Was the studio Josh works in supposed to be the famous Marvel Bullpen?
Yeah, that’s where we wanted you to think it was. We didn’t actually shoot it in the actual place where all those great comic books were drawn. We created that set in an office building in Manhattan, but Stan told me that in reality there isn’t actually much of a “Bullpen.” The artists mostly did the work at home and brought it in, but in The Ambulance I wanted to have some place which was a focal point. A lot of the guys sitting at the tables in those scenes are the actual artists who drew the Marvel comics. They came in and did it, but I couldn’t identify which one is which for you. I do know that a lot of fans call me up or write me, and tell me that the people working at the various tables in that scene are actual Marvel artists.
Eric Braeden plays “The Doctor,” the villain of the piece. What was he like?
Well, I had originally hired Wesley Addy [6] to play that part, but I didn’t think he was suitably scary and menacing enough. He was a pretty good actor, but he was a little too old and wasn’t quite right for The Doctor. I managed to secure some additional shooting time, and we got Eric Braeden to come in and perform all of his stuff in just one ten-hour shooting day. It was a little tough, but sometimes a film is only as good as its villain and Eric made a very good villain. Actually, Eric was a German-born actor formerly known as Hans Gudegast when he first started out in the business. In the 1960s, he played one of the Nazi officers in The Rat Patrol. Braeden was also in a couple of other television shows that I did, too, again billed as Hans Gudegast, but he later took the name Eric Braeden and became hugely popular in America as the lead on the daytime soap opera, The Young and the Restless. In fact, when I was casting the villain in The Ambulance, I asked my mother who I should hire to play The Doctor. She immediately said, “Eric Braeden.” So, naturally, I went out and got Eric Braeden. It was entirely my mother’s idea, simply because she watched The Young and the Restless every day.
There is a wonderfully creepy moment early in the film, when The Doctor touches Janine Turner’s character with rubber gloves.
Yeah, and he says, “I love the feel of human flesh through surgical gloves!” [Chuckles] I think I made that up on the spot when we were shooting the scene. I thought Braeden played that moment very well.
Tell me about your approach to creating moments of suspense. Do you subscribe to Hitchcock’s “showing the bomb” theory?
There are various approaches you can use in creating suspense that follow Hitchcock’s theory. Of course, it’s true, you can’t deny it, there is more suspense generated when the audience is ahead of the characters in the movie. If the audience knows that danger is lurking nearby, they are waiting on edge to see if the hero will walk around the corner and meet his fate. Your choice as a filmmaker is to either use that approach or have the hero simply walk around the corner and suddenly discover that the villain is waiting for him. So, as Hitchcock understood, you have a moment of shock as opposed to having maybe two or three moments of prolonged tension. There are very few moments of genuine suspense in movies today. Everything is thrown at you and its all pyrotechnics and second unit and special effects. There is no build-up for the audience to get edgy and concerned. They immediately want to give you everything right away. A perfect example of a patient escalation of suspense is North by Northwest. Cary Grant gets off a bus in the middle of a quiet cornfield and is standing at the side of the road. He is just waiting there and nothing happens. Then a bus stops and an old man gets off and in the background we see a crop duster plane flying over the cornfield. There is a lot of waiting — a gradual developing of suspense — and then, finally, the plane approaches and starts shooting at him. By the time that happens, you are really hanging on the edge of your seat because you’ve been waiting for something to happen. Hitchcock allows you the time to get fully immersed in the scene as the tension builds and builds. If a modern director was going to stage that sequence today, the actor playing Cary Grant would step off the bus and bam! The plane would immediately start shooting at him. There would be no time for the audience to get involved with the scene. Today, there is no editorial sense of setting scenes up, establishing suspense, and letting it play out. Actually, I don’t see much in the way of suspense in anybody’s movies lately, certainly nobody who approaches Hitchcock’s intelligence as a filmmaker. Everything is cut very quickly and every movie looks just the same now. When you look at the trailers in the cinema, five trailers come on and each one looks like the same movie. A lot of directors don’t seem to have any individuality or personality anymore. Modern cinema is homogenised and bereft of originality. Nothing around now interests me very much.
