Rob Zombie
Closing out Hollywood’s run of blockbusters this season is the remake of what many consider to be, outside of Psycho purists, the greatest horror movie ever made, John Carpenter’s Halloween. It was certainly the most successful independent film of its era. At the helm is artist/Rock star/film director Rob Zombie – truly one of the most passionate and genuinely likable guys in the entertainment business. Last week Mike Bacon of FMQB and Mike C. of Icons Of Fright were able to tear Zombie away from his busy schedule to chat about his take on the terror masterpiece due in theaters nationwide August 31.
(MB) How did the opportunity to direct Halloween present itself?
It came up in a weird way. After I finished “The Devil’s Rejects” I met with a lot of different people about a lot of different projects. Other remakes came my way that I didn’t have any interest in, other original stuff too, different things. I took a million meetings and worked on some projects a little bit. Then they started turning into things I didn’t want to be associated with. One day I got a call asking if I wanted to meet with Bob Weinstein. Ok, I’ll have a meeting, but this is the last meeting I’m doing. I’m sick of having meetings because they never amount to anything. It’s just a lot of chit-chat. So I went and met him at his hotel and we started talking and he just threw out the thing about Halloween. Dimension owns the rights to Halloween and he wanted to know my take on Halloween. Not as a remake, just in any sense. They had Halloween and they didn’t know what to do with it essentially. I know they had tried several times to make a Halloween movie and it failed, so that’s basically how it came to me. Just out of the blue.
(MC) So, you’re presented with the opportunity to direct Halloween, and it must be great considering you’re a huge genre fan, but also consequently you have to reinvent Halloween. Did you have a moment where you thought “What have I gotten myself into?”
At first I didn’t know if I really wanted to do it because I was not really keen on the idea of a remake. I just said “I’ll think about it”, sort of thinking I was going to call them back later and say no. But I left there and I thought about it for a couple of weeks. Then I starting feeling like, “Wait a minute. Why am I assuming that this is a bad idea? This could be an incredible idea. I’m taking the completely wrong attitude.” I started envisioning how you could do this. I looked at it and thought Michael Myers is a great character. He’s one of the few modern day iconic monsters. They very rarely pop up and present themselves in a classic way. So, I thought, “Shit I have to do this movie. This is a great thing.”
(MB) How much free reign was given to you to make it yours?
100%. I wouldn’t have done it any other way. That’s what they wanted. Bob Weinstein said, “We want you to take it and run with it!” If there was one thing he kept stressing to me, which became his catch phrase it was, “Make it more Rob Zombie!” He wasn’t worried about protecting the franchise. He just wanted me to take it and run with it. Once again, it was a very rare situation so it was hard to say no.
(MC) Was it difficult to make with the time crunch? You had a lot of time between House Of 1000 Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects. Halloween was announced last June and it’s now coming out in August.
It was tricky. The biggest hindrance to me was I made the mistake… Well, I had seen Halloween a million times, but I had never seen it with the thought that I was going to remake it. So then I watched it again and again, and it actually started doing more harm than good. It started f-ing with my head because I had the same thought that fans have. How can you possibly do this? How can you change this? So, I had to stop watching it and stop thinking about it and just start spinning it off in my own direction. It wasn’t that difficult. It was harder towards the end, because the beginning of the movie, doing young Michael Myers’ life was easy, because it hadn’t existed before. People look at the first movie and go “Oh he was a normal kid!” We don’t really know any of that. He doesn’t say anything and we don’t really get any insight into him. I thought I could run with that because it’s pretty much a clean slate. And then everything with Doctor Loomis in the early days of Smiths Grove Sanitarium was also a clean slate. I could pretty much do whatever I wanted there. It was really when I got to the third act of the movie where we got to Haddonfield that I could make it different but retain classic elements. The best way I can describe it for people is that it’s like Batman Begins. You’re keeping Wayne Manor. You’re keeping Batman. You want the Bat-suit. You’re probably going to have Alfred as the butler. You’re going to keep some of the classic things, but the way you want to represent it is completely different.
(MC) What did you want from your cast? What did you want for your Loomis, and your Annie and your Michael Myers?
