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INTERVIEW: What You Can Get Away With: The Collegial Cutting Room Collaborators of Joe Dante, Part 2

[EDITOR'S NOTE: A much-shortened version of this article originally appeared in CinemaEditor magazine, Volume 60, Issue 1, First Quarter 2010, under the title, “The Collegial Cutting Room Collaborators of Joe Dante: A Symposium.”]

My conversation with Joe Dante, Tina Hirsch, and Marshall Harvey continues with a discussion of the director’s most famous film—Gremlins—and several later productions with more challenging post-production circumstances.–Peter Tonguette.

Tina Hirsch: Joe was so worried about the gremlins. He just thought the puppets were completely phony and nobody was going to believe them.

Joe Dante: This was a giant Muppet movie. When you make a picture like this, the question always is, “Are people going to buy this?”

TH: It comes to the end of shooting and he was supposed to stay away and give me a week to finish cutting all of the material. But he came in the next Monday or Tuesday, soon after wrap, and I said, “Joe, you look awful.” [Laughs.] We hadn’t shot all of the puppet stuff yet. They were going to take a break for a month and figure out what they needed to shoot. He said, “They’re so phony and awful.” I said, “Joe, they’re not. I believe them. I’m the audience! I’ll tell you what: I’m not completely finished, but I have 95% of the picture finished. How about we have a screening?” We go in, we look at the film, and he comes out and says, “Well, it’s not a disaster.”

JD: Our job was to try to take this puppet footage, of which there was an immense amount, and hone it down to the parts that were the most believable. A lot of times, that came down to which reaction shot of the character we used. I’m a firm believer that even a great special effect is going to look lousy if the reaction shot doesn’t convince you. The real trick was to make the audience believe that the characters on screen believe that the puppets are real.

TH: To cap it off, he got hate mail from people about how cruel he was to these gremlins! [Laughs.] It was exactly how I felt. I said, “I buy that they’re real. You know they’re not, but to me they’re real. Look at the dog! The dog believes they’re real!” That was the smartest thing they could have done, to have a dog at the beginning of the movie react to Gizmo.

JD: It was the best dog that I ever worked with. His name was Mushroom. I actually met him years later and he remembered me. This dog was incredibly
expressive and fascinated by the puppets. He was seemed to think they were real. We found that the more we cut to the dog, the more people bought it!
[Laughs.]

Peter Tonguette: I understand that Explorers was a difficult film from a post-production standpoint.

JD: The script wasn’t finished when we started filming and they had a release date in mind. The other problem was that the studio changed hands during the
post-production and the new people said, “This picture is coming out two months too late. We’ve got to have it two months earlier.” So we were basically told to stop work on it at a certain point, just finish it.

Movies get found in the editing room. The movie that you make is not always necessarily the movie that comes out of the editing room. The trick is to perfect
the movie that you have and make it the best version of what you’ve shot, regardless of what the intent may have been. In this case, we were still finding
the movie. The script we shot didn’t have an ending, so we made up a lot of stuff. Here we were, sifting through all this material, trying to focus it, and suddenly it’s, “Okay, all done.” And there it went, out to the public in the rough cut.

TH: Had they only given us another two weeks. A scene was written for the end of the picture which would have been with Dick Miller’s character. It would really have summed up the picture. There was no button at the end of the picture. It just kind of dropped off a cliff. It could have been done really cheaply, with one set, so it’s really sad. But the new studio just didn’t care.

JD: The basic conceptual problem with the movie is that it’s the opposite of E.T. (1982). The first half of the movie is Spielbergian and the second half of the movie is the opposite of that. The kids believe that they are going to find the meaning of life and God in space and they find only a reflection of themselves as distorted through pop culture. That didn’t turn out to be that popular! [Laughs.]

PT: Dave Kehr has written appreciatively about that very aspect of Explorers, noting that the film “perfectly mimics the nocturnal, nostalgic tone of Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Close Encounters of the Third Kind until the moment [it] explodes into the unrestrained delirium of a Bob Clampett cartoon.”

