the cellulord is watching: 01/01/2010

DAYBREAKERS: An editing exercise.

Since this blog is mine and I decide the editorial policy, I write the reviews to whatever length feels right. In the case of Daybreakers this initially ran to a little over 800 words. Ultimately, I decided that the optimum length for the piece was to trim it slightly to 700 words for publication on the blog here.

But, of course, I understand the need for brevity and word limits, so I’ve presented this review here in its uncut 800+ word version, then a version trimmed to a healthy 500 words and, finally, a truncated and slightly re-written 200 words. Just to show I can hit any word count required without losing the essence of the review.

Uncut 835 word version:

Okay, it’s a rubbish title. Let’s get that out of the way to start with. A bad, horrible, clumsy, committee-approved title. Daybreak? Nice. Break of Day? Classy. Daybreakers? Pah. Gack. Spit. That’s the name of a duff straight-to-video action pot-boiler from the early nineties. Starring Jeff Fahey or Wings Hauser. So offensive is the clumsiness of this title it almost stopped me watching the film. Only the presence of Willem Dafoe tempted me. He’s usually very reliable. Even if this were one of those rare films he did just for the money … it must have some value, surely it can’t be another Mr Bean’s Holiday (2007) or XXX2 (2005) … can it?No, it can’t.

What it can be is another Gattaca (1997) mixed with more than a dash of the first Blade (1998) and just a hint of the ubiquitous Matrix (1999). Not a bad gene pool from which to draw inspiration.

A rather confusing introductory montage gives us to understand that we are ten years in the future and the world is entirely vampire. It takes the vision we see in, say, Alan Ball’s True Blood TV series (and the Charlaine Harris books on which it is based) and extends that into a logical future where humans are a minority, grown in factory farms and bled for food. The vampire world is trundling along very successfully, having completely replaced our society with a dark mirror-image of it. Almost everyone seems happy with their immortality. Almost everyone.

Cue Ethan Hawke – who doesn’t make nearly enough films – as Edward, Chief Haematologist of the Bromley Marks corporation which provides the vampire world with all the blood it needs – now refined as a supplement to add into coffee in place of milk. Hawke is very good at looking worried and Edward is very worried. Worried about the shortage of living humans and their blood, worried about the failure of his experiments to refine an artificial blood substitute but, above all, worried about the morality of reducing humans to food animals. His boss, played with practiced ease by the always malevolent Sam Neill, has no such qualms. He, like any good captain of industry, sees every problem as an opportunity to sell more product.

The Grendel at their gates is the effects of starvation. If a vampire goes without blood for long enough, he becomes ‘a sub-sider’, a bestial creature with little remaining intelligence and a powerful, overwhelming thirst. I would make a joke about the film being made in Australia here, but I can’t think of one.

Inevitably, then, there will be a human resistance movement which Edward stumbles across, as you do, and finds himself adopted by them. They are led by Willem Dafoe who has a secret, the key to unlocking the problem that both the vampires and the last remaining humans face.

Visually, the film has a very classy, noirish feel to it, with some particularly striking images – such as the queue of vampire commuters standing on the tube station, all in silhouette, their eyes reflecting like cats. Even though this film cloaks itself in the guise of science fiction, it is undeniably horror – with enough moments of explosive blood-splattered violence to keep most gore-hounds happy.

The work that writers/directors The Spierig Brothers have done in conceiving and then executing a modern world designed for vampiric convenience is very clever indeed. If you can’t go out in daylight, then the preferred mode of public transport will be the subway. Obvious. If you can’t see through the smoked-glass windows of your car, festoon the exterior with cameras so you can still safely drive around the streets. The only problem I had with all of this is that ten years just doesn’t seem long enough for almost everyone in the world to adjust to such a massive change, to come up with all these wonderful coping mechanisms then put them into production so everyone has access to them. Civilisation seems to have fallen then risen again with astonishing speed. I bet they didn’t put any of these innovations through for planning permission. That’ll add a decade or two!

Don’t worry too much about the logic of the way vampires breed and evolve, nor about the plan that Dafoe and Hawke hatch which is, frankly, barmy. At least the Spierigs stay consistently within their own rules and successfully explore the problems that arise from them. The dénouement manages to be satisfyingly cunning while addressing a fundamental flaw in Dafoe and Hawke’s plan (that I can’t discuss without giving too much away) and gives vent to some spectacularly explosive blood-letting, all-the-while leaving the way open for a sequel.

