A: I heard that "Blue Steel" was the film that you were least satisfied with?

ER: Where do you hear all this stuff?

A: I read Fangoria and I’m on the net all the time. I even heard that you were offered to direct it?

ER: I think I was, sometime in the 80’s…

A: Ok, let's clear this rumor up: I heard that you were offered to direct the flick but turned it down because you weren’t fully satisfied with the final outcome of the script.

ER: I just didn’t think it was as good a script as the other ones. The thing that nobody gets is that "Blue Steel" is just a female version of "The Hitcher".

A: That's true. Everything the psycho puts her through provokes her growth but I personally didn’t see much growing. To me, she came across more as “Dirty Harry” from the get-go. The transition wasn’t as obvious an in "The Hitcher".

ER: It was essentially just the same story and dynamic as "The Hitcher" but with a chick.

A: Why didn’t you direct it?

ER: I think I was also involved with “Body Parts” at the time.

A: So you think "Blue Steel" came out all right?

ER: Yeah, I think it's fine, I love Jamie Lee.

A: She rocks!

ER: She was my idea.

A: Good call there, Ron Silver came through too…

ER: I thought he was great.

A: Yeah, he did an awesome job.

BODY PARTS (1991)

A: You directed your second feature in 1991 called "Body Parts". How was your experience on that shoot?

ER: The shoot went great. It was the most fun I had making a picture. It was the highest budget and I had all the resources to do the film properly.

A: How much was the budget?

ER: It wasn’t a big budget film even for then…like 10 million, but there was no real pressure to put stars in the picture, just good actors. There was enough time to shoot it well, the Toronto locations worked great, there was enough money for the stunts and the effects. It was good fun.

A: Congratulations on giving Brad Dourif a sympathetic character…that’s rare…

ER: Well, he’s certainly capable of playing sympathetic characters but he’s sort of been typecast at playing the weird guys, but he gave a perfectly empathetic, likeable, irreverent kind of performance here.

A: Ii just dawned on me that none of your pictures have sequels? Has that been intentional?

ER: When you kill off everybody at the end of a picture it makes it hard.

A: <lol> So what would you change about "Body Parts"?

ER: The one thing about "Body Parts" that I’m dissatisfied with is the ending. I think the picture for me works great up to the handcuff car chase scene.

A: I love that scene…it's nuts!

ER: It’s a great scene but I like the first hour of the film better than the last half. What was interesting in that story was to deal realistically with the idea of getting a limb transplant. Several characters do that and suffer personality changes that might be due to the physical trauma of the accidents that caused it, but might also be due to some sort of transference that comes from receiving someone else’s limb. I think that the first hour of the picture, to me now, you really believe the characters, the people and everything that’s going on. But the final half hour, even though it's fun and the set pieces are great, loses the suspension of disbelief that’s established very well in the first hour, and basically just sort of fades away towards the end.

A: Were there a lot of re-writes on "Body Parts"?

ER: I wrote the first draft of the script and then we brought in Norman Snider and then brought in Larry Gross. There were actually several writers on the picture. I was busy in prep and I was pleased to have them come in and write their scenes. I think for that particular type of project it worked generally pretty well.

THE LAST OUTLAW (1994)

A: You wrote a script called "The Last Outlaw" and it became an HBO movie.

ER: Yeah, it was an original script and I produced it with John Davis.

A: You were the sole writer on the film?

ER: Yes.

A: Did you have any input on the casting?

ER: I had primary influence on the casting in that picture. My big involvement on the picture was getting John Davis to finance the picture and the whole style of the casting on that film was largely due to me. Casting Steve Buscemi, John C. McGinley, Ted Levine; a kind of visceral realistic type of casting. I wasn’t the only person involved during the casting for the picture but I was extremely influential on it.

A: What about Mickey Rourke, was that your choice?

ER: I certainly was enthusiastic about it right away. He was one of the people we went through on the cast list and when he was suggested we pretty much all agreed right away.

A: I’m a huge Mickey fan, how was he on set?

ER: I wasn’t hugely pleased with Mickey’s performance in the movie. I think he has some great moments but I was not overly pleased with the makeup.

A: Yeah, his eyebrows were penciled in or something…

ER: Mickey came onto the picture with a fairly outlandish “Madam Butterfly” style makeup concept for his character. We had to re-shoot three days of shooting because it didn’t work. It didn’t look right and he was very objectionable at the time about changing it. I wasn’t particularly pleased with it, nor was Geoff Murphy or HBO either. It was quite a pain in the neck to have to go back and re-shoot part of the film, I think he latched on to a description I had in the script of his character Graff having fierce “Kabuki” features.