JD: I’m a firm believer that a movie can come out a year later or a year earlier and be successful or not depending on what the Zeitgeist is at the moment. But right then, that was not what people wanted to hear! [Laughs.]

PT: Starting with the segments you directed for Amazon Women on the Moon (1987), and then The ‘burbs shortly thereafter, you’ve worked extensively with Marshall Harvey.

JD: I had known Marshall since the Roger days and I’d seen a lot of the exploitation pictures he had cut. We just had a rapport. We liked the same movies and we had the same background.

Marshall Harvey: Joe and I have always gotten along together probably because we share a very similar sense of humor.

JD: The 'burbs was a particularly difficult movie because we shot it in sequence and we ad-libbed most of it.

MH: It was shot during the writers’ strike which meant there was no writer on the set. There were problems with the script, particularly in the third act. It was a great premise, which I think gives the movie its longevity. A lot of the funniest lines were ad-libs that the actors came up with. Joe would just let the camera run and let people improvise at the end of takes.

JD: We were trying to hone in on the good the parts and get rid of the bad parts. The rough cut was two-and-a-half hours and completely different than the
released movie. I’d say he really pulled that out and so the further I went on, Marshall was my go-to guy.

MH: He’s always been the best director in the editing room, partially because he started as an editor. He understands editing and he understands film history. If something isn’t working editorially, he understands why.

PT: Does he like to be in the cutting room?

MH: He likes to be there, which is helpful for the editor. Sometimes you want to try something and then you discover you don’t have the right footage to make that kind of cut. I’ve worked with directors who give their notes and go play golf and you realize, “Oh, geez, this idea is not going to work.” Then they come back and go, “What?” Whereas Joe is right there all the time and he can see immediately that it won’t work. “Why don’t we try this instead?”

At the time we were making The ‘burbs, Joe was pooh-poohing it. “This isn’t exactly my magnum opus!” Yet I’m with him at these events and people come up and the first thing out of their mouths is, “Oh, we love The ‘burbs!” There are web sites dedicated to the movie. We can’t quite believe it has such a following and a longevity to it.

PT: What were some of the difficulties in making Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003)?

JD: From about 1997 on, the atmosphere in town about making movies has changed. It has become more corporate, there are more cooks in the kitchen than there have ever been, and the effort to get your idea of what the movie should be through has become like plodding through quicksand.

There were twenty-five writers on Looney Tunes, and that’s too many writers for a movie. It was being changed up until the minute that it was shown. It took a year-and-a-half and it was an extremely depressing experience. It pretty much soured me on the whole studio set-up.

MH: The only reason he took on that project, I think, was to preserve the Looney Tunes heritage. He knew Chuck Jones. If you go to Joe’s house, he has a big framed, signed thing from Chuck Jones. He disliked Space Jam (1996) and thought it was kind of a travesty to those characters.

JD: Chuck had just passed away. I thought, “I owe this to Chuck.” I owe him to not have the characters do hip-hop. They need to be true to themselves. My
mission in the movie, and [animation director] Eric Goldberg’s mission, was to try to make sure that these characters emerged intact.

MH: He sent me the script and I thought, “This is not very good.” But if we could make it like a Bob Hope-Bing Crosby road picture, with Daffy Duck as Bob Hope and Bugs as Bing Crosby, I thought it could be fun. Unfortunately, the studio didn’t quite see it that way and insisted on cutting out all of those kinds of things. The fact that the movie still ends up preserving the Looney Tunes sensibility is kind of a miracle, really.

PT: Coming on the heels of Looney Tunes, it must have been a relief to make your Masters of Horror episodes, Homecoming and The Screwfly Solution.

JD: They were a blessing for all of us. Directors who are used to battling the studio over everything are suddenly given carte blanche to do whatever they
want provided they could do it in ten days and for not much money. There was absolutely no interference on any level on that show. I was very proud and happy about the two episodes I did that I could never have done anywhere else. They were just too weird, dark, and controversial.

MH: Mick Garris, who created the show, is a director himself. The whole idea was that it was a director-oriented television series.

PT: Tell me about your current project, The Hole.