All-in-all Daybreakers is a refreshing and enjoyable take on a clapped-out old sub-genre which reminds us that, however prettily and romantically vampires may have been re-packaged for selling to a naïve teen audience, they are, essentially, parasites that see humans as food. Relationships with them will, given time, always devolve to the relationship a butcher has with his cow.

Edit #1: 500 word version:

Okay, it’s a rubbish title. A horrible, clumsy, committee-approved title. Daybreakers? That’s the name of a duff straight-to-video action pot-boiler from the early nineties. Starring Jeff Fahey or Wings Hauser. But, despite this, what we get is a film worthy of standing alongside its influences: Gattaca (1997), the first Blade (1998) and the ubiquitous Matrix (1999). Not a bad gene pool from which to draw inspiration.

The film is set ten years in the future and the world is entirely vampire. Humans are a minority, grown in factory farms and bled for food. The vampire world is trundling along very successfully, having completely replaced our society with a dark mirror-image of it. Almost everyone seems happy with their immortality. Almost everyone.

Cue Ethan Hawke – who doesn’t make nearly enough films – as Edward, Chief Haematologist of the Bromley Marks corporation which provides the vampire world with all the blood it. Hawke is very good at looking worried and Edward is very worried, worried about the shortage of living humans and their blood, worried about the failure of his experiments to refine an artificial blood substitute but, above all, worried about the morality of reducing humans to food animals. Sam Neill has no such qualms as his blood-sucking boss, the slippery evil-doer of the piece, a role he has slid skilfully into many, many times before.

Inevitably, then, there will be a human resistance movement, led by Willem Dafoe, which Edward stumbles across, as you do, and finds himself adopted by.

The Grendel at their society’s gates is the effects of starvation. If a vampire goes without blood for long enough, he becomes ‘a sub-sider’, a bestial creature with little remaining intelligence and a powerful, overwhelming thirst. I would make a joke about the film being made in Australia here, but I can’t think of one.

Edit #2: 200 word version:

Ethan Hawke and Willem Dafoe star in this superior mix of Gattaca (1997), Blade (1998) and the ubiquitous Matrix (1999).

The film is set in the future, where the world is entirely vampire. Humans are a minority, grown in factory farms and bled for food. But the humans are dying out, blood is scarce and, if a vampire goes without blood for long enough, he becomes ‘a sub-sider’, a bestial creature with an overwhelming thirst.

Hawke is very good at looking worried, Dafoe is all about being earthy and wise while Sam Neill turns-in his trademark slippery evil-doer role.

Visually, the film has a very classy, noirish feel to it yet, even though it cloaks itself in the guise of several different genre, it is undeniably horror – with buckets explosive blood-splattered violence.

The work that writers/directors The Spierig Brothers have done in conceiving and then executing a modern world designed for vampiric convenience is very clever indeed.

WHERE EAGLES DARE

BROADSWORD CALLING DANNY-BOY … the making of WHERE EAGLES DARE

This retrospective was commissioned and published by 'Film Review' magazine in 1998, to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the release of the film. As specified by the brief, it is 3,000 words long.

1: “He came out with the shittiest fucking title you could imagine.”

Film Producer Elliot Kastner doesn’t do interviews, but will occasionally make exceptions to discuss ‘Where Eagles Dare’, a film which he was involved in from before the word ‘go’:

“I rang Alistair MacLean at his home in Surrey, and told him that I would really like to meet with him. He refused; he didn’t wanna meet without my telling him more details. So I told him: I wanted him to consider writing an original story, directly for the screen. There was a moment of silence, followed by ‘Hmm, nobody ever asked me that before.’”

Kastner, a native of Harlem and exponent of a typically dry New York sense of humour, was amused to be invited to MacLean’s house after lunch. “This was so he didn’t hafta spend any money feeding me. Well, he was Scottish.

Kastner is refreshingly candid about money: “I agreed to give him ten thousand pounds up front and an additional hundred thousand dollars when I had arranged the finance. The first ten grand being from my own money.”

“ 'So’ he said ‘What is it you want?’ ‘I want a team of five or six guys on a mission in the Second World War, facing enormous obstacles. I want a mystery. I want a sweaty, exciting adventure movie.’ That’s all I told him, just that.”

Inevitably, Kastner’s mind returns to the subject of money and what he considers his big mistake: “So, we made the business arrangement and ... shit, I even gave him ten percentage points of the profit. I tellya, to this day he and his estate collect money from ‘Where Eagles Dare’. Every February, they still get a cheque.”