You decided to reveal that Josh’s potential love interest is alive shortly after she has been abducted. Obviously, you don’t think that was a mistake.
No, because I wanted the audience to know that she was alive. I wanted it to seem like there was something clearly at stake. Our hero is desperately trying to save this young woman and we only know that there is somebody worth saving because I’ve shown you that she is alive.
You also disclose the source of the evil behind the ambulance early on in the film, rather than hiding the identity of the villain and preserving a sense of mystery.
Yes, but you wouldn’t have cared if you simply had an anonymous figure lurking around. The audience needed to specify in their minds exactly who this person was and what he wanted. Otherwise there basically wouldn’t have been any villain. The Ambulance wasn’t structured like a mystery, where there are a bunch of suspects and you have to guess which one is the killer. If we had not shown you The Doctor, the hero would have been chasing after nobody. We did have these two big ambulance attendants that would appear occasionally in the picture and chase him around, but there was no shadowy villain that was the equivalent of Professor Moriarty or somebody. You need to quickly set up a formidable adversary and I thought by putting The Doctor in there early enough and giving him some really evil, diabolical dialogue we could establish an adversary that the audience would be interested to see more of. They would be waiting to see exactly how our hero would fare when he eventually crossed paths with the bad guy. I think The Ambulance worked just the way I wanted it to work.
A tense scene occurs when Josh is drugged in his apartment and struggles to remain conscious long enough to convince his fellow tenants that the ambulance attendants are about to whisk him away to his death.
I thought that scene functioned as an effective red herring. It was a fun twist, having a real ambulance show up to collect him, but he struggles and fights against the attendants. He believes that the moment he loses consciousness he will be taken away to his demise. Of course, it turns out that it’s actually a legitimate ambulance and he’s made a fool of himself. That misunderstanding now reinforces the idea that nobody believes his story. He has totally discredited himself by going into this rage and I felt that development worked well. The same idea was used by Hitchcock in pictures like The 39 Steps, Saboteur, and North by Northwest. Hitchcock often had the hero embroiled in a mystery and nobody ever believes him. Something terrible is going to happen and the hero is trying to find the true spy, or the true ringleader, and stop him, but the police usually think that the hero is the bad guy and are pursuing him instead. Hitchcock’s heroes are always railing against more than the villain because the authorities doubt their integrity. In North by Northwest, Cary Grant tries to tell his story after he’s been picked up as a drunk driver. He tries to say that he’s been kidnapped by spies but nobody believes him. That was the same thing I tried to do in The Ambulance. I wanted to discredit our hero in the eyes of everybody, but the audience knows he really is onto something and they are rooting for him. We stack these obstacles against our hero because these obstacles create the drama.
A neat reversal on the scene where Josh is drugged occurs when he incites the street gang that have just mugged him into attacking the ambulance attendants.
Yeah, and of course,
this time it really is the evil ambulance men coming to claim him. Again, that scene feels very Hitchcockian. Whenever I do these kinds of offbeat suspenseful scenes in pictures I always ask myself, “Okay, what would Hitchcock do in this situation? How would he have handled this scene?” I then try to create something that approaches what Hitchcock would have done, or at least what I imagine he might have done.
Were any sequences particularly difficult or demanding to shoot?