I think he went from looking like a buffoon to a half ass version of Charles Bronson. But I guess the idea was that the makeup would make him look different from the other characters. He has moments in the film where he’s really quite good and the performance grows on me over the years but I’m far more taken in the picture by Ted Levine, Steve Buscemi and McGinley who really nailed it. What I tried to do with the original script was to make a sort of “Wild Bunch” type of picture, a realistic portrait of outlaws during that period. It's still by far the bloodiest movie ever made for TV. Everybody but one person dies in this movie! It’s quite something.

UNDERTOW (1996)

A: Undertow was one of your early scripts.

ER: Yes.

A: And it got made like…pretty later on…I don’t have the date…

ER: It took ten years to get a movie made about three people in a house and a storm.

A: I’ve been following your career since "Cohen and Tate" but after "Bad Moon" I lost sight of you. "Undertow" and "Vindicator" I know nothing about.

ER: Actually "Undertow" was before "Bad Moon". I made it for Showtime and it was the second highest rated film on Showtime in 1996. It was then released on video.

A: Who stars in it?

ER: Lou Diamond Phillips, Mia Sara and Charles Dance. Charles Dance is a terrific British actor.

A: He played in "Alien 3".

ER: Yeah, and in "Undertow" he plays a psychotic American mountain man. He gives a tour-de-force performance.

A: Is it an action picture?

ER: It has action in it. It’s about a drifter that gets washed off the road during a storm and gets rescued by a backwoods moon shiner and his wife in the moon shiner’s fortress of a house. The three of them get caught together during the terrific storm and the drifter gets involved with the moon shiner who’s quite psychotic and the abused wife. Gradually the drifter and the wife get together which amounts to a tremendous confrontation with the mountain man and his house full of weapons. The last half hour is pretty much straight action.

A: And are you satisfied with the final outcome?

ER: I loved it. I shot it in Lithuania in about 24 days. It was a terrific experience to film. It was critically reviled but was extremely popular. It’s not a critics film. I don’t know if any of my films are "critic films".

A: Yeah, I can’t believe Roger Ebert gave "The Hitcher" like 0 stars. Personally, it's a part of my all-time top ten list.

ER: You have no idea how much hostility "The Hitcher" got in Hollywood when it came out. People forget. For whatever reason, "The Hitcher" in particular was a film that really upset the Hollywood establishment when it came out.

A: Wasn’t it a hit though?

ER: No, it wasn’t. It didn’t do very well on its initial opening. None of my pictures have been quote un-quote "hits" in terms of their release. They seem to gain their audience and their momentum over a period of years and also critical respect. "The Hitcher" is now a critically well-respected film, "Body Parts" is also pretty much respected and "Bad Moon" is now starting to get the attention I wish it had gotten when it first came out. It seems to be something that happens later. It seems to never happen during their initial release like I hoped it would.

A: I think that your scripts are very "in your face". Some people appreciate it and others don’t.

ER: Horror films don’t generally get good reviews to begin with. You can preview a horror picture, the audience can jump out of their seats, it could work great but you’re not going to score great in the cards. Because they’re not going to treat it like “Remains Of The Day” which is part of a more respectable genre. The horror genre is a more subversive genre. They’re there to shock and excite and deal with themes of good and evil. That’s actually one of the things I love about "Bad Moon", it was the one picture I’ve attempted to do in my career where there was no ambiguity. The good guy was completely good (the dog) and the bad guy was ultimately bad but somewhat understandable up to a point. But I thought it was a very direct type of story. And I loved Pare's performance in the picture.

A: The guy is so underrated. Name me some of your favorite scary movies?

ER: Three pictures that have really scared me in my life. Three experiences I’ve had in the movie theatre where I jumped out of my seat, got that paralyzing sense of terror and the tremendous adrenaline rush. The first is "Psycho" which I saw when I was about nine years old and probably set me on a path for life, The second and still the scariest movie I’ve ever seen in a movie theatre was "The Exorcist", I saw it the day it opened. It’s a combination of realistic handling of a believable situation and incredible special effects. I don’t think that any film has ever had such an effect on me. And the other was the ending of "Carrie", still one of the scariest moments that I’ve seen on film.