Kastner found himself invited back to MacLean’s house some weeks later, for a progress report. “This time he invited me to lunch, well, I had given him ten grand. Anyway, after lunch, he took me into his study and showed me a globe. He gave me a magnifying glass and pointed to a spot in the Alps and said: ‘This is the Alder Schloss. This where it’s all going to happen.’ And that’s all he told me; he wasn’t a very demonstrative guy, but I could tell he was excited about it too!”

By this point, Kastner had brought his childhood friend Brian G. Hutton on-board as director; so, when the script was delivered, at a whopping 170 pages, the three of them worked on it and whittled it down to130 pages. “I never called another writer in, I stayed with Alistair and, with a lot of work, we got a screenplay that was absolutely delicious.”

Unfortunately, MacLean’s title didn’t leave such a sweet taste in the mouth; or, as a New Yorker might put it: “He came out with the shittiest fucking title you could imagine. I don’t even remember it, it was so bad, but I thought about this ‘Alder Schloss’ meaning ‘Eagles Castle’. That reminded me of a quote from ‘Richard III’, “Where eagles dare to perch”, so I snapped off the end and ‘Where Eagles Dare’ had a nice rhythm to it.”

Although Kastner had rapidly established a track-record of working with premier league talent (Paul Newman in 1966’s ‘Harper’ [‘Moving Target’ in the UK], Warren Beatty in 1967’s ‘Kaleidoscope’) he wanted Richard Burton for this one, and Burton was in a league of his own.

“I had enormous difficulties with his agent, a man called Hugh French, who was contemptuous of anything that didn’t come directly from the studio head offices. So I went round him. I chased Burton down to a Bistro near the Victory Studios in Nice.

“I did my tap dance with him, and he kinda agreed. Then I had another obstacle: I had to get him to go with a director who was totally unknown. We came through that okay, then I went through it all again with Clint Eastwood. They didn’t wanna pay $350,000 plus a percentage to a Spaghetti Western star.”

As it happened, Hutton would follow ‘Eagles’ a year later with ‘Kelly’s Heroes’, which also starred Eastwood, then quit the film business altogether. As for Kastner and Burton, they would work together again on ‘Villain’, ‘Equus’ and ‘Absolution’.

2: “The day I met Richard Burton, he set his dogs on me!”

Once he had the green light, it was time for Kastner to stop chasing, and for others to chase him. Ingrid Pitt crossed two continents to make certain of her place in the credits roll. “I was living in the States at the time, working on the TV show ‘Ironside’. Ralph Meeker rang up and asked if I wanted to join him in a poker game. Well, you don’t pass up any invite in Hollywood; so I played poker with him, John Wayne, Yakima Canutt and a few others.

“Yakima told me he was preparing for ‘Where Eagles Dare’ and urged me to speak to the director. So, the next day I got Brian Hutton on the blower, we met, I blew in his ear and all was well.

“Months later, I was having my hair washed when I got the call. I was needed ... immediately. I ran around the house, packing, with my hair dripping all over my clothes as I packed them.

“I arrived in Salzburg in the evening, was due on set next morning and didn’t have a costume to wear. However, Ever-Ready-Ingrid had foreseen that something like this might happen, so I had brought some things with me ... The waistcoat they found for me was loose and horrible, so I had to sit up all night on my bed, sewing the bloody thing.”

The next morning would be her first chance to meet Richard Burton, one of her screen idols: “I arrived and Brian wasn’t ready for me, so I had to go and sit in this lean-to and wait. “I went in, and suddenly these dogs rushed out of the dark at me, barking and biting at my ankles. I yelled ‘Call your dogs off!!’ Then, there he was, Richard Burton, my idol, with this huge fur wrapped around him, sitting by a fire. The day I met Richard Burton, he set his dogs on me!

“I got my revenge, though! In my first scene, I got to slap Richard. ‘You’re not really going to hit me are you?’ he pleaded. ‘Don’t be daft, I’m gonna hit you, take it like a man!’ I kept him on tenterhooks all morning, then when we did the take, I just missed him.”

Then there was another hold-up for Pitt, her costume was fine, now her hair needed altering: “Mary Ure insisted on being the only blonde in the film, so my hair had to be dyed, which eventually sent it all green and brittle. I should have just told her what she could do with her blonde hair, but it was my first big film, so I rather did as I was told.”

Peter Barkworth went along to audition for the role of a German spy: “Brian Hutton and I got on so well, he changed the nature of the character to an Englishman and the name to Barkley, to accommodate me. Unfortunately, after all that trouble, I only had five lines.”

