Interview with a Zombie
Interview with a Zombie
Writer/Director Rob Zombie Talks Halloween II: H2.
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Staci Layne Wilson Reporting
Q: You said you would never do another Halloween and now you did another one – what convinced you?
ROB ZOMBIE: I said I wouldn’t do another one and no one asked me to do another one because I had made it so clear to the Weinstein Company, they never even asked. I had heard these other guys were doing it and I went, “whatever.” And I was at the Scream Awards last October and I talked to somebody from the company and went “how’s filming going on HALLOWEEN II.” And they said, “we’re not even filming it. We don’t even have a script yet. We don’t have a treatment we like yet.” So I had gone on tour and gotten away from HALLOWEEN enough that the idea of coming back seemed interesting. And at that point, I didn’t like the idea of some other writers and directors coming in what I saw coming in as my character and my version and running away from them, so that’s when I came back.
Q: You had three weeks to write script?
ZOMBIE: I’m not sure how long I had. We started shooting in February and I started messing around ideas in November. It was a couple of months..? I knew some of the things I wanted to do. The beginning of the movie was easy, immediately picking up right after. I had written a bunch of different scenarios. The first script I wrote was totally different from this script. I didn’t have Laurie living with the Brackett’s, I had all these other scenarios. I just simplified down to what it was, because I wanted to keep the Annie and Sheriff Brackett thing a little more prominent throughout the movie and keep those characters in Laurie’s life. It was tighter unit. The script went through so many changes. Some eof the things I wrote that while we were shooting. This movie has almost no relation to the script I think.
Q: And you had a four hour rough cut?
ZOMBIE: The first assembly of a movie is like four hours. Usually, I like to overdo film scenes a lot of times. I figure, for me, working with actors, the scene starts slow, it’s kind of a mess, they totally get into a groove and then it degenerates. Then you snip off the ends and throw them away.That’s why I think, if it’s a short scene, and give them a short scene, they have no ramp to it. When Sheriff Brackett, Laurie and Annie are eating pizza, there was a lot of other chit chat in the scene that was useless, without it, they wouldn’t have felt like a group sitting there talking. It’s really a way to get the actors in the groove. We don’t have any rehearsal time. It’s stuff that usually gets worked out in rehearsal and since the schedule was so tight, we didn’t have time to rehearse.
Q: Why shoot 16 versus 35mm?
ZOMBIE: I shot the last movie in 35 and I hated the way it looked. I thought it looked too clean. The subject matter seemed too movie like and not as nasty as I wanted it to look. 16mm feels more like real life to me.
Q: You’re talking realism and surrealism with all the dream sequencers? How did you decide to attack those, versus the actual attack scenes?
ZOMBIE: Those were tricky, that was the one element of the story I wanted to keep, because I wanted to have a device so Michael Myers had some device in the movie, where he’s not some hulking guy walking around. But of course, the movie reality based the movie gets, the more tricky it is to incorporate something that is so fantasy like. Really, the way he sees the world and his crazy brain, it works fine. It’s what’s inside his head. Nobody else is seeing it, until Laurie starts spiraling out of control and she’s seeing it. it was always a balance to make it work and we found a way to make it work?
Q: Was it interesting to shoot the Loomis stuff – since he was so isolated from the rest of the story until the end?
ZOMBIE: I wanted to make this gritty little movie with the Laurie character. I always felt the Doctor Loomis character throughout the series – they knew they wanted Donald Pleasence in the movie and they didn’t know what to do with him. That’s what I always felt watching the movies. There would be a story going on and then suddenly this crazy bald guy with half his face burnt would come running in to help, when really, they should be calling the police because he seems completely out of time. So how do I keep Doctor Loomis alive in a totally different way. It was like we were shooting two separate movies the whole time. Everybody else is in the freezing cold in the mud and Malcolm's at some swanky hotel or in the back of a limo or a lecture hall having a great time. It wasn’t until the end of the movie and that was the last thing we shot. Malcolm was separated from the cast until the last days of shooting. So it worked out pretty good. As an actor and a character, he had his own trip the entire time.
Q: As a filmmaker, what attracts you to the genre. What compels you to tell you a story that’s really dark and really morbid?
ZOMBIE: I don’t know. I’ve always been attracted to dark material. Not just horror material. I would like to do stuff that is dark, that isn’t a horror movie. Some times with horror, it’s what people expect. There is a much darker cut of the film with Laurie. It was almost like we were making a drama about the destruction of a teenage girl. But of course, people expect Michael Myers and expect these things because of the title of the movie. So you can’t go as far down those roads as you would like to some times. I don’t know what attracts me, but it’s definitely what I want to keep doing.
Q: Will there be an uber cut on DVD?
ZOMBIE: Probably. There’s another version of the movie that’s a much darker version of this one. Maybe it’s fifteen minutes longer. It’s all character stuff with Laurie. There’s other scenes of her descent. In this movie, she starts normal, holding on to reality and starts losing it. In the other cut, she’s already lost it from the beginning and she gets worse and worse.
Q: What was the impetus for the ROCKY HORROR dress up at the Halloween party?
