No, I don’t think so. It was motivated by a need to tell this particular story, that’s all.
But you just said that you don’t believe in “an organized anything” and that view is evident in God Told Me To as it is in the It’s Alive trilogy and The Stuff. You don’t appear to have much faith in institutions and organized systems, whether they be the Government, the media, the military, or the church.
Well, all you have to do is look at the newspapers you read. Every week somebody in power is exposed as being a complete creep. Our leaders all lead double lives. They are not the idealistic and benevolent characters that they would like us to believe they are. They have all got a mistress or a boyfriend on the side, or are stealing money, or are doing something else that is entirely dishonest and unjust. There are so many phoneys and fakes around, to believe in anything with a strong degree of faith is extremely difficult. Every time you turn around there is a company that is exposed as having covered up the defects in their automobiles or the chemicals in their products that are poisoning people. When I was a kid during the war, I remember they used to announce that Camel, Lucky Strikes, and Phillip Morris were all sending 500,000 cigarettes to our boys in uniform — every week — in the Pacific and in Europe. They were only sending them cigarettes for the purpose of addicting an entire generation of young men, so that when they came back from World War II, they would be addicted to smoking. The cigarette companies actually killed more American boys than the Germans and the Japanese combined. That’s what they did! It was a premeditated interest in addicting them by giving them free cigarettes and they just did it, regardless of the consequences. So, what can you say about people who would do such things? It’s that kind of behaviour which gives you a contempt for authority, but that’s the way it is. You just have to learn what the world is all about. You see the poor guys on Memorial Day lying in their graves having died for their country. You inevitably ask, “Hey, what happened? How come all of our enemies are now our friends and all our friends are now our enemies? And how was it that you were unlucky enough to have been caught in the middle of all this and be dead? What did you die for? Who decided that you should die?” There is a lot of pain and sadness and dishonesty in the world as a direct result of organized systems — governments, religions, the military, whatever it is. The decisions they make and enforce cause immense pain, confusion and death. Of course, it’s my job to put all of this into the movies.
One of the most disturbing moments in God Told Me To is when the father, who has just slaughtered his entire family, calmly describes to the Detective how he tricked his young daughter out of a locked bathroom in order to execute her.
Yeah, right. He says, “Come on out of the bathroom, honey.” It’s probably the father’s sense of tranquillity that makes that scene so disturbing — the way Robert Drivas, who plays that character, delivers it. He recounts this hideous, unforgivable act he’s committed so calmly and vividly, it becomes far more effective than actually showing him killing his loved ones. A lot of directors would have showed the deaths onscreen simply for the shock value, but it’s far more powerful when you don’t show the violence. It kind of lingers in the audience’s imagination, the utter horror of it. I didn’t copy that situation from any real transcript or case, but that’s the kind of thinking that goes into these people who end up murdering their families. A week doesn’t go by out here in L.A. that we don’t have a story in the newspapers saying that somewhere in the country somebody has executed their family. Sometimes they knock off the whole family, including the kids, and then usually end up shooting themselves. That is real horror because it’s the horror that cuts the deepest and rings most true. People clearly recognize that these terrible incidents do actually occur.
You worked for the first time with Paul Glickman, who would be your cinematographer on a number of projects over the next decade. How did you become aware of him?
I don’t remember exactly how Paul Glickman came into my life, but I do know that one day I summoned him and when he showed up with his crew, he made quite an impression. Paul was wearing a big leather hat and a pair of torn jeans with his ass hanging out! [Chuckles] He had this beard and looked like a hippy. Paul was kind of a wild guy, which meant he was perfect to work with me. As a matter of fact, Paul and I have become very friendly again and actually spent some time together just recently in Chicago. When we were shooting God Told Me To, I told Paul that I wanted the whole picture to be shot with a handheld camera. Even though there was no reason for everything to be shot that way, I wanted that candid feeling. I wanted that sense of immediacy that would make the film look like a hard documentary, like a street movie about crime in the inner city.
The pseudo-documentary feel of God Told Me To with its handheld camera, jagged editing, and naturalistic performances is very affecting.
Yeah, and applying those techniques to a genre film was fairly revolutionary at the time. I mean, you just didn’t see that back in the 1970s. Of course, the hard documentary look has been duplicated in several movies and television shows that have appeared since. It’s really taken for granted today. You just accept it now because a handheld camera and naturalistic performances can lend anything a documentary reality, even when you have a totally preposterous story. Back then, I wanted to explore the elements of horror and fantasy in God Told Me To in a very serious and realistic fashion, and use the camera and performance as a means of making the audience believe that these apparently fantastical things were real.
The film is a science fiction/horror/police procedural and is a prime example of your ability to mix and match various genres. How conscious were you of combining assorted tropes and elements in God Told Me To?
