In 2003, I interviewed legendary horrormeister Stuart Gordon for the now defunct Science Fiction Weekly from Scifi/SyFy.com. The piece, originally edited due to length concerns, is no longer available online.
As a Halloween treat, I’m reprinting the complete 6,000 word conversation in three easily-digestible blog entries.
One of my more enjoyable assignments, I hope you have as much fun reading this as I did chatting with the affable Gordon.
Stuart Gordon Interview Part 3
With Rick Klaw
Are there any books that you would like to do that you haven’t done?
GORDON: Oh yeah, there’s a lot of them, actually.
You sound like a big literature fan.
Yeah, I like to read, and there’s some sort of dream projects I would like to do. I’ve been talking to Ray Bradbury about doing The Martian Chronicles. That would be great.
Considering the TV version they did, you couldn’t do any worse than that.
Yeah, I mean that would be fun. I know they’re working on a movie version of that, so that would be great. And for a while there, I was connected with the project Iron Man, the Marvel Comics character, and that would be really great.
Are you a comic book fan?
I am, pretty much so. I’ve got a lot of friends who make comic books. Now seeing all these comic book movies coming out, it’s be fun to do one.
Jack Kirby
This isn’t surprising since several of your earlier horror films especially Re-Animator and From Beyond are very much like comic books in tone, the shooting of them and everything.
Yeah, that’s true.
Are there other books?
GORDON: Now they’re doing all of these Alexander the Great things, and there’s a book by Mary Renault called The King Must Die that would be a fantastic movie. But I’ve got to get into Peter Jackson-land to get the bucks for that.
What do you think about Peter Jackson? I read somewhere Peter Jackson was influenced by you.
Yeah. We got to be friends, which was really great. We met at a film festival when he did Brain Dead. He’s terrific. He’s really fun and very down-to-earth; that’s the thing I like about him. And I’m sure he’s still the same way. I haven’t seen him in a few years, but he’s very open and approachable.
I don’t like Lord of the Rings; I never liked Tolkien, and the only reason I wanted to see the movies is because I’d loved all of Jackson’s older movies. All these people wanted to see it because it was Lord of the Rings, and I had these visions of people deciding to see all of his other films. I’m not to sure that would be a good idea.
(laughing) Well, I don’t know, I think they should.
I think they’re very good movies, but I think a lot of people…
Well, they’ll be shocked by some of them.
It’s like someone enjoying The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit and deciding to watch some of your horror films.
(laughing) But I also think there’s something interesting. You’ve got Sam Raimi doing Spider-Man, and I think there is something to be said here about people that come out of the horror genre and very small movies. It’s kind of great way to make your bones. And rather than getting these guys who just do commercials and MTV videos to direct these movies, going back to people who’ve got a background in what’s considered B-movie fare to do a big budget movie seems to be working.
What do you think about the current crop of horror films?
28 Days Later I thought was great. I was really impressed with it. It was extremely well done and very well written and acted and directed and that’s what makes me happy. So many horror movies you get the feeling that the people think that they’re slumming. That they’re not really into it, they don’t really have belief in the genre, they’re kind of winking at you all the time, and those I really don’t care for. But the ones where they really are trying to knock your socks off. There’s something very scary about realizing the director is very, very bright and talented and willing to do things that other directors aren’t, and he’s not going to play by the rules. That becomes a very scary proposition. I love movies like The Audition by Takashi Miike, the Japanese film. Or there’s a movie called Irreversible, which is a French director Gaspar Noé which is just mind-boggling. These movies will like…you will not be…able to think about anything else.
Most American horror films are utterly forgettable. I remember when Jeepers Creepers came out and everybody was going nuts for it. I saw it and was very under whelmed and bored.
Yeah. I thought the first half of that movie was good, and then it just…What happened was they started explaining it to you, and one of Lovecraft’s basic rules is Never Explain Anything. I liked The Ring, the American version of it, and then I went and saw the Japanese version, Ringu, which I liked even more because it doesn’t explain anything. You know, in the American version there’s all of this…they feel this need to explain everything, and…
I sometimes fell they think we’re idiots.
I don’t know. I think it’s there’s too many executives. I always run into this when I’m working at a studio where they go, “Well, what are the rules?” It’s like they want everything spelled out, and what’s scary is when you don’t know what the rules are, and anything’s possible.
Michael Moorcock talks about making an Elric movie and the problem he’s had in the past is they don’t put geeks in a position of power. And so you get, “Why is he an albino?” Where a geek would just say, “He’s an albino,” and that would be the end of the conversation.
It’s true. I mean, someone was telling me the other day about studio executives, and he said, “If they were making Lawrence of Arabia, they’d want to know what kind of shoes he was wearing.” It’s like, “Do we have to put him in the desert?”
I’ve heard about that kind of stuff. Joe Lansdale talks about that. When they were going to make Cold in July, they were like, “Do we have to set it in Houston?” It’s a crime novel set in Houston, a very violent crime novel set in Houston. He wondered why? They told him: “Well, we want to set it in Amarillo.” Have you ever been to Amarillo, Texas?