When it came time to shoot the last sequence where the ambulance crashed into the huge excavation and blew up, the New York Film Commission would not allow us to do it in New York. They said it was too dangerous to blow up a vehicle in downtown Manhattan, so we had to shoot that stunt in downtown Los Angeles. I remember we spent the entire night carefully setting the sequence up. We had this catapult that was going to propel the ambulance way down into the pit where it would crash at the bottom and explode in flames. In the meantime, a stuntman was going to be hanging on a fence and dangling above the explosion. Now when it comes to working with explosives, you have to put yourself and your movie in the hands of experts because you don’t want to get someone killed. An unfortunate result of this is that you no longer have control as a director anymore. The shot is in some ways somebody else’s responsibility and I don’t like surrendering control. But it’s entirely necessary in instances like this because no movie is worth dying for. The stunt director and the special effects people on The Ambulance didn’t get along and they were arguing all night long about how this sequence was going to work. I kept saying to them, “Look guys, the sun is going to be coming up shortly. We are not going to get this scene at all if you keep fighting like this. I don’t need to remind you that once the sun rises, it’s not night anymore and the footage is not going to match with any of the other stuff we’ve shot. C’mon, we’ve got to shoot this now!” Eventually they got the ambulance completely rigged with explosives and positioned the stuntman above it on the fence. By now, it was literally minutes before sunrise and I was getting nervous. Finally, they propelled the ambulance through the air and it plunged down into the pit and — wouldn’t you just know it — the fucking thing didn’t explode! I couldn’t believe it. Everybody just stood there like statues, not knowing what to do next. People weren’t sure if they should approach the vehicle because it could still obviously explode at any moment. We were all just looking at each other, saying, “The sun is going to rise any second now! What are we gonna do?” Then someone suggested that we obtain a can of gasoline and hurl it down into the pit in the hope that it would slide underneath the ambulance. The idea involved possibly attaching a wire to the can and detonating it so that the igniting gasoline would set off the other explosives. That sounded fairly plausible to me, so I agreed to it. Some guy was quickly assigned to creep half way down, toss the can of gasoline under the ambulance before scrambling away to safety. He managed to accomplish this and we swiftly pushed the button on the detonator. Mercifully, all of the explosives went off and the ambulance exploded. Boom! Almost immediately, it seemed as if by magic, the sun came up and illuminated the pit. It was quite remarkable, really. We had just about got the shot we needed by the skin of our teeth. It was incredible, racing against time like that. Of course, all filmmaking is essentially a race against time, but this was too literal for my comfort! It was a very close situation. If we hadn’t have got that shot — at that exact moment in time — we would’ve had to come back another night and go through all the work of setting this complicated stunt up again. That would have been at a tremendous expense of time and money that we could ill afford to squander.
I get the impression that The Ambulance was something of a family affair for you as your daughter, ex-wife, and current wife all have parts in the film.
I know my ex-wife played a nurse in the movie, and my daughter, Jill, played the young girl who gets abducted at the horse stables. I don’t think my other daughter, Melissa, appeared in the film, but she was the still photographer on The Ambulance. [Pause] Yeah, just the one daughter and one ex-wife was in it. Actually, I don’t think my second wife is in there.
Yes, she is. I believe she is credited as “Cynthia from Chicago”.
Oh, right! She appeared at the disco scene and was wearing a red dress. She didn’t have any dialogue, she just did a walk-on. I told her that everybody was wearing black in that scene, so she showed up in a red dress!
A charge levelled against The Ambulance — and some of your other pictures — is that you often create an interesting and compelling premise, but frustratingly fail to develop or maximise its dramatic potential. Is that criticism fair in your view?
No, I don’t agree with it. I don’t know what the critics mean by that. I thought there was considerable tension and suspense in The Ambulance and that the ending really paid off. In fact, I thought the film contained a couple of endings. The first one occurs in the nightclub when the ambulance completely decimates the place; we then have a second ending afterwards when the ambulance crashes into the excavation pit and explodes. I thought those were good scenes that resolved the story in an intriguing and satisfying way. I don’t think we had any opportunity to do any more than that. I don’t know what the critics mean when they claim I don’t “maximise” the dramatic potential. I always fully explore every story’s dramatic possibilities to the utmost. I thought The Ambulance contained an especially nice touch that occurs after the hero finds the girl and liberates her: the first thing she does is to ask him to call her boyfriend. I thought that was a lovely and painfully ironic moment in the picture, because of everything the hero has gone through. He’s continually risked his life and reputation to save this girl and when he finally finds her, he realizes that she has no romantic interest in him whatsoever. That was something I’d never seen in anybody else’s movie before.
