So, as promised, here it is, the Main Event, the Mother Load, our interview with James Gunn!

The first part of this interview was conducted in the huge studio in Vancouver. The ceiling was at least 50ft. high with a 30ft to 40ft high black curtain to simulate night time on the set which was set up for the propane/tubule scene at the end of the film.

CAUTION: POSSIBLE SPOILERS CONTAINED HERIN!

JG: Hi guys. (Finishing up a call on his cell phone)

Q:  Did we read somewhere that you said Rosemary’s Baby is you favorite movie?

JG: I don’t think it’s my favorite movie, but it’s my favorite horror film probably. I’m also a huge fan of Once Upon a Time in the West. So, it’s hard for me to say. I go in and out about what my favorite film is… it just depends on what day it is.

Q:  So you’re saying this harkens back to Creature from the Black Lagoon and some of the old Universal horror stuff for this movie?

JG: I think it’s a mixture really. When Eric (Potechin) and I did Dawn of the Dead we wanted to do something that was a little bit more ‘70’s style; a little grittier. When I started writing this film I wanted to do something that was a little bit more in the style of the ‘80’s movies that I love; the Cronenburg films, and the Carpenter movies, The Thing especially. Something that was more over-the-top; more extreme and had a lot of different types of things happening in the film. But, I think in the process of that I kind of got back to finding out something that I really loved about horror movies. From the time I was a little kid I was fanatical about the old Universal horror films; when I was five and six years old, seven years old. And something that I really like about this movie is that we have a monster, a character, who is really a sympathetic creature. He murders, kills, is awful; but at the same time I think there is something very human about him. And because of that, it reminded me a lot of what I loved about Frankenstein as a kid and Creature from the Black Lagoon; especially those two movies, actually.

Q:  And Michael Rooker plays the monster?

JG: Yeah. Rooker is inhabited by “The Long One” as we call him. Who’s this ancient being that goes from planet to planet killing off everything it can. And Grant Grant is played by Michael Rooker and he’s the newest creature taken over by “The Long One”. And “The Long One” loves being Grant because he’s human for the first time. He’s really only been lower life forms, animals and things like that. And now he gets to be a human being; so he’s sort of learning what it’s like to be human. But at the same time his nature, his murderous impulses, are taking over as sort of this living consciousness, this conscious disease. And he goes from host to host; taking them over and killing them, killing everybody.

Q:  There is kind of this mix between poignancy and gore.

JG: [Laughs] I don’t know. I think that all movies begin with characters. I wanted to write this movie and I wanted the characters to be interesting in and of themselves. If this was a small independent film about a few people that I wanted to be interesting; first I would show how those characters work and how they interact with each other. And then add the things I love about horror movies to that. This includes the gore, and the special effects, and the prosthetic effect and everything. We had a scene here the other day which murdered me! It’s this scene we shot yesterday with Elizabeth Banks and Michael Rooker. Rooker is in this huge makeup getup, and their both crying. It’s a very intimate wonderfully acted scene. And it’s a weird situation because 90% of what makes the scene work is the acting of these two actors. But 95% of what we had to do to make it happen is dealing with these fucking tentacles that are everywhere. And then what they’re doing, and which ones are practical, and which ones are CGI, and, you know, what they’re doing form shot to shot. It’s murderous! It’s absolutely murderous! Then we FINALLY get around to doing Elizabeth’s performance at the end of the day. And I’m sitting there crying as I’m watching her do her speech because she was wonderful! And I felt real blessed. But it’s funny how making these movies, and I’ve made other movies too, where you kind of forget about the basics. The human element of it all and how that keeps it driving. I love horror movies, and I love a lot of horror movies, and I love a lot of stupid horror movies. But, in a lot of horror the characters are just something to be chased or something to be fed upon. Or there’s not really anything going on there so you can really get to know those characters and care about them. And truthfully the horror is much more horrifying when you have a character who you care about, who you love, and then they get killed.

Q:  How important is the pre-viz stuff?

JG: How important is the pre-viz stuff? Some of the pre-viz I was really happy with, and so that stuff was actually pretty important, ‘cause we followed it pretty completely. We’re doing this barn scene tomorrow in which I’ll follow the pre-viz pretty well because I actually went through it. Some of it I did earlier in the process and that’s actually the better pre-viz because I was able to actually sit down with the animated artist and go through shot to shot with exactly what lens I wanted to use and exactly where the camera was going to be. Working it out in a realistic manner instead of having every shot being a completely different shot; instead of, you know, combining shots so that we can actually shoot on schedule. Some of it has been extremely helpful. There’s a scene in the barn that we’ll shoot pretty close to what the pre-viz is. There’s a scene in this house with all these parasites… that we use pretty completely. But then some of the other things I’ve had to kind of change around. So, they’re helpful in terms of our special effects because we can figure out what needs to be prosthetic and what needs to be CGI. But it’s not as helpful in, you know, where we’re going to need wire removal and budgeting and all that stuff. So it helps those guys a lot, but in terms of the creative process of what the scene is going to be, maybe it isn’t what I wanted to see. So I make little story board drawings, that nobody can tell but me, that are just little shapes and faces and squiggles. And to me, that’s how I read the scene.

Q:  Aside from the obvious pleasures, why do you like horror films more than other kinds of films?

JG: I mean, honestly, I think I was probably an odd kid. And when I first started watching horror movies, I probably associated with the monster. I would imagine there’s something about… even something about just the oddness of horror films. For instance, when I was a kid I loved, loved horror movies. But it wasn’t that I loved being terrified or scared, it was that I loved the weirdness of them. I think it goes back to like, you know, Lovecraft. Thinking of his stories; his weird tales not his horror films necessarily. The scariness, the weirdness, or the unusualness of them; and taking us outside of our regular brains and to someplace else. So, I think that probably has something to do with it. Just being odd I would imagine. I think that’s what I love. And so I like science-fiction films for the same reason. But horror movies seem to get a little more to the core of that dream life; to me.

Q:  What’s the craziest scene in this movie?

JG: You know I don’t know if there’s one craziest scene. It pretty much gets more and more fucked up as it goes on. They work in such different ways you know. The scene that we’re going to shoot starting tomorrow where Brenda explodes… and gives birth to 35,000 wriggling parasites who are all extensions of Grant’s mind; that scene’s pretty fucked up! I think of this movie a lot like Terms of Endearment, so I try make it a lot like that.

Q:  You mention Rosemary’s Baby and Once Upon a Time in the West; is [Slither] a pretty modern horror movie; or is it, visually speaking, more of a ‘70’s or ‘80’s sort of movie like Squirm?

 JG:   I actually think that it’s really just my own thing. It’s rougher; we have a lot of hand held stuff. The visual aesthetic is a lot like a Nirvana song. Because, there’s these long patches that are rather quiet and very intimate about human beings dealing with each other and interacting. Then all of a sudden the chorus comes and it’s this fucking incredibly, you know, ridiculous gory scene. And then we back to a little bit of quiet for a little while. As the movie goes on it keeps building and building until you get to the climax. And then we have Curt Kobain screaming out at the top his lungs.

Q:  Do you listen to, or play music on set like that?

JG: No. The only song we play on set was the Air Supply song Every Woman in the World which is the song that Grant and Starla got married to. And so they love it, and the monster has a particular fondness for that song at the end too.

Q:  Can you explain how Grant starts to become infected?

JG: Yeah. Basically at the beginning of the film, there’s a little bit of a nod to The Blob, there’s a comet and a spore comes out of it. It’s got the infector inside of it. This needle type protuberance which shoots out into [Grant] when he is about to cheat on his wife and he gets infected.

Q:  What has changed from your original idea, or how has this evolved from when you originally came up the concept?

JG: It hasn’t change that much actually; it’s really stayed pretty much the same. The movie is uh, God, it’s really pretty much like what I originally envisioned. You know what I mean?  The thing that really set me off I think, you know I’m talking about all these famous horror movies and all this other stuff, but I read this comic Isumake by Itangi Ito (I know my spelling is probably way off here. I apologize, so please do not be offended –R.C.) and was so intense and so wonderful and so creepy. And I think creepiness has been lost form a lot of horror movies today; that there isn’t enough creepiness in horror movies anymore. That, you know, just that sort of a dread and seeing something that’s off but you don’t know quite what’s causing it and where it’s coming from. Or something that isn’t a “boo” scare. You know, I mean “boo” scares are good and they’re a lot of fun, but they only go so far. But something that kind of makes your skin crawl a little bit. And Isumake did that to me. Isumake really is a creepy cool comic; and it’s funny. There’s a lot of humor to it as well. So, I really wanted to do something like that. And the other thing I liked about Isumake is that it has this menace, this spiral that sort of infects. You know, it takes over a lot of different things in a lot of different ways. And I thought that would be a fun way to go with a horror movie, as opposed to having one alien or one group of walking dead or whatever; to have this menace that sort of changed and shifted. Sort of like what happened in The Thing actually.

Q:  Is it harder writer different genres or is it harder writing different budgets?

JG: That’s an interesting question. What’s hard is manipulating every screenplay you write. And no matter what the budget is, you have to change it to suit whatever your real budget is. You always have to cut it down.

Q:  When you were working on (Slither) were you able to really just go for broke, knowing that at somewhere down the line you can put it on DVD? And how much freedom did you have?

JG: I’ll be honest with you; when I originally started writing this movie I thought I was going to get in big trouble because of the MPAA. I thought it was going to be so incredibly gory that I was going to have to settle for a mutilated ‘R’ rated version and then a version that was what I really intended on DVD. But the truth is that the movie ended up being… I think it’s more creepy and disturbing than it is gory in the end. So I think that will actually be OK. We’re going to have to cut here and there some gore; but for the most part I think the movies going to be pretty much what I intended to have as the ‘R’ rated version. Because I don’t think it’s not… you know it’s more… I don’t know. I’ve never dealt with the MPAA in terms of what’s creepy and disturbing. But they don’t seem to be as harsh on that as just flat out gore.

Q:  Is this movie set in the real world or is it something slightly off center?

JG: I think the world in my brain is slightly off center to begin with. I think this world that I see is off center to everybody else’s world anyway. So it’s probably slightly off center. But, then again, I’ve tried to keep everything very naturalistic. In terms of the performances, the characters are eccentric, they’re unusual. But I really don’t like acting too much, I don’t like people acting. I like people to sort of be real; so I’ve tried to keep everyone really naturalistic. It was one of the most difficult things about casting.

Q:  Is that something that you’re trying to fix? Because you say you’re paying homage to some of the ‘80’s movies, late ‘70’s movies. And that was one of the big problems with them that they were not natural.

JG:       Yeah, right. Well that’s something that I do love about the ‘70’s movies. Movies like Rosemary’s Baby or even Dog Day Afternoon, or things like that where the action was a little bit more naturalistic in a time when things were more natural. And so that part of the ‘80’s movies, the sort of wide eyed, opened mouth, blonde bimbo naked in the shower screaming. That’s not really the part of the ‘80’s movies I like. What I like about them is the extreme fun; willing to go places with the imagination that are not usual. I think that there’s a lot of stuff today that is unimaginative, you know? And that’s not bad. I mean, there are lots of horror movies that I love that are not imagination based. But there aren’t many horror movies being made today that are about imagination; about these incredibly strange occurrences. That’s an unusual thing today.