The main thing I wanted from everyone at all times was to be real and to take it seriously. Horror fans love horror. But there’s a whole section of the population that not only don’t love horror, they don’t care about it at all, including some actors. They come into it thinking “Oh I know what these movies are like. You know, it’s going to be kind of campy.” You know, they have a preconceived idea of what kind of acting you want for a horror movie. But no, I don’t want that. I want you guys to play this as if it’s a true story. Dead serious. This whole movie’s going to live and die on the acting. It’s not about bad acting and the special FX. I want this whole movie to be compelling because you guys are giving amazing performances. Not because there’s a guy in a big mask running around.
(MB) How beneficial was it for you that some of the main cast members had never seen Halloween?
It was great that they hadn’t seen it, because I didn’t want them to imitate what had come before them. The people in the original didn’t imitate anything. That was just their fresh take on what they should do. If people start imitating, then it would get weird. You don’t want to watch someone do a Donald Pleasence imitation or something. And there’s no reason that they should, because Malcolm is a great actor. I wanted Malcolm McDowell to be Malcolm McDowell, not to be imitating someone else.
(MC) It seems like we were all getting our news and information from your My Space blog. Was any of the feedback you were getting on the internet influential while you were making the film and if it wasn’t positive, how were you dealing with that?
It was not influential in any way whatsoever. It really can’t be, because the people that are commenting have no idea what they’re commenting on. They’re commenting on a movie that they haven’t seen, or a movie that hasn’t even been made yet! It’s completely useless information unfortunately. When I was working on the film during pre-production, I didn’t look at anything on line or anywhere, because I didn’t care. You’re so focused on what you’re trying to do, that it just doesn’t matter. The only way to make your movie is you have to have a vision for what you want, and you have to be so single-minded that you don’t give a f-ing sh*t what anyone else thinks. It’s the same thing with casting. Certain people in the movie, nobody wanted me to cast them, and I had to fight to cast them. It went on for months sometimes, but I wouldn’t go of it. Now that it’s done, they’re like “Wow, that person’s amazing. Thank God we cast them!” Because that’s the way it goes. That’s the director’s job, you have to put on the blinders and get ready to fight the fight.
(MC) Is the theatrical version going to be your final version or will there be a double disc DVD with an alternate version?
You know, what was really funny about this movie is that we did not get into any trouble with the MPAA. We got an R rating super easy. And I was totally baffled by it. I don’t know if it’s because there’s been such an onslaught of harsh films, that this didn’t seem so harsh. I actually think we got away with more because it was Michael Myers, and it was like a monster, as opposed to a human hurting another human. You can blow a zombie’s head off, but if you blow off a normal guy’s head it’s a problem. They make these weird rules.
(MC) The music in Halloween is almost as iconic as Michael Myers himself. What were you looking for from Tyler Bates’ new score?
Tyler was in the same boat as me essentially, because the music is just as iconic as anything else. We weren’t really sure, because as I was shooting, he didn’t really start the music. He kind of dabbled with it, but he didn’t start until late in the process. We weren’t even sure if the John Carpenter themes would work, because they’re so familiar and so associated with the movies you’ve already seen. I thought maybe when you’re watching this movie they’ll seem out of place. Who knows? We eventually used all the classic stuff. He went back and rescored them, but played them pretty straight. We didn’t want to make it big and bombastic and rocking and techno-ie or any horseshit like that. We did it on purpose so it kind of sounded old. If anything it had a weird synth thing, we’d use some old junk. We wanted it to sound authentic. When he composed new music, it was the same thing. We wanted to make it sound like maybe there was a piece of score we never heard from back then. The score is pretty cool.
(MB) How’d you decide on the songs? And how integral to the film are they?
Well, the songs I picked that I used don’t play as score. It’s not like Devil’s Rejects where “Freebird” plays as a score element. The songs are all pretty much background on the radio and things like that. What I like about putting songs like that in the movie is it just grounds the world in reality. What was also nice is that there’s almost no sound in Smiths Grove Sanitarium. It’s so sterile. And when Michael gets out the first place he goes to is this huge truck wash where they wash 18 wheelers and that’s when he has his altercation with Ken Foree’s character. The guys are washing the trucks and blasting music. And it was just like, from the world he had been trapped into for 15 years, he steps outside and just explodes in this world of sound. It was a way to contrast the isolation that he’d been living in for all those years.
(MB) What an amazing thing as a horror aficionado – to have the opportunity to remake one of the greatest horror films ever made.
