Voices on the Art Form

Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Any reason you wanted to do a vampire film?

It was offered to me and they had a lot of money to pay me, so that was a nice incentive. There was a book called Vampires and there were a couple of scripts that were written, and it was an interesting idea. I read the scripts and I read the book and I thought, well I can do something with this. It's kind of a neat story about a team of vampire slayers and they're up against master vampires going to find a black cross and walk in the sunlight. The vampires are created by the Catholic Church, it's modern day, and the American Southwest. It's a Western! Great. Clearly a Western.

All my films are Westerns. Every one of them. The structure, the characters, the situations - they're all Western situations. Assault on Precinct 13 was a movie I did in l976. It was an action movie about a police station under siege in Watts. It's Rio Bravo. It's the same movie, redone. A lot of them are journey movies, where the gunfighter has to leave town and go to another town and fight, and comes back to town. I got into this business to make Westerns.

You compose and record the music for your films. Do you have the music in your head while you're directing, or do you wait until it's all done?

I'm a journeyman. I wait 'til it's done, I look at the movie and see what scenes need to be scored, what scenes need the emotion, the tempo, whatever, then I do it. But it's total journeyman. If not, then I don't think about it.

Every process has a certain period of time. There's a writing period, that's a different process. All the possibilities and potentials are great: You can do anything, you're writing it down on a piece of paper. Then there's the preproduction, which is a drag, because then you have to make all these decisions, you have to go location scouting.

The shooting is a whole different process onto itself, because you're dealing with everything. It's going really fast, there's long hours and you're exhausted. You're spending anywhere from 14 to 18 hours a day on this movie, and all the health habits - just forget them! You drink too much coffee. . . . We used to put little odometers on our belts just to see how far we walked every day: 12 to 15 miles, just walking back and forth from the camera.

Postproduction is a whole different phase. Now you're dealing with what you have. Writing was dealing with potentialities; now here's what you've got. So you've got to comb through the footage and make the movie that's the best you can make out of what you've got . . . and the music and the sound effects and the finishing touches.

How would you describe your experience filming in New Mexico?

The pleasant thing about it was that every local hire, everybody worked really hard. . . . Everybody wanted to work. I was real impressed. . . . The weather's a variable. It rains. When we shot it rained every day, so we had to vamp around that. The light changes every day, so you have to work around that. The locations were spectacular. For that amount of landscape, there's nothing like it.

Do you see any particular challenges for filmmakers, now or in the near future?

There's only one challenge: Get your vision on the screen. Only one. If you have a vision of something, and you have a feeling for it, getting it on the screen is your challenge. That's your job. That's what I was trained to do at USC, that's what every director is supposed to do. If you don't have a vision, if you don't see it, it's easy: you can do anything you want. But somebody who really cares, you gotta work to get it up there, to put it on the screen. That's the challenge.