Well, firstly, I should say that I think God Told Me To inspired The X-Files. [2] It came way, way before The X-Files, but the way our movie took science fiction and horror and played them directly against the intense reality of a police procedural was definitely an approach that hadn’t been done before. So, we were breaking some new ground there, I think. But I don’t consciously mix and match genres. I just sit down and write these conceits and then make the picture. When I’m writing, I’m not into self-analysis too much. I never think about why I’m doing something, or if two very different elements will work together or not. It’s just a part of the story that is unravelling and usually I’m just making it all up as I go along.
As is the case with most of your movies, the cast is very strong. I think Tony Lo Bianco is particularly good as Detective Peter Nicholas.
Originally, the part of the Detective was played by Robert Forster. Robert did act in the picture for a couple of days, but we didn’t get along and so I let him go. I then had to find a new lead actor and remembered Tony Lo Bianco, who had played the lead in my off-Broadway play, The Nature of the Crime. I had also seen Tony in The Honeymoon Killers [3] and thought he was great in that picture. He did such a fine job for me on the play that after I’d dispensed with Bob Forster’s services, I knew Tony was the right choice for the Detective. So, he quickly stepped in.
What exactly was the problem with Forster, his performance or his attitude?
The problem with Forster was his chewing gum! I kept telling him, “Hey, this character is possibly a demigod and gods don’t chew gum!” So, Bob would take the gum out of his mouth, or would at least pretend to. A few minutes later, I would see his jaw working again and he’d still be chewing gum. I wasn’t going to put up with that for very long. I said, “Look, if you keep doing that you are going to chew yourself out of this movie.” A short time later, we agreed that it would be better for the both of us if we went our own separate ways, and that’s exactly what happened. I should also add that, all these years later, Bob has now become a very good personal friend. Back in those days we didn’t get along, but we get along great now.
What about Sandy Dennis who plays the detective’s estranged wife? Was she good to work with?
Yes, very good. Sandy was a pretty big star and a wo
nderful actress. She had won the Academy Award for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and had starred in Up the Down Staircase and a lot of other great movies. She had also won a Tony Award for Any Wednesday and, frankly, I was lucky to get her for the film. Sandy really brought a sombre intensity to the role and was really into it. She was doing theater in New York at the time and sometimes when actors are doing stage work they are also willing to do a movie, too, because the theater doesn’t really pay that well. Actors can augment their earnings by trying to fit a movie in and I’m always happy to adjust my schedule to accommodate them. That way, they will be able to do their matinees on Wednesdays and Fridays and finish shooting in time to get to the theater every night. Sandy only had to work on the film for a few days, so there was never a problem.
The “St. Patrick’s Day Parade” sequence is extremely impressive for such a low-budget production. How did that come about?
There was no way to do that sequence except to shoot it during the actual St. Patrick’s Day Parade in New York. I could never have staged the parade again, so it was a complete one-shot deal. Many years later, they had a similar scene in The Dark Knight where The Joker wreaks havoc in the middle of a police parade. What I find interesting is that for such a big-budget movie, their sequence was much smaller than the one we did — certainly in terms of the number of cops they used. We had 5,000 cops in our sequence and utilized the real parade. The only way for us to possibly do that was to somehow infiltrate the event itself and put our very own actor into the parade. That actor turned out to be Andy Kaufman, who was a complete unknown at the time but went on to become a great comedy star. Andy played the cop who suddenly pulls out the gun as he marches along and goes berserk. Of course, we had no permission and no permits to place our actor in the parade, but I thought we could at least attempt it and see what happens.
How did you actually cover the event?
I had three camera crews because everybody had to work on foot. Once the parade started, it wasn’t going to stop for us, so we had to keep shooting as it was in motion. That meant that one unit would have to shoot and finish up, before running on ahead a couple of blocks. They would then have to quickly get set up to pick the parade up as it marched by again. The second unit would then take over and would shoot for a while, before they, too, would run further ahead and prepare to shoot again, unless they went up on a rooftop to catch an overhead shot. Everything had to be co-ordinated and executed with a tremendous amount of speed and precision. I guess that because we were in the middle of this parade, brandishing all these cameras, everybody just assumed that we had obtained permission. Nobody else would have ever dared walk into the midst of 5,000 cops and start shooting illegally. When you are usually shooting without a permit in New York City and you see cops, you just flee in the opposite direction as quickly as possible. Here we were right in the middle of them — surrounded on all sides by policemen — and we were going to have people getting shot at and crazy things like that. It was really absurd. I think the fact that the cameras were present meant the police knew that there was a movie going on. They didn’t get scared or react when they saw somebody with a gun in their hand, because there was a camera only a few feet in front of them calmly filming everything. Actually, the cops all cooperated quite a bit. After we shot that day, I came out to California and contacted the Irish-American organizations here and asked them if they would like to march again. They said they would as they only got the opportunity to do it once every year. I said, “Well, here’s your chance to do it again. All you have to do is show up in downtown Los Angeles at a specific location on Saturday morning.” They arrived at the agreed time with all their people, their musical instruments, their marching band, their drum majorettes, and everybody else who was willing and available. We then restaged the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in L.A. and put Andy Kaufman back in there. We shot some more footage of chaos ensuing with blood-squibs going off and people falling down and fleeing in all directions as musical instruments were being scattered. Then we matched the L.A. shots with the footage we filmed in New York and made an integral sequence out of it. Incredibly, this did not cost me any money because all the Irish-American people came free of charge. They even arrived in buses that they had arranged for themselves. All we had to do was shoot them.
