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Review by E.C. McMullen Jr. |
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"I'm not stuck to the storyboards, because you’ve got to let the actors have their room to do their thing. Find the surprises on the set. If we stick to the storyboards too much then everything looks stiff!"
- Gregg Bishop
Feo Amante's Horror Home Page
Presents:
An interview with
Gregg Bishop
by E.C.McMullen Jr.
Gregg Bishop: I financed it myself!
ECM: How did you finance $15 grand yourself?
GREGG: It was a rare occurrence. I started with a short film. A five minute short that will be on the DANCE OF THE DEAD DVD. About a little girl who's trying to get rid of her mother’s date with a voodoo doll. It's kind of a dark comedy, but it had legs and is playing at all the short film festivals. Then it just happened to hit at a time when all of these websites were sprouting up that wanted short films for their programming. Then it started playing on cable stations like the SciFi channel; that show Exposure. And there came a day when I got a check in the mail and I said, "Oh! Well if there ever comes the day when I want to make a feature film, I'll put this toward the movie." And I was trying to get DANCE OF THE DEAD made but nobody wanted to touch it. Nobody wanted to make a zombie movie, nobody wanted to take a chance on a first time film maker. They were all, "What’s this? Nobody's making zombie movies!"
So I took that money and went made my own movie. So we made that movie and, it went to the Slamdance Film Festival where it got picked up for a limited theatrical release – a producer saw the movie at a festival and asked me what other material I had. I handed him the script for "Dance of the Dead" and it was like, "Kid, we're gonna make your picture!"
And you hear all of these Horror stories like THE PLAGUE, where they take your film away because some producers are not all about, "Let the director do what we hired him to do." They want to have control and make the movie themselves. The best thing you can do is to just go out, make your own movie, raise the money yourself, and when you've finished it, THEN show it to Hollywood. Then, when you want to make your second movie, they trust you. They know you know what you're doing.
My producer, Ehud Bleiberg, let us loose because he trusted us. He gave us some notes, let us go make the movie. We brought it back, he watched then gave some more notes. My producer is a great guy. We have a lot of respect for one another. And he's very rare in this town. He listens, he's very true to his word. Straight up. Another guy was the co-producer, Brian James Crewe. He's the real deal.
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ECM: What about a Line Producer?
GREGG: I didn't have one! (laughs) I've never had one! Someday, hopefully I'll make a big enough movie to have a line producer!
ECM: Any bloopers on set?
GREGG: Yeah! We had this complex sequence where we had the camera flying around on a steadi-cam whipping around our heroes with hundreds of zombie extras and everything is going great, the camera is everywhere. So then we're watching this and the scene is going fantastic! It's perfect, the timing is perfect, and then for one moment the camera pauses and right then, one of the zombie extras reached up and scratched his nose!
ECM: Ha! He didn't think he was on camera!
GREGG: Yeah, but zombies can't have itchy noses!
ECM: You ever have a problem with logic that you didn't spot during the shoot, but stands out in screening?
GREGG: Oh yeah. You sit there and then a moment comes where you say,
"Why did we have him do that? It was a good idea on paper. It looked good during filming, but watching it here it looks so dumb. Why didn’t we have him do this instead?"
And that's when you go into the pick-up shots, re-shooting that scene.
ECM: Like problems with clichés?
GREGG: Yeah. You have characters and you want to flesh them out, but on an ensemble film like DANCE OF THE DEAD, you don't want to spend too much time on one person, yet you want to make sure you didn't leave them with so little that they become a cartoon. We wanted them to come up as human.
The coach was the hardest one because we've seen that character in so many movies. So we have a moment where the kids see how he lives and him talking about his broken marriage, how his ex won't call him back. That's a human side: A human moment. Even the crazy character needs to show that side. So we have him tell a little of his tale. The kids have to bring him back so he doesn't fall too far into his story, but just so he's real. We need to keep him real enough to make him matter.
ECM: Any thoughts on moving to a studio movie?
GREGG: I'd just want to work with people who enjoy the same kind of movies I enjoy and are fun to work with. Also people who trust me, and that’s the whole point. As soon as a filmmaker shows that he knows what he's doing, he gets more freedom.
ECM: Robert Rodriguez did that. He made El Mariachi and then made a few Hollywood films, but still felt obliged to go back to Texas and make his movies there.
GREGG: Yeah, where people will leave him alone.
ECM: Right!
GREGG: People leave him alone, and he doesn't require a bunch of money to do his stuff.
ECM: Do you want to be more like a Rodriguez kind of guy or a Spielberg kind of guy? Or do you see yourself as something else?
GREGG: You know, I just want to make cool movies. One guy asked me, "When would you be satisfied in your career? When do you think you've made it?" That's a heavy question, but I think it's when you can make any movie you want.