JD: It’s a small picture with a small cast and not a lot of locations. It’s basically a psychological horror film. It’s a little old-fashioned and it’s a movie that’s suitable to take kids to.

It’s a movie that I went in on. I’m sure they were talking to twelve other guys, but for whatever reason, they liked my take. I went back and I said, “I think there’s one thing that would improve this movie. I don’t know if you’ll go for it or not, but I think this would be a good 3-D movie.” After a couple of days thought and some research, they said, “We think you’re right and we’re going to add a couple of bucks to the budget to pay for the 3-D.” That was great for me because I love 3-D.

PT: What are the challenges of editing a 3-D film in this day and age?

MH: It’s a lot easier than you would think. First of all, we don’t cut it in 3-D. It’s really no different for me than doing a regular movie, except you have to keep in mind that, when it is in 3-D, how certain things will be affected. The Hole doesn’t have a lot of gimmicky throwing things at the audience stuff in it. He took more of the Alfred Hitchcock approach to 3-D in how he staged it, giving depth to each shot.

The most difficult thing about it is that, because I wasn’t able to see the dailies in 3-D, a lot of the shots I’ve never seen in 3-D. Some of the visual effects
shots I’ve now seen in 3-D and I’m going, “Wow! That looks a lot different than I thought it would!” [Laughs.] If there’s something in the foreground, you don’t
really pay any attention to it in a normal movie, but when you see it in 3-D, it’s a totally different experience. You’ve locked the picture and now you’re seeing it in 3-D. “That’s really cool! I wish we could have stayed on that shot longer!”

Joe’s great with child actors and all three leads in it are quite good, particularly Nathan Gamble, who played Commissioner Gordon’s son in The Dark Knight
(2008). He plays the younger brother in this and he’s really good. For a guy who doesn’t have kids, Joe really connects to child actors.

PT: How does Joe work with young actors?

TH: Well, I think he’s one of them. [Laughs.] It’s very natural for him to be with young actors because he has not lost the six-year-old boy. That person is still inside him. I remember one time going on the set of Explorers and he was with the three guys [Ethan Hawke, River Phoenix, Jason Pressen]. He was telling them to do something and then they did the scene and it didn’t happen. And then he didn’t get it a second time. I thought, “Oh, boy.” But he just said, “Okay, we got it, let’s move on.” He realized, “This is all I’m going to get.” He had a day to make and he had kids he was dealing with. They can only do what they can do. He felt, “This is good enough.” To me, that’s a very sane way to work.

PT: You’ve worked with many of the same editors again and again, notably Marshall, Tina, and Kent Beyda. Do you find that to be beneficial?

JD: I find it beneficial in every category: the composer, the DP, the art director. You do form a cadre of people that you trust and who are good at their jobs and who know you and what your quirks and foibles are. It makes making movies very collegial and a lot more fun.

MH: In my experience, Joe is the most loyal person in the film industry. There aren’t that many people that are so loyal to stick with the same group of people.

PT: Do you think you are a better director for having been an editor?

JD: Unquestionably. I think that anybody that wants to direct, particularly writers, should spend some time in an editing room, whether it’s a film of theirs or someone else’s, or shoot their own picture on video and cut it. There’s a way of thinking that comes with being an editor that is incredibly useful on the set.
People who don’t have that sometimes find themselves getting into trouble. It’s not just a vocabulary thing or a right-to-left thing or script supervisor stuff. It’s a way of thinking about the film and the shots and the way they fit together—what you need and what you don’t need, and what you can get away with if you have to.

Peter Tonguette is the author of Orson Welles Remembered and The Films of James Bridges. He is currently writing a critical study of the films of Peter Bogdanovich for the University Press of Kentucky and editing a collection of interviews with Bogdanovich for the University Press of Mississippi. You can visit Peter's website here.

What You Can Get Away With: The Collegial Cutting Room Collaborators of Joe Dante, Part 1

[EDITOR'S NOTE: A much-shortened version of this article originally appeared in CinemaEditor magazine, Volume 60, Issue 1, First Quarter 2010, under the title, “The Collegial Cutting Room Collaborators of Joe Dante: A Symposium.]