One can be forgiven for asking why Kastner had cast actors like Burton, Barkworth and Michael Hordern in roles hardly befitting their abilities. “Well,” He explains: “Any actor worth his salt can bring something great to any material. The English have always been known for their pool of character actors, and we deliberately picked the best.”

Peter Barkworth remembers the day he, Burton, Eastwood and the others had to cross a bridge and saunter through a German check-point: “Now, gentlemen”, Brian Hutton had told them, “I want you all to look at those German guards and think ‘oh shit, what do we do now’. In fact, this is the Oh Shit Bridge!’’

“We laughed a lot on ‘The Oh Shit Bridge’ that day.” Barkworth confesses. “Brian and Richard were ribbing each other off camera, while Richard and Clint were ad-libbing the bits no one has bothered to write, on the bridge. By the time we finished work, we were all weak with laughing.”

Extracts from Barkworth’s film diary beautifully sum up the atmosphere on set: ‘January sixth, 1968: It’s extraordinary, we actors are given wooden boards to stand on, so our feet don’t get cold in the snow, chairs to sit on, capes to protect us from the bitter wind, and caravans to rest in. It is lovely, I enjoy being pampered very much.’

Summing this up, Barkworth adds: “During those first five or six weeks, I felt at the heart of something, like I was really working on a big film. That feeling soon departed when we got back to England to shoot the rest at MGM. That was just months of hanging around. In fact, all-told, it took me six months to say my five lines!”

3: “All the cattle for miles around spent the next week suffering from diarrhea!”

Veteran stunt-man, Alf Joint worked closely with Burton throughout, not only taking the falls, but, because of their striking physical similarity, literally doubling-up as the star’s on-screen stand-in. Spending so much time at the centre of the action afforded Joint plenty of opportunity to see Burton at his best, and his worst:

“You hear stories that Burton was inept; people talk of his suffering from vertigo and needing a hoist to help him climb walls, but this was just him being lazy. When his family visited, he was jumping of the cable-car and running around and showing off to his kids.”

But, on the other hand, Burton did like his drink: “I remember one time he went to Paris on a drinking spree with O’Toole, Harris and Trevor Howard, his usual drinking set. They set off on the Friday, promising that they’d be back on the Monday. They were carried off the plane on the Thursday.

“Because of that, Brian decided to use me as Richard’s double more extensively. I worked on three or four sets that Burton himself never even saw. It saved them a lot of money.”

One set Joint shouldn’t have seen, was the baronial hall, scene of Burton’s big monologue. “Of course,” Alf explains, “Burton had had a few, and, as he’s striding around, walks straight into the mantlepiece over the great fireplace, knocking himself out cold.

“After that it was, ‘Alf, get into uniform’, and we shot the rest of the scene from behind. I must have the most photographed shoulders in the business.”

One temperamental star can’t hold up a production the size of ‘Eagles’ by himself. If he really was doing it deliberately, Burton must have enlisted the help of Mother Nature. Alf Joint again: “Burton kept getting the blame for the shoot going on and on, but, at least during the location shoot, it was actually the drastic changes in the weather. For example: there was the jump out of the cable-car into the river. The first time we did it it didn’t work because the snow was gone, we’d been filming for so long it had turned Spring.

“They were up three nights covering the ground in commercial epsom salts and then, of course, there was a torrential downpour which washed all the salt into the river and all the cattle for miles around spent the next week suffering from diarrhea!”

Still, while the cast and crew were away from home far longer than planned, they managed to maintain a holiday atmosphere. Peter Barkworth’s diary recalls: ‘Long talks with Richard and the gang, led to an invitation to the Burtons’ for drinks and dinner. Elizabeth Taylor was visiting. She was wonderful, exquisitely dressed, a perfect, oh-so-relaxed hostess’.

‘Elizabeth told me that she had been lost as to what to feed us all, then thought of cold roast pork and chips! The best cold roast pork comes from The Salisbury in St Martin’s Lane, London; so she had sent her jet over to London that morning to collect a leg of pork.

‘We had that wonderful leg of pork, with french fries and a salad. Elizabeth advised me to spread some Heinz salad cream on a roll and make a sandwich of the whole lot, which I duly did and it was delicious.’

4: “I ended up hanging upside-down from the platform.”

Back in England, delays continued to dog the production, and presented Burton with yet more distractions; as Pitt remembers: “He used to invite us all to luncheons in a thatched barn in Borehamwood.

“Sometimes Robert Shaw would visit, or Peter O’Toole, and, inevitably, these luncheons would turn into marathon drinking sessions. I’d sit there, sipping a wine and feeling so guilty, I’d apologise to Elliott Kastner, but he’d say, ‘Don’t worry, we don’t need you, we need him’.” That’s New York diplomacy for you!

