Joe Dante is self-admittedly a B-movie director who got lucky and he is happy to be in London promoting his new film 'The Hole 3D', a return to a simpler kind of film which I reviewed last week and highly recommend you checking out. He very kindly agreed to a roundtable discussion and as we all sit down and place our Dictaphones at the head of the table he animatedly double-checks that they are all on and begins. He sets us all at ease as he passionately and honestly talks about how the film industry has changed over the years.
Joe Dante on... THE HORROR GENRE
This genre is so popular with directors because you use every cinematic trick in the book to be able to scare people and its actually kind of fun to do. You get to use all these tricks that you wouldnt get to use if you were making a different kind of movie.
Joe Dante on.... INFLUENCES AND CHILDHOOD
My generation grew up studying film because it was around us. On television there were old movies on constantly. When we went to college and were serious about film there were a lot of interesting and scholarly magazines such as Sight and Sound and Films and Filming, which I used to slavishly wait for at the newsstand! Films and Filming was my favourite magazine because they took seriously movies that werent taken seriously in America, genre movies with directors like Roger Corman who werent even considered worth talking about in America but written about very intelligently in the British media. All of those movies were in black and white, and it was the norm to watch black and white. Now kids wont go near it! Black and white is an art form if these kids cant appreciate that there is an entire half a film industry, the best half in my estimation, thats out the window.
Joe Dante on... HIS APPROACH TO 3D
'Dial M For Murder' wasnt shown in 3D very much because it came at the tail end and it is one of the most interesting 3D movies I have ever seen because its not conventional 3D. There are a couple of scenes where things stand out to you but for the most part its a film play about the emotional and physical spaces between the actors. Even the way the furniture is set up and the shots has an emotional impact. It is not the same movie in 2D, more of an amusing play. In 3D it actually makes you feel like you are on the stage with the actors and in that sense it is a very interesting Hitchcock picture. For me making The Hole, I thought this is the kind of way I want to approach it; I dont want to be throwing stuff out at the audience every five minutes. We will do some of that to make them happy but then we will stop. I think if you can make the audience feel like the story is wrapping itself around them it will just be better for the movie.
Jone Dante on... CASTING
You always have to hand pick them, the thing about kids is that they go in cycles and if you are making a movie in one season there will be one crop of kids and they may be a good crop and they may be a bad crop. A good crop is kids who are good actors and are natural, a bad crop is kids who just came off the Disney channel and have been taught to be cute. You cannot watch them for an entire feature film; its unpleasant. The studios will immediately say give me a kid with a name, it has to be a kid with a name! There are no Shirley Temples anymore, so the chances of you finding a Miley Cyrus, Hilary Duff or Zac Efron are fairly remote because all those people have their own empires and baggage so they will not be believable as your kid next door. So you gotta find new kids. Now in this case I was lucky enough to find the three right kids. Chris (Massoglia) had done one picture that I hadnt seen but he came in and read with Hayley and there was a spark there. Nathan (Gamble) and I had never met, I saw him in the Batman movie ['The Dark Knight'] and I just thought he was really good. But he had a conflict, a TV pilot, so I had to get a backup. The backup looked a little more like Chris but he wasnt nearly as good. Luckily we got Nathan. I think the movie would be 10% worse if Nathan wasnt in it cos he has so much to do in it and is such a good actor.
Joe Dante on... TREADING THE LINE BETWEEN ADULT AND KIDS ENTERTAINMENT
I remember when I did 'Gremlins' there was a lot of hoo haa about a scene where the mother puts the gremlin in the microwave and people said, you know whats gonna happen? Kids are going to see this movie and put their poodles in the microwave. How will you like it when that happens? I just always remember thinking these people are really underestimating their children. There may be some psychotic children but thats their parents fault. The movie isnt going to make them psychotic. I remember what Alfred Hitchcock said to the woman who told him my daughter wont take a shower after seeing 'Psycho', he said, send her to the drycleaner! 'The Hole' hinges on a very dark family story and there was a question of how explicit shall we be about this; we were essentially making an adult story thats suitable for kids. . The trick is to do it on a level where the adults understand the gravity of that sub-plot and the kids understand that its a bad thing but they dont know exactly what happened.
Joe Dante on... CLOWNS
Frankly, Im not sure that kids today know what clowns are. There are not a lot of circuss left through various reasons. I remember when I was a kid I saw 'Dumbo' and there were these mean clowns who did bad things to Dumbo and you hated them! I went to the circus when I was young and I never found them funny, I found them odd and maybe even a little disturbing because the slapstick that they do is basically violent. And dressed up in these bizarre faces there is a part of me that wonders how anyone could have found clowns funny. In todays world where the whole circus concept is so removed for kids I wonder if the doll in The Hole is even identifiable as a clown. It was in the script and it was a harlequin because that was the doll that was easiest to manipulate. Basically we thought it looked creepy.