I like the Hammer films a lot, too. Terrance Fisher is probably my favorite horror director. I think that sort of style the good Hammer films had, especially when Fisher was doing them, being very straight-forward, treating the subject matter very seriously, having very believable performances with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing that still hold up today, the use of gore, selective but visceral and just the overall handling of it all, is my idea of what makes a good horror film.

BAD MOON (1996)

A: There aren’t many good werewolf movies out there. You took a crack at it, how do you feel about "Bad Moon"?

ER: I love the picture.

A: Did it get a bum job on distribution or something? It went unnoticed!

ER: I’ve never had much luck in my career in terms of marketing and distribution on the pictures that I’ve directed. "Body Parts" came out two weeks after Jeffrey Dahmer started his murder rampage in Milwaukee and there was a kind of odd, astute association with the film that may have cost us in terms of the perception of the picture. "Bad Moon"; the company simply didn’t market it. Morgan Creek opened the film in like 900 theatres and didn’t put ads about it in the papers a week before it opened. I mean they gave it a semi-wide release but didn’t give it any marketing support or TV time.

In the intervening years, the picture has had a beautiful DVD release by Warner Brothers and an extensive cable release. But as far as the movie itself is concerned, I think it turned out very well. Again, it wasn’t an expensive film to make but we had the resources to really shoot it well up in Vancouver and I think that the story from the beginning had a very elemental appeal; a family member who’s becoming evil because of a werewolf disease and another family member, a dog, sort of a force of unconditional love, has to protect the family from one of its own members. I find the story to be a simple, appealing one.

A: The film was based on the book "Thor"?

ER: Yeah, it’s based on a great book by Wayne Smith. It’s actually all told from the dog’s point of view in the book.

A: You must have had a blast with the dog. Was it harder working with a pooch or a kid?

ER: It's time consuming to work with a dog. It took a lot of time to cast. You have to cast an animal pretty much the same way you have to cast an actor. You have to take screen tests, they look a certain way onscreen and it took me months to find the right dog for Thor. We found the hero dog (the close-up dog) in Seattle. He had the right sort of primal, animalistic, heroic beautiful Shepherd-look and we went through a ton of dogs to find him.

We had to train him for months in advance, put out a whole list of behavioral things that are in the script that the dog had to learn to do. From running to jumping to walking downstairs to sitting on the floor. You roll a lot of film on set to get those moments because for every 3 seconds where the look, that perfect placement of the head and expression of the face is right, you have like five minutes of film where they’re twitching, scratching, doing this, doing that and then when you finally get into the cutting phase, you just use the good pieces.

A: You only used one dog in the film?

ER: I fundamentally shot it with two dogs. Primo was the close-up dog, he did the bulk of the activity in the picture. He was a very hyperactive, young alpha male. I also had an older dog, actually female named Echo who did the sitting, lying, walking in front of the camera to do dog over the shoulder shots. Because it was an older dog she was perfectly happy not to have to do the strenuous activity. Then I brought in a border attack dog for the final sequence of the dog and werewolf fight. It's actually one shot in the film with that dog. The scene where the dog walks across the room, piles in the werewolf and knocks him halfway across the room. That was a border attack dog. That whole fight scene was heavily storyboarded and shot in about two days.

LOST BOYS 2 script and others…

A: Did you really write a "Lost Boys 2" script?

ER: I did.

A: And were you hired by Warner Brothers to write it?

ER: Joel Schumacher actually hired me. I did "Lost Boys 2" and "Flatliners 2".

A: Was "Lost Boys 2" a prequel?

ER: Yes, it was a prequel set at the turn of the century in San Francisco about a vampire that comes from middle Europe and meets the five kids who eventually become the vampires in "The Lost Boys". It was about how they become involved with this sort of Dracula, Vlad the Impaler character, and each one by one become vampires. It was great fun, a real period spectacle and it ended with the big earthquake.

A: "Lost Boys 2" been buzzing for years, how come it never came through?

ER: I don’t know. But it’s a good script full of action scenes and it was a great deal of fun to write.

A: I heard you were also commissioned to write an "Alien 3" script?

ER: Yeah, Alien 3 the script that unfortunately circulated…I don’t even look at it as my script. The piece of junk was a product of a few weeks of intense, hysterical story conferences with the studio to rush to get the picture into production and it turned out completely awful.

A: Did you wind up seeing "Alien 3"?

ER: Yeah and I didn’t care for the picture, they didn’t end up with very much either.

A: A lot of screenwriters were hired for that one, right?