Continuing to fly in the face of received wisdom , Kastner had insisted on employing retired living legend Yakima Canutt as his stunt co-ordinator. He gets positively misty-eyed when recalling his collaboration with the man they called ‘Yak’: “My partners couldn’t unnerstand why I wanted to pull this old guy out of retirement, but it was because I knew he was the best. He forgot more than most young stunt-guys know.”

Yak’s major responsibility - the big showpiece stunt on ‘Where Eagles Dare’ - was organising the jump Alf Joint was to make from one moving cable-car to another. This was supposed to have been one of Canutt’s first jobs on the film, to be shot using a real cable-car. It ended-up being one of the last things shot, back in London, using a full-size model; as Joint explains:

“In Salzburg, Yakima asked me to go out and look at the cable-car with him. He explained that I had to jump from one to the other, while they were moving. I said ‘Do what?’ So, we climbed out on the roof of the cable car and I was explaining to him that there was no way this would work, when the other car passed by - whoomph - and was gone. Yak said ‘God. What was that?’ ‘Oh, that was just the cable-car you want me to leap onto.’

“Next Sunday, Plan B: He’s built this platform onto the side of the mountain, from which he wanted me to leap onto the passing cable-car. Fair enough; ‘Supposing I miss?’ I asked. It was a long way down. So they tied a rope to me.

“I leaped it and just made the cable-car. Problem was, they forgot to tell the guy in the control station to put the brakes on, so the car kept going and I was still tied to the platform. I ended up hanging upside-down from the platform. Yak whipped his lasso out, lassoed my leg and pulled me up; but I wasn’t too pleased.”

Consequently, all talk of doing the stunt on location stopped and plans were laid to build a full-size set, back at MGM. “When I actually did the job, it was against a front projected screen. I more or less dove off a small trampoline at the car as it came up, grabbed hold, and everything worked out alright.”

“Except ... when I did the dive, I hit the car with all my body weight and smacked my mouth into the safety bar. It saved me from sliding off and falling sixty-odd feet, but I lost three teeth.” Of course, it is only fitting that Joint’s most famous job should have made a permanent mark on him.

This same set provided Peter Barkworth with the climax of his part: the vicious fist-fight with Burton on the roof of the cable car, during which the two combatants never actually met: “They could only manage one shot per day, because it required such precise setting up. Then, if the camera was pointing at me, Richard wasn’t needed, so Alf Joint would stand in, with his back to the camera. We would swing one punch, and that would be that for another day. We had that ferocious fight, which took weeks to film, and never actually laid our eyes on each other, let alone our fists.”

While this second unit work was going on, Ingrid Pitt was still waiting around to finish off her first unit chores. “I wasn’t working very often, but I had to always be on call in case they changed the schedule (because Richard hadn’t shown up), so I sat in the Hilton Hotel for days and weeks on end. I must have read every book in the library. God it was boring. I tell you, sitting in that hotel, fending off the Arabs who kept sending me bloody roses, was horrendous.”

But there were moments when the camaraderie of the Salzburg shoot would return, usually thanks to Burton and Eastwood’s mischievousness: “Never more-so,” Pitt concludes, “Than after the last day of shooting. We were driving back from Borehamwood in Richard’s Rolls when Clint said to Richard ‘Shall we tell her now?’ I said ‘Tell her what?’ ‘Well, we had a bet over who would get you in the sack first, him or me!’ I thought that was very ... cute. Bloody actors.”

For Kastner, the problems of the shoot are now a dim and distant memory, a lot of water has flowed under The Oh Shit Bridge these past thirty years: “That film was a joy for me, from beginning to end,” He enthuses, “I was making the perfect meat and potatoes movie movie. The kinda movie I love, the kind that grabs an audience for two hours and sucks ‘em in! It was like a Michael Curtiz or John Huston film: ‘Robin Hood’ and ‘The Maltese Falcon’, rolled into one. Those were movie movies, and so was this.

“Everything about that movie was so tremendously satisfying, to relive those moments is delicious for me; that’s why I’ll talk about that film and no other. I just enjoy remembering it; you know what I mean!?”

ROBERT RODRIGUEZ INTERVIEW

LOS HOOLIGAN

A C(hat) with Robert Rodriguez

This 3,000 word interview (cut down from one almost twice that length) comes from a different world. A world before the internet. A world before viral marketing allowed a movie like The Blair Witch Project to prove you could have a big hit with a cheap film and long before Paranormal Activity came along and did the same again. Nowadays, literally anyone can make a film and get it seen. This was not the case before cheap HD video and internet distribution. Back then, making and releasing El Mariachi was a unique and almost miraculous achievement.

