It's hard being a full-time geek. The pressure of opening my mail to find the latest goodies, schmoozing my favorite heroes in the media and most of all those tiresomely way too fun movie fests. For crying out loud I had already done an interview with legendary horror film director Gary Sherman a week or two before but now I had to truck myself and my beast behavior out to the totally cool Music Box Massacre sponsored by Movieside Film Festival to catch Gary's cut of the rarely screened Death Line (1972). Then it was out for dinner courtesy of New Eye Films ace raconteur, producer, writer, actor and director Rusty Nails where Gary, Rusty and the rest of us shameless hangers on talked into the wee hours. Eschewing my normal bus ride I walked home in my velvet cape, bowler hat and reproduction 1941 Wolfman silver topped cane.
GARY SHERMAN INTERVIEW
Director Gary Sherman walked into the Starbucks where we met for this interview like a man at ease with himself and the world which seemed like a neat trick to this reporter who'd shown up a good half an hour early racking his brains to come up with questions worthy of the director of such horror classics as Dead and Buried and Death Line (a.k.a. Raw Meat). 'Bucks seemed like an incongruous place for such gory discussion until Sherman unleashed his trademark wit and intelligence on all things political, social and genre related- all while managing to give me a great scoop on his upcoming shocker 39: A Film Directed By Carroll McKane.
I: So what’s this I hear about you loving invisible special effects? Aren’t the effects in your films pretty obvious?
GS: I guess I’m trying to root those sorts of moments in the real world. Don’t get me wrong. I think movies like The Matrix are fun to watch but they aren’t particularly fun to make- not for me. I’m not really into creating fantasy. In fact I think what makes my movies so scary is how rooted in reality they are, I don’t want my audience to escape. Look at Saw. I enjoyed Saw.
I: So You saw it?
GS: Saw?
I: Si.
GS: Yes… I’ve seen Saw.
At this point Gary looks at his PR guy. The PR guy looks at me. I look down at the table and mumble something. Gary continues.
GS: I enjoyed Saw. It was fun but not because I bought into it. I mean c’mon. That movie gave the audience all sorts of places to hide- to step back. What’s that guy doing on the floor? I don’t know about you but I snore, I move around. There were so many plot holes.
I: It was interesting that the marketing of Saw was so reminiscent of Seven. I think a lot of people were expecting something deeper but what they got was almost a horror comedy. I mean it’s so over the top. Ultimately it’s a riff. Your films don’t really riff on anything as much as incorporate a little of everything. But f I try to tell someone what Dead and Buried is about I can’t without ruining it, same thing with Death Line.
GS: The stories support that sort of multifaceted approach. Dead and Buried was originally conceived as a really dark comedy, sort of It’s A Wonderful Life gone wrong. It wasn’t important how Dobbs was able to control the town, it was the fact of his control that was so important to the heart of the film. I suppose if you wanted you could make an argument that nothing in that film is real, that’s it’s just a sick fantasy in Dobb’s mind but that wouldn’t change what the film was about.
I: But of course the first thing people think about in Dead and Buried, especially if you talk to them about reality, are Stan Winston’s amazing effects. The film is ghastly but it’s ghastly in a real life sort of way. These are things that actually happen to people’s bodies.
GS: Yeah Dead and Buried is really twisted but so is the business. The studio changed hands three times during the production so it’s sort of a miracle it even got finished. My favorite anecdote about that is when Mark Damon of PSO bought it, saw it and turned to me and said, “If I wanted Bergman to direct a horror picture I would have hired Bergman. Now let’s make a horror picture instead of this intellectual bullshit.” He actually wanted the film more violent than I did and people who know me know I’m certainly not opposed to violence in movies.
Ultimately I was told we had to re-shoot some of the effects or that someone would do it for me. I was glad at least that they gave me the chance to do it myself.
I: So what about Dead and Buried made you want to stick out that process?
GS: Well all of my films have a hidden political or social statement in them. Dead and Buried is a movie, again, about control- manipulation. It’s about people like George W. Bush who use their power base to manipulate. I believe very strongly in the sanctity of the individual and I’m very opposed to assumed philosophies. Each one of us should be responsible to come up with our own philosophy of life and we don’t need these people, preachers or priests or rabbis or pundits telling us what to believe. For me Dead and Buried makes an even more important statement now than it did when I felt so compelled to make it. Even the one human being in the film that believes he has free will wakes up to find he’s been under the same control. There’s this growing fear amongst many thoughtful people that we are headed far down that road at this point.
I: Of course you do have a strong sense of community in Dead and Buried. The burial scene suggests that strong sense of support we need from each other. What’s the sign welcoming people to Potter’s Bluff say?
GS: “A New Way of Life,” we had so much fun making that sign.
I: The connection to “It’s A Wonderful Life’s” Potter’s Field which is itself sort of a horrid parody of the American Dream is really potent. Where does community fit in? Obviously we need some sort of model for leadership, assuming responsibility for each other etc.