Like so many children of the eighties, I grew up with Joe Dante’s films, and knew even the less heralded ones—like Explorers (1985) or Innerspace (1987)—by heart. When I decided to write about his work, I spent a long time searching for an angle or hook before I asked myself a very simple question: How many directors began their professional careers by editing trailers for Roger Corman?

Joe Dante did. If I wanted to tell the story of his films, I had to tell it through the editors he worked with, starting with himself. With Mark Goldblatt, Dante co-edited his first two features—Piranha (1978) and The Howling (1981). He would later work with a succession of devoted editors. Tina Hirsch edited Dante’s biggest successes, like Gremlins (1984) and his acclaimed segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), while Marshall Harvey has been with him on most of his projects since the late-eighties, including The ‘burbs (1989) and Matinee (1993).

In the summer of 2009, I interviewed Dante, Hirsch, and Harvey, and I started where I felt I had to: with the director in the cutting room.

Joe Dante: I began as a film editor on The Movie Orgy (1968), which was a 16 mm compilation film that was patched together by me and Jon Davison when we were in college. It’s seven hours of stuff. We kept changing it around and a beer company gave us money to take it to college campuses. We didn’t have the rights to anything, but it was an exercise in editing, basically. And it’s pretty much where I learned how to edit, on a 16 mm print with optical track and one splicer.

Peter Tonguette: Did you want to become an editor or did you see this as a way to eventually become a director?

JD: I think I wanted to be a director, but I really wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to have something to do with the movies. I was a film critic and I had some expertise. When Jon Davison came out here to work for Roger Corman and asked me to come to edit a trailer, I thought, “Well, why not? I’ll see if this is something that I’m good at.” I was having some family issues at the time. My mother was passing away. It was a time of real turmoil, and they often say that’s the time when you change the direction of your life.

So I came out here and did a trailer for Roger for The Student Teachers (1973). George Van Noy cut it and I sort of supervised it and wrote the copy. It was way, way too long. [Laughs.] It was three times as long as a trailer should be. I came back home and the picture came out and made money. Somehow my name was associated with the trailer and when it came time to replace the piecemeal editors that Corman had been hiring with a “department”—consisting of two people—I was asked to come back. I did a couple more trailers and then was joined by Allan Arkush. We became the trailer “department.”

PT: How did this lead to you and Arkush co-directing your first feature, Hollywood Boulevard (1976)?

JD: We were very familiar with the contents of the various New World pictures because we had done the trailers. Of course, we both wanted to direct. The idea came to us that what if we tried to put together a really, really cheap movie. And we’re talking really cheap because this is New World Pictures.

Roger didn’t really want to let us go away from the trailers because he needed continuity. So his deal was, “I’ll let you guys do this movie. But it’s the cheapest movie we’ve ever made, you’ve only got ten days, and you’ve got to do trailers at night.” So we figured out a way to do a very cheap movie with all the action scenes being inserted from other pictures. We never could have afforded to stage any of those. The only concept that we could come up with that made any sense to use all of this disparate footage was a movie company making a bunch of different kinds of movies. So Hollywood Boulevard was born.

It was a very educational experience. I learned that I liked directing. Editing is kind of a solitary job. But then I found on my first day on the set that I really enjoyed the electricity and the camaraderie and the ability to discuss and get ideas.

PT: You and Arkush edited Hollywood Boulevard yourselves, along with Amy Jones.

JD: We had cut our own movie and cut our own footage, which I recommend to directors. If you sit down and are forced to confront the mistakes that you made, and try to figure out a way around them, then those are lessons that you are going to carry with you. A lot of people at New World would do the picture and then go away and let the editor cut it and then come back and declare themselves a genius! But, in fact, many, many tricks had been employed to make the footage usable. And so they would make the same mistakes on their next picture. Well, we didn’t do that. We were very scrupulous about making sure that we knew why things didn’t work. It was film school where your movie was actually going to play in drive-ins.