How did Andy Kaufman become involved with the film?
Well, I had first seen Andy at The Improvisation Club in New York. He came in to do his act and was just breaking into the business at this point. I knew immediately that Andy had something special about him. I thought he was so remarkable I just had to talk to him after his performance. I approached him and said, “I’m making this movie called God Told Me To and I’d like to put you in it. I know you’ve never done a picture before, but I’d like to able to say that I was the director who gave you your first movie role.” When he heard what the movie was about and what I planned on doing, Andy realized that he had finally met somebody who was crazier than he was! [Laughs] Everybody thought that Andy was rather deranged — and he was — but I was even more deranged! No one could have imagined that we could pirate a scene during the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in the midst of thousands of police. You would have to be crazy, and I think Andy appreciated that. When he agreed to do the movie, I said, “Okay, first we have to get you a policeman’s uniform. Tell me the size of your shirt and jacket.” He said, “I don’t know. I wear my father’s old clothes.” I looked at him and figured that he was about my size, so we got him a policeman’s uniform and went down to Fifth Avenue. We got him dressed in one of the luncheonettes that was right off the street and, when the time was right, calmly walked him into the parade. Of course, Andy utters just one line of dialogue during the scene. We didn’t have any sound recording equipment with us, so there was no means to record his voice. As his character lay on the ground, dying, Andy just mouthed the words: “God told me to.” Later on, when we did the mix, I recorded that line myself but when Andy saw the finished film, he said, “How did you get my voice?” I said, “Andy, that’s not your voice, it’s mine.” He said, “No, I know my own voice when I hear it. That’s my voice! How did you do that?” I tried to explain to him that we didn’t have any microphones with us when we shot the scene, but he kept insisting that it was his voice in the movie. Andy was just perplexed about how I was able to do that and almost every time we spoke afterwards he’d always bring it up.
So you and Kaufman remained friends?
Oh, yes. As a matter of fact, I was constantly talking with him on the phone about us doing another picture together. Andy hadn’t had a lot of success as a movie actor, but he had become popular in clubs and on television in Taxi. [4] I’d written a script called Miracles in Brooklyn and Andy was going to play five or six different characters in the picture. It was a comedy in the style of Mel Brooks and was about three miracles that take place in Brooklyn, New York. It was a very funny script and would have been a nice showcase for Andy’s talents. He would call me up and say, “What’s happening with the financing? When are we starting? I’m anxious to get moving with this.” I would then update him on any developments. Of course, all the time he was talking to me and expressing his excitement, he was sitting in a wheelchair and dying of cancer, and he knew it. He knew there was never going to be any chance of him ever doing a movie with anybody, but he constantly kept talking to me about the project. He was very ill at the time, but I would never have known that from our enthusiastic phone conversations. Perhaps he was just trying to convince himself, but it was all self-delusional. Andy was in no condition to work. Then somebody called me and said that Andy had died. I couldn’t believe it, because we had been making all these plans to do another picture together and now it was never going to happen.
Richard Lynch [5] plays Bernard, the shimmering alien. How did you locate him for the role?
I had seen Richard in a couple of pictures including Scarecrow, a road movie about two drifters played by Al Pacino and Gene Hackman, that had been
released two or three years before we shot God Told Me To. Richard had played this very dangerous psychopathic villain that the drifters encounter. At one point in the film, Richard’s character brutally beats Pacino almost to death. I thought Richard had a very interesting look and presence about him. He had this weird threatening quality in his performances that I felt would work perfectly for the alien. When I contacted him, he was living in New York and had never actually worked in California. He agreed to do God Told Me To, and I was happy about that. One day, I remember we were shooting the confrontation between the alien and the Detective in this deserted tenement building in Manhattan. Unfortunately, we didn’t have any dressing rooms available for the actors. All we had were these various dilapidated rooms or apartments where they could change clothes. I walked into one of these rooms as Richard was changing and saw that he was stripped down to the waist. As I looked at him, I suddenly noticed that his entire body was covered in thick, crisscrossing scars. Apparently, he had set fire to himself during a binge of some kind — I guess he might have been high on drugs at the time — but whatever happened, Richard had immolated himself. Thankfully, he had survived this traumatic event, but the scar tissue grew back all over his body. The alien chest that you see in the movie with that large, peculiar, vaginal indentation in the center of it, is actually Richard Lynch as he really was. There was no makeup applied to his torso at all for that scene. I looked at Richard’s scars and said, “Hey, would you mind showing that body of yours as the body of the alien?” He simply said, “Yeah, no problem,” and we just did it.
Larry Cohen Page 21