ER: A lot of writers, a lot of directors…"Lost Boys 2" came out nicely because there was the studio and there was Joel Schumacher. The people that made the original film were supervising the creation of the sequel and they knew how the first one worked. It was an easy all together process. Problems with things with like "The Hitcher 2" or "Alien 3" is that the disorganized situation dramatically affects the quality of the product that you end up with.

A: The first two "Alien" movies were solid but I didn’t care for the last two too much.

ER: Sequels are very demanding to do. They have their own group of problems. When you do the first picture, you’re basically setting the ground rules, you’re designing the engine, you're building the car and setting how it works. Sequels (I’ve written a couple of them) have different requirements because you both have to use the things that worked in the first picture if you can, but also give it a different spin and make it different. They’re tricky, they’re not as simple to put together as they might seem.

AND BEYOND...

A: When are you coming back to the genre? I’ve been hearing "Vindicator"!

ER: "Vindicator" is a project I’ve developed with “Dark Horse” entertainment. We’re putting the financing together for it right now. It’s a superhero flick, not a horror flick. It’s a fairly realistic superhero picture about a comic book artist in New York City, sort of like Jack Kirby or Neil Adams or somebody like that. He’s badly assaulted in his apartment and his child is killed in the process. The man goes over the edge and decides to become a super hero himself, he dons a home made suit and starts going out at night.

A: It sounds fairly dark.

ER: Yeah, it’s dark and exciting. The starting idea I had I guess was sort of like the Batman: Dark Knight thing where if somebody would really be a superhero, they’d be insane. I thought it was really interesting to create a character that’s both heroic on one hand but also part nuts on the other. The film is also about his confrontation with a group of police officers who are the bad guys in the picture.

A: Any pure horror scripts coming up?

ER: The main one that I have is one that I co-wrote with Wayne Smith who wrote the novel on which it’s based. It’s a contemporary vampire script called "Nightlife". It's set in San Francisco and it's about a woman who comes to Frisco looking for her missing prostitute sister. She winds up getting involved with a man that’s rich, successful, charming and a vampire. What she doesn’t know is that her sister also has been involved with this man and has since become a vampire herself. It's about a collision course these three characters are heading towards. Kind of more of a return to the type of films I did during the 80’s. It's very relentless, it’s very sexy and it deals in a very graphic way with the violent eroticism imbued in the vampire myth.

A: Now that’s what I like to hear! Can’t wait for you to come back full-force, dude, I need another REAL genre flick! I need my Eric Red fix!

ER: <lol> The industry changed a bit, the type of pictures I did in the 80’s and mid 90’s are now kind of "out of vogue". During those years there was a lot more of independent financing situations and also the temperament in terms of subject matter was much more hard edge and I guess more challenging, for lack of a better word. Those we’re all very hard edge, exciting violent pictures. There’s kind of been a backlash against violence in film. It cyclical.

A: And hypocritical…

ER: Yeah…movies can and should deal with complicated characters. Characters that have elements of good and evil should be startling and provocative. But the environment right now has become pretty politically correct. So there’s isn’t the receptiveness at the moment for more extreme kind of pictures. But again...it's cyclical.

A: Here’s my last question: of all the movies that you’ve directed which one are you the most proud of?

ER: I like different things in all of them. I really couldn’t give you a straight answer on that. I love the film noir, the characters, the performances and the gritty realistic aspects in "Cohen and Tate". I love the modern Gothic look of "Body Parts" and its various set pieces: the operating room scene, the freeway wreck and the many dramatic moments. "Undertow" I like for being a much smaller, dramatically driven picture. And "Bad Moon" I liked for its heart appeal and think it's one of the better werewolf movies out there. You like elements, it's hard to say that one is a particular favorite, it's like choosing a favorite child. There’s something special in all of them. Does that answer your question?

A: You bet it does…thanks a lot…

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And there you have it, an interview with (in my humble opinion) one of the genre's most overlooked and important writer/directors. I want to thank Eric for stopping by and taking the time to give me this massive interview. I have nothing but respect for the man. His films were never about moneymaking fluff, they were always about real people, real violence, real terror, all delivered in his unique, relentless, Red way.

I guess that's why Hollywood isn't kissing his ass, he's too damn real and straight-forward. As long as dudes like Eric Red keep punching at the horror bag, I'll keep watching. Who else is going to save me from garbage like "I Know What You Did Last Summer 3" or "Urban Legend 3"? I want real horror, goddamn it! Bring it back, Red!!!!

Read PART 1 of the interview here

Read my BLUE STEEL review here

Read my BODY PARTS review here

Read my BAD MOON review here