PT: Hollywood Boulevard was made before you edited Ron Howard’s Grand Theft Auto (1977), so did you initially go back to editing?

JD: We went back to trailers. Hollywood Boulevard was not exactly the biggest success in the world! In fact, it only played for two days on 42^nd Street and was pulled.

The idea of directing still burned, more than ever now, but we needed a job and Roger had kind of a little family there. This was when the foreign trailers began to come in, the Fellinis and Truffauts. That was a lot of fun because we got to meet them.

Then two projects came down the pike: Rock ‘n’ Roll High School (1979) and Piranha (1978). Allan really, really, really wanted to do Rock ‘n’ Roll High School. I didn’t particularly think Piranha was a great idea because it was a Jaws rip-off too many years later. But Allan got Rock ‘n’ Roll and I got stuck with the fish!

In the meantime, Ron Howard had asked us both to work on Grand Theft Auto because we had meet him while doing the trailers for Eat My Dust (1976), which he was in. His deal with Roger was that if he starred in Eat My Dust, Roger would let him direct the next picture that he starred in. So I cut it and Allan did second-unit.

It was my first and pretty much only stab at editing somebody else’s picture.

PT: How did you find working with Ron Howard?

JD: Working with Ron was great. He was a really nice guy and he knew his craft. He’d been studying during all of the movies that he’d been in. He’d been confabbing with the directors about how they did things. He worked with a lot of really good people. He took those lessons to heart and he knew exactly what he was doing. The footage cut together beautifully.

The only problem I had was that in those days Roger printed all of the film in black-and-white, even if the film was in color, because it was cheaper. We wouldn’t see the picture in color until it was finished. Well, I don’t drive, so I couldn’t tell the back end of a Chevy from the front end of a Buick. There were all these demolition derby scenes where I couldn’t tell which cars were which! So I had to make educated guesses. Later, Allan Arkush said it was the only car movie he ever saw where there were no shots of anybody shifting. [Laughs.]

PT: On Piranha, you’re credited as co-editor with Mark Goldblatt.

JD: One of the reasons that I joined the Editors Guild eventually was that I wanted to edit my own films. But unfortunately that’s kind of frowned upon or at least it was at that time. It’s a lot of power to give the director to edit his own stuff. It’s also a time thing: you don’t want to have to wait for the guy to finish shooting before he starts editing.

When I was shooting Piranha, Mark was cutting. Then I would come back and do what a director would do. I’d look at the edit, except in this case I’d take it over and go into a room and do it myself. Then the later scenes we’d just split up. He would do half of them and I would do the other half. Ultimately, once we had gotten the picture to a certain point, I started to go through it and make immense changes. I was so sure the picture was a disaster that I didn’t go to the wrap party. I thought that every second that I spent editing the movie was important. I lived in the editing room. I have memories of people coming in and I would look up from my stupor and I didn’t know who they were. [Laughs.] “Is it better if the piranhas are eight frames long? Is it better if they’re three frames long? Is it better if they’re sped up? Is it better if they’re slowed down?”

It was the first picture Roger had printed in color. In those days, the film stock was such that if you made a tape splice and pulled the tape off, it would pull off the emulsion, so there would be a big green blotch on the print. You could always tell what I had second-guessed because when you would run the work print there would be these green blotches!

It turned out that the picture worked very well. It made a lot of money and all of a sudden I was not working for Roger anymore. People were asking me to do other films.

PT: Your next film was The Howling (1981), which you again co-edited with Mark Goldblatt. You mentioned earlier that you tried as a director to not make the same mistakes twice. Were you quite as obsessive on The Howling as you were on Piranha?

JD: I don’t think I was quite as obsessive because I didn’t have the bad feeling about it that I did about Piranha. I had always wanted to do a werewolf film. I was not the original director on the film. My friend Mike Finnell, who had worked on the previous two pictures, was one of the producers and when the original director was let go, he called me while I was on another movie called Jaws 3, People 0, which never got made, and said, “I’ve got this werewolf movie and they’re looking for somebody.”

I came in and I re-worked it quite a bit by bringing in first Terry Winkless and then John Sayles. It turned out quite well.