It was 1995. On the train coming down to London for a press-screening, I finished reading a book called Rebel Without a Crew. It is a film diary telling of the year in the life of a 23-year-old Texan who made a home movie called El Mariachi for $7,000, then sold it to Columbia Tri-Star for a quarter of a million.

Rebel Without a Crew is a startlingly honest and inspirational book which leaves the reader with the unshakeable belief that any shmo with a little money, a lot of gullible friends and a determined streak a mile wide can make a movie. It’s certainly a philosophy that has made Rodriguez one of the most interesting and creative film-makers working in (or around) Hollywood.

I arrived at Columbia Tri-Star’s preview theatre in London’s West End, sporting my favourite baseball cap (well, it’s always a good idea to dress up for these formal occasions). It bore the legend Hard Boiled in bolshy gold letters. The choice of this hat was a strategic move on my part as I was about to interview Robert Rodriguez, the fore-mentioned Texan one-man film crew, post-Tarantino phenomenon and, not coincidentally, lover of John Woo films.

This’ll get his attention! I thought ...

First they screened Desperado, the sort-of-sequel-sort-of-remake to El Mariachi then, as the lights rose, in wandered the director, dressed in jeans and a lumberjack shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Oh good, I thought, at least I’m not the only scruffy bugger here! After our brief introduction I switched on my microphone and set about checking levels on my tape machine, the first words it recorded were: “Cool hat! Wow, where do I get one of those? Damn.”

“Ehm ... who distributed the film? Metro Tartan, I think. I got it off them!”

“That’s great!”

[Trying hard to act surprised] “Thank you. Ehm ... So, has your reputation for making films cheaply helped or hindered you in Hollywood?”

“Oh, completely helped! I’ll work forever off Desperado alone, because Hollywood just doesn’t know how to make movies that look big, that can be sold like a big movie, but that cost under ten million. It’s really funny, ’cos they just can’t see how to do it, and I dunno why.

“Desperado cost seven million which is, y’know, a lot for me but it’s nothing for a big action film. Action movies start at thirty and, if it’s a summer movie, which this one was in the States, they start at fifty. In fact, there was an article in one of the industry magazines and it showed all the hits and all the disasters - the big bombs that cost a lot and made nothing - and there were only seven films on the list that made it. Desperado was one of ’em, simply by the ratio of what it cost to what it made.”

“No one in Hollywood really knows what they’re doing, they’re all dependent on somebody else. The studio guys don’t know how to make movies, they’re all accountants who’re totally dependent on guys like me, who can tell ’em anything. They don’t know. They haven’t learned what you need. They should, then they wouldn’t get shafted so much! On the other side, creative guys aren’t usually very technical so they’re dependent on technicians and on the crew, who tell ’em it’ll take so long and cost so much to do, so there’s another waste.

“Something I learned from my first job in high school was that the last thing a creative person does is learn to be technical, they’re just too lazy to do that. But, if you’re creative and you become technical, then you’re unstoppable. That’s what I did, I learned how to make a movie from the ground up, I learned all the camera stuff, I learned how to cut it, all so I wouldn’t be dependent on anybody.”

“And you’ll continue doing it this way?”

“Yeah, ’cos once I’d set the precedent with El Mariachi (and then they made the mistake of letting me do it again with Desperado) that really locked it in. I was able to persuade them to let me direct and shoot and edit Desperado like that because I was doing it for so little money. They had nothing to lose, so they let me do it. Now it’s standard operating procedure. From now on, when a producer hires me, he knows already that I’m gonna shoot it and edit it and arrange the music myself, he won’t even question it.

“It used to be that you either made big movies which everybody had to go see so were really watered down, and had no one person in control or you had to make really small independent movies where you had a lot of freedom, but no one would go see ‘em. But movies like Pulp Fiction, Desperado. and From Dusk Till Dawn don’t have to appeal to everybody because we make ‘em cheap enough that the investors’ll get back their money back plus a little profit.”

They want me to make movies that make money and don’t cost anything. True, when they see how cheap I can work, they sweat a little it makes it harder for them to justify such great expense. But that’s good! The whole industry has gotten too big, it’s time it was shaken up a little bit. That’s what young people are supposed to do, shake things up. Then I’ll be there in a coupla years and some new guys’ll breeze into town and tell me what an idiot I am. I guess what goes around comes around! I’m just making the most of it while I can.”