GS: But to do that you need cut under all the crap. Dead and Buried has someone whose willing to stand up to society and say what needs saying but he finds out he’s just another puppet. Admittedly Dead and Buried is pretty cynical. In Death Line it’s not nearly as much. Death Line is about class distinction and social responsibility but in the end someone does take a stand. The real enemy in both films is a very real life one. We have to watch out for the people who step on anyone they think is lower than themselves.
I: It’s interesting to me that your films rely so heavily on cosmic dread- they really are very Lovecraftian. There’s always that sense that the characters are trapped in these horrible situations, that ultimately aren’t going away no matter what anyone does.
GS: When I walked out of Kerry headquarters last November having worked so hard I just hung my head and said, “There is no God.” Cosmic dread starts to look pretty tenable when we’re faced with four more years of Bush/Cheney.
I: So where does the sanctity of the individual, the idea of it, or the moral value of the idea, comes from if we look to ourselves as the only authority.
GS: Cosmically? The sense of duty to one another seems to exist within us as individuals. Reading foreign newspapers, being aware of what the rest of the world thinks about the United States, weighing out the difference between Fox and NPR this is how we come into a belief system. But most people are too lazy.
I: The same can be said about movies. The most boring horror movie is one that’s not about anything. It might be entertaining once but you probably wouldn’t watch it again.
GS: Yeah it’s funny but the more disturbing a horror film is often the better a film it is. This new film is without a doubt the most disturbing film I’ve ever made. It’s about an individual who is in so much pain that all he finds himself able to do is cause pain. It’s not as universal a political statement as Raw Meat or Dead and Buried but it is about the
individual. The world would look at the main character as a monster the same way the man in Death Line was branded a monster. But these characters, and people in real life, aren’t just self-created. If these people are monsters what does that say about what helped them to become monsters?
I: Do you find it a frustration making your films for an audience that might miss the points you’re trying to make?
GS: No because I feel like I’ve done my best to live a life informed by those ideas. The most important thing to me in my movies has always been my characters just like the most important thing in life should be the people around us. Even stuff I’ve done mainly for the money like Poltergeist III, which was such a nightmare. Losing Heather in the middle of it was so awful. But ultimately we tried to make a movie about how society perceived this little girl. And I’m still close to people from that project like Zelda Rubenstein.
I: Wow! Zelda’s still plugging away?
GS: Oh yeah. Zelda’s definitely alive and kickin’. I talk to her all the time. She’ll call up and talk to me in that voice of hers, “Hey Gary. How ya doin’ it’s Zelda!” She’s so sweet. I’d love to work with her again sometime.
I: Speaking of characters!
GS: Right, characters are what it’s all about though. Once you forget that the characters in your movie have to be alive for your audience you lose the whole thing, you lose the audience and the movie. My favorite films are Woody Allen films. I mean, I don’t want to make a Woody Allen film. It’s never gonna happen…
I: A Woody Allen splatter film would be incredible! But your new movie doesn’t have Woody Allen in it right?
Gary looks at the PR guy again, who looks at me. I pretend to clean a spot off the table.
GS: No. My new movie is called 39. I don’t want to limit it by called it a horror film because it’s so dark and disturbing that people probably shouldn’t compare it to what passes for horror these days. It’s also the most in depth portrait of a serial killer that I think has been put on film.
The main character Carroll McKane is a serial killer obsessed with new media and that lets him document his other obsession with "changing things". For the past ten years, in front of his Dvcams, he’s "changed" thirty-six human beings into "debris". But instead of becoming his own sort of ultimate victim and committing suicide or trying to get caught, which is what most serial killers do, Carroll converts his killing room into a studio where he records the murders of two more people and the torture of a forensic psychiatrist. Carroll's goal is to make the doctor his biographer as well as force him to be the killer of his final victim… number 39.
Serial killers have interested me for years and years. And when I found this script by Larry Brothers called The Storm and we started to adapt it I found out that Larry had some personal experience with this sort of thing where someone that knew someone he knew was a victim. I don’t know a whole lot about the situation and I’m sure it’s nothing he wants to delve into but it provided a really strong motivation to get it right when he researched the project.
As good as a lot of psycho type films are they usually aren’t very accurate in the way they handle the crimes or killer. The truth is it’s a very hard tightrope to walk because most of these people have undergone some pretty severe trauma in their lives to end up doing the things they do. You don’t want to justify their actions but the real story is so much more interesting and turning them into some sort of entertaining boogeyman. Because that’s where we’re all caught isn’t it? Trying to understand what creates this problem.
I figured out a while ago that I could make movies for PBS and talk to the converted or I could occasionally make a thoughtful horror movie that would speak to an audience that doesn’t watch a whole lot of PBS. If they understand it great if they don’t then at least I tried. The older I get the more important it seems to talk about all this stuff. It’s all about people.
I: I agree. It’s the whole cannibal, zombie Woody Allen auteur filmmaking thing it…
Gary looks at me one last time; PR guy has snorted his latte onto the table. I have never been so alone in my life. I race to the door thinking that everything will be fine if I can just get home to my secret room downstairs where my new victim lies waiting…