PT: You next directed an episode of Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983). Tina Hirsch was the editor and it was the first of three films you made together, followed by Gremlins and Explorers. This was the first time that you weren’t editing one of your own films.

JD: Now I’m working for a studio. New World and Avco Embassy were one thing. Now I’m in the Directors Guild, now I’m working on a major film, and there was no way that I was going to be able to cut it. I had known Tina since we had shared editing rooms at Roger’s. I was doing trailers and she was doing features.

Tina Hirsch: It was the most joyous time [at New World]. We were young and just in love with movies. That’s all we ever talked about. Joe would cut the trailers of the movies that I cut. He said to me one day, “You know what you always do? You always cut when the person leaving the scene is still in frame!” I said, “Oh, I do? I didn’t know that.” Then and now, the truth is I’m aware after the fact, but while I’m working I’m in some kind of strange alpha place. I don’t have a conscious attitude about what I’m doing.

JD: I asked her to do Twilight Zone, she said yes, and we got along great.

TH: He called me when he got the job, but I was in New York on another movie. I was so disappointed because I really wanted to work with him. Then the next week they cancelled the movie. The first thing I did was call him and I said, “They cancelled the movie! I can do it!” Then the next day, the unfortunate Twilight Zone accident happened. We thought the film wasn’t going to happen, but it did.

JD: They left us completely alone because of the fallout of the accident that had happened. The movie, which went ahead anyway, to my surprise, was pretty much done in a vacuum. It was a studio picture and there was studio money and care and craft, but there wasn’t a lot of oversight because nobody really wanted to be responsible for the movie. It had a kind of cloud over it. Here we are going through all of these Warner Bros. cartoon tracks and doing all of this crazy stuff with this fairly straightforward Twilight Zone adaptation that had been done before for television very well. But we were taking it in a completely different direction and nobody said anything. I got the erroneous impression that that’s how studio movies were made!

TH: There was a scene in Twilight Zone that we called “Nowhere.” It’s after Anthony [Jeremy Licht] wishes up all these demons and the teacher [Kathleen Quinlan] whom he’s brought home to his house says, “Wish it away, Anthony. Wish it away.” He thought he was giving her the greatest gift ever of these crazy puppet things. He says, “I wish it away. I wish it all away.” As planned, we were going to dissolve to a totally white stage that was supposed to be nowhere. There was nothing in it at all. The boy who was playing Anthony was seven-years-old. A seven-year-old boy tends to be a little ADD, even in those days. Little boys have a lot of energy and not a lot of focus.

I think Joe printed three takes of a one-er. He choreographed the scene where the teacher and the boy kind of walk around each other. In a way, it’s a little bit like a dance. It was really quite lovely. It was well-imagined and well-designed because they start out apart and in the end they come together. He also shot coverage for safety, but I didn’t even look at the coverage. The scene had to play in one big master.

The third printed master was the best of all of them. However, it started tight on the boy’s face and his eyelids are flapping in the breeze. In various parts of the scenes, he wasn’t looking at her. He’d look at her and then he’d look over at Joe and then he’d look at the camera! After I ran the scene with Joe, I said, “God, it would be so great if we could just put something over it.” He said, “Okay, why don’t you try?” I said, “You mean I’ll just take another take and put it on top?” He said, “Yeah, let’s just look at it.” It takes a lot of courage to do that. I would say most of the people I’ve worked with would say, “That’s a stupid idea. We can’t do that. Let’s just cut it up in pieces.”

Anyway, I took take nine, which was the second best, I stripped the track out of it, and I just put it in the picture head on top of the other one, just arbitrarily. We start running it. You could only hear the one track of the main piece, but you could see that the timing was off just enough to be really interesting. It was completely magical. We came to the end, I put on the break, and I said, “What’d you think?” He said, “That was pretty good!” In walked our optical effects guy. I said, “Shall we have him do a test?” He said, “Yeah.” I literally took it, went back to the head, paper-clipped it together the way we had just looked at it—the one time only—and ordered it. And it lives that way in the film today.