It’s totally surreal. I’ve had a bunch of surreal moments in my life like that. One of them was about a year ago when I was on stage playing “God Of Thunder” with Ace Frehley. I was thinking “This is so weird!” I was like this goofy kid that worshiped KISS in the 70’s and I’m on stage doing this song. Ace’s on stage with me doing the song, and the other KISS guys are standing off stage and I’m thinking “This is f-ing weird! This is like some bizarre dream.” Halloween was the same thing. You’re on set… shooting Halloween. I’m in Pasadena, shooting a lot of it on the same streets that Carpenter shot on. This seemed like I woke up and had a weird Halloween dream. I never lose that feeling of how insanely cool it is.
(MC) People are touchy about Halloween, and because remakes have a long tradition in horror, what can you say to sway fans of yours that this is okay?
To me, remakes are sort of about passion and intent. When someone says “Who do you like better as Dracula? Lugosi or Christopher Lee?” I love them both! They’re both awesome. But you can tell when something is quickly remade for a buck. This was not that case. I really believed in this. And being such a big fan of the original, and like many people, watching Michael Myers degenerate through seven sequels until you’re like “What? That’s what it’s come down to?” I really wanted to take that character and when he comes on screen have people go, “Wow. Michael Myers never looked so bad-ass!” It really mattered to me. I really wanted it to be great and took it totally serious. People thought I was only doing it for money. I could’ve went on tour and made ten times the money I made making this movie. It wasn’t about money. It was about really wanting to do it and that’s when movies work.
The thing with remakes is, no matter how good the remake is, nothing can make you love something more than the original because it’s something special to you…same for me. No matter how great the remake of Dawn Of The Dead was, it’s never going to be as special to me as the experience of seeing the original in a packed theater at midnight while I was in high school. That was a mind-blowing experience. That’s no insult to the movie, it’s just there’s so much emotional baggage attached to these films for some people. I totally get it. But that doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be done. If that was the case, Nosferatu would be our only version of Dracula that we would have seen for the rest of our lives. There’s nothing wrong with doing it, you just have to do it with the right intent and not just to make a quick buck. Which obviously is what goes on a lot. We don’t have to bullshit each other. I don’t care about everyone else’s movies. I tried to make this awesome.
(MB) A reboot of the series was really the only way to go and to be put in the hands of someone who cares about it like yourself was a great move.
I would never have done a Part 9. Part 9 probably would’ve went direct to video anyway. What are you going to do? I felt like by Part 8 it was Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. A once great character had become a punch line for someone. That’s what Michael Myers felt like to me in Part 8. Then Hammer does it with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing and those are things that made me think this is totally the way to go.
(MC) Have you made your peace with Michael Myers, or would you take it further when this movie does well? Or would you leave it the way Carpenter did?
I’m done with it. No matter what this movie does. If this movie was the biggest movie of all time, I still wouldn’t come back. Because I wanted to make a single great film and that’s all I was concerned with. The way the horror genre works, it doesn’t matter what I did, they would find a way to make Part 2. Ya know? If we exploded Michael Myers into millions of pieces, for Part 2 he would regenerate himself maybe. He’d be living in an underground laboratory as a secret government project and they would reassemble him! The thing I didn’t want to do was restart a franchise, because that’s how you get into trouble. That’s how you make crap. You just really have to be concerned with making a great film for everybody, because that’s all anyone really cares about. You don’t want it to end and set it up for Part 2. That’s a cheat.
(MB) Well, let’s hope there are no sequels and that this can stand on its own.
They’re not even talking about it. That’s what I really liked about Bob Weinstein. He wanted to reinvent it and do something different and wasn’t ever talking about firing up a franchise. He was always focused on making one solid movie, because they’d already be planning Part 2 if they were thinking that. And they’re not. That’s what I like about this. The intentions all around were really in the right place.
(MB) Are you taking time off after this?
I’m going to take a little bit of time off and then go back on tour in October. Once the tour’s done, I’ll start another movie. Right now I’m just trying to figure out what that exactly will be. The live record comes out in September, the box set is…God knows when, by the time I get it done they won’t even make box-sets anymore. People will be like “What’s this I got for Christmas?! This strange box with these discs in it.”
**QB Content by Mike Bacon**