Joe Dante on... MOVIES TODAY
I think its fair to say movies are getting pretty brainless. The feature film audiences now are basically between 12-18 those are the ones they really target and they dont exactly do Shakespeare for those guys. A lot of the content movies are moving to television and every so often there is a costume film starring Colin Firth that will get some traction, but for the most part the audiences that spend the most money are audiences that basically want to see spectacle. Spectacle doesnt usually involve character developments or clever plotting, it just includes climax after climax after climax Kids are now taught this is what to expect when you go to the movies and they will be disappointed when it doesnt have 27 trucks blowing up and giant robots battling with each other. The Hole is a riposte to that kind of thinking; its a little more old fashioned, more linear, more character driven. Is it too old fashioned? Maybe, I dont know! I think there is still room for a story being told that way.
Joe Dante on... SPECIAL EFFECTS AND GREMLINS
The technology I used for 'Gremlins' is ancient now, so out of date. In 'The Hole' there is a scene with a puppet where I was wondering to myself what am I doing here with puppets again, why do I do this to myself? I hate puppets! We did use techniques that were similar to the ones in 'Gremlins' although they are different now. In 'Gremlins' you had to hide the puppeteers behind things, now you can have them right in the frame and then you digitally remove them. With Digital you can do so much. It makes you want to go back to your old movies and fix everything that is wrong. I dont think Ill ever be asked to do another 'Gremlins' because they need a younger guy. Those movies were so defined by the limitations of technology that the stories were written around capability of puppets. Now you can do anything with CGI and I certainly dont want to make a re-imagining of 'Gremlins'.
Joe Dante on... COMIC BOOK MOVIES AND REMAKES
I thought 'Iron Man' was very good, I wasnt as crazy about the sequel but it was still better than a lot of the other ones I have seen. Some of them just dont work at all and they tend to be very repetitive. How many times are they going to re-make 'The Hulk' now?! There wasnt much time between the two versions. Speaking of which, how long was it between the 'Death at a Funeral' remakes maybe a couple of years what was the story there??? And they cast the same actor because they couldnt find another midget!! The first movie wasnt that successful in America, I thought it was quite funny!
Joe Dante on... BILL GAINES
There was a script going round, a musical about Bill Gaines, and it was really terrific. The woman who owned it decided it wasnt good enough yet and started to re-work it into something that really didnt work at all and now there is a competing project which I think John Landis is supposed to do. Its in the works, it may not happen though.
Joe Dante on... AVATAR
I thought it was a very clever recycling of clichés from a hundred years of movies. There are more clichés per minute in that movie than anything I have ever seen. But that is not a criticism as we all juggle clichés, which is what movies are all about. I was impressed that he waited all those years for the technology to create a world that is so attractive that some people see the movie because they want to live in it. Every character and twist in the movie is from a western, a space movie etc. You could have a great trivia game by getting people to watch the film and call out the pictures that the lines and plot are from. It would be quite fascinating.
Joe Dante on... FUTURE PROJECTS
I dont know if I am going to get the financing for it but I have a lovely script about Roger Corman shooting 'The Trip' and taking LSD. Its a very funny script and Ive been trying to get financing for a number of years and I am still hoping to make it. Right now is not exactly the premiere year for getting movies financed, there are an awful lot of people who lost money making movies. There really arent a lot of dentists left who dont know you are not going to make any money!
Joe Dante on... FILM CRITICISM
People now dont want to read criticism because they dont want spoilers; its all about entertainment. Even when I read the trade reviews, I just read the first couple of paragraphs. I dont want to read the rest of it because I dont want to know that much about it. I may go back and read it after I have seen the movie. And with the fact that everybody is being fired because people are not reading papers at all I dont know what future there is for film criticism. There is some very good film criticism on the internet, there are some very good blogs, and with a lot better writing than people are given credit for.
Joe Dante on... TRAILERS FROM HELL
This website has old movie trailers narrated by contemporary film directors, and they talk about what the movies meant to them when they saw them and maybe try to steer you towards movies that you may not have seen. I had a lot of trailers and I thought it would be interesting to put them up with some narration. I put a couple up and then some friends of mine saw them and they wanted to do it and several years later we had this website and we have everybody from John Landis to Guillermo del Toro talking about movies that they either like or have some interest in and want you to see. The reason it came about is simply people today dont know those movies, they are not on TV like they were when I was a kid, there is nowhere to go to find out about them. People now will not be able to go to the video store, as there will not be a video store, so they will have to stream them. How are they gonna know what existed? This is a site where there are about 500 plus movies, where you can go down the list and you can see Eli Roth thinks that I should see 'Forbidden Planet'. Its an attempt to try and keep the past alive, the studios have this huge backlog of movies that they try to sell, but they can only sell to people who have seen them. I told a home video executive if you are smart youll put out all your black and white movies in the next 10 years because the audience for them will be gone. We feel like we are doing a mini film school online. Joe Dante's The Hole 3D is in cinema's now.