ZOMBIE: It was one of those things. Any film I do, is based around stuff I like. I always loved ROCKY HORROR and I remember first discovering it in the late ‘70s when I was a kid. And for some reason, the three actresses looked perfect for those three parts. It looked like the master plan when I was casting. Scout, who I never would have thought, looked like Magenta when she had the make-up. Angela really looked like Tim Curry. It was one of those happy accidents.
Q: Are you done with HALLOWEN now. Would you do a third one?
ZOMBIE: No, I don’t think I would do a third one for several reasons. I feel like I ended the story. No matter what you do, people think you’re always setting up a sequel. The same reason I didn’t revisit DEVIL’S REJECTS. And it seems like the third one always sucks.
Q: Do you have nightmares shooting stuff like this?
ZOMBIE: No. If I have nightmares, it’s about scheduling and the problems I’ve had and not about monsters.
Q: What happened with TYRANNOSAURUS REX?
ZOMBIE: I was talking to the Weinstein Company about a possible next movie. They were just supposed to put on thee schedule UNTITLED ROB ZOMBIE PROJECT. But someone put TYRANNOSAURUS REX on the schedule, so everyone started asking me about it. But at that point, it wasn’t anything but a placeholder. Maybe that will be the next movie, maybe it won’t, I don’t know.
Q: But finally, EL SUPERBEASTO is coming out.
ZOMBIE: EL SUPERBEASTO comes out September 22 – finally. That’s been a long trip with the movie. That movie had the same journey as HOUSE OF A 1,000 CORPSES. Companies changing hands and executives leaving and new executives coming in and being totally baffled by what the hell the project was. I’m really happy with that one. I’m glad that’s coming out soon. It’s really weird.
Q: Have you thought of doing something other than hardcore horror?
ZOMBIE: I would like to do something different. If you look at what’s out there in general, all they want to do is remakes. So every offer that comes to me is a remake of something. They want to remakes, comic books, graphic novels – no one wants to do anything original anymore, so it gets harder and harder to get something new in the pipeline.
Q: You spent a lot of time with MYSPACE and TWITTER to promote the movie throughout production?
ZOMBIE: Trying to do interviews is impossible, because you’re not in the mood to talk to anyone and it seems really annoying. Whenever I would put something on MySpace, it would be after the day of shooting or before. I think people expect to be somewhat updated. I tried never really to put anything all that important. It’s really hard to keep anything a secret. It’s hard to for people to walk into a movie and be surprised, because by the time they walk in, they know everything. The trailers give everything away, if not, some website does. I tried never to post anything that was particularly important.
Q: The Halloween movies notoriously tweak their endings, so… was this the final version?
ZOMBIE: We went back and reworked the ending, what I’ve always done, we left the ending to the end of shooting, because we knew we didn’t have enough time. It was a ploy to give us more time to shoot. If I left the Weird Al stuff to the end, they would have said, “you don’t’ need any more money to fix that,” but if you purposely leave the ending to the end, they have to give you more money to work on that. [so] There was some stuff in the shack. As we were shooting, they cutting days from the schedule and that’s a nightmare because you have your whole movie mapped out and if someone cuts days, you can’t just cut scenes, the movie won’t make any sense. Something like the ending in the shack, where we had four days to shoot and then we had one day to shoot it. So one day with all the cops and the helicopter, it was insane. Same thing with the Phantom Jam. It starts as four days and it becomes one day. So you're trying to film this giant rock concert thing with all that stuff in one day and it’s complete madness. I think it was 33 days. It was really, really short. Shorter than the last one.
Q: How was it shooting L.A. as a small town for the first one, and now Georgia?
ZOMBIE: Georgia was way better than shooting in Pasadena. In Pasadena, you have what you have and it’s nothing else. You can’t shoot that wide, because you’ll see things you don’t want to see. Down in George, there are things you would find like dilapidated buildings. In the beginning of the movie, we were walking Scout down this town square in the rain. We didn’t lock up the town square. There were no cars. We said “let’s shoot there. No one would stop us. No one is around.” If you did that in Pasadena, you need permits and cops at every stoplights. In Georgia, let’s walk down the middle of the road no one is here. There is no cars, not nothing, no police. We could do what we wanted. It was very much guerilla style. And 16, the cameras are lighter and more movable, and you get more bang for your buck. The movie looks bigger than the first movie and we had less time and less money.
Q: I'm curious to know about working with Scout again, how she may have evolved since 2007.
ZOMBIE: It was working with Scout again. I had just met Scout when we had done Halloween. She was 17 and now she’s 20 and over the course of time, we’ve become friends. The more you get to know someone, the more you can do with them. The biggest thing for me, the more the actors trust you, the more you can get out of them. Actors are guarded, and if they don’t trust you, they’re not going to give you anything. At the end of the premiere, as soon as it was ended, he was so happy. He didn’t know what to think, and he came out of this one a totally different person. I didn’t feel we connected on the first one and on this one we connected right away and I felt on this one his performance was much more than it was on the first one.
[end]
Also see:
Exclusive Interview with Malcolm McDowell [soon]