“But a lot of film-makers get on the ladder by calling in favours, getting someone high up to give them a break, and they do on condition that later on you do them favours back ...”

“That’s one way to get in, but I tried not to do that. There are people who borrow money from their parents to make their first movie, but I tell people “Go sell your body to science for a few months, then you can do it with your own dime. Put yourself on the line, don’t drag someone else into it.” That’s what I did, and if it’s your own risk you’re actually more careful with the money.

“Does working so cheaply make the job easier?”

“Well it’s never easy with any budget, but with a bigger budget you’ve just got other kinds of problems. You’re always gonna have problems, it’s just that you solve ‘em differently when you don’t have a lot of money. It wasn’t like “Hey, now I’ve got seven million dollars, I can relax”, ’cos I was making something that, by Hollywood standards, would cost much more. So it was still a struggle, but when you don’t have very much money you end up solving your problems creatively. What a movie is, is a whole series of creative problems that you have to solve, that’s why big movies get into trouble, ’cos when they get a problem they don’t stop and think about how to fix it creatively and make the movie better, they just wash the problem away with the money hose. That’s easy and it doesn’t really solve your problem.”

“So how does seven million dollars get spent?”

“I shot the whole movie, put everything in the can, for $3.1 million. The rest went on wages for the actors, producers, post-production, the SDDS eight-track sound mix, the release prints, all the post stuff which we didn’t think we needed to spend so much on, but the studio thought we did. I’ll be controlling more of that from now on! But to actually make the movie, all the sets, all the explosions and all the stunts came in at 3.1. That’s nothing.”

“Does more money mean bigger names?”

“On Desperado, Antonio Banderas cost a little bit, not much. He was on the way up. The same is true of George Clooney in Dusk. You can either pay twenty million dollars for these big actors, or you can find new guys and make them into twenty million dollar actors. We got George Clooney for a song ’cos no one was offering him movie roles when I hired him, now he’s been offered Batman, which is great. I’d rather make someone a star and then not be able to afford ’em, so have to go find someone else and make them a star instead! That keeps the budgets down and sparks your creativity.”

“Do you resent the way that you and Tarantino are grouped together in people’s minds?”

“I think film makers have always worked together, Spielberg and Lucas worked together for years, and that happens all the time, because Hollywood is a small community where you find that people you relate to are few and far between. Quentin and I worked together three times in a row [Desperado, Four Rooms and From Dusk Till Dawn]... but on Desperado, he was only there for one day.

He always wanted to be an actor, he studied acting, and he took it very seriously on Dusk. After I saw him in Desperado, he seemed like a real natural. It’s true that he needs a strong director while he’s still learning, especially when he comes up against a guy like George Clooney who’s been in awful stuff for years, but got away with it because no one even paid enough attention to dismiss him. The critics wouldn’t say “George Clooney was terrible in this movie” because they didn’t even care who George Clooney was. He had years to get the seasoning that Quentin has to get very quickly and, as you see in Dusk, he got there very fast.

“How do you respond when your films are compared to John Woo’s?”

“That’s great, ’cos that was our major inspiration. American action movies were getting really stale because, I found out, action is usually shot by second unit, a stunt guy who takes the camera and a whole other crew and shoots the action stuff. They usually move so slow on a big movie that the director will spend all his time directing the main sequences with the main actors while the difficult stuff is passed on to second and third crews. We did everything first unit on Desperado, I wanted to shoot everything. I was horrified when I found out that I was supposed to hand all the fun stuff to somebody else, that’s what I was waiting for the most, I didn’t wanna do the dialogue scenes, I wanted to blow things up.

“It was the John Woo movies that made me realise that the difference between our films and films from other countries is the way they would commit to the action. I hadn’t been excited about an action movie like The Killer or Hard Boiled since I was a kid watching James Bond movies, and I thought it was just ’cos I was getting older, but I realise now that it’s just that our movies are getting stale. Those Hong Kong movies made that catharsis come back again, they made you wanna be Chinese and do all that neat stuff.”

“Where do you find your actors?”

“All over the place. People sometimes have very little acting experience because they don’t get the chances, so I start them sometimes from nowhere. I saw Salma Hayek on Spanish television saying how she couldn’t get work in the States ’cos of her accent, even though she is a big soap star in Mexico. In Desperado, for instance, since we were shooting in this little town, we couldn’t afford to fly a lot of actors out of Los Angeles, so a lot of the actors, even in bigger parts, are my crew people. I deliberately hired a Mexican crew, so my first assistant director’s in the movie, my director of photography, my grip, my gaffer, my make-up artist, they’re all in there.

