’d open up a picture frame and show a little movie about how light bulbs were made, etc. You know, little films about how things work and such. And I did those.

DG: Oh, you directed them?

GR: Yeah.

DG: How did you get in there? Had you already been working toward becoming a film director?

GR: Yeah, we were doing commercials, or, rather, we set up a shop to do commercials. But the first job we got wasn’t a commercial at all; it was for Mr. Rogers.

DG: So that’s where you learned the technical skills you needed to make movies?

GR: Well, when I was first learning, cities the size of Pittsburgh all had 35mm and 16mm labs because the news was on film; there was no such thing as tape. So there were three labs here, and that’s really where I learned. The guys at the labs let me hang around and help out, and I learned the basic use of the equipment. Then during my commercial days, we shot wide-screen 35mm. I mean, commercial budgets are still some of the biggest budgets I’ve ever had [laughs].

DG: So what was the critical reaction to Martin at the time of its release?

GR: It got really good reviews — from Time and Newsweek, for example. Really good reviews, it just didn’t make any money. It didn’t have terrific distribution, to say the least, and it wound up playing midnight shows. It got most of its audience that way.

DG: Do you think people were maybe expecting another zombie picture from you and were perplexed by efforts such as Martin and Jack’s Wife, with their suburban settings?

GR: I didn’t get too much of that. I’m lucky because I’ve been able to do — particularly in the early days — films the way I really want to do them. I’ve always felt that the real horror is next door to us, that the scariest monsters are our neighbors. That was true with the shopping mall scene in Dawn of the Dead, and it’s been a theme throughout my work. Then later I got to collaborate with Stephen King (Creepshow,The Dark Half), and that’s his style too — to bring the horror into our own homes, to fill the stories with brand names that we all use, beers that we like to drink, streets that look like our own. I think it’s much more effective that way rather than just doing some gothic exercise and trying to revamp it with bigger special effects. I don’t know why they bother remaking those kind of things. They wind up being nothing more than eye candy.

DG: What was your attraction to horror in the beginning?

GR: When I grew up it was right at that lucky time when they were rereleasing all of the classic monster movies of the ’30s. Films like Frankenstein and Dracula were playing on double bills when I was a kid, so I got to see them on the big screen. After that came all the nuclear fear movies — giant ants, giant tarantulas, all that stuff. And so few of them were any good, really. There were some I really liked, like The Day the Earth Stood Still and Hawks’s The Thing (1951). I also used to read E.C. comic books pretty heavily, but that was just frivolous stuff, that just gives you the basic vocabulary. Eventually, I started to appreciate horror more, and all kinds of fantasy, as a way to have fun and still be able to get at least some of your views out there. It basically is just much easier to do in a fantasy context. And I was also influenced by things like Tales of Hoffman, the Michael Powell film. That’s the movie, I think, that made me want to make movies. I just thought it was beautiful, and here were people going to listen to opera, but, in my mind, they were watching a horror film. So, I guess that combination of influences had an effect on me.

DG: It’s been nearly ten years since you last had a film released (1991’s The Dark Half). Can you talk a little bit about what’s led to this extended hiatus?

GR: Well, I was right at my peak. I had made more money on The Dark Half than I ever had before, and I was getting all kinds of phone calls. So my partner and I signed a contract at New Line Cinema. They paid us a lot of money, gave us offices… but they never produced a movie for us during our two years there. All we came away with was one property, a ghost story called Before I Wake, and my partner got MGM interested in it before we left New Line. So then MGM took another two years to develop it. Finally, we had everything in place. The production was set in motion: Sets were designed, we had the staff. But by that time the studio had forced more special effects into the script, and it had kicked the budget up to the point where they thought that it was cast-dependent. It was a very short list of acceptable actors that they gave us, and, when a few declined, the studio began to think that maybe something was wrong with the project. Then just as that project stalled, Universal green-lighted us on The Mummy. But MGM decided they wouldn’t let us out of our contract, and we lost The Mummy too. So, just like that, five years had passed with nothing to show for it.

DG: Was that the Mummy that was just recently made with Brendan Fraser?

GR: Yeah, but our budget wasn’t 100 million bucks; it was like 12 million. So then along comes Twentieth Century Fox, suddenly showing interest in Before I Wake. Another two years pass and we go through 12 more drafts and special effects tests and everything, but, as the project kept moving from studio to studio, it kept incurring costs. We were basically 7 million in the hole before we even got into preproduction. So it was really cast-dependent at this point. Just to show you how cast-dependent it was, they wouldn’t make the film with Gwyneth Paltrow in the lead. I mean, she wasn’t the star she is now, but still….

DG: So, after all those lost years, how did you get back on track?

GR: After everything fell apart, I sort of gave up on Hollywood. I decided I was going to go back to making smaller, more personal movies. I wrote a script called Bruiser, and it took us about a year to find someone who understood it, because it’s not at all an obvious thing.

DG: How would you describe it?

GR: It’s about a guy who’s a good soldier and does everything he thinks he’s supposed to do in order to get ahead in life. He’s on his way up the ladder, but he has to eat a lot of shit. And one day, he wakes up and finds that his face has disappeared. Believing that he’s lost his identity, he becomes a kind of avenging angel or maybe devil is a better word for it.

DG: Before I let you go, I’d like to ask you about this whole mythical Twilight of the Dead project I’ve heard about. People say you’re working on a final chapter to your zombie series. Does it exist?

GR: No. I cracked a joke about that once, and I think that’s how people picked it up. For a long time I had this idea that I’d do one Dead film in each of the last four decades. And I jokingly said that maybe the last one should be called Twilight of the Dead, or, better yet, Brunch of the Dead, because I figured that the ’90s were all about ignoring problems anyway. But it’s never going to happen. The rights are so convoluted now; there must be eight different companies involved. To make another Dead film, I’d probably have to find a new way to make zombies. I’d have to reinvent them all over again.

August 8, 2000

Writer of hit Hollywood films including North By Northwest and Sweet Smell Of Success

Christopher Reed
Thursday July 7, 2005
The Guardian

At a time when prominent authors regarded Hollywood as a place in which to make money, an artistic exile, Ernest Lehman, who has died aged 89, was the first noted writer consciously to pursue screenwriting as his main vocation. He may also have been its most successful practitioner ever.

His four best known films represent a remarkable range: the 1959 Alfred Hitchcock espionage thriller North By Northwest, an original screenplay; the saccharine musical and box-office record breaker, The Sound Of Music (1965); the pitiless study of a ruthless New York columnist, Sweet Smell Of Success (1957), from his own novella; and the acerbic marital catfight, Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? (1966), based on Edward Albee’s play and starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.

Throughout his screen work, Lehman maintained a finely crafted fidelity to a good story, and that became his hallmark. Yet despite four best screenplay Oscar nominations and the record for awards from the Writers’ Guild, he only received an Oscar in his 85th year – for lifetime achievement (the Academy’s consolation prize).

This did not astonish him, for despite his scintillating record and substantial wealth, he always subscribed to the Hollywood writers’ perpetual lament: lack of re spect. He also found writing screenplays difficult – abandoning several and confessing to once spending a fortnight on Northwest staring at his typewriter in his studio office without setting down a single word. Eventually he made a panicky phone call to Hitchcock, who came round promptly and began offering ideas….