Did the script undergo any revisions during the intervening years?
Originally, the script was set in Hollywood, but we ended up doing it in New York City. That was the only major revision. I thought it was perfectly valid to transport the story to New York as so many directors like Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, and Sidney Lumet were headquartered there. A whole breed of filmmaker preferred to use New York as their home base and make their pictures out of the city. There was an entire New York film industry, and I felt the story would be just as relevant in New York as it would be in California. Actually, it worked out better as we were able to find that fabulous house that was owned by the renowned painter, Lowell Nesbitt. [1] Nesbitt had this beautiful three story townhouse in Lower Manhattan that had an indoor swimming pool and a Jacuzzi at the foot of the bed. It had all these bizarre furnishings and paintings on the wall, and all the leitmotif of flowers everywhere. In fact, Nesbitt’s artworks often involved flowers, and so every direction you looked there were paintings and sculptures of flowers. This detail later inspired a line that I added to the script, where the detective investigating the death of the young woman asks Chris Neville, the director, why he has such an obsession with flowers. Neville replies, “Because they are so beautiful and they die so quickly.” So, this new environment we’d discovered ran perfectly into the character of Neville and into the themes of the story, too. We were very fortunate to find that unique location in New York. We would never have found a house like that in California.
Was the film always intended as a ferocious satire of the film business?
Well, naturally, we did attack the hypocrisy and cruelty of the film business, but we weren’t the first to do that. I thought we did an apropos job of showing what can happen when somebody is a success in the business and then suddenly isn’t anymore. I mean, during the interim period between the time I first wrote the script and the time we made the picture, a good many well-known and celebrated directors had fallen by the wayside and were no longer able to get work. These were people who had won Academy Awards, like Michael Cimino. [2] He had won the Oscar for The Deer Hunter and was one of the hottest directors in the business, and then, suddenly, after making Heaven’s Gate, he was no longer employable. Nobody wanted anything to do with him and he was pretty much destroyed. That’s more or less the same situation with Chris Neville in Special Effects. He’s persona non grata in the industry after directing a big-budget disaster and nobody wants to be associated with him anymore. There are tainted directors in the film business like that, people who’ve had very bright but very brief careers, such as the English fellow who made Chariots of Fire. [3] He was a hot director for a while and then made a bomb and disappeared completely. So, there have been Academy Award-winning filmmakers whose careers have quickly evaporated and, frankly, I don’t know what they do for the rest of their lives. They must direct commercials or rock videos, something like that.
The opening credits play over audio excerpts from a spiky press conference in which Chris Neville [Eric Bogosian] rolls off an array of witty retorts to assembled journalists. Are those actual questions you’ve fielded during junkets?
No, I made all of that up. I wanted to put in relevant comments that would be paid off by the movie itself as it went along. At one point, a journalist asks Neville who his favorite director is and he says, “Abraham Zapruder.” Of course, Zapruder was the bystander who shot the 8mm footage of John F. Kennedy being assassinated in the Dallas motorcade in 1963.
Interestingly, Neville is later seen running the footage of Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassination at the hands of Jack Ruby on a Moviola.
Yeah, we had the footage of Oswald being shot by Ruby and then Neville asks the young starlet played by Zoë Tamerlis, whom he has lured back to his house and is about to murder, “Is this real or is this fake? Can you tell the difference?” He is trying to bridge what separates reality and fantasy filmmaking. In running that footage back and forth Neville has command over it. He runs it forward, Oswald dies. He runs it back, Oswald lives. It’s a way of controlling reality; a means of having power over life and death. I guess in some way Neville is also predicting the future of the film business. A lot of the movies that are made now attempt to blur the lines between reality and fantasy by trying to resemble actual documentary footage. Filmmakers deliberately degrade the quality of their images and deteriorate the sound in an effort to present a fictitious situation as a factual film, home movie, or newsreel. You have these horror films that are purported to be recovered footage that have the intentional look of amateurish photography. They are meant to be showing us the footage that the victims supposedly shot themselves before they were murdered. This approach was popularised by The Blair Witch Project and has continued on through many, many movies made since. The idea of taking fantasy and making it look like reality is something that Neville would appreciate. It is what he himself is trying to do with his movie. He is incorporating an actual murder into a fictitious film about the murder; when in fact viewers would be watching the actual murder taking place onscreen and would be thinking it was merely fantasy.
This idea of constructing a representation of reality, or instigating an indistinctness between fantasy and reality, is encapsulated by Neville’s comment to Detective Delroy [Kevin O’Connor]: “People assume that special effects means taking models, miniatures; tricking them up, making them look real. I’m taking reality and making it look like make-believe. That’s a special effect, too.”