“You know that bit where Antonio slides across the bar and the other guy slides up to him and they run out of bullets and they’re shooting empty guns at each other [a sequence ripped whole and bleeding from John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow, it must be noted!], well that’s my second assistant director. As soon as we killed him he went back to work. I just looked at my crew and said “Man, you guys look like movie stars”, so I put ’em all in. That was fun, every day a different crew guy got to be in the movie, which kept the morale up!”

“Did you get much co-operation from the small town you filmed in?”

“Tons. We’d shot Mariachi there, but they didn’t notice us when we were there first time because there was no crew, just me with a camera running around shooting one take and then off to the next location, really fast. That’s how we made it look expensive by filming on the real streets, with real cars rolling by. Normally you have to pay the city to clear the streets, hire people to rent cars, bring in guys to drive ‘em - it’s all that backwards kind of thinking, the old way is just to let real cars go by and film your actors running between ‘em. This time we wanted to go back because we wanted to pay back the town. Everyone got to work on the movie in some capacity, ’cos it’s only a small place.”

“Will there be a third Mariachi movie?”

“We’ll see. Maybe I’ll call it Once Upon A Time In Mexico. I heard about this small town in Mexico where all they do is make guitars, so I thought, maybe that’s where he’ll be holed up, building guitars.”

“Obviously you’ve got a reputation for action movies, but in Rebel Without A Crew you talk about starting out with animations -”

“ - And family comedies, yeah, that’s mainly what I do. I’m the blood and guts guy now, but what I’ve always been is Mr Family Comedy. I wrote a comic strip for a few years called Los Hooligans, which was based on my family, and that’s what’s coming next. I mean, From Dusk Till Dawn is by far the capper on all this, I can’t go any further than that, it’s like completely an exploitation, drive-in, horror, action, splatter thriller with Tarantino and me together at our most extreme. You can’t go beyond that. So it’s time to go the other way, I’ll probably do a family comedy and after that maybe a biopic on Stevie Ray Vaughan.”

“Does your drawing lead you to storyboard everything?”

“Not so much these days, ’cos there’s so many shots if I had to draw ‘em all ... If I didn’t operate the camera myself I’d probably do that, but since I’m framing the shot anyway and I’m choosing the lens, I just tell people to move fast and follow me. You just use a storyboard to tell your crew what you want. That’s what directing is in Hollywood, it’s more of a power position where you tell people what to do I don’t like to do that. I don’t wanna be the boss, I wanna be making the film, so rather than telling the crew what to do, I’ll work with them and lead by example, that’s how we can move so quickly and make the movie so cheaply, not because I’m cracking the whip but because I’m leading the way, and I’m moving very, very fast.

“You’re not good at deputising then?”

“No, I don’t deputise. I can’t imagine who even thought of that. Editing is the best part of making a movie. Who thought to give that to someone else? In fact, they don’t just give someone else the chance to have all the fun, they pay them to have all the fun, that’s ridiculous. To call yourself a cook when all you do is buy the groceries doesn’t make any sense, y’know. Too much of this and not enough of that can screw up the whole thing, so editing’s very, very important, the most important part of the job.”

“Rebel Without a Crew almost reads like a manifesto of how you think people should make films ...”

“I’ve had several people tell me that, does it really sound like that? When people quote me they say “You said ‘You should do this’.” But I never said “You should do -” anything, ’cos I hate it when people tell me that. All I said was what I did, and I wrote it to show you that it is all completely against everything you’ve ever heard, but it worked for me. It should make you realise that all that stuff you thought you needed to know, all those people you thought you needed to be in with, you don’t need that at all.

“I just wanted to demystify it, make it seem less frightening, because that’s what held me back for so long - just not knowing the nature of the beast I was confronting. It turns out to be a little rabbit. So, I thought I’d better tell some people, ’cos no one else wants to let people know or there’ll be too much competition, but I don’t care. I know what I can do, it’s the other filmmakers who are scared they didn’t want anyone to know how easy it all is, which makes me mad, so I decided I’m not gonna keep the secret, I’m gonna blurt it out.”

And with that, his next appointment arrived. However, so won over was I by the man’s disarming honesty, by his refusal to be precious about his ‘art’, I felt foolish getting him to autograph my copy of Rebel. Instead of just acting like a fan-boy, I offered him a trade. Consequently he went to his next interview happy in a new hat, and I walked to the tube clutching my treasured book and my signed photograph, while the wind whipped around my now hatless head.