No.
There’s nothing there. It’s flat. Amarillo’s like, when you think of the Hollywood version of Texas, it’s Amarillo. Tumbleweeds. “’Cause it looks more like Texas.”
Yeah, and it’s so funny. There was a book I really wanted to do. It’s called A Wrinkle in Time.
The Madeleine L’Engle?
Madeleine L’Engle, yeah. It’s a great book. When I was at Disney I was trying to talk them into doing it, because they have the rights, and they had done all of these terrible screenplays. They were unreadable. And I finally went in and they, “Well, what’s your take on the material?” And I said, “Do the book.” And they go, “That’s it?” like they were expecting that you’re going to have some brilliant idea to turn the project inside out and upside down and it’s like, no, this is a brilliant book; just do it. When they were doing Wizard of Oz, they did Wizard of Oz.
Like Peter Jackson with Lord of the Rings.
Exactly. But they’re into this whole thing where everything has to be this high-concept, that you have to be clever, clever, clever, and reinvent something that doesn’t need to be reinvented.
What exactly were you doing at Disney? Were you under contract to them?
After I did Honey, I Shrunk The Kids they gave me an office there, and I was at Disney for about 10 years. I was there to direct…to develop family films.
I’m sorry. What?
I know, it’s pretty bizarre. And I think that’s what Disney finally realized after awhile, that I was like this freak in there… I was the Castle Freak down in the cellar, and it’s like, “What’s he doing here?” Actually, The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit was the very last project that I did at Disney, so it was kind of like a chance to work with Roy Disney, which was great. I’m really sad that he’s left Disney, because he really was the heart and soul of that place. So now it’s like soulless; totally soulless.
Did you want to do animated films when you were at Disney? Were you interested in that?
I was, and as a matter of fact, we talked about doing The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit as an animated film, and they even did some conceptual drawings that were fantastic of the characters. But then they finally decided that…everyone kept saying the same thing about that story. “The story is too small. It’s too simple.” And I said, “You know, small and simple is good for a movie.”
You just keep mentioning Disney, and I just keep going…
“What is all this Disney stuff?” Well, I mean, I loved Disney when I was a kid, and the idea of being able to work for that company was like a dream for me. Just walking on the lot every day was great. I used to go to the archives and go through all the stuff from the other movies. When Walt Disney was alive, he had a stenographer at every meeting taking notes, so you can read these sessions that they had. It’s sort of like reading a play.
Did you ever read Harlan Ellison’s essay about his time at Disney?
No.
They hired Harlan Ellison to come write for them. He’s got his own parking space, his own secretary, and his own desk. He’s thinking this is great. He does his morning work and then goes to lunch. At lunch he suggests a porn flick starring Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse. Ellison then proceeded to act out the parts while imitating the voices of several animated Disney characters. And all of the other writers are looking at him with their eyes wide, and they’re all like, “Uhhhhhh.” Sitting at a nearby table are Roy Disney and other studio heads who have heard the whole thing. Ellison goes back to his office, the secretary is gone, his typewriter is gone, and he’s looking out in the parking lot and they’re painting over his space.
(laughing) Well, I’ll tell you sort of the flip side of that, which is when I did Dagon, I showed it to Roy Disney, and afterwards I said, “Well, this is my version of The Little Mermaid.” And he laughed. It’s funny, I think he was the only guy at Disney that kind of got me… what I was doing.
Somebody must have gotten you.
‘Cause they hired me, yeah. And it was kind of great to be on the same wavelength with him. He’s the man…if it weren’t for Roy Disney, they would…first of all, they would have changed the name of the company to Touchstone, this is true, they would have stopped making animated films entirely, and it would have been the end of Disney Studios as we know it.
I did not know that.
Yeah. He’s the guy who brought in Michael Eisner, actually, which is why it’s so ironic that now it’s Eisner that’s forcing him out.
That’s sad, but it happens. And now you make your own movies, so you can be the guy forcing people out, since you’re the producer now.
(laughing)
What are you working on now?
GORDON: I’m working on a couple of projects. I’ve talked about the Mamet project, based on Edmund, a play of his, which William H. Macy wants to play the leading role with Julia Stiles, so I’m looking forward to that. I’ve also got a project that I’m working on with Jack Ketchum, which is called Ladies’ Night, and it was based on one of his novels which is about a toxic spill that only affects women and turns them into…first they become very sexually aggressive and then they become killing machines, and of course their main target: men. It takes place in Manhattan, so you get the feeling that the entire city is going crazy. It’s kind of like 28 Days Later, except it’s not 28 days later, it’s today.
That does sound like a Stuart Gordon film.
Yeah. That would be really fun.
What kind of legacy do you want Stuart Gordon to leave behind? When people look at your work in a hundred years, what do you want them to say about you?
I’ll be happy if people are looking at my work in a hundred years. I’ll be happy if people are looking at my work in ten years. But you know, I think if people enjoy them, that’s the best thing. Hopefully I try to make movies that go places that people haven’t gone before, and so, if that continues to be true, then I’ll be happy.