That’s exactly what I’m saying, and it means what it says. The taking of an entirely fake situation and presenting it as real is now a very common approach for a lot of successful movies, but I kind of predicted that idea in Special Effects. That’s what Neville considered to be a special effect. But in addition to that, I would like to point out that during the entire running time of Special Effects, there isn’t one special effect; there isn’t a fade in or a fade out; there aren’t any opticals or any other kind of effects whatsoever in the picture. I was very careful to ensure that we never had any kind of special effects in a movie called Special Effects.
Did you consider adopting a vérité aesthetic [creating what appears to be candid realism] in shooting Special Effects?
No, that would have been too obvious and literal. The blurring of fantasy and reality was already inherent in the movie, so there was no need to overstate things by presenting the film as a documentary. It’s a movie about movies, not documentaries.
What’s the importance of Neville asking Mary-Jean [Zoë Tamerlis], “Ever had an experience and then realized you only saw it in the movies?”
Well, there are things you see in the movies that do get into your mind. There are also things that you dream, an event that didn’t really happen but it seems very real to you. Perhaps after several years have passed you will think back and say, “Did that actually happen to me? Was it a dream I had or was it something that I saw in a movie one time?” You may come upon a familiar street on a trip and think, Have I been here before? No, I saw this in a movie once. What movie did I see it in? You think you’ve been there before, but it all happened in a film. That is exactly what Neville is driving at there. What I also find interesting is when you enter a theater and see people sitting there in the dark; they are always immobile and silent. They are completely without motion and are staring blankly at the screen — utterly lost in whatever is playing. It really is a strange experience to watch an audience watching a movie. It’s a show in itself, observing all these people who look as if they have been taken out of their own reality. They are asleep and, at the same time, are awake. They have now entered somebody else’s dream. A movie is really somebody else’s dream, only you are allowed to be in it. When people enter a movie theater, they are putting themselves into a dreamlike state or reverie; a mind-fix in which they are opening their minds up to accept somebody else’s fantasy.
Neville often employs film terminology and self-reflexive jargon to express himself. For instance, whe
n he propositions Mary-Jean he announces, “I think we should dissolve to the bedroom.” He then later says, “I’ll call you when it’s time for your entrance.”
That dialogue merely illustrates the way Neville thinks. He thinks in movie terms, but it is also indicative of the way that movie terminology has infiltrated our everyday speech. We often hear expressions like “That’s a wrap,” “Cut to the chase,” and “Let’s fade out.” All those expressions have been picked up from movies.
I like the idea that Neville is finally motivated to kill Mary-Jean when she begins regurgitating some of the bad reviews he has received from critics.
Yeah, she incites him. She realizes that he is trying to exploit her and photograph her having sex. In response, Mary-Jean uses the only weapon that she has — her mouth — because she’s not physically strong. That’s what women often use as their primary weapon — their mouth. They may not be able to physically overpower their husband or boyfriend, but they can desperately hurt him by saying things that they know will cut very deeply emotionally. Women will do that quite often. Mary-Jean was using her weapon against Neville and he reacted violently.
I also like the fact that Neville is a killer with enough sense to scrape his own incriminating skin cells from under his victim’s fingernails.
Originally, that was not in the script. I made that up as we were going along, particularly as there was this fabulous Jacuzzi at the end of Lowell Nesbitt’s bed. When I saw that, I immediately said, “Oh, this is great! After he kills the girl he can bathe her; and after he bathes her, he can dry her; and after he dries her he can give her a manicure!” I thought that would be a nice touch in a thriller and it was also something that I hadn’t seen before in anybody else’s movie. I think it was a perfectly logical and methodical thing for Neville to do, because when they were struggling in bed she probably did have his DNA under her fingernails.
How did you come to cast Eric Bogosian as the demented Chris Neville?
Eric had done a successful off-Broadway one-man show called The Bogosian Explosion, which I saw in Greenwich Village. Eric wrote all of his own material and played seventeen or eighteen characters during that performance. I was very impressed with him, and he was already a very well-known figure in the underground culture of New York City, both as a writer and actor. He went on to write another off-Broadway show called Talk Radio [4] that was performed all around the country and was then made into a high-profile movie by Oliver Stone. Stone hired Eric to play the lead part of the controversial radio host he had originated onstage, and all of this happened to him after we’d made Special Effects. Eric had never appeared in a movie before doing my film. As with Perfect Strangers, I was looking for actors who were not members of the Screen Actors Guild because I had to make this picture very cheaply. I couldn’t afford to hire SAG actors and pay them the overtime, the penalties and all the other things that are stipulated. Eric was a stage performer, so he didn’t have membership of SAG. Eric and I had a great relationship, except for something that occurred on the first day of shooting: he came to work and was behaving very strangely. As the day went on, Eric became extremely difficult, irritable, and hostile. I finally said, “What’s the matter with you?” Eric suddenly started yelling at me and eventually I said, “Look, I can’t continue on with you and this type of behavior. Why don’t you just go ahead and leave. I’ll find somebody else to play your part.” So, I more or less fired him and he left. Everybody was just standing around in shock. My cameraman, Paul Glickman, then came over to me and asked, “What are you going to do?” I said, “Don’t worry, he’ll be back.” An hour later, Eric did indeed come back and he apologized. He said, “Look, I’m hypoglycaemic and if I don’t eat every two hours I go crazy.” I said “What do you need to eat?” He said, “Well, I have to have nuts and fruit, stuff like that.” I said, “We’re going to get you a whole table laden with nuts and fruit, so you don’t have to worry about that anymore. Everything will be fine.” And everything was fine after that. Eric was always co-operative, generous, and did everything he was asked to do. I think Eric had a good time making Special Effects. I’ve seen him several times over the years and he often says, “I only wish we’d made the movie a few years later when I was more experienced as an actor. I could have been so much better in the part.” I always tell him he did just fine. Eric really captured the same quality a lot of those kinds of directors have.