After the complications you faced on Wicked Stepmother and The Heavy, it sounds like The Ambulance was a reasonably smooth shoot.
I had a nice time on The Ambulance. It was a fun movie to make. I enjoyed working with the cast, particularly Eric, James, and Red. For once, I also had a good working relationship with my producers. The Ambulance was a well-organized picture and was one of the few movies I’ve made where I had some producers who were competent and actually helped me. Contrary to what you might think, that is not always the case on a picture. As you know, I usually had to produce these movies myself but on The Ambulance I had some people who did a decent job. They were supportive and didn’t get in my way. They let me do my thing the way I wanted to do it, which is important to me. The producers understood that there was a way I liked to work and, if they allowed me certain freedoms, the final result would be good.
Did you share a good understanding with your crew, also?
For the most part, but I do remember some things that got me crazy. We had an office set up in downtown Manhattan and there were a lot of people in there who had gone to film school and had worked on other pictures. Everybody was trying to be efficient, but they weren’t really helping at all. In fact, their efficiency was making everything worse. Being who I am, everyday I would be changing the script around and coming up with new scenes and new dialogue. Every time I turned around, somebody would then be mimeographing fifty copies of the script. The next day, I would change the script around again, and they would be out there mimeographing another fifty copies. I said, “Please stop mimeographing everything! Wait until the end of the week and we finally get the script locked up. Every single day we are throwing fifty copies of the script in the garbage because the next day’s changes supersede it again. There is no reason to have fifty copies of the script. It’s completely unnecessary, so just stop!” These people had been instructed in film school to do it that way and were simply following their training. Despite what I’d told them, the next thing I knew they were out there mimeographing fifty copies of the script again! I couldn’t believe it. It was the same thing when we were shooting: I would walk onto the set and notice that tw
elve people were standing around holding walkie-talkies. I’d say, “Who are all these people with walkie-talkies? What are they there for?” I never really did get an answer to that question. You know, the one piece of equipment that is most often stolen from a movie set is a walkie-talkie. Honestly, it’s true. If you start out with twelve walkie-talkies, by the end of the day you only have eight of them as somebody has stolen four. It’s the company that always ends up paying for this and it’s another totally unnecessary expenditure. My theory is that everybody on a film set suddenly feels important if they have a walkie-talkie in their hands. No doubt, this is another unfortunate result of film school training. I would constantly be asking people, “Why do they need these walkie-talkies? What are they actually saying into them? If anybody wants to know anything, come and ask me. I’m the only one in authority and nobody else can make any decisions. So, put away your damn walkie-talkies!”
Did The Ambulance go straight to video?
It played in some theaters but not in the major markets. Epic Pictures was, like many companies, on the verge of collapse, so they didn’t have a lot of money to spend on advertising. As always, if you don’t have a lot of money to spend then a theatrical release is futile. One of the people who ran Epic, who also happened to be one of the producers, said to me, “The Ambulance is the best picture we’ve ever made, but that’s not saying much.” I was actually pleased by that comment because he knew the kinds of films turned out by that company were not very good. But as satisfied as they were with The Ambulance, Epic still didn’t give it much of a theatrical release. To tell you the truth, I was very disappointed by that. I felt I’d made a good movie that could have done very good business. I know that The Ambulance did very well in France, as I was over there when it played. I went to three French theaters it was playing at, and it was doing good business. It also earned some good reviews, so what can you do? You can control every aspect of a movie when you are making it, from the scripting to the casting to the shooting to the editing, but you can’t control distribution. Once your movie falls into the hands of other people, they are not going to listen to you. It then becomes a matter of how much money they are willing to spend, and it’s not my money, it’s their money. They are always going to do exactly what they want with it. You certainly can’t tell them what to do. In the end, it all comes down to dollars and cents. If you don’t spend the money, you can’t make the money.
Larry Cohen Page 55