ECM: Yeah, when you can make Shark Boy and Lava Girl, you know you've made it.
GREGG: (laughs) Yeah! And he just made it as an experiment, you know? That's great!
ECM: Yep! He made it to impress his kids. His kids came up with the idea of the characters and he was all about, "Hey, watch what you're old man can do!"
GREGG: One of my favorite quotes Rodriguez said is, and he was talking about an art class, the teacher says to the kids,
"Okay, we're all making clay pots and you can go one of two ways. You can make 50 different clay pots and they can all be crap, I don't care. Or you can make one clay pot, but it has to be perfect."
And the kids who tried to make the one perfect pot? They all failed. But the kids who made fifty different clay pots had all of these wonderful designs, all made in different ways, and some of them were pretty good! And Rodriguez is the same way, he just keeps churning them out. Some are more brilliant than others, but so far they're all pretty good.
ECM: Sure! In his early days, Hitchcock turned out a bunch of movies and they weren't so great. He became a "Master" late in life and folks remember his last few movies, not the tons he made before. And Hitchcock developed a formula: He had no problem admitting to it. His formula was to map the entire movie out in a storyboard and as far as he was concerned, that was it. The movie was made. Then he had to only go and get people to copy the storyboard.
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GREGG: I like going into a shoot, having everything storyboarded versus not. We were in a unique situation with this movie in that, going into DANCE OF THE DEAD, the script and storyboards were written to have this one lead character named Lydia.
Then the lead actress who was going to play her dropped out and we didn't have a lead character. So we had to step back from the script and kind of look at it and we thought,
"You know, she doesn't really do much in act 2. She's strong in act one and act three, but in the middle, she really doesn't drive the story and she's not someone I'm really connected to."
So we made the decision to go with Lindsey and Jimmy as our leads because they're the most real and the most interesting and the characters we cared about. So 10 days before the shoot, we have all of these storyboards that we had to throw out the window!
Even though that happened, I had already figured out my camera angles. I knew where I wanted the camera to be when this happened and when that happened. I'm not stuck to the storyboards because you've got to let the actors have their room to do their thing. Find the surprises on the set. If we stick to the storyboards too much then everything looks stiff! You have to encourage the actors. Let them get loose. Encourage them to make the role their own. I mean, you have a plan, you stick to the plan as much as you can, and it's always there to fall back on. But you have to be creative too.
ECM: How much rehearsal do you give to the actors?
GREGG: For DANCE OF THE DEAD, most actors got there a week or two before. I put them in stunt training really early, to get them prepared for the physical stuff they'd have to do. Carissa (Capobianco), who plays Gwen, became an honorary Black Knight Stunt Member because she was always in there practicing her stunts everyday.
I'd say usually I want the level of the performance at about 70 percent in rehearsals. I don't want them to go all the way yet. You got to save it for the cameras.
ECM: Say that if someone came up and gave you the money to do whatever it was you wanted to do on DANCE OF THE DEAD or THE OTHER SIDE, is there anything you wish you could have done but weren't able to do it, because of money or time?
GREGG: Hmmm. Well, before I go into making any movie, I always have the $200 million dollar version of that movie in my head.
ECM: (laughing) Really? A $200 million dollar version of DANCE OF THE DEAD?
GREGG: Really! Of course, it'd be chaos! (laughs). Even with THE OTHER SIDE, I had a big budget version of that in my head. You always want a huge crowd scene. I do. I always like epic scenes. Real crowds, not a cgi one. Like Lawrence of Arabia you look at that now and think, "How did they even pull that off?"
But the great thing about being constrained are the compromises, because a lot of creativity comes out of having a low budget and you have to solve your problems that way instead of throwing money at it.
ECM: Like the remake of THE HAUNTING! Augh! So horrible! Okay, final question, Can be anyone, doesn't have to be an actor, can be crew, composer; who would you want to work with?
GREGG: I'm sure every director gives this answer but, Spielberg.
ECM: Really? You'd love that?
GREGG: Oh sure. Sure. He is the reason I'm out here! Oh! And I got to tell you, I've got the answer now for the remake.
ECM: Oh? Cool!
GREGG: It just popped in my head, but I never actually saw the movie.
ECM: Ha! Now wait a minute!
GREGG: No, no, hear me out! I remember when I was a kid and hearing the news about this movie they were making, I saw the stills and thought wow, this movie is going to rock. But then it kind of disappeared. I recently saw it on the DVD shelves and I thought, oh, it's that movie! ROBOT JOX.
ECM: Stuart Gordon!
GREGG: Yeah! Yeah! I've no idea what the story is, but those images of two badass robots fighting! Awesome!
ECM: Stuart Gordon's a great guy. Well thanks for talking to me.
GREGG: Yeah sure. This was fun!
END
This interview copyright 2008 E.C.McMullen Jr.
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