Which is what exactly? How would you articulate that quality?
Well, a lot of directors are social misfits. They are not very comfortable with themselves. They are not at ease within their own bodies and personalities. Directors are not always the most well-groomed and affable of people during a conversation. In fact, they are often uncommunicative in their speech. If you walk onto the set of a movie and you look for the nerdiest person there, usually that individual is the director. I’ve run into a lot of directors like that, including Michael Cimino. We were once at a film festival together in Avoriaz, France, and Cimino was terribly obnoxious and unpleasant to people. I mean, everybody hated him! I thought that Cimino really disliked me but when I ran into him again back in Los Angeles, he threw his arms around me and said, “Let’s have dinner!” I never thought that he would actually call me, but a couple of days later he did. Cimino asked, “Where are we going to have that dinner?” I said, “Where do you want to eat?” He said, “I know, I’m taking you to dinner at the Hamburger Hamlet!” [Chuckles] Well, the Hamburger Hamlet is a nice little restaurant if you want to go for a hamburger, but it’s not a fancy restaurant by any stretch of the imagination. Of all the nice restaurants in L.A., Cimino wanted to have dinner in this little hamburger joint. So, that’s where we went. We had a very pleasant dinner together — him, my wife, and I — and then I never saw or heard from Cimino again. What can you say? He’s had a strange life, but Cimino certainly reached the highest heights that any filmmaker can aspire to. What I find fascinating is he passed from that into nothing. When this happens to a director, you find that the phone never rings again and people cross the street when they see you coming. It’s like the scene in Special Effects where Neville encounters his ex-agent, who is now a studio executive, and the guy more or less blows him off. Neville is now considered poison and that can happen to you very quickly in the movie business.
Bogosian’s co-star, Zoë Tamerlis, plays the dual roles of the murdered Mary-Jean and her substitute, Elaine. Tamerlis is an actress of considerable cult status, but how did you first become aware of her?
I first saw Zoë in Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45 in which she played a mute woman, who goes out on a killing spree to avenge her brutal rape. It was one of the first films that Ferrara made, and I thought Zoë had this vulnerable and peculiarly exotic quality. She didn’t do much after Ms. 45, but when her name came up for the two parts in Special Effects, I grabbed her right away as she was a good actress. She was also very good-looking — although a little on the thin side — and was willing to do the nudity. Zoë was easily able to play both of those characters, but she was an extremely strange girl.
Strange in what way?
Well, firstly, nobody knew where she lived or what her phone number was. The production people came to me one day and said, “Larry, we don’t know what to do. Zoë won’t give us her address or phone number and we don’t know how to handle this. What do we do if we need to communicate with her?” I said, “Has she ever been late to the set?” They said, “No.” I said, “In that case, leave her alone. She obviously has her reasons.” They actually tried to follow her home one day, but Zoë changed taxi cabs twice to throw them off her trail. Can you believe that? She did not want anybody knowing where she lived. I’m convinced she was a drug addict. Another odd thing was Zoë always kept a leather satchel with her that contained a script — not my script, a different one. I once asked her, “Zoë, why do you always carry that script about with you?” She said, “I can’t leave it at home. Suppose somebody breaks in and steals it?” I said, “Why don
’t you just make a Xerox-copy of it?” She said, “No, somebody at the copy store could steal a copy of it and then where would I be?” I said, “Nobody is looking to steal a copy of your script,” but she wasn’t willing to take that chance. There’s no question, she was totally obsessive about it. Everywhere Zoë went, that script went with her. That screenplay turned out to be Bad Lieutenant [5], which was later made into a successful movie by Abel Ferrara, starring Harvey Keitel. Zoë is credited as the screenwriter on that picture and, years later, it was remade very badly. Subsequently, Zoë moved to Europe, got married, and became Zoë Lund. She ended up dying of a drug overdose several years ago, which was very sad. [6]
Is Tamerlis’s voice dubbed in her guise as Mary-Jean?
No, that was her. I think we did re-record some of Zoë’s dialogue and it may seem like it is a little out of synch or something, but that was her voice in both parts.